Haiku Review 2 – Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney's “Cremaster Cycle”
Ritzy Cinema, South London, October 25 to November 14, 2002

November 6, 2002

In his monumental cycle of five films, video artist/Renaissance man Matthew Barney takes reality and deliberately, masterfully and endlessly creatively abstracts it. The films, made over the last decade, and in which Barney himself performs, were shot out of sequence - 4, 1, 5, 2, 3 - and it is unclear if they are intended to be viewed in any particular order. As Barney says, "the stories themselves are somewhat interchangeable". On Sunday November 3, 2002 at the Ritzy Cinema in South London, all five films were shown in numerical sequence. I attended this mega-marathon - from 2pm till 11pm - and although I confess to still being mystified as to the artist's intentions, I was nevertheless enthralled from start to finish, for Barney's visual eye is sharp, seductive and above all, original.

In the first offering, Cremaster 4, all of the elements are present which will be repeated, re-drawn and re-cast in the subsequent films. It was shot in 1994 on the Isle of Man and is part sports tv (motor car racing), part musical theatre (tap dancing) and part sci-fi (a post- humanoid crawls through a maze of Vaseline, but more on that Vaseline thing later). What is true of his first film seems to be true of them all. They are all what Nancy Spector has called, “…a self-enclosed aesthetic system…”, a system that references itself over and over again. They are like a new language and as such are taught by repetition. And like all language, its origins can only partially be explained. The environment is highly stylized and tightly controlled. Baroque is a word that has often been used to describe Barney's work and it is perhaps fitting, with its excesses, elaborate interiors and detailed costuming. Satyrs, nymphs and mythical, partly human figures tap dance, sing, scale interiors, race cars and perform creepy operations in environments that are abstracted enough from reality to catapult the viewer into new realms.

There is little that feels familiar here and Barney seldom lingers in any one of his many locations, for part of the seduction is the way in which his invented reality moves and responds to the stimuli of his imagination. His is a highly protean world whose meanings are not easily recognizable, if at all, and whose only tangible law it seems is the law of change. For that reason the Cremaster world is perhaps akin to a biological system, for Barney desires to create an internal system of his own, an artistic anatomy that is as functioning as it is hidden. The title is perhaps the most obvious key to unravelling the helix of his work. Cremaster is a muscle covering the testes that controls its height in order to regulate temperature for optimal survival of the sperm. The cremaster responds to both arousal and fear, making it a kind of control booth for the survival of the species.

"The five chapters of the story are about an organism that is changing, and the system that changes that form alters from chapter to chapter." That system is Barney's brain, and it is an artistic fountainhead from which sculpture, painting, installation, photography, choreography and film (in many of its genres) pours forth in a prodigious display of the power of imagination. In lieu of any graspable narrative thread, I found myself searching for Barney's leitmotifs, for his chain of imagery, that essentially links and binds the films. Things like magic shoes and women's stockings, hexagons and pentagons, and Vaseline. Like Beuys and fat; Yves Klein and that blue; Matthew Barney will surely forever be remembered in the same breath as Vaseline. It is his ectoplasm, his glue. Sexual only in theory, for on the screen and in the quantities in which he uses it, the Vaseline becomes industrial and horribly messy. No matter how many orifices it oozes from (and there are plenty of them), it remains asexual.

In Cremaster 1, a giant Vaseline sculpture of the female reproductive organ surrounded by grapes is the centrepiece in the film which takes place in two giant zeppelins. It grows, it melts, it dominates and it is carefully guarded by slickly dressed hostesses. Other recurring female images are women as multiples, or clones, often balled up in tight spaces and scantily clad. In Cremaster 4 the women are mechanics and mutants. In Cremaster 1 they are a retro chorus line of dancers being controlled from above by a mysterious woman who is squashed into a tight white space. In Cremaster 5 they are water sprites and hand maidens. In Cremaster 3 they seem to be lifted from an Esther Williams film, only with slightly less clothing.

There is the hexagon, which is referenced over and over again in the beautifully constructed sets. In floor tiles and iron lace, in wooden panels and bee hives. There is the pentagon, significantly portrayed by the Chrysler building, the setting for Cremaster 3. These are Barney's basic units of life, his alga, emblematic of the entire cycle of his work.

There's a lot of all-Americana going on too. There's the cowboy movie (C2), the sports channel (athletics in C1, rodeo in C2, race car driving in C4), boys and their cars (in C2 and C3 and C4). But as Barney says about these references to American traditions, "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." Of course, there is nothing even remotely pedestrian about his imagery. And it is precisely because of that consistent detachment from the world that Cremaster is both seductive and cold.

The action of the films seems to switch dramatically between opposing spaces. Often a locked and desperately claustrophobic space will be followed by an open and majestic landscape. These provide a tension or conflict that does not seem to exist between his characters. It's not that the characters are all in harmony, it's that they’re more like kinetic sculptures than sentient beings. In C4, the action shifts from a stifling Vaseline-injected tunnel to the Isle of Man. In C1, it shifts from under the table in a zeppelin to a football field (shot in Barney's hometown of Boise, Idaho). In C5 it moves from underwater shots to snow- encrusted landscapes. In C2 the Vaseline-smeared interior of a mutant car gives way to the vast space of Canadian icefields. And in C3 there is the locked interior of the elevator shaft in the Chrysler building and beyond that Manhattan.

Barney uses music/sound effects in place of dialogue to great effect. These interior and exterior worlds are personified by the sounds that each produces. The stifling interiors of the Vaseline tunnel in C4 and the zeppelin in C1 are especially overwhelming as these tight spaces are filled with the grinding noises of an aeroplane engine. Music beautifully takes the place of dialogue, but the absence of a tangible narrative is more difficult to replace. It is certainly to Barney's credit that he succeeds as well as he does with as little narrative as he has. The films, in particular C2, are hugely entertaining, and that is because of Barney's endlessly energetic vision. Mysteriously attired characters perform inexplicable tasks with great purpose. Lavish and magnificently constructed sets indicate places that seem familiar and yet are uncomfortable and uninhabitable. The landscapes are monumental, as is the ambition and reach of these films.

The near absence of narrative is a curious thing, for the films themselves imply a narrative as well as deny one. They are films insofar as they are shown in cinemas, which is an exhilarating way to experience video art, but it is precisely this context which seems to build an expectation of narrative. Barney offers precious little. The deliberate obscurity is offset by his seductive images, and these images when seen piled one on top of another are strangely entertaining. Stories are built around objects and places. The initial point of departure is an image and from that a crudely assembled narrative is pieced together. Barney says he's interested in something that "appears to be narrative motion-picture" but is clearly not.
"It's difficult to do that. It requires pulling back in ways unnatural to that form - not allowing characters to develop in ways they want to develop, or in ways a viewer wants them to be developed." Herein lies the central fascination and frustration of Barney's “Cremaster Cycle”.

There has been an enormous amount of material generated about the Cremaster Cycle as it seems to have been universally greeted by critics and public alike with great excitement. You could read for example that Harry Houdini, who is referenced in C2, was falsely believed to be Gary Gilmore's grandfather. Gilmore was a convicted murderer who became infamous for being the first man to be executed since the death penalty was re-instated in 1976. Gilmore, who is referenced in C2 is also apparently resurrected at the beginning of C3. Budapest, the setting for C5, is Houdini's birthplace. Norman Mailer, who wrote a famous book about Gilmore called “The Executioner’s Song”, utters some of the only words in C2 which are taken from his book. Mailer also plays Houdini in C2. The artist Richard Serra who does lots of things in C3 also throws hot Vaseline on the top rung of the Guggenheim, apparently in exactly the same way as he threw lead in the late 1960s.

What all of this reveals is a small aperture into the mind of the artist. His interests, the construction of his visual vocabulary, the way in which he has stitched his films together, how each one minutely references the other, how much planning and thinking has gone into the work. But what it will not reveal is a coherent interpretation or understanding of the Cremaster Cycle. So, what is it all about? Must it be about something? If so, then let it be about creation, about Barney's very own creative engine. And this is as much its strength as its weakness. All of the intrigue certainly keeps you guessing, hoping even, but in the end is too little revealed? Too little said? I wonder what will remain in the days, months and years after the initial impact of the visuals recedes, for the almost total absence of human emotion might easily provoke apathy. Especially in the final film of the sequence, C3, which runs at just over 3 hours and culminates in some dreadful stuff shot in the Guggenheim Museum, including a punk band that really feel like they should not be there and stand out as being one of the only unoriginal, pretentious elements in the entire cycle.

Cremaster 5 was shot in Budapest in 1997. It is more literally baroque than any of the other pieces and partly takes place in the Budapest Opera House, where a character called the Queen of Chain (played by Ursula Andress), lip-syncs an aria. The words were written by Barney and he had these translated and sung in Hungarian. The singing is mournful and ornate. The last word sung, the last word of the entire cycle translates as, "Forgive me". What are we being asked to forgive? That the mystery of the Cremaster Cycle remains a mystery to the end? Or maybe Barney just wants you to let the visuals roll over you, and perhaps even away from you, and leave all that literal stuff for someone else. ◊

Haiku Review was started by renowned Sydney-based visual artist and writer Ruark Lewis back in the dawn of electronic journals.