Reaction to Matthew Barney and Glass Jaw

The documentary of a contemporary storytelling artist who considered himself a "sculptor," Matthew Barney, struck my attention in a sketchy, but captivating way. As a phenomenon of athletic training, he believed "Change cannot happen without struggle." I never heard of Matthew Barney before the video we watched, so I could not fully understand what his motives were for his Cremaster 3 video, The Order. His video was deliberate, full of symbols and events that happened for a reason; but I could not understand what it all meant. Like many other people who have never heard of him, I was confounded at the waste of time put into the video. His language was just perplexing. I tried to open my mind from the obsurdity that I thought made no sense. However, as I continued to watch, in conclusion to the video I started to think about the aesthetics and design of the video making. I listened to the comments made in class and started to realize how this was really a work of art. It was interesting to see how he focused on different sets of characters on different degree levels of the Guggenheim. It was like a surrealistic, dream-like game about overcoming obstacles towards a task or goal.

This dream-like, obscure video contrasts with that of a powerful, journal-like film called, The Glass Jaw by Michael O'Reilly because of his deeply intimate, ghostly perspective. After being beaten up in shock, he suffers anesthesia in a graduate hospital where medical reform was needed. He video tapes his whole experience in such a compelling manner, that viewers can almost feel his anguish. By video-taping in close ups and sharing all of his inner thoughts and feelings, it made the viewer see through into his own eyes. From the description of his blood soaked baseball-stitched head, 38 staples, the effects with sound as if to hear voices, all contributed exemplifying the stream of conscious he felt through the video. Pity and awe was expressed, because of the intensity of his pain in such instances where he described that even "thinking [was] like brail in butter."