Cine-File Blog

Matthew Barney’s THE CREMASTER CYCLE & DE LAMA LAMINA
Music Box — Friday-Thursday, September 3-9, Check Venue website for showtimes

It has been about six years since artist Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER CYCLE has been available and it is being given a new release this year before it, we assume, goes back into mothballs for a while. It has never been released on DVD and Barney claims that it never will be (though bootlegs of at least some of the parts can be found), so if you are curious, here’s your last opportunity for a while.

THE CREMASTER CYCLE is nothing if not a curiosity. It is a divisive work; its admirers prone to great hyperbole (“The most important American artist of his generation” says Michael Kimmelman, New York Times Magazine) and its detractors seriously befuddled by the praise and attention and serious regard it generates. Below is an explication by Cine-File contributor Josephine Ferorelli. Additional pro or con posts may appear this week as well. — Ed.

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Despite the fact that it is opaque, pompous, and very, very long, Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER CYCLE continues to be screened and draw crowds. With its current weeklong run at the Music Box, you may want to see it if you haven’t already. Or you might not, since the cycle comes in at around 400 minutes you will never get back. I saw it when it last screened at Doc Films in 2004, and I’m still on the fence. Herewith, an overview from a paper I wrote to help make an informed decision, and possibly save you some time.

Matthew Barney studies the body, and how it struggles to change. He has devised a system of three internal types of human energy: Situation, Condition, and Production. Situation, Nancy Spector writes, is the state in which “the energy is unorganized and essentially useless, but definitely ripe with potential” (The Cremaster Cycle, p. 5).
The first film in the series is an elaborate, Busby-Berkeley style enactment of the tenuous time before a human zygote/fetus becomes one sex or the other. The entire cast is female, just as in that stage of development, a fetus is considered to be female by default. Dancers on a football field create formations that are controlled by twin bombshells in parallel womb/blimps. The formations are alternately Barney’s invented symbols and actual diagrams of cells splitting and gonads forming. The dancers wear sexy makeup and flash their architectural underwear, but they seem oddly neutered.

Despite the fact that these films are perforce an enormous collaborative effort, Barney is clearly occupying the auteur’s position; it’s his mythology, he directs and stars as most of the major characters, and despite the disparate settings and unconnected characters, there is a unified style of presentation. Throughout the five films, there is an underlying sense that we are in the same world, rather than five separate ones. The camera always moves at the same pace, stays at the same distances, and frames scenes in similar ways. The light is always cool and medical. The colors are vivid, even the neutrals. There is no suggestion of different viewpoints or viewers (or even much brain activity in characters); it’s Barney’s omniscient third person who is in charge of what you see and how. He also subjects himself to real and imagined tests of physical endurance. The viewer is intended to believe the myth, and Barney marks a clear boundary between himself and the audience with the brutal grandeur of the visual world, and with his astonishing budget, courtesy of Barbara Gladstone, the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, and Hugo Boss’s biannual cash prize for the advancement of contemporary art.

The real and imagined brutality of Barney’s work predates and permeates the CREMASTER CYCLE. His personal history as an athlete figures in here, as the first movie is set on a football field in his hometown of Boise, and the third movie climaxes with him in a series of physical challenges, a kind of live-action Cliffs Notes to the whole work. In an earlier performance piece called Anal Sadistic Warrior Barney penetrated himself, climbed around the walls of a gallery, and filmed it. In CREMASTER 3, Barney’s character, the Entered Apprentice, undergoes a savage beating, and an equally savage subsequent visit to the doctor’s office. In CREMASTER 4 he has anodes attached to his testicles, which are then pulled by a moving vehicle. In both the third and fifth film, he climbs to great heights unassisted. In the fourth, he tap-dances to the point of collapse (albeit collapse through a hole in the floor). In Barney’s philosophy, the second kind of physical energy after Situation is Condition, which according to Nancy Spector is “a visceral ‘disciplinary funnel’ that processes the body’s crude energy”(CC. p. 6). The Entered Apprentice’s beating is the disciplinary funnel through which he is ultimately able to become a full Mason. The hole he makes in the floor by dancing is the funnel through which he, the gonad, descends.

Despite the fact that most of the characters represent aspects of human sexual anatomy and development, all of the characters in each movie have non-standard, non-gendered genitals. These fairly alarming nubs and vestiges are a literal representation of the more abstract intersex state that the movies are inventing. Barney doesn’t care about development as a means to an end as much as he is interested in the tension between the will to develop and the forces that try and prevent it. Any act of physical exertion is a fight against inertia, and an effort to push the body further than it naturally would go. In Barney’s world, Spector writes that “form cannot materialize or mutate unless it struggles against resistance in the process”(CC. p. 4). Barney’s sculptures stand as a record of the struggle; they do not on their own tell the story, they are only artifacts.

The sculptures are often limp, formless gobs of Vaseline or strange objects that seems stranded without the context of the movies. Barney claims that “for me it is critical that all of these forms come together as one piece. The films, the sculpture, the photographs, the books. And the museum is the place for that to happen” (Tate Magazine, Issue 2, Interview by Hans-Ulrich Obrist), but anyone who has not seen the films, which can be hard to come by, even in museums, will have a hard time making heads or tails of the sculptures.

This is an interesting phenomenon when one considers the third stage of Barney’s energetic schema, which is Production. It is at this stage that the body makes the funneled force “manifest in the world via anal and oral channels” (Spector, CC, p. 6). And it is this stage that Barney is interested in bypassing, or short-circuiting. In the CREMASTER CYCLE, says Barney, “Production ‘was an anal or oral output that would be bypassed by connecting those two orifices and making a circular system” (Tate interview). As long as nothing is externally produced, the body can stay in its asexual limbo, and the fantastic world of CREMASTER CYCLE can continue its precarious existence.

In a way, the existence of the sculptures signals the end of the movies’ solipsistic mythology, by breaching the closed system. What could it possibly mean about the films if they represent struggles whose finished product is a heap of petroleum jelly?

But even as the movies go so far afield from any meaning-making that the viewer struggles to stay engaged, Barney makes a few sly art-historical allusions, particularly in CREMASTER 3. The richest and most apt reference is to Marcel Duchamp. On the first floor of the Chrysler building there is a Masonic bar, where Barney’s Entered Apprentice goes to try and have a beer. The bar at which he sits bears the distinctive curve of Duchamp’s Fountain, the urinal. The bar is the stage for a preposterous comedy of errors as the bartender tries in vain to pour the apprentice a glass of beer. In this scene, the bar is a closed system out from which beer cannot come. The fact that the beer is trapped in the urinal is a hilarious short-circuiting of two orifices. The fact, too, that Duchamp is contained and concealed within Barney’s system is evidence of his ambition’s huge scale. — Josephine Ferorelli