Doubt & ​“Redoubt” At YUAG

There’s a tree in the middle of the third-floor exhibition space at the Yale University Art Gallery. A couple trees, in fact. Copper plates hang on the wall, in various stages of chemical obfuscation of the images etched into them. And downstairs in the auditorium is a feature-length film that pulls it all together.

Or does it?

All of it is part of an exhibition of Matthew Barney’s ​“Redoubt,” running at the Yale University Art Gallery through June 16.

As early writeups of ​“Redoubt” in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and Forbes — along with several articles in art-focused publications — make pretty clear, Barney is a Big Deal in the art world, and has been for a couple decades. He made his name with The Cremaster Cycle, five films totaling six and a half hours that he began in 1994 and finished in 2003. If you’re curious, the cremaster muscle is what raises and lowers the testicles to regulate their temperature. That Barney got a decade’s worth of work out of this simple idea suggests the scope of his epic ambitions, for which he has been rewarded. Much of what has been written about ​“Redoubt” so far addresses all this, and notes that, after ​“Redoubt” departs Yale, it will travel to Beijing for the second half of 2019 and to London in 2020.

But what if, to put it maybe a little too bluntly, you don’t really care about the art world? What if you have no idea who Matthew Barney is? What if you just want to stop into the Yale University Art Gallery to check out its special exhibit? Is it worth it?

It’s probably best to start with the film that sits at the heart of the exhibit; several of the labels for the pieces in the top-floor gallery note specifically that they’re intended to accompany the film. This is a bit of a problem if you’re interested in taking in as much of the piece as possible, as the gallery is only showing the film once a week on Saturday afternoons starting at 1:30 p.m., with a few exceptions. It’s also a 135-minute movie with no dialogue, and I realize that by writing that, I may have just lost half of you. Which is fair! When you make a two-hour movie with people in it doing things, it’s reasonable to expect that they might talk to each other once in a while. That they don’t can feel a little forced, even in the symbolic-mythological world that frames the story.

The accompanying notes helpfully explain that ​“Redoubt” is a loose retelling of the myth of Diana and Actaeon. In the myth, Actaeon blunders across Diana and her nymphs while they’re bathing in a spring in the woods. In her anger, Diana turns Actaeon into a stag. Actaeon is then killed by his own hunting dogs.

Barney sets his retelling in the modern-day winter landscape of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. Diana (Anette Wachter, a sharpshooter in real life; check out her website, 30 Cal Gal) is a hunter in camoflage, armed with a high-powered rifle. Her nymphs (Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes) follow her through the snowy mountainous woods as she hunts first a stag, and then wolves. In this film, hunting on the scale Diana does it is part of the natural order of things. She hunts like wolves do, and when wolves die they’re eaten by carrion birds. So it makes sense that Diana’s secondary job is to protect where she lives from interlopers. Her Actaeon here is an engraver (Matthew Barney himself), a Forest Service employee who ventures into the wilderness to make copper engravings (though he does shoot a mountain lion as well) and brings his artwork back to a backcountry trailer, where the etchings are given a series of electrochemical baths by an electroplater (K.J. Holmes). When the engraver gets a little too close, Diana shoots not him, but his engravings, to great dramatic and artistic effect.

Toward the end of the movie, the engraver skins a wolf that Diana has shot (the film assures us that this is all done through special effects), and in what feels like retaliation, a pack of wolves destroys the trailer. Before that happens, however, the engraver drives into a nearby town for a beer at a bar (this is where the no-dialogue rule seems particularly awkward) and passes by an American Legion, where a hoop dancer (Sandra Lamouche) does a dance.

That’s the whole plot, really; there’s just enough of it to move the film from scene to scene, and sometimes not quite enough. The accompanying notes call the hoop dancing scene ​“pivotal,” though in watching the film it’s hard to see how that’s really true. I felt like the wolf-skinning scene, followed by the wolves trashing the trailer, were perhaps more pivotal; maybe that’s just me.

But I’ve told you the whole plot because — like a Transformers movie — the plot is really beside the point. We’re really here for Barney’s scene-by-scene depictions of the Sawtooth Mountains, which he renders with a stark, crystal-clear eye that only brings out their bleak, wintertime beauty. We’re here to relish the surreal lives of Diana and her nymphs, as Diana stalks her prey with all the gear of a fully modern hunter, which she clearly knows how to use, while her nymphs prove to be quasi-contortionist dancers, enacting the violence Diana does to her prey to both humorous and chilling effect. We’re here for the glimpse into how one makes copper engravings, from hiking out in the woods, even in inclement weather, to cut images from nature into a copper plate with a spiked tool called a graver, to giving the engraved plates a series of baths to cause the copper to bloom around the engravings and embellish and sometimes distort the images. The hoop dancer’s dance is mesmerizing.

All that said, you’d be forgiven for finding the film to be pretty boring; the Boston Globe’s reviewer did. For myself, I wondered at about the halfway point whether the six separate hunts couldn’t have been boiled down to three. I imagined tougher editorial decisions resulting in, say, a 75-minute version of this film that may have been more effective; in fact, the five-minute trailer above captures an awful lot of what’s interesting about it.

But I wasn’t bored. Beyond the shot-for-shot beauty — and really, just about every shot was beautiful — the film had several moments of humor and David Lynch-esque creepiness (my favorite kind). There was a particular pleasure in watching the wolves ruin everything in sight at the end. Jonathan Bepler’s soundtrack, which carried much of the movie’s emotional weight, was a quiet marvel, bringing together gongs, harps, dulcimers, and other objects to eerie, moving effect.

And the film, in the end, isn’t meant to be seen in isolation; it’s a part of the exhibit upstairs. For those of us visiting the gallery, though, it raises the question of whether you need to see the film to appreciate the rest of it.

The answer, for me, at least: kind of. Before the film, the series of copper plates left me cold as a viewer, to the point where they were fairly easy to ignore on the wall after seeing two or three of them. Seeing the movie, and understanding better the context they were made in, the processes they went through, and what was perhaps on Barney’s mind when he made them, helped me appreciate them more. I admired more what they went through to get here, even if I didn’t necessarily connect with them more in the end.

What is worth stopping in to see even if you can’t catch the accompanying film are the gargantuan sculptures — the photos really don’t do them justice — made by using burned trees that Barney harvested from the Sawtooth Mountains. As the notes detail, ​“Barney hollowed out the trees and poured molten copper and brass into them, using a technique that created an explosive reaction when the metal made contact with the wood. For some of the sculptures, he also invented a process that deliberately prevented the metals from mixing, instead allowing them to entwine around each other.”

The process seems ingenious, and to the pieces’ credit, completely irrelevant. I didn’t need the explanation to feel the effect, the marriage of industrial materials and natural forms, the fractal-like proliferation of textures that somehow seem a product of both nature and artifice. If the film presented a problem, the way nature was often at odds and ultimately destructive to the artist’s process, the castings of trees presented a solution. I visited these trees before seeing even a second of the film, and at the risk of sounding grandiose, I felt that I’d possibly just seen a new way of making art that addresses the question of our place in the natural world.

Questions about our relation to the environment are often framed in two ways: they either present humanity in opposition to nature, or remind us that we’re part of it. Both have their piece of the truth, but it’s hard to see how to reconcile them. Barney’s monumental pieces seemed to reach toward a way to reconceptualize those questions. Standing in their presence, I felt as though I caught a glimpse of a broader understanding that accepted both viewpoints, to the point where they didn’t seem like contradictions any more. There was the flash of real vision there, emotional and inspiring, and I didn’t need the film to get there; it happened well within the time of a normal lunch break.

So see the movie if you’re curious. Spend a long time in the gallery if you want. But if you find yourself on the corner of York and Chapel with a little time to kill, it’s worth taking a quick trip to the third floor to see those sculptures before they head off to Beijing. You might find yourself subtly changed in the time it takes to wait for a bus.

Matthew Barney’s ​“Redoubt” runs at Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., through June 16. Check the gallery’s website for hours and specific film screening times. Admission to the gallery and to the film is free.