Yet, the exhibition includes more than forty objects-sculptures, engravings and electro-plated copper plates. At its core, Redoubt is a feature-length film set in Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness. Redoubt consists of numerous elements that must be comprehended as a whole, although its components can be considered and appraised individually. The term “ensemble,” a word used by Pamela Franks, the exhibition’s curator, is particularly apt. Redoubt is an ensemble exhibition by Matthew Barney. Courtesy of the Artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Matthew Barney, Redoubt, production still, 2018. Barney’s work is a synthesis of creative intelligences, his and his collaborators. In cinematic terms, the film’s feeling recalls the laconic, enigmatic dreaminess of Terrence Malick. Scored music melds with the sounds in the Idaho landscape and in the Electroplater’s house trailer laboratory. Perhaps there are six or so human utterances of animal calls. Each hunt, each stanza in the tone poem, is accompanied by a “specific instrument, theme, and elemental focus.” There are neither dialogue nor lyrics. In fact, River of Fundament, which also conflates myth and modern America, is an operatic film.) The visual narrative of Redoubt has a graceful fluidity, enhanced by an aurally mesmerizing score by Jonathan Bepler, Barney’s long-time collaborator. (Barney’s work has been likened to opera. There is enough continuity in the storyline that Barney scripted, that the film operates like a visual equivalent of a tone poem. Hence, the film has six “Hunt” chapters, consecutively numbered. The film’s structure evolved from a conversation Barney had with a hunting outfitter who suggested it takes a minimum of six days to track and locate wolves. These intertwined stories climax when a pack of wolves enter and shred the isolated workshop-home of the Electroplater. This myth crosses with another story line, that of an Engraver, played by Barney, who works with an Electroplater who provides him with copper plates on which he documents the landscape and his observations of Diana and her nymphs. Barney’s story is a loose adaptation of the myth of Diana and Actaeon-a hunter who trespasses on Diana’s privacy in the wild. In the film, characters representing Diana, the Roman goddess of wild animals and the hunt, and her two attendants pursue an elusive wolf in the rugged, winter terrain of the Sawtooth Mountains. Redoubt -a project made over a four-year period from 2016 to 2019-is positioned as layering “classical, cosmological, and American myths about humanity’s place in the natural world, continuing Barney’s long-standing preoccupation with landscape as both a setting and subject.” At its core, the film depicts a wolf hunt within a redoubt, an area of fortifications or natural features, such as mountains, that provide safe havens. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. I always had it in mind to take it on artistically.” ( Redoubt, p. Barney recalled, “given the place that wolves occupy in our imagination, the conversation took on a mythological quality and. In April 2011 Congress attached a rider to a must-pass budget bill that stripped Endangered Species Act protections from wolves in all of Montana and Idaho. Fish and Wildlife Service began moving to reduce or remove protections for wolves. Having been driven to near extinction as a result of human activity, a wolf camp was formed in 1991 in a 25-acre enclosure for the Sawtooth (Wilderness) Pack. In the 1980’s, before Matthew Barney attended Yale as an undergraduate, he was a witness to the tug-of-war about the reintroduction of gray of wolves in his adopted home state of Idaho. Yet, it would take nearly 20 years before 66 wolves from Canada were released into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. government had approved an eradication campaign, destroying all wolf species that were considered “injurious to agriculture.” Finally and at last, in 1974, the gray wolf was protected under the Endangered Species Act, and a Rocky Mountain wolf recovery team was created. Between 1870 to 1877, for example, as many as 100,000 wolves were exterminated annually. In the United States, hunters, outfitters and ranchers have historically opposed legal protections for wolves. They have been depicted as everything from “savage hell-dog to benevolent spirit,” despite their vital role as a keystone species in diverse ecosystems in Eurasia and North America. Wolves are a common motif in folklore, mythologies and cosmologies.
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