Personal Mythology--Gesamtkunstwerk Of Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney integrated involves the performance, sculpture, installation, painting, video, music and other visual art forms to create a spectacle of Visual Culture, which exploring more possibilities in the multimedia era. His art can be seen as "Gesamtkunstwerk"-Richard Wagner envisaged a form of total artwork.This paper studies and analyses Matthew Barney's Gesamtkunstwerk with Visual Culture Theory, which involved Performance Art, Body Art, Installation Art, Video Art, Film and other visual forms, aims to revealing his epic Gesamtkunstwerk as personal mythology built in the era of Visual Culture. In the context of global cross-cultural, studies of contemporary Western art should reveal some implications for Chinese Contemporary Art.Matthew Barney's Gesamtkunstwerk reveal the Hybrid of Post-modernism, the characters he shaped without any sexual organs provides a hypothesis to solve the problem of gender identity, which the creation is "some kind of undifferentiated new sex, neither male nor female, but a third sex, or the next sex" and the body of deterritorialization becomes Deleuzian "Body without organ", and also presenting the spectacle of "Post-human". Matthew Barney weaves his personal mythology with Restraint and Release, which is the principal contradiction in his Gesamtkunstwerk. The artist's hubris is to demolish the binary opposition models such as Restraint and Release, Male and Female, Artificial and Natural. He expects to break the boundaries of gender beyond rational rules and looks forward to achieving the undifferent totally free state.