Fantastic Metropolis

We have been steeped so thoroughly in postmodernism and popular culture that we are already jaded about it even as we continue to consume it with zeal. We have for years been over stimulated by television, cartoons, movies, comic books, rock and roll, heavy metal, punk rock, jazz, Frank Zappa, The Butthole Surfers, Miles Davis, video games, MTV, computers, psychedelica, the internet—not to mention traditional artistic forms such as writing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. How are Picasso and Matisse to truly compete? That may be a sad statement, and it is by no means meant to denigrate the genius of these two men nor the power of their work to move us, but the passage of generations has a lessening effect on the resonance of any art.

Enter Matthew Barney, an American artist and at 35 nearly the same age as my brother and I. Here is an artist with whom we can truly relate, who sees the world through a fragmented, multi-layered vision similar to our own. Here is a man who can mix film, performance art, sculpture, photography, dance, drawing, mosh pits, custom-designed race cars, Vaseline, naked flesh, a Dave Lombardo drum solo, the droning of bees, Harry Houdini, serial killers, Masonic symbolism and ritual, the Chrysler building, live pigeons, flags, computer animation, architecture, New York hardcore punk bands, malformed genitals, ice caves, and the Rocky Mountains together to create a single work of art that truly defies description.

In The Cremaster Cycle, which Steve and I stumbled upon serendipitously at the Guggenheim Museum the day after our visit to the MoMA, Barney integrates the high brow and low brow, the low tech and the high tech, the static and the dynamic, the intellectual and the visceral, the male and the female, creation and destruction, the trivial and the profound, the ridiculous and the sublime, the beautiful and the grotesque, the alluring and the revolting, the historical and the futuristic, fact and fiction.

Quite simply, it is my belief that Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle is the single most important and brilliant artwork that will be produced in my lifetime. I say that with full knowledge of how gratuitously hyperbolic and ridiculous it sounds—yet I am compelled to say it, and truly believe it. It’s not just that The Cremaster Cycle is brilliant and fun and moving and everything that great art should be. What makes it revolutionary is that it redefines what art is and can be, how it can be presented and experienced. I believe it will cause a generation of artists to rethink what they are doing, much like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon shook up the art world almost 100 years ago. To quote my brother, “Its an art form so advanced, a venue type doesn’t even exist yet to hold it!”

It is difficult to declare The Cremaster Cycle a single artwork, yet it is most definitely a conceptual whole, embodying an entire system of symbolism, mythology, and philosophy. Barney, who established himself as a performance artist and sculptor in the late eighties and early nineties, created The Cremaster Cycle over a period of nine years, from 1994 to 2002. At its center is a series of five 35mm films, totaling eight hours, one for each of the five “levels” of the cycle. However, the films appear primarily to be Barney’s way of capturing and presenting images, archetypes, sculptures, costumes, music, dances, characters, and a symbolism-laden storyline.