Evans is a place on Earth: Guns & Ammo:Matthew Barney's Redoubt.

Hunting! Shooting! Fishing! Proper macho pursuits for real men. Real men with big beards, big stomachs, and big coats. Real men like the American artist, photographer, and film and video director Matthew Barney whose Redoubt exhibition is currently on at London's Hayward Gallery. It's an exhibition you need to devote a lot of time to (its centrepiece film is 134 minutes long) and that is time, to be quite honest, you can't get back.

Sawtooth Battery (2019)

It's not so much that it's bad (it's not, the film is beautifully shot and some of the works are made with the utmost craftsmanship and intricate detail) so much as it all seems a bit pointless. We're told Barney is addressing cosmology, ecology, frontier mythology, the cultural significance of wearing camouflage, and a time in the 1990s when the reintroduction of wolves to rural Idaho (where San Francisco born Barney grew up) led to a bitter dispute between ecologists who supported this government initiative and the hunters and landowners who opposed it.

The word 'redoubt', a type of defensive military fortification, has of late become associated with the American survivalist movement and if you think they're all a load of conspiracy theory addicted crackpots and gun nuts, Barney is here to tell you you're wrong. But how convincing are his denials?

Cosmic Hunt (2020)

Disappointingly, not very. The two hour plus film looks very impressive. Lots of horses riding through awesome snowscapes and long slow scenes of naive artists at work but, my, it drags. My ticket was for late afternoon so it was impossible to watch it all and see the rest of the show. Even so, after a reasonably decent shift I feel I got the rough idea and continued on to look a collection of Barney's wooden militaristic sculptures (some using 3D printing techniques to, supposedly, recreate the fur of a wolf pelt) and, in stark contrast, delicately etched electroplated copper plates.

Some with names like Cosmic Hunt:Kyrtpek Artemis, ATACS Virgin, and Tactical Baroque (which at least impressed The Fall fan in me) and others with far more basic names like Slug or Diana. As the goddess of the hunt in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Diana features quite heavily - and so does Actaeon, the hunter who discovers her bathing naked in the woods and as punishment is transformed into a stag and hunted down.

Redoubt (2018)

Diana:State two (2018)

In the film, Diana is played by real life 'sharpshooter' Anette Wachter and the mysterious Engraver, a ranger for the US Forest Service, is played by Barney himself. There are dancers and wild animals (in their natural environment, we're informed, and not treated cruelly) as well and no doubt in Barney's mind this all made some very deep and meaningful points but all it seemed to say to me was that the natural world is fantastic (which I would wholeheartedly agree with), that it is dangerous (can't argue with that one), and that shooting animals is cool (yep, lost me there).

I actually enjoyed the outdoor sculpture Sawtooth Battery (cast in metal from a burned lodgepole pine tree in Idaho) but not because it included a snare to trap animals or because its brass base was inspired by the heavy weaponry of World War I. More because it was big, it was outdoors, and you could see the London Eye and the Royal Festival Hall behind it.

Slug (2018)

Diana (2018)

Cougar in Bearing Tree:State five (2018)

The rest of the exhibits upstairs in the Hayward were just that really. Exhibits. Oh look, there's Diana with her roots showing, there's something called Cougar in Bearing that's an unusual shape - I wonder what that means, here's another exhibit called Redbout that has doors that open and looks a bit different to the others, and there's one called Diana on Shooting Bench that looks a little bit like something Joseph Beuys might have made.

Beuys displayed himself in a cage with a wolf (okay, a coyote then) once so perhaps he was an inspiration for Barney. That alone made it one of the more interesting articles on show. Most of the rest of it, though impressively made, had little impression on me. I felt little. I wasn't moved, I wasn't angered, and my interest was rarely piqued. Maybe I'm becoming a cynical old git but the Hayward Gallery is a huge and important arts space in London and I feel there are so many more interesting ways that it could be used than as a theatre to indulge Matthew Barney living out his Rambo wank fantasies.