The resultant video recording, drawings and "set" (featuring various items of gym apparatus) exist as an archive of the performance. By applying the idea of hypertrophy to artistic growth - be that physical, cultural or spiritual - he explored the concept that the "strongest" artists (like the strongest athletes) should have to overcome self-imposed obstacles in order to create something "higher" something more "powerful". Through this experiment, Barney had effectively confronted the time-honoured maxim that the best art is a spontaneous, reflexive, activity. Drawing Restraint 2 was a gymnasium-based performance in which the artist made artistic "marks" on walls and ceiling while tethered to a ramp with bungee cords. The earliest in the series ( Drawing Restraint 1-6, produced between 1987-89) brought together drawing, photography and video performance in a way that reflected Barney's preoccupation with hypertrophy that being the idea that athletic physicality and strength is built up through muscle resistance. The Drawing Restraint series was a long-term project that Barney began in 1987 while still an undergraduate at Yale. Indeed, in Barney's vision, "bodily functions are interchangeable with the primordial ooze of the earth". In his infamous River of Fundament, Barney pushed his viewers' mental (rather than muscular) endurance by asking them to confront human waste, not, as he says, as a shock tactic, but rather as a legitimate subject for philosophical meditation. ![]()
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