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Fall 2004 - Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle

Eight years in the making, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is an epic transformative adventure in five parts that includes the films presented in this series, as well as related installations, sculptures, photographs and drawings.  Formally referencing the cremaster muscle that retracts the male testis in response to a variety of environmental stimuli, this artistic extravaganza incorporates biomechanical rites of passage; polymorphous degrees of scale; sculptural-narrative tropes and constructions; and performances, choreographed spectacles and contests involving local folklore, popular culture and knowledge of the universe.  Barney’s cunning artist-figure, part human and part beast, embodies aspects of the actor, stuntman, sculptor, magician and athlete.  This creature, a physical manifestation of the mythical hermaphroditic image of creativity, possesses a kind of wisdom that spawns a phantasmagoria of depraved perversity and mystical humanity.  The Cycles breeding ground supports varying climatic conditions of emergent metaphoric florescence that encourage the obsessive-compulsive behaviors of meta-figures who compete and survive as hybrid characters.  The sculptor-storyteller’s geophysical allegories are experienced through trials and transformations as the candidate-apprentice gravitates toward and tunnels through layered dimensions of the planetary event-space.  At times the magician-stuntman’s struggles become neutralized and he floats dynamically stable, Houdini-like, performing slights of hand.  This sculptural-cinematic work takes shape as a historically framed chain reaction embedded in the flowing topologies of time and place.  The modular constructions of the sculptor bifurcate and feed back with the oral traditions of early storytellers, and the medium of cinema with its diverse genres provides an ideal incubator for the organic-machinic system of the Cycle.  In this bio-graphical work, the analog transformations of myth and machine are continuously variable, mating with and side stepping the digital division of rational logic. –Patrick Clancy

 

The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney (USA), 1994-2002, five 35mm films courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

 

September 8, 2004 

Cremaster 1, 1995, 40:30 min.
Cremaster 1 is a musical revue performed on the blue Astroturf playing field of Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho—Barney's hometown.  Two Goodyear Blimps float above the arena, each tended by four air hostesses.  In the middle of each cabin interior sits a white-clothed table, its top decorated with an abstract centerpiece sculpted from Vaseline and surrounded by clusters of grapes.  Under both of these otherwise identical tables resides Goodyear (played by Marti Domination).  Inhabiting both blimps simultaneously, this doubled creature sets the narrative in motion. –Nancy Spector, Curator of Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Cremaster 2,1999, 79 min.
Cremaster 2 is a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system.  The looping narrative moves from 1977, the year of Gary Gilmore's execution, to 1893, when Harry Houdini, who may have been Gilmore's grandfather, performed at the World's Columbian Exposition.  The film is structured around three interrelated themes—the landscape as witness, the story of Gilmore (played by Barney), and the life of bees—and describes the potential of moving backward in order to escape one's destiny. –Nancy Spector

 

September 15, 2004  

Cremaster 3, 2002, 181:59 min.
Cremaster 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building.  A character itself, the building is host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence.  These factions find form in the struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect (played by Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (played by Barney), who are both working on the building.  At a later point in the narrative, the film pauses for a choric interlude in which the rites of the Masonic fraternity, through allegorical representations of the five-part Cremaster cycle, are staged in the guise of a game in the Guggenheim Museum.  Called The Order, this competition features a fantastical incarnation of the Apprentice as its sole contestant, who must overcome obstacles on each level of the museum's spiraling rotunda. –Nancy Spector


September 22, 2004 

Cremaster 4, 1994, 42:16 min.
Set on the Isle of Man, Cremaster 4 absorbs the island's folklore as well as its more recent incarnation as host to the Tourist Trophy motorcycle race.  Myth and machine combine to narrate a story of candidacy, which involves a trial of the will.  The film comprises three main character zones: The Loughton Candidate, a satyr (played by Barney), and a pair of motorcycle sidecar teams, the Ascending and Descending Hacks.  A trio of attendant fairies mirrors the three narrative fields occupied by the Candidate and the two racing teams. –Nancy Spector

Cremaster 5, 1997, 54:30 min.
Cast in the shape of a lyric opera, Cremaster 5 is envisioned as a tragic love story set in the romantic dreamscape of late-19th-century Budapest.  Biological metaphors shift form to inhabit emotional states – longing and despair – that become musical leitmotivs in the orchestral score.  The opera’s primary characters – the Queen of Chain (played by Ursula Andress) and her Diva, Magician and Giant (all played by Barney) – enact collectively the final release promised by the project as a whole. –Nancy Spector

For more information see www.cremaster.net and Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, essay by Nancy Spector.  New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2002.

 
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