Michael Workman

Matthew Barney is here for the duration.

The sculptor has long drawn accusations of preposterousness and puffery, not the least because he chooses to work with such materials as petroleum jelly and tapioca. Even more absurd, he has made five feature-length films to showcase his sculptures which, collectively, make up what is now notoriously known as "The Cremaster Cycle," the release each year numbered out of order ("Cremaster 3" premiered in New York in 2002). Despite everything, I predict that Barney will weather the conflict of opinion surrounding his work, a storm that has reached a critical mass rivaling the spectacle of the works themselves. Rather than attempt to reiterate the highly inconclusive arguments surrounding Barney and his work (a Google search will net you hours of reading)--I prefer instead to put forth some thoughts for a first encounter with "Cremaster."

Perhaps most important when delving into Barney's engrossing visual practice is to not appraise the experience with apathy. Barney's films, filled with imagery conceived from a point of view in which the disjunct wholes of each film are greater than the sum of their parts, require active engagement. Beyond that, keep in mind--and this is hard to do when you're watching a movie--that you're not expected to approach this experience like you're watching a film. OK? Not a film. This is an especially complex task since Barney places his films in the context of popular cinema.

Barney imagines his films in a way that departs radically from conventional notions about the consumption of popular cinema. For Barney, rather, these films are a vehicle for his sculptures in which spatial relations, shapes and forms are embedded in whole schemes of weird symbols and allusions, metaphors, signs and invented, highly autobiographical systems of (at times explicitly occult) ceremony. Barney's visual practice shares a distant relation to cubism, especially the Bergsonist concern with time as the basis of reality. His seizure of film's time-based processes, and his placement of his sculptures in this context, parallels the arrangement of cubism's two-dimensional picture plane in such a way that, so the theory goes, the multiple points of view of a three-dimensional object can be simultaneously viewed.

Nonetheless, when confronted with that corpse rising from the ground, or when the fleshy tubule prolapses out of a character's rectum spilling a mouthful of broken teeth, hang tight. Equally, if the monotony of certain events manages to get under your skin--like watching those cars slowly ram the Imperial New Yorker until it's reduced to a fist-sized chunk of metal--don't start getting anxious. This is Barney's strategy for opening up the observational faculties of his audience; if you become bored, remember that boredom is just a species of frustration.

Moments of piercing melancholy give way to experiences of sympathetic elation, the peaks and valleys of the life-process that Barney elaborates. He derives. to a highly ritualized degree, from the anatomical framework that is the starting point for the films: the cremaster muscle, which raises or lowers the testicles in response to temperature or stimuli such as fear and desire. A second concern is the process of sexual differentiation in the womb: in Barney's metaphoric take, the gonads ascend to form the female, and descend to form the male foetus. As models, the process of sexual differentiation and the cremaster muscle, if not definitive, are moderately pervasive visual leitmotifs for this concern with ascent and descent. This concept gets further abstracted into what appears to be Barney's enthrallment with natural cycles of vitality, inertia and rejuvenation, and the spirituality of those elements as they relate to his artistic project. Into these cycles, Barney self-consciously manages to incorporate autobiographical elements of his own celebrity's rise and fall.

The popularity of these films extends their role as a vehicle for art into notions of film as an art in and of itself. Barney's desire to operate at this level seems to explain the acceptance of, and even participation in, Barney's films by rock musicians, who make up the only other American art form popular enough to challenge the dominance of film for mass-culture superiority. In one scene, the hardcore band Agnostic Front incites a mass of "hooligans" into a slam-dancing frenzy; in another, former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo plays drums to the amplified sound of swarming bees. In the end, however, Barney still views these films purely as vehicles for his sculptural project, and not cinema. And so, the "Cremaster" cycle requires that viewers attempt to temporarily suspend the impulse for weary abstention. Maybe this is asking too much. Even so, George Santayana's astute proposition that "beauty is pleasure objectified" may prove instructive when viewing Barney's films for the first time. The payoff of a sympathetic perspective to the highly personalized pleasures of art presented in "The Cremaster Cycle" may yield no less than the joy of a previously unimagined art, newly born in the world.

"The Cremaster Cycle" is being screened in its entirety this week at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema, 2828 North Clark, (773)248-7744.

(2003-05-28)

Also by Michael Workman

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Of all the wonderful art on exhibit during this past weekend's art-fair bonanza, the one work that I appreciated the most involved a pancake brunch on Sunday called "Menu."
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Is it really "us" versus "them"? Are our current art options as simple a choice as between "alternative" and commercial?
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Sex in Public
(2002-12-12)

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