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An
in-depth look at Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3
This article originally
appeared in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) Graduate
Journal
In Cremaster 3, the final stage of the five-part Cremaster
cycle, Matthew Barney has not only created a masterpiece of postmodern
art but has also immortalised himself in film. The scale, ambition
and sheer beauty of the finished work is breathtaking. Over the
five films, Barney has articulated a personal mythology so richly
detailed, so densely populated and so carefully sculpted that
to imagine undertaking such a project is daunting, even after
witnessing it's completion. Michael Kimmelman wrote in the New
York Times, "Barney is ultimately the most important
American artist of his generation because his imagination is so
big". It is testimony to the power of Barney's artistic vision
that Cremaster 3, a film lasting 3 hours, that moves at
a snails pace and is largely without dialogue can feel like a
roller coaster ride of such intellectual intensity that once over
you just want to see it again. Curator Nancy Spector claims that,
"With the CREMASTER cycle, Barney is transcribing a new,
post-Oedipal myth for our contemporary culture. His is a counter-narrative
that depicts internal conflict rather than external mastery; it
is an epic saga in which definition is defied and resolution deferred."
Barney uses the breadth of cinematic expression to explore the
complex subtleties and contradictions of creation and destruction,
belief and non-belief and male identity and sexuality.
As his approach is that of an installation artist,
Barney neatly sidesteps much that plagues cinematic endeavour.
By creating the Cremaster cycle out of numerical order, for example,
there is in no sense a sequel or remake. In fact, finishing the
cycle with Cremaster 3, Barney
takes us to the heart of his masterpiece, the central point that
then folds in on itself making it simultaneously an end and a
beginning. Auteur theory is simply dismissed, as it is clear from
the onset that this is a work of art. Barney uses the grammar
of cinema in a way that seems very natural to him. As Dave Kehr
has written, "Barney has become a filmmaker in spite of himself."
Barney explains, "It's grown out of documenting real-time
performance," he continues, "That's how I started: creating
these situations where a performance would happen around a network
of objects, and a video camera was there basically just to document
it. Slowly, I started having an interest in editing those documents,
and the editing process got more and more exciting to me, to the
point where it started becoming about storytelling." (Kehr).
Cremaster 3 makes some allusions
to cinema and has been compared in reviews to Star
Wars, Evil Dead 2,
the Carry-on comedies of the seventies, gangster films and the
ornate work of Peter Greenaway. I feel that Barney is not a devotee
of cinema; therefore he is not a slave to its conventions. There
are maybe elements of Cronenberg or Lynch but Barney seems much
more comfortable discussing ESPN. He explains, "A lot of
these angles … are really about trying to mimic broadcast
sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize
it before it becomes abstracted." Barney described his films
as moving at the speed of art, i.e. slowly and functioning in
a way similar to sculpture that requires the viewer to move around
it to understand it, and to visit it repeatedly. Thus, Barney
sets out to make art with what cinema has to offer as a medium
and he as an artist pushes at the limits of both cinema and art
in a way that no other contemporary artist has done.
Attending Yale on a football scholarship, Barney
supported himself by trading on his boyish good looks. He worked
as a model, most notably for the Gap. Born in 1967 in San Francisco
but brought up in Boise Idaho, Barney has been characterised as
the all-American guy-- athletic, attractive and intelligent. Ivy
League football may not be the average background for an artist
but the experience was not without its value. As Barney points
out, "I was a quarterback, I'm very comfortable working on
a single thing with a group of people." Cremaster
3 is prefaced with a quote from Vince Lombardi, giant of
American football and architect of the modern game, who said,
"Character … is the integration of habits of conduct
superimposed on temperament. Will is character in action."
(Wakefield). Instead of pursuing a career as a professional athlete,
Barney studied medicine and this explains, "something of
the precision of his invented anatomies and the anatomical title
of his … Cremaster series.
The cremaster is the muscle in the male genitals from which the
testicles are suspended (and which retracts them in cold or fear)."(Eyestorm).
In Cremaster, Barney crossbreeds
elements of personal history with seemingly disparate strands
of contemporary culture, identifies the necessary characteristics
and then gives life to the hybrid form. Barney says of Cremaster,
"I've always thought of the project as a sort of sexually
driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer
of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by hunger
or anything like that. It's a desire in the sense of a kind of
sexual desire. He says he has, "an interest in creating a
kind of internal system. So those sorts of biological systems
are really useful to look at. Literal systems that exist have
their own sets of logic and their own sorts of pressures and conflicts."
Barney sees himself as an abstract artist and
this is evident in the details of the sculptural pieces in Cremaster.
He explains, "I think a lot of the references I make to American
traditions - whether it's athletics or a kind of car culture -
I think those are things that I've certainly grown up with and
understand. It makes those things very available to me to use,
and I consider them as kinds of vessels. I don't think that by
the time they've been hashed through the project they're representative
of what they necessarily are in everyday life." There is
a fetishistic attention paid to material, shape and form. His
manipulation of substances such as Vaseline, wax and self-healing
plastic shows sensitivity to media similar to Beuys' use of felt
or fat and Robert Gober's use of porcelain and beeswax. A particularly
visually stunning vignette in Cremaster 3 sees the paralympian
and double-amputee Aimee Mullins with prosthetic plexiglass legs
using a specially designed heel to cut potatoes into pentagonal
wedges. Mullins, a character who reappears in several guises,
plays the Moll and is referred to as the Entered Novitiate. As
Stephen Holden writes, "If any modern athlete incarnates
the will to overcome the seemingly impossible, it is certainly
Ms. Mullins who presides over the movie like an ominous muse."
In a replica of the Art Deco lobby of New York's Chrysler Building,
one 1930 Chrysler Imperial New Yorker is loaded with the body
of the executed Gary Gilmore - a central character from Cremaster
2. The car is then ritualistically crushed by five 1967
Chrysler Crown Imperials, "five cars orbit their prey. Without
warning the bleeding red tail light and glint of steel and chrome
carries the full force of a punch as the progenitor Imperial is
pushed backwards into the elevator bay and systematically punished.
Choreographed as if to the deadly eroticism of a bullfight, the
escalating impact of the machines compacts the once stately vehicle
into the shape of a dental implant."(Wakefield). With this
Barney connects many of the strands of Cremaster into one explosive
spectacle, pent-up pressure and tension is unleashed as aggression
and violence.
Architecture and location are important
elements in Cremaster 3.
We are transported from the natural phenomenon of the Giant's
Causeway in Northern Ireland, to the modern marvel of the Chrysler
Building in the 30's and finally the Guggenheim Museum in New
York. Throughout Cremaster,
Barney uses conceptual devices to site his work and recalls the
land art of Christo, Smithson and Long. His use of architectural
space is reminiscent of Matta-Clark or Rachel Whiteread. In Cremaster
3 the interior of the Chrysler building
is perverted in the production of a huge stringed musical instrument,
perhaps a Celtic harp for a Northern Irish giant. As the central
motif, the Chrysler Building, represents much at the core of the
work. It's man's mastery over nature, "an epic paean to a
vertical empire predicated on lateral mobility."(Wakefield).
It's a steel phallus and in Barney's mind the personification
and setting for the struggle between the Great Architect, played
by the sculptor Richard Serra, and The Entered Apprentice, played
by himself. Serra's character in Cremaster
3 is complicated. As Barney explains,
"The story has primarily to do with the construction of the
Chrysler tower. And, as the Architect is described, it starts
overlapping with the mythology of the Freemasons. Hiram Abiff,
the architect of Solomon's Temple, is the martyr in Freemasonry--
he was killed by corrupt stonemasons who worked beneath him. They
believed he knew the name of God and they wanted to be told the
name of God. Hiram wouldn't tell them so he was killed by a plumb
and a level to the temple and a maul to the forehead. So "CREMASTER
3" starts to fold into some of the mythologies of Freemasonry
that way. Richard Serra's character, the Architect, becomes like
Hiram at a certain point. The Chrysler tower is actually never
completed in the same way that the Temple of Solomon is never
completed." The relationship between Barney as the Mason's
apprentice, and Serra as the Grand Architect is one of father
and son and is fraught with the dark complexity of masculinity
and male sexuality. "For Georges Bataille, Oedipal tensions
between father and son were part of a chain of symbolic linkage
that connects the Ancient Tower of Babel to the priapic ambitions
of the modern skyscraper: 'We find here an attempt to climb the
sky - that is to say, to dethrone the father, to possess oneself
of his virility - followed by the destruction of the rebels; castration
of the son by his father, whose rival he is."(Wakefield).
This battle of wills reaches a strange and dreamlike zenith in
a former dental lab on the 71st floor, where the Entered Apprentice
is castrated and Grand Architect forces, "the remains of
the compacted Imperial into his mutilated mouth and shitting out
his own teeth leaves little doubt as to the severity of phallic
retribution." (Wakefield). With this act the Architect and
the architecture become indivisible from each other, the unfinished
building becomes a mausoleum for the Architect sealed off in its
great spire. In the finale staged in the Guggenheim the Entered
Apprentice freed from the responsibility of his work and the struggle
of wills becomes a comic faery-like character moving between the
structure's levels like a character in a computer game. Serra
on Level Five is doomed to the repetitive motion of hurling hot
Vaseline in exactly the same way he had done with molten lead
earlier in his career. Cremaster
3 like all great art, poses more
questions than it answers and offers no resolution or redemption,
instead it reflects back the confusing and mystifying void that
is life and death, the very void that most cinema seeks to fill.
Barney, Matthew. Cremaster
3. PBS Television, 2002.
Eyestorm Editorial Staff, Matthew Barney. Eyestorm
online magazine, 2002.
Holden, Stephen. Racing Dead Horses. Dental Torture. The Usual.
New York Times, 2002.
Kehr, Dave. Cremaster' Is a Wrap. New
York Times, 2002.
Kimmelman, Michael. The Importance of Matthew Barney. New
York Times, 1999
Spector, Nancy. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle. Guggenheim
Press Release, 2002.
Wakefield, Neville. The Passenger. Issue 67. Frieze,
2002.
About the Writer
Kevin Reay (b. 1971 in England U.K.) studied painting at Glasgow
School of Art in Scotland and participated in an exchange program
with Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. He opened pogo, a short-lived
project space for cutting-edge installation art in the summer
of 2001 in the Old City section of Philadelphia. The pogo project
continues as a virtual exhibition space and e-zine and can be
found at pogozine.net. He recently co-curated, 'NewHormones' a
group show of new work by students from Tyler School of Art that
took place in domestic spaces in Philadelphia. He also took part
in 'InLiquid
Investigates: Artists Outside the Box', a roundtable discussion
about the role of artist/curators in Philadelphia. Reay lives
and works in Philadelphia and took part in In:View
as part of this year's Fringe Festival, a recent solo show at
Project Room, and will have a solo show at Nexus' Community Gallery
in spring 2003. He delivered a lecture on the artist Matthew Barney
as part of the PAFA 'Art at Lunch' series in January 2003.
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