More important, he has realized his ideas in quite amazing imagery. In other words, he has updated the old Platonic myth of the sexes to fit our times, with our gender politics and our high-tech biology and prosthetics. The itinerary described by Barney’s cinematic “Ring” is not only the way up and the way down but also the way from sexual ambiguity to gender identity.

It’s not just the movement of the testicles that interests Barney, though more crucial, perhaps, is the prenatal morphology of the still sexually undifferentiated fetus. If it’s warm, as in a Hungarian bathhouse, they reach the “fully descended state.” It’s as simple as that. If it’s cold, as it is on a glacier, they are drawn into the body. CREMASTER 3 is in the Chrysler Building in New York, CREMASTER 4 was shot on the Isle of Man, and then CREMASTER 5 is in a bathhouse-the fully descended state.” The fully what? The artist has often explained his master scheme, for example on German television recently: The cremaster muscle controls the position of the testicles, which varies with temperature. CREMASTER 2 is on a glacier, like an ice cap. After finishing the first film, CREMASTER 4, Barney outlined, in an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve published in these pages in 1995, the entire sequence in advance: “I’m going to do number one this summer in a stadium in Idaho that has blue Astroturf. Forms don’t take on life, says Barney, until they are “eaten” by the narrative.Įverything, it seems, has followed a plan, exact and grandiose. The works are linked in a kind of metabolic chain. Yet the separate episodes feed into each other, often in inscrutable ways. Each film creates its own universe equipped with its own fables, which are related to the site of production, be it the Isle of Man, Budapest, or Manhattan’s most glittering architectural phantasm, the Chrysler Building. Chewing, digesting, and excreting its own revolving essence, it represents a closed system in which each element seems to refer to other parts internal to the cycle. This dazzling serpent not only chases its tail (as the character of the Kid does in Barney’s early video Drawing Restraint 7, 1993) but devours large parts of its body. Lofty branches would sprout here and there from a living body.”īarney’s CREMASTER cycle, the tremendously ambitious series of films he has made over the past nine years, has finally reached completion, and we can now see that the vicious circle thus brought into being is a one of a kind found in other mythological systems. Hybrid growths of man and beast would arise. Here is just one, more than two thousand years old, from the writings of Lucretius: “You would see monsters coming into being everywhere. What’s offered up to us is nothing less than a perverse mythology for our times, one that seems to me decidedly American but which has many precedents, literary as well as philosophical. Humans transform into animals, organisms blend with artifacts. This is a more confusing world of mutating materials, a fluid cosmos of energies and hallucinatory processes rather than stable things. But the fetishistic desire so.obvious in his productions relies on neither the charged objects of classical psychoanalysis nor the commodities analyzed by Marxism. In fact this tendency has been there all along, and in his most recent works the artist has included scenes and imagery from the worlds of Mormons and Freemasons, the latter an especially rich source of hermetic symbolism. It may be quite logical, then, for Barney to be attracted to esoteric ceremonies and rituals. “The occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of the commodities,” Theodor Adomo writes in Minima Moralia (1951). Surely one way to enter Barney’s work is through the rich world of fetishism. In CREMAS(the recently debuted, last-to-be-realized installment of the pentalogy), a woman with crystal legs is suddenly transformed into a cat-like creature, possibly in heat a lovely lady with blades on her feet dices a roomful of potatoes, for reasons that will remain forever obscure an elderly enchantress secretly lifts ceremonial instruments with her toes. And it’s not only shoes in the traditional sense that play a central role in Barney’s work, it’s strange devices attached to the feet, tools for ritualistic practices and occult communication. With great care, the soft hands of three monstrous muses attached prosthetic gadgets to his elegant shoes-not since the early Andy Warhol has an artist spent so much energy on footwear. It started, in CREMASTER 4, 1994, with a tap-dancing freak-half glitzy performer, half goat-dressed in white. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner (1895)īAYREUTH CAN WAIT: Matthew Barney’s CREMASTER cycle is a Wagnerian vision for the new millennium.

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