The artist casts himself alongside a real-life
NRA sharpshooter in this wordless exploration of wilderness
Redoubt is a wordless outdoor movie-ballet inspired by the huntress myth of Diana, set in the forested wilderness of Idaho’s Sawtooth mountains and brought to us by artist and film-maker Matthew Barney, whose most famous work is probably his colossal five-film sequence, the Cremaster Cycle.Cremaster was a headspinningly gigantic folie de grandeur spanning six hours in total, inspired by the interrelation of biology and creativity. Redoubt is a more modest two-and-a-quarter hours, part of an art installation including sculptures and engravings, originally commissioned by Yale University. Barney plays a hardy outdoorsman, an engraver who hikes around the wilderness, making etchings on an engraving plate; his redoubt appears to be a modest
trailer which he shares with a woman (KJ Holmes), perhaps his wife or partner, who electroplates the resulting work in a chemical bath. But the engraver is in a mysterious state of antagonism, or at least wary coexistence, with three
Women in the forest who are hunting wolves: Diana (played by real-life sharpshooter and NRA member Anette Wachter), and her “Calling Virgin” and “Tracking Virgin” (played by the dancers Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes) who are dressed in camo, carry serious rifles and hardware; the Virgins go into strange, showy dance moves in the
SNOW (which, it has to be said, rather negates the importance of camouflage and not revealing yourself to the prey).