GUTS ON DISPLAY
Matthew Barney's CREMASTER CYCLE

THE CREMASTER CYCLE
February 21 - June 11
Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th)
Sa-W 10-5:45; F 10-8; closed Th
Sponsored by Hugo Boss and Delta
Additional support from Pitti Immagine
and the Young Collectors Council
Reviewed by Ben Spatz April 11, 2003

Matthew Barney in Cremaster 3

Art is about a pathological exception like Vincent Van Gogh expressing himself and then a whole bunch of other pathological people saying, 'Oh my God, that's the most beautiful thing I ever saw,' and then beginning to notice that each one of us is a pathological exception.

- Peter Sellars, radical theater director
"The question of culture" in Theatre in crisis?
ed. Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich

Like Peter Jackson's three-film nine-hour LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, Matthew Barney's five-film eight-hour CREMASTER sequence offers audiences a glimpse into a vast and complex mythological world full of stunning imagery and bizarre characters. Both epics are brimming with beautiful landscapes, violent trolls, heroes, enemies, sexy not-quite-human women, battles, tortures, towers, long quests, and creatures with funny makeup. Behind each of them is an arcane system of secret languages and histories that people spend years studying. Both depict alien worlds that can be read either as pure fancy or as allegory, and both range over their many hours from funny to sexy to gross to beautiful. What is it then that makes the CREMASTER CYCLE so unique? Why is it showing at the Guggenheim while the Tolkein epic is a blockbuster that would never be allowed inside a museum? The difference between THE LORD OF THE RINGS and CREMASTER is the difference between the genres of fantasy and surrealism.

If you had to pick one element that unites the five CREMASTER films, it would be vaseline. And if you had to ask who dreamt the world of CREMASTER, the answer is definitely Barney. Unlike THE LORD OF THE RINGS, or any fantasy, the world of the CREMASTER is not drawn from our collective unconscious. It is not meant to appeal to common cultural archetypes, but revels in being personal, private, and esoteric. That is why it often feels as if Barney is stringing nonsense together, more like Lewis Carroll than J. R. R. Tolkein. Even within each movie it is difficult to see why the scenes are in their particular order, and the relations between the five films are still more impenetrable. It is not that the bits and pieces of CREMASTER don't relate - only that their relations are obscure because they arise very specifically from the private psychology of the artist. This is what makes THE CREMASTER CYCLE surrealist rather than simply fantastical.

There are those for whom THE LORD OF THE RINGS is a surreal experience. Many people who do not dream of wizards and dragons and heroes and quests, and to them the world of Middle Earth can only be boring, quaint, or curious. These people ask: "Why does everybody find this stuff so powerful?" But THE LORD OF THE RINGS films are loved by millions, and the characters in that fantasy appeal to so many precisely because they are part of the mythic background of our culture. Peter Jackson's films are not meant to create or change a mythology but to illustrate one that already exists. Their goal is not to change our culture's collective unconscious but to celebrate it. Fantasy movies are meant above all to entertain.
If Hollywood is our public dream factory, then Barney is a rogue alchemist working with nightmares. His work is also dreamlike, but in a very different way. CREMASTER is full of symbols, but they are not the familiar ones of the established fantasy or science fiction genres. The images themselves are from pop culture, but the meanings and significances behind them are deeply alien. Indeed, the baroque structures of a surrealist language are not meant to be easily understood. You can spend hours deciphering the codes in CREMASTER and never feel that you have got it. You can ask why the astroturf is blue, why the cars destroy themselves, or why the vaseline oozes upwards in one case and downwards in another. All of this will bring you deeper into the world and may make the experience more powerful, but you will never get it completely. You will never feel about vaseline the way Barney does, and that's okay. That's what makes it art.

THE CREMASTER CYCLE is sculptural, even architectural. Surrealism is a world of objects gone mad. There are characters, but even they are more like objects than people. They do not have emotions or motivations. Instead they move about in their bizarre worlds like mutant chess pieces or the gears of a psychedelic clock. They kill, fuck, fight, and operate on each other, all without breaking a sweat or cracking a smile. Everything is seen from the exterior. When the imagery resonates with your own dream-life, it's an incredible experience - like seeing something you dreamt last night up on a billboard in Times Square. When it doesn't, it might as well be nonsense.

Surrealism is speaks to the senses, but not in any pure or abstract way. There is almost nothing that could be called formalist in CREMASTER. In fact, the pop aspect in Barney's work makes his films seem a bit out of place in the Guggenheim. Although the pace is much slower, the imagery is as visceral and immediate as any Hollywood action movie. But if CREMASTER is a little out of place in the Guggenheim, it would be absolutely bizarre in a mainstream theater. For all their battles and towers and half-naked women, the CREMASTER films are unmistakably art flicks. To put it simply, fantasy is not that weird, not that twisted. Even David Lynch and David Cronenberg, who blur the boundaries between these categories, have clearer plots and more human characters - overall, more to latch onto.

The movies do not hang together, and they don't need one another. They get better in chronological rather than numerical order. The third film, which was the last to be made, is the longest by far and also the best. It is a three-hour epic in its own right, and worth seeing alone. On the other hand, as an eight-hour experience, CREMASTER has a very definite self-indulgent side. Much of the attached symbology and exegesis is weak in comparison with the pure effect of the imagery, and I often thought it would be better not to know that many of the characters are played by Barney himself. At a certain point it starts to feel gross and you wonder why you're taking the time to wade through this incomprehensible yet overwhelming psychological junkyard.
The reason is that an artist is someone who puts their shit up on the wall for other people to look at - someone who spends their time and effort taking what is inside them and presenting it to the world in the hope that someone else will see those guts on display and recognize them. Surrealism does not speak in the common language, but in a language that presents a challenge: "What of this do you get?" A lot of people will find a lot of CREMASTER to be nonsense, but where one person finds one image to be powerful - that is where new language is being made.[Spatz]

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