The difference matters, especially as it lends insight into Barney’s particular way of working , with images, bodies, and ideas. Choreographer William Forsythe has said (in a 2006 Bomb interview) that Barney is himself “an absolutely superior choreographer in every sense. Really one of the best in our field. No one moves ideas around like he does.” In a 1995 piece in Parkett, Keith Seward compares Barney’s work to Artaud’s desire to stage “events” or “emanations of forces” rather than “men,” aka psychologized individuals. But Barney never vanishes particular bodies in order to shepherd ideas, events, or forces through space and time. Instead, he works through them—often literally, by exploring the body’s capacity to absorb, infiltrate, or expel. And while he has evidenced a long-standing interest in mythologies of different kinds, his use of them does not reflect the problem, articulated by Carter, that “[m]yths deal in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances.” Bodies, no matter how strange, are always particular circumstances. Jim Otto may be the “porous, perforated” antagonist (aka the Hypothermal Penetrator) who “seeks to open more orifices in others,” and Houdini, the “self-contained, sealed-off, hermetic” protagonist, but these figures are not archetypes. Their universe and activities are too surprising and strange simply to “represent.” Instead, via their idiosyncrasy, they make a new thing—something suspended between myth, event, forces, characters, and individual bodies.

This suspension is critical for Barney; in the OTTO trilogy, it’s also literal. Though they constitute some of the longest video pieces here and have the least variability of image, I continue to find the two cross-ceiling climbs—MILE HIGH Threshold and BLIND PERINEUM—among the most compelling. The obvious difficulty of the physical feat being attempted, combined with the ridiculousness of the image (Barney dangling naked, save silicone swim cap, harness, socks and shoes, and a tail fan of ice screws), sets the viewer rocking between seriousness (will he make the next move without falling?!) and inanity (this is art?! Etc.). Over the course of watching, however, one gets enjoyably lost in the daft, mesmerizing momentum of simple physical effort. This momentum seems skimmed off any operative plot about Houdini and Jim Otto rather than constitutive of it—a feeling key to Barney’s approach to narrative and abstraction. Abstraction derives from the Latin, “to draw away”; the abstraction here arrives via Barney’s separation of the propulsive force of each scene from the more elaborate narrative that may have generated it, a method reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s activation of the power of the declarative while leaving sense-making behind (as in insistences such as “Sugar is not a vegetable”).