Self Lubricating Plastic, Oh My

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On the left is The Deportment of the Host, a large installation, and on the right is a print entitled Drawing Restraint 9: Shimenawa. These seem very different in size, style, material, and theme, so that one might think all they had in common the room they are in.

These two works have in common 2 qualities: the artist, Matthew Barney, and a material, not immediately apparent, of self lubricating plastic. Matthew Barney is a contemporary American artist whose works spans performance, sculpture and video art, with a tendency toward cryptic personal stories and erotic themes. Quite a few of Barney’s works incorporate this material. In the print, it forms the frame around an image of Matthew Barney and Bjork. His use of this odd material certainly seems cryptic.

But to the point, what is self lubricating plastic, and why does Barney use it? It seems like a high tech product used to little effect, except perhaps the fondness of a biology major for cool technology. He tends to cast polycaprolactone thermoplastic and self lubricating plastic in his sculptural pieces like The Deportation of the Host. Using anything lubricating in regards to framing a print doesn’t make sense to me.

The plastic didn’t seem to be wet, although I was stopped from touching it. Any ideas?

Watertower at MoMA

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Can you spy the water tower? It’s in the top right.

The rooftops of NYC are filled with water towers, but this one is deceptive. It is not actually a water tower, but a commissioned piece Water Tower by British artist Rachel Whiteread. Cast in clear resin of the inside of a real water tower, it actually has no color of its own. A fact I didn’t realize when I was trying to take a picture of it and couldn’t quite get it.

Whitehead says:

So it’s a single clear plastic casting of a full–sized water tower that sat on the roof on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street, on a dunnage.

I had originally thought of making this piece solid but that’s technically impossible. So we had to make it empty, so the whole thing is a skin of about four inches all the way around. And it has the texture of the inside of the water tower, so it’s really about solidifying water and trying to make this water look like it’s just frozen in a moment of time. It’s like the actual water tower has been stripped away and there’s this solid water left behind.

It’s translucence means that in different lights it shows up more or less visibly, like a sky ghost over Manhattan.

Rachel Whiteread. (British, born 1963). Water Tower. 1998. Translucent resin and painted steel, 12′ 2″ high x 9′ in diameter.

Book Review: A Quiet Adjustment

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A cursory glance at the jacket copy makes clear why I picked this book up: it’s a fictional account of Lord Byron’s wife, and thus Byron. Byron’s work is delightful, he was a fascinating person, and I’m a tad enamoured. I love Byron no less after this imaginative and vivid account of his cruel humor and selfish megalomania, not to mention his more depraved side, but I don’t recommend anybody actually read A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits (Fathers and Daughters, Imposture).

Is Byron’s character pure imagination on Markovits‘ part? Hardly. He embellishes the facts but not the characters of the ill matched pair of Annabella Millbanke and Lord Byron. Prudish, self-righteous, and dignified Anabella had no idea what she was getting into when she ended up marrying tempestuous, willful, and perverse Lord Byron. Their marriage seems like an accident on both their parts, as Annabella felt little love and Byron less. Byron’s antics from shattering bottles on the ceiling during her confinement to carrying on an affair with his sister in front of her eyes are horrid. Markovits tackles Annabella’s inept reaction to his behavior that put off divorce for too long, and then refused to name the most terrible ground for divorce. (What that unnamed reason was remains a mystery, rumored to be incest or sodomy.)

Would I recommend this novel to those who couldn’t give 2 figs about Byron? Absolutely not; it’s dull. The monotony of A Quiet Adjustment, with its accomplished character development and good sense of setting, stems from the plot and not the author. Of course, I happened to know the ending, but the more basic failure is that its plot follows that of the real Annabella’s life. Life does not often form the arc of suspense and conclusion that a satisfactory plot requires.

Unless you happen to be Lord Byron, and then you continue to live, love and write the rollicking Don Juan until your death fighting for Greek Independence. Byron makes a much better story than a person, and no doubt Annabella was a better person than she makes as a story. Markovits choose an angle for his story that is more of a straight line, which is shame because as a writer he seems capable of more.

Bottom line: read Byron instead.