Author:
Parschikov Alexei Topics: Culture
01.02.2004
Matthew Barney’s cycle of five films is intitled “Cremaster” – the word that defines the muscle that raises or lowers the testicles in
response to fear or change in temperature.
Barney also uses it as a synonym for the genital indiscernibility of the embryo
during its first seven weeks, after which it
begins to develop its male or female form.
All the films are produced on video and copied onto CD and into 35mm format for showing in standard cinemas. The Ludwig Museum in Cologne installed a cinema and the rest of the exhibition space was used to display the installations and props used in making the films.
All the films are produced on video and copied onto CD and into 35mm format for showing in standard cinemas. The Ludwig Museum in Cologne installed a cinema and the rest of the exhibition space was used to display the installations and props used in making the films.
The symbolic figures and visual sequences that Barney introduces onto the screen
are entirely original creations and show his preference for expressing himself
through visual metaphor. It is an approach that challenges the idea of
borrowing other people
’s words. In the last quarter of the 20th Century many commercial types of art
relied heavily on quotations from literary texts. Barney uses storytelling as
the basis for his metaphors. For a century and a half all visual art, in
defending itself against the literary, had come to rely too much on the
supremacy of form, and had exhausted itself in the process. Barney
’s work is simultaneously abstract and figurative. This is a combination that the
Surrealists had also tried to achieve but from the beginning they lacked the
experience to demonstrate the universal use of abstraction. The viewing of
Barney
’s films requires receptive but passive perception – what Samuel Becket called a necromancy that regards every object as a mirror of
the past. From
this point of view his films can be linked to those of Kronenberg, Greenway,
Reifenstahl, Genet and Caro. Russian cinema could also add the name of
Paradganov and perhaps, to a lesser extent, that of Tarkovsky.
Although Barney draws on literary themes in the creation of his art, it would be
a mistake to judge him on the basis of drama. Rather he is simulating the
process of telling a story. His work could perhaps be seen as poetry except
that a poem allows us to travel through time whereas his films do not. Barney
lacks that dramatic imperative that helps us to remember what came first and
what happened next. The rythmic sequence of his film technique constantly
shifts the scene of the action and generally speaking, the dramatic thread of
his films is too loose. We cannot question the meaning of metaphors for they
exist outside the realm of logic. This is why German art historians maintain
that Barney
’s art has many images yet their message remains unclear.
Who then is Matthew Barney? Born in San Francisco in 1967, he graduated from
Yale and moved to New York where he currently lives. He has worked in many
media including video installations, films, sculpture, photographs, and
sketches. His first show was at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in
1991 but the decisive influence on his reputation and career advancement was
the New York Gallery of Barbara Gladstone. From 1992 onwards Barney began to
introduce into his works the images of fantastic creatures that pre-figured his
later cinema epics.
To form an impression of Barney’s works, one needs to know the cultural context of his environment, ideas and
sources. The American editors of the
“Ctheory” magazine, Arthur and Marilouise Crocker in an article “The Matrix of Image” explain how bio-technology will broaden the spectrum of image formation – “our future is to disappear in images”. These are not just external images on TV, cinema and digital photography. They
are also the matrix images which are defined by the human frame, layers of
images such as computer scanning, MRI, tomography and ultra-sound. The media of
the future will be influenced by those invisible cameras
– the eyes of scanners that can be heard, the unseen cameras of satellites.
Let us return to the film “Cremaster”.The order in which the five films were created between 1994 and 2002 was not
chronological. The first to be made were Nos. 1 and 4, followed by 5, 2 and
finally 3. We will give a brief outline of the action and location of these
stories and of the part played in them by Barney himself.
An analysis of these films reveals a series of signs and symbols taken from
cosmology, alchemy and anatomy and ranging from Greek mythology to electronics.
Many articles have been written on Barney and the catalogue accompanying the
exhibition at the Ludwig Museum is a massive folio including a lexicon with an
index of names, symbols and received myths.
In “Cremaster 1” the action takes place on two levels: in a football stadium with a surface of
blue astroturf, and in two advertising balloons of the kind often seen hovering
over sporting events. In the stadium, chorus girls dressed in white and orange
with wide hooped skirts and white hats like a wavy drop of frozen cream, dance
in chain formation making living patterns. At the same time, in the balloons
four severe-looking air hostesses are sitting at oval tables piled high with
bunches of grapes
– black in one plane, white in the other. The immaculately dressed hostesses are
bored and longing for touchdown.They pass the time smoking, adjusting their
postures, glancing out of the windows and eating grapes. One of the
protagonists finds herself under a table that is covered with a white cloth.
She wears a skimpy light silk dress and dances slowly around the hollow
table-leg, lying on her back. Then she makes a hole in the tablecloth with her
hairpin, and surreptitiously steals some grapes, which magically roll through
her body and pour onto the floor through a hole in the high heel of her mule.
When they reach the floor, the grapes link together like necklaces and form
regular, symmetrical, mirror-image patterns. The figures they form look like
female genitalia, and replicating this, the chains of girls in the football
stadium arrange themselves into identical biomorphic shapes. The film has no
beginning and no resolution: the balloons will never land, the protagonist will
go on building new figures out of the grapes, stretching slowly like a mollusc
as she looks for a lipstick; the air hostesses will not break their silence,
and the smiles of the girls in the stadium are frozen for eternity. Perhaps,
the protagonist, hidden from these sculpture-like air hostesses, expresses
their subconscious desires, their biological rythms and their suppressed
eroticism.
In “Cremaster 4” we find ourselves on the Isle of Man, known for its TT motor-cycle races. One
of the Celtic folk images of the island is the sacred Ram of Louth, a part
played by Barney himself. His Ram is a red-haired Satyr in a Victorian white
suit, tap-dancing in front of a mirror in a small white house hanging out over
the water at the far end of a pier that reaches out into the sea. Three
cube-shaped fairies with androgynous features surround the Satyr and prepare
him for a journey, filling his pockets with handfuls of pearls. Simultaneously
we hear the engines of two motorbikes, one blue, the other yellow, roaring off
in opposite directions on the road around the island. The Satyr dances
obliviously until the floor begins to grow thinner, and he finally falls down
into an underwater cave formed of expanding and contracting masses of white
sticky organic material. Along these Vaseline labyrinths the folkloric daemon
is crawling towards his target fuelled by the same competitive spirit as the
racers around the island. It doesn
’t matter what their objective is; one can feel that the characters, on their
different levels, are experiencing the same emotions.
“Cremaster 5” is a lyric opera, a story of tragic romantic love in Budapest in the 19th
Century. Ursula Anders plays the part of a melancholic, fateful and capricious
queen, whose beloved magician ends his life by committing suicide. This part is
taken by Barney. The drama takes place in the baroque Opera House in Budapest,
on a chain bridge across the Danube, and in the Gellert saunas connected to the
royal box, where the drowned hero re-appears in the guise of a Triton with
silicone organs. Mermaids surround him. He wears coral boots with widening tops
like gladioli or calla lilies, which reach to his waist and look like horny
flesh. In the underground saunas, pearly balls are rolling on the surface of
the water and, under the water, pale-beige mermaids, with tiny nets of
capillaries visible through their skin, are swimming with flowers and ribbons
in their hands. The camera reveals a panorama of Budapest covered in snow. The
queen
’s beloved, the magician, dismounts from his beautiful, black horse on the
bridge. His hands and feet are bound with huge, white plastic handcuffs, and
wearing these encumbrances he jumps into the waters of the Danube as dawn is
breaking. According to Barney, this is an act of emancipation, but it also
replicates a performance of the master of
“escapes” Harry Houdini, who was born in Budapest in 1874 under the name of Erick Weis.
Fascinated by Houdini who was a master of escapology, Barney associates him
with the study of the limits of the human body, intellectual power and the
possibility of physical and spiritual renewal.
The next film in the sequence, “Cremaster 2”, can also be read on several levels. On the biological level this film
illustrates Barney
’s idea of a rupture of harmony when an embryo begins to take its male or female
form. On the metaphoric level it shows the regression of a man to the beehive.
The central character is Garry Gilmore, a murderer sentenced to death.
According to his personal mythology, he saw himself as a drone doomed to ruin.
In his return to primitive forms of life Gilmore discovers the art of
‘release’ from present-day conditions and imagines a legend of Harry Houdini as his
ancestor, regarding him as his grandfather, married to the Queen Bee. These
mythological assumptions and twists are entirely individual to Barney and based
on the exercise of his freewill. They owe nothing to the psychology of the
detective story or documentary. The content of the film
– the murder and the execution of Garry Gilmore – is stylized as a Gothic western. He kills an attendant at a petrol station, a
Mormon, by shooting him in the back of the head on the tiled floor of the wash
room. The case was widely discussed in America in 1977, and the sentence might
indeed have been changed, but Gilmore refused to appeal and chose instead to
convert to the Mormon faith believing that acceptance of his execution would
save his soul from perdition. The scene of the execution resembles a rodeo at
the salt island in Idaho. Gilmore sits astride a bull and
“rides into” death. These close-ups are intermixed with panoramic views of endless strange
mountain landscapes, promising a final resolution within their severe
reclusion. The bull that Gilmore rides to his death is a creature of fantasy :
it looks like a living ceramic statue of an animal with a rugged crupper. It
steps onto the matt surface of the salt bank, and this frosted glass is
symbolic of an anima, the soul of the murderer. In the final part of the film
Barney takes us back to the beginning of the 20th Century. In a hangar of the
Columbian Industrial Exhibition, we see Gudini who has just finished another
performance. The Queen Bee comes up to him and seduces him thus becoming
Gilmore
’s grandmother. This is how “Cremaster 2” ends.
The final film in the sequence “Cremaster 3” lasts for three hours, divided into three parts of unequal length. For the
first two hours we are watching the story of the construction of the famous
Chrysler skyscraper in Manhattan at the end of the 1920s. The last hour is
devoted to a performance at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art in New
York. In
“Cremaster 3” Barney shows us a vertical process of spiritual advancement by means of a fight
between the Architect (Richard Serra) and his Apprentice (Barney). The
Architect recreates a Masonic myth of the building of the Temple of Solomon and
the discovery of how we should understand the Universe. According to the plot,
the Apprentice undergoes a three-part process of initiation from the first to
the highest grade of Masonic Master. The Prologue opens with a Celtic
mythological scene: two savages: one cunning, the other stupid, are fighting,
though seemingly in a spirit of optimism. A female figure appears from beneath
the Earth as if summoned up from the depths of the distant past. (An
explanatory to the scene tells us that this is Gilmore
’s re-incarnation).
As if from nowhere, some boys appear and drag this living corpse into the
central foyer of the skyscraper, where they leave it on the back seat of a
black
“Chrysler Imperial New-Yorker”. After that, in the same foyer five more long-nosed “Chrysler Crown Imperials” begin driving in circles until they reach the center; they then methodically
ram an
“Imperial New-Yorker” until it looks like a half-baked, misshapen fist-sized cabbage head. Meanwhile
the Apprentice is moving between floors in a lift. One symbolic scene follows
another. We watch a horse race in Saratoga where the horses start to decompose,
their muzzles melting like blancmange. A Masonic candidate is progressing
through his initiation. In the bar of the Chrysler club a group of officials
decides his fate, juggling with the artifacts of Masonic ritual. These rituals
become grotesque as we descend to the level of mere mechanics. Nowadays we
might smile at the choreographic moves of a Greek soldier or the ritual of some
exotic country might strike us as absurd. The Masonic ritual in the film is
just as risible. In a dentist
’s chair sits the Apprentice with missing teeth and bleeding gums. The Architect
is implanting fragments of the battered car into his mouth. This disemboweling
of a man symbolizes the destruction of a lower level of the Ego in order to
allow it to progress to a higher stage. Finally both Architect and Apprentice
die: the building their proud initiative has completed proves stronger than
human desires, and the Chrysler building destroys its makers.
Now that we know the content of “Cremaster”, what are we to make of it? As we can see, every object that comes within the
focus of Barney
’s lens seems to be surrounded by an invisible buffer zone. These objects seem to
be wrapped in a kind of immunity; microcosms of elementary particles that are
divided one from another. At the centre of Barney
’s art is the human body, combining mythology and technology. We may ask
ourselves: are there any historically important heroes in Barney
’s works? Does our Age recognise such figures? The Middle Ages had the miraculous
deeds of Saints, the Renaissance had the Bible and Classical antiquity. Our
time is the age of the businessman. Barney takes his characters from the
Pantheon of digital images that represent nothing but their own electronic
essence. In his works we find an epic uniformity, a never-ending movement
towards some objective. Nothing is clearly defined or attainable; rather there
are opal lights reflecting on surfaces, high-molecular materials, and
artificial or natural extensions of the human body. This leaves only one
question. Where do these extensions take us?