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Attempting to sum up the scope of Matthew Barney¡¯s epic in a few
words is like trying to shove the history of existence through a
scrotum-shaped pinhole. Like a magic lantern tapped directly into
the obscure struggling crevices of Barney¡¯s brain, The Cremaster
Cycle allows the psyche to reign over a legion of evocative
icons-in-action ¡ª all captured in a series of films named after a
muscle that protects the testicles, and causes them to retract when
provoked.
In Latin, cremaster means ¡°to suspend.¡± And taking after its
namesake, the series hovers over and incubates sexual ambiguity like
a fetus developing in the womb during the first eight weeks, when
nothing is definite. This is a strange parade. Whether or not you¡¯re
into a tap-dancing red-haired satyr, a vicious cheetah girl,
Scottish giants, an ex-Bond girl mouthing arias, grape-eating
stewardesses, fairies with six-packs or Gary Gilmore, in Barney¡¯s
football-and-fine-art-fed mind, they all illustrate a biological
process that never quite completes itself. For almost a decade, The
Cremaster Cycle has been enchanting art connoisseurs from around the
world; it could prove itself to be a paradigm in the evolution of
art.
Barney, now 36, has been the boundary-pushing darling of the art
world ever since his New York debut in 1991, when he presented a
video of himself scaling the walls and ceiling of the Barbara
Gladstone Gallery, naked. He¡¯s won the prestigious Europa 2000 award
at the 45th Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim Museum¡¯s Hugo Boss
Award, among myriad accolades for his work. ¡°The most important
American artist of his generation because his imagination is so
big,¡± raved New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman in a 5,000-word
profile that hailed Barney¡¯s range without ever succinctly summing
him up.
In addition to writing and directing all of the films, Barney acts
in all but one, and has produced a Cremaster catalogue of books,
drawings and sculptures, a project he¡¯s worked on for almost a
decade. The guy has cooked up a wicked international stir with
instant recognition, praise and success hurled at him and his
¡°Marlboro Man¡± good looks. A living dream? Björk seems to think so.
She and Barney are a couple made in aesthetic heaven. In the scope
of avant-garde rock, Björk is another adored artist of outstanding
originality, and she gave birth to Barney¡¯s child last year, on the
crest of daddy¡¯s fame.
Although some of the films have made it here before, for the first
time in Detroit the entire Cremaster Cycle will be shown this
weekend. With a combined running time of just under seven hours,
these five films communicate almost entirely in image, music and
movement with next to no dialogue. They¡¯ll be shown in numerical
order, not in the order they were made (4, 1, 5, 2, 3). As you pick
and choose how to divide your free time, keep in mind this is an
experience not to be ignored, even on Halloween weekend. The
Cremaster Cycle is more than just a muscle-inspired cluster of
hermetic islands speaking in metaphoric tongues. They feed into and
rely on each other, stronger as a whole, although damned intriguing
by themselves, beginning with Cremaster 1.
Hovering over the tips of two goal posts in a football stadium are
two Goodyear blimps. Everything is bathed in stadium lights that
remove shadows so that objects seem to float. On the striking blue
field, there are smiling showgirls in shiny pink swirling dresses ¡ª
like upside down double-cupped flowers. As the girls move in
formation on the field to a sort of dreamy elevator music, the
camera cuts to two airborne lounges up above, somewhere, maybe
inside the blimps, permeated by a lulling, amniotic engine hum. Each
lounge has its own set of stewardesses who gather around a table of
grapes (one room with green and one room with red), and each table
has a uterus-shaped Vaseline sculpture in the center.
In each lounge, under the table, under the white tablecloth,
crouches a platinum blond woman on a white plastic platform; in
these womb-like cramped quarters she pulls grapes down through a
hole in the tabletop, onto her chest. Somehow, the grapes come out
of the bottom of her shoe as if she¡¯s a human fallopian tube, and
pretty soon the grapes begin to signify ova (or human eggs). By the
time this platinum blonde makes it to the ground wearing her own
swirled white-metallic dress, she and the two Goodyear blimps she
holds onto ¡ª with a cord in each hand ¡ª become the personification
of the womb and ovaries ¡ª a universal place of creation. And there
the 40-minute-long movie ends.
As with all of the films, translating Cremaster 1 (1995) into words
is a disservice to the elevating intensity and intrigue communicated
through sound and imagery.
After watching a few of these movies, and letting them sink in, you
quickly get hip to the Cremaster tools: white plastic devices,
pearly white balls, and Vaseline ¡ª which turns into a sort of
biomorphic glue, connecting, filling, splattering against and
covering choice objects and fissures. Associations we have with old
genres ¡ª like Busby Berkeley musicals, sporting events and half-time
spectaculars ¡ª are added on top of this new genus of film (and
associations) Barney conjures up by shaping together fresh images
both provocative and electric. And while these wild juxtapositions
might bring the long tradition of surrealism to mind, the term isn¡¯t
quite appropriate. In Barney¡¯s eyes, these images are all quite
reasonable, alive in their own reality, with their own rationales.
And it doesn¡¯t take long before visual connections between
associations become darker and more complex. The camera moving
across horizontal white lines on the blue football field in C1
clicks into the intense gothic horizontal lines of church pews in
C2.
Cremaster 2 (1999), the fourth made, strays furthest from the
Cremaster formula, in part because there is dialogue (the other
films are void of spoken words ¡ª although some are sung), and
because of the film¡¯s dependency on a historical figure, Utah
murderer Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first American to be
executed in 10 years as America re-embraced the death penalty.
It helps to know some things about Gilmore in order to really dive
into C2, for instance that he owned a blue Mustang but lusted after
a white truck (which he bought but couldn¡¯t afford the payments on),
that his affectionless mother Bessie intimated that Houdini was his
grandfather, and that his brutally abusive father Frank initially
christened him with the first name Faye ¡ª the same name as Frank¡¯s
mother, Gary¡¯s grandmother, a spiritual medium ¡ª before Bessie
changed it to Gary.
The imagery in C2 is a plague of ice, bees and restrictions, such as
outrageously tiny-waisted corsets and confined spaces that frustrate
and imprison. Gilmore, played by Barney, sits on the front seat of a
Mustang at a service station. Soon you realize that the Mustang¡¯s
interior is connected to another Mustang¡¯s interior (one blue, one
white) in an otherworldly constructed tunnel, the shape of which is
reminiscent of a honeycomb. Gilmore fidgets on the seat. He attempts
to pry off and bend together pieces of the interior, but his
Vaseline fails to glue the connections. Gilmore¡¯s eyes turn bloody
red in frustration. As his rage builds, death metal sung by a man
overlaps a melancholy country ballad crooned by a woman ¡ª until
Gilmore is driven to violence. Barney later parallels Gary¡¯s
liberation from prison through death with a death-defying
metamorphic escape by Houdini (portrayed by Norman Mailer, whose The
Executioner¡¯s Song chronicles Gilmore¡¯s life).
It¡¯s safe to say that Cremaster 3 (2002) (his longest ¡ª running at
182 minutes) is Barney¡¯s Cremasterpiece, completely standing on its
own with substantial narrative ebb and flow, yet intricately tying
into the other films while referencing back on itself. Although
framed within Barney¡¯s comic version of the giant-ridden Scottish
myth behind the creation of the Isle of Man, C3 very quickly takes a
horrific, magnificent turn.
A woman crawls up through the earth, skin just covering her bones;
she¡¯s marked with the colors of decomposition. At the same time, a
man (Barney as the Entered Apprentice) in a fedora and leather apron
fills in the Chrysler symbol (just one side shy of a honeycomb) on
the front of numerous cars with cement. The woman collapses when she
reaches the surface, and her eyes ooze blood, and her flesh drops to
the floor as she¡¯s placed (apparently dead) in the interior of a car
(her hands placed in a white plastic loop) alongside an eagle
fidgeting on the seat. Five cars back toward the death car in a
formation mimicking the Chrysler symbol, then proceed to crush the
car with the woman and eagle inside ¡ª the car harboring things of
the earth ¡ª demolition-derby style.
Eventually, the Chrysler Building becomes the colossal phallic
center of a pagan maypole dance orchestrated by sculptor Richard
Serra as the Master Architect: Men in white gloves, business suits
and fedoras interbraid pink and green ribbons in and around the
building.
Barney has said that he considers the film series an extension of
his ¡°sculpture practice.¡± With a sculptor¡¯s attention to every
possible detail, Barney has given each film its own symbolic emblem,
a coat of arms of sorts, with the same underlying shape: a rounded
rectangle (like the shape of a plane window) merged with an
intersecting squared-off thin bar. It¡¯s as if Barney has created his
own Western version for the yin-yang symbol to build his layered
mysteries on. And because of the general stoicism and silence of the
characters, other aspects within the films ¡ª confining conditions,
jump cuts, shapes, as well as their variations, and even buildings ¡ª
begin to carry emotion and narrative with equal emphasis.
So just why did Barney make the films out of order? Maybe ¡°The
Order¡± (the last section of C3) can give us some insight. As the
Entered Apprentice, Barney is clad in blue argyle socks and a pink
plaid kilt with pink shako to match, as he climbs the spiraled tiers
inside the Guggenheim Museum. Fashioned as a sort of high-profile
sports-spectacular obstacle course, the Apprentice¡¯s path is far
from linear; he has to move back and forth between levels before
mastering them. (If you managed to make it to the Barney show at the
Guggenheim this past summer, you could have watched ¡°The Order¡±
projected on multiple screens at the top of the very place it was
filmed. In other words, you could participate in your own strange
spiraling of realities.)
Throughout the films, and especially in C3, the camera is an
all-seeing eye, able to take on any perspective, and more often than
not moving ¡ª slow and brooding to record a process so personal, it¡¯s
universal. Watching Barney as the Entered Apprentice continually
riding on the outside tops of the elevators, and later climbing on
the outside of the building to reach its pinnacle seems to allude to
his career in fine art, traveling outside the corporate status quo
yet reaching a pinnacle spot in the public eye.
The first film shot in the series, Cremaster 4 (1994), was
originally filmed to be broadcast as a fake sporting event, but it
never made it to TV. Three incredibly strong fairy-god-fairies,
played by women bodybuilders (without breast jobs), guide and watch
over the progress of the Loughton Candidate (a red-haired,
white-suited satyr played by Barney). The satyr tap dances through a
white plastic floor into the ocean, as two motorcycle teams race in
opposite directions around the Isle of Man.
Somehow, Barney managed to get semi-retired former Euro-bombshell
Ursula Andress for Cremaster 5 (1997). As the Queen of Chain,
Andress, clad in black, walks on shoes with flared white plastic
soles. She mouths mournful arias while looking through a hole
fashioned like a white plastic anus. Barney, the Magician, hurls his
naked self into dark waters in a Houdiniesque spectacle, with his
hands and feet trapped in white plastic loops by white plastic
gloves and his toes clutching white plastic balls ¡ª objects
connecting him to the destructive aspects of masculinity swimming
through C3. This final film culminates in a sumptuous,
red-marbleized fleshy scene, unfolding lush myth through the
commingling of an operatic love of tragedy with underwater nymphs of
nebulous sexuality. Reminiscent of the maypole dance in C3, doves
hover about, connected by ribbons to the Magician¡¯s ambiguous
genitalia, finishing the cycle inside a bathhouse in Budapest (the
birthplace of Houdini).
Is it really finished? It seems that Barney would like it to be.
He¡¯s not doing interviews on Cremaster any longer, as he¡¯s claimed
to be eager ¡°to move on to the next stage of his career.¡±
But looking at his biography suggests some clues about his work. The
tension between sports and arts on the screen seems to reflect the
different genders his parents represent. They split when Barney was
15, and he divided his time between his dad in Idaho (where Barney
avidly played high school football and quarterbacked his team to a
state championship) and his mom, an abstract painter in New York
City. He¡¯s said that since he wasn¡¯t tall enough to hope for a
professional football career, he went to Yale intent on becoming a
plastic surgeon. But he wound up transferring to the art department
and worked his way through school as a male model. (How many other
artists have posed for Ralph Lauren?)
Whether or not his films reflect a hesitation to pick one love over
another, The Cremaster Cycle whirls in a symbol-strewn sea of
objects and beings that embody a confounding gender-blending.
Barney¡¯s fearless determination to realize his cinematic sculptures
on such an enormous scale puts most of us to shame. In Cremaster 2,
Houdini states that within metamorphosis, he digests the lock to
become a part of the cage that contains him in order to break free
of it. As in art and dreams, The Cremaster Cycle speaks in a
language of symbols, archetypes and metaphor, refusing to yield to,
and refusing to work within, the limitations and confines of
rational reality. Barney somehow manages to digest that reality we
all know and gives birth to a fantastic land steeped in processes
from biology to geology to mythology to biography.
For at least a little while, we can all break free and allow
ourselves to live inside a vital playground of free associations,
where a simple everyday shape can hold complex histories that never
settle on being a he or a she.
From
Metro Times
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