The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins—it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Travis Diehl traces the high contrasts that animate Matthew Barney’s most recent film, 2018’s Redoubt, screened in January at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles.

Matthew Barney, Redoubt, 2018. Production still. © Matthew Barney. Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.

The Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho—the snowbound world of Matthew Barney’s latest film, Redoubt—are exotic to most living beings, but have personal significance for the artist: he grew up in the area and returns there often from his studio in New York. There is a message here, somewhere, trudged out by boots in the snow, about nature and humanity and the bond of their mutual endurance. The film’s icy, mesmerizing quality is propelled by survival in the way that its main characters, a hunter with her rifle (a modern Diana, played by sharpshooter Anette Wachter) and a park ranger with an etching plate and stylus (Barney himself), must keep moving or else freeze in the silence. The hunter-goddess tracks a wolf while the ranger-artist stalks images. Each performs their respective form of culture within nature’s indifferent frame. They move deliberately, searchingly, and their slowly intertwining quests give Barney’s film its backbone, while the film, like an extension of Barney himself, seems to search without knowing what for. No one speaks, a wolf howls, guns fire, and the film carries on like the white hands and black turtleneck of a mime wandering through the wrong part of America, compelled by a grammar of contrast.

Trees and figures break swathes of crusty snow, mingling, camouflaging each other. Every action, no matter how subtle, leaves a flurry of marks on a ground—the mark against the unmarked. The ranger sets up plein air, gouging mountainsides and pine needles into copper plates that his assistant, played by the dancer KJ Holmes, suspends in electrolytic baths inside a trailer. Art appears against brute matter. The ranger renders a cougar, the cat both emerging from and concealed by a swarm of burred gashes, bark and limbs and fur cohering around two eyes looking dead ahead, before the ranger puts down his stylus, takes his gun, and shoots it out of the tree. There are no do-overs in etching or in hunting, any more than you can unsee a pattern. Trace copper follows the flow of electricity and the recesses of the artist’s marks build into ridges. He drinks from a stars and stripes mug. The stars rotating above the trailer are white holes in a black sky.

Redoubt is Barney’s largest drawing restraint yet. On the snow of Idaho, he thrashes out a composition of life against death. Skill makes the difference, such as it is, between intention and accident—a gun going off when it’s asked to, the bullet going where it’s wanted—the skill to capitalize on chance. Barney cast Wachter, a world-class sharpshooter and NRA star, as Diana. He cast himself as the artist. As with his other films, Redoubt is the cinematized version of his actors’ already exceptional performance as human beings. They act like myths, gods of their respective domains, so that they stand out against the ordinary who’s-who. The engraver and the hunter track their respective prey, while the film’s plot brings them closer together. Eventually, they meet and exchange fire: the engraver captures the hunter’s likeness, then the hunter fires a bullet into the edge of the engraver’s plate.

The film’s fifth act, its classical climax, is intercut with shots of a Native American dancer, Sandra Lamouche, flapping wings of racking, interlocking hoops in an American Legion hall. She seems to dance to music in her headphones that no one else can hear. Within the film’s plot, her presence is disconnected from the other characters and their cycles of hunts; we see her, but they don’t. Barney the filmmaker contrasts Lamouche’s rhythmic, morphing movements with the lolling, miming, rope-and-harness stunts of Diana’s two white-clad virgin attendants (aerialist Laura Stokes and dancer/choreographer Eleanor Bauer), while the red rings of her hoops echo the shape of the cycle itself. Redoubt, like the history of this country, is an attempt to transpose Greek myth onto the North American landscape. Lamouche falls outside of the Classical schema. Her dance inside a modest hall named in honor of US military veterans is staged like the inverse to the final, fantastic dance of the film, when Holmes improvises outdoors during an eclipse; the contrast between these two dances, one that predates European Classicism and one that struggles to unlearn it, opens up the shape of their transposition’s failure, mirroring conceptually the opening shot of a hot, round carcass on the snow. The congruence between the hunters and the hunted is a hole for the film to fire into.

It takes six acts for Diana to shoot and kill the wolf. The wolf is skinned, while the gun is ritualistically dismantled, touched, posed by her two attendants. Its pieces are lost in the snow. There is a shot of the muzzle’s bore. This composition, in its way, punctuates the film’s aggressive subtext, the fact of its constant observation: us watching the artist who plays himself, “hunting” for “images,” as Barney’s high-definition camera machine-guns through every scene. Barney’s camera, unlike the gun, is always shooting. The shape of the state of Idaho, placed between MATTHEW BARNEY and REDOUBT in the film’s title, is turned ninety degrees so that it points like a gun.

Barney feels a bond to Idaho’s wildness, and yet his self-styled role in the film is to play its prodigal compliment. The artist is a man among five women costars; he is a white settler to the Native; he is coastal to midwestern, cosmopolitan to rural, sophisticated to raw; he hunts while his assistant gathers; he trudges while others dance. As the ranger-artist tracks Diana who tracks the wolf, he loses himself in his own artwork; he grows isolated and unheroic. In the end, after their confrontation, the ranger disappears. Or perhaps he retreats behind his camera, to a position outside the dichotomies he has so carefully arranged. Perhaps this is where he belongs. A pack of wolves rips through his bedding and drinks the electroplating chemistry. The choreographer dances and thinks about the stars, while the stars don’t think at all. x

Travis Diehl is Online Editor at X-TRA.