Wandering up and down the ramps of the Guggenheim, it is a relief to not have to focus on any single segment of the Cremaster Cycle one can move with the logic of association and make the delirious leaps the work itself proposes. Barney's art is associative, infectiously generative, and relentlessly circular. ![]() The weight of the Cremaster Cycle at the Guggenheim, then, is to show that the films, photographs, sculptures, installations, and drawings, taken as a whole, constitute a compelling, multifaceted work of visual art. Unlike his work of the early 1990s, however, where the performance videos were exhibited alongside the related sculptures and drawings, most viewers have only seen the Cremaster films projected in isolation in theaters like Film Forum. I'm not sure Barney would disagree with any of this, and indeed he has repeatedly commented that he regards himself primarily as a sculptor. The cinematography in the Cremaster films is efficient and professional, but when compared with great filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, it is undistinguished the editing is clear and straightforward, but in contrast to serious cinema and video, it has little aesthetic significance. The Cremaster films, made out of order, each more elaborate and expensive than the previous, are not so much narratives as allegorical pageants of the kind staged in Renaissance Italian city states (and to which major painters and sculptors like Leonardo and Bernini contributed), or for that matter in Busby Berkeley musicals, moving from one ornate visual set piece to another. ![]() Barney's singularity comes from the scope and surreal density of his associations, between the interior of the body, sexual differentiation, obsessive athletic perfectionism, medical technology, Greek and Celtic myth, and landscape and architecture, all of which miraculously congeal into works that are luxuriantly beautiful and physically and emotionally disorienting. Begun in 1994 and fueled by the metaphor of the cremaster muscle (the thin, smooth muscle that raises or lowers the testicles relative to temperature and fear) and the primordial moment in embryonic development which precedes sexual differentiation, the five-part, seven-hour Cremaster Cycle encompasses the figures and themes of Barney's earlier work and more, but with ambition, extravagance, and decadence on an unprecedented scale: cheerleaders dance-pulsating, anal Jim Otto "0"s in a brightly lit football stadium, a hardcore singer encrusted with live bees shouts into a telephone, Barney decked out as Gary Gilmore rides a wild bull in a stadium made of salt, haunted Chrysler Imperials engage in a funereal demolition derby in the Chrysler Building. ![]() Barney is hardly the first artist to combine video, performance, and sculpture: Beuys, whose art of the 1960s Barney's work often evokes, effectively did that, as did Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman. "Drawing Restraint 7" (1993), the sole highlight in the dismal 1993 Whitney Biennial, envisions Barney prosthetically transformed into a creepy, clownish, yet menacing satyr with nub horns and furry, hooved goat legs. Barney's early exhibits, as well as his spectacular and grueling contribution to Documenta IX in 1992, contain intricate allegorical rituals featuring Barney's signature demonic figures, Harry Houdini and the Oakland Raiders's legendary center, double "0" Jim Otto. In the "Transexualis" (1991) installation, which consists of objects in "Blind Perineum" and "Mile High Threshold: Flight with the Anal Sadistic Warrior," gym equipment fashioned from queerly unnatural yet flesh-like petroleum jelly is held together by precision coolers in the gallery. In the wonderfully titled "Mile High Threshold: Flight with the Anal Sadistic Warrior" (1991), Barney is again naked, taped, and penetrated, lowering himself onto gobs of semen-colored petroleum jelly. ![]() In "Blind Perineum" (1991), for instance, with feet and hands taped like a football player's, mountaineering equipment swinging from his anus, a young, buff, naked Barney makes his way across the ceiling of a gallery stairwell, struggling against self-imposed restraints in a creative test of will. Barney's hybrid of performance, video, sculptural objects, and drawings, his erotically polymorphous athleticism and predilection for perverse, baroque fantasy, and his use of materials like chilled Vaseline, tapioca, and cast plastic, made him a flash of light and weird pleasure amidst an art scene bogged down in identity politics and righteous sloganeering. Guggenheim Museum Through June 11, 2003įrom the moment of his first exhibits in Los Angeles and New York in 1991, Matthew Barney was catapulted into artworld fame and cult status.
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