Delfim Sardo ///

Isomorphisms: Mattew Barney and the Memory of Beuys.

When I saw Matthew Barney's exhibition in the Whitney Museum in 2003, I was hit by a sensation that I had not just gone to see an exhibition, but something whose purpose was much more ambitious than usual in terms of museological presentations, whether due to its gigantism or because of its symbolic/systematic character. More intense and relevant, Matthew Barney's exhibition had its own ghost. This sensation became even stronger the following year when during the São Paulo Biennial I saw the project that Barney had created for the Bahia carnival, presented in the Pinacoteca. In fact, the most disturbing aspect of this sensation was the initial feeling that that work was not (just) what was visible, nor that it was very easy to deduce in relation to his references to the syncretism of Afro-Brazilian beliefs and rituals, but that it referred to something else, something older and simultaneously internal to the universe of art itself.