Matthew Barney: Redoubt; Igshaan Adams: Kicking Dust – review Laura Cumming
Matthew Barney’s first British show in more than 10 years is all picturesque nature, a 21st-century version of the American sublime. Everything centres on the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, where the artist was raised. Gilded tree trunks soar up through darkened galleries, radiant etchings cast an eerie glow on the ground, and a feature-length movie unleashes spectacular visions of snowbound peaks, torrential rivers, star-shine, dawn, dusk and wolves. This is a meditation on the wilderness, with Barney as a multimedia Thoreau.
The film is easily summarised (surprisingly, given the abstruse mythologies of Barney’s great five-film Cremaster cycle). Ovid’s tale of Diana and Actaeon is restaged with Actaeon working as a ranger for the US forest service, and Diana as a camouflaged sharpshooter tracking him through the sights of a hi-tech rifle. The nymphs he unwittingly spies are two cont