Samuel Fury Childs Daly at the LARB:
Despite his Yale education and his patrician tone, Barney has a working-class sensibility; watch an interview with him and you’ll see someone who speaks like an academic but dresses like a teamster. This means that Barney cuts an unusual figure in the art world. He is thoroughly a jock, and his work is so unapologetically macho that describing it can sound like parody. A “cycle” of films named after part of the scrotum? A six-hour opera about Norman Mailer? This is art by, for, and about men, even though the machismo is more mottled than it might appear at first glance.
The scenes Barney stages can be so repellent that they end up being strangely beautiful (one scatological moment from 2014’s River of Fundament will be with me forever), or so reactionary that they come full circle and become radical. Barney celebrates, and seems to revel in, the rites and emblems of a traditional masculinity that is today almost universally pathologized—especially among people who tend to work in art galleries.
more here.