My friend K and I went to the member museum preview of the Matthew Barney exhibit at SFMOMA last week. From the SFMOMA website:

SFMOMA is the only U.S. venue for this full-scale survey, the first to gather together Matthew Barney’s entire DRAWING RESTRAINT series. Spanning almost 20 years, DRAWING RESTRAINT is an ongoing, performance-based project exploring the notion that form emerges through struggle against resistance. A site-specific installation designed by the artist, the exhibition occupies the Museum’s entire fourth floor, which has been reconfigured to eliminate the gallery walls and so encourage a nonlinear experience of the art.

The opening was your typical San Francisco artsy scene. While we were waiting in line outside, there was a couple walking around dressed like some of the images in the Matthew Barney exhibit. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether these people were dressed up especially for the exhibit or whether they were just being themselves because at any given moment in San Francisco someone is always in costume, but at a typical art opening the number of people in costume expands exponentially depending on the magnitude of the event and gravitas of the artist. At the Matthew Barney member opening, it felt like about 40% of the people attending were in costume. I just found it so fascinating that SFMOMA had such a variety of members. Besides the artsy fartsy crowd in costume, the blue-hairs were there as well as people who look like they would never walk into a museum let alot a modern art museum. It always makes what Andy Warhol would have thought about us all had he been standing outside SFMOMA last Wednesday night.

I love Matthew Barney. He does such interesting work with with sculptural material. There pieces of scuplture that looked like foam or a blob of shaving cream, but which are in fact hard to touch. There was a piece that looked like someone had put a huge slab of butter or dough on the floor. It's all so fascinating!

The artist Bjork was in his photos and in his films, and she added the rock star phenomena to his pieces. I love the juxtaposition that he was a football player and wrestler in his youth and is now this avant garde NYC artist. There is something about that combo that is so very strange.

Then there was these weird videos about fawns doing strange things in a limo. I thought they looked like birdies myself, but my friend K said there were men dressed as fawns and doing lewd and weird things in a limo driving through the streets of NYC.

You can read what the SFGate had to say about the Matthew Barney exhibit,
Matthew Barney, In Glory all his own.