Matthew Barney - Blind Perineum (1991)

Barney’s now-iconic video action for which he crossed over the ceiling of the gallery above Repressia — a fleshy-pink-colored wrestling mat with two soft shackles protruding from it (also on view) — using a harness and ice-climbing screws. In it, Barney propels himself by the forces of muscle and will. The 87-minute videotape was called “Blind Perineum,“ and the show consisted of it and other videos, the refrigerator and bench, mouth guards, a gynecological speculum, cast wedges of uncooked tapioca and the ghostly traces of his pitons and hand prints on the ceiling and walls. Some of the titles he gave to the objects in the show referred to the escapist Harry Houdini, whom he had begun to see, some years earlier, as an alter ego.