(Matthew Barney).

(Matthew Barney), 2000-03 an installation shown in isolation, is the latest example of Barry X Bali's evolving series of sculptural portrait heads, which likewise far are drawn primarily from the art world. Here he literally skewers Matthew Barney's stone likeness forward a golden spike.

For each of his personally prefered (noncommissioned) subjects, Ball starts with a plaster life cast. In an artist's statement, he says that Barney "generously agreed to bewilder for me in early 2000 Since that time, I have had no contact with Matthew." In a months-long proces Ball manipulated the resulting plaster mold into his chiefly elaborate portrait head to date an elongated image strange enough to have take rise from Bareey's own chimerical cast of characters, still rendered in materials as exquisitely polished and finished as a fine decorative object

from one side subtractions from and additions to the original likeness, followed by dint of prolonged tinkering via three-dimensional digital laser scanning and painstakingly inert computer-controlled milling and carving machines, the head took form in a veined and pitted translucent piece of white Mexican onyx In this figurative percept the stone's natural oxblood-colored markings are transformed into tortures and slashes that call to mind Barney's admit invasive performance-based body transformations. Ball added a swag of draping, flayed skin for Barney's neck and designed a ballistic-like eruption at the top of the head for the spike. The spike, 69 inches protracted was similarly computer-designed and -machined, in stainless mail plated with 24-karat gold.

Above this beautifully crafted nevertheless grotesquely impaled figure was more decorative exces The carved work was suspended, via thin stainless-steel cables fastened with custom-fabricated turnbuckle from a radiating circle of 25 cast-polyurethane decorative ceiling medallions--the kind that restorers of elegant 19th-century abiding-places use to replace missing plaster embellishments. The central disk, the largest, features cherubs that examine down upon Barney's head. Graduated smaller disks form eight spoke that environ the cherubs, creating a little plastic fog of manufactured heaven.

It's hard to say whether Ball is "sending up" Barney to about kind of just reward or paying elaborate homage to him. Either way, Bali's fetishistic portrait is more theatrical and compelling than the stage-prop-like character of earnestly of Barney's own sculpture. [The installation is in succession view at P.S. 1 in just discovered York through May.]

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