Fantastic Metropolis

Going through the entire exhibit took about two hours, yet I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of The Cremaster Cycle. This fact was confirmed when I got to the gift shop and saw the aforementioned 550 page exhibit catalog, which even included, of all things, a glossary. Something my brother said later explains perfectly the need for a glossary: “It seems any single entity in the Cremaster system is connected to about 100 other things in the system. It’s an insane network of symbolism and metaphors that makes “Twin Peaks” look like a 10 minute pencil sketch.”

There is one more aspect to this exhibit that I must attempt to explain: The Order. The Order was a live performance that Barney staged at the Guggenheim during the filming of the Cremaster 3 movie. Much of the sculpture and film footage we saw that day was actually from this performance. The Order uses the metaphor of a game, with Barney as the lone contestant, playing the character of the Entered Apprentice, who must traverse a series of obstacles, including climbing the levels of the Guggenheim’s spiral, using his bare hands to scale small climbing walls attached to the outside of the railings. The whole thing is symbolic live-action re-enactment of the entire Cycle.

Each level featured sculptures and live actors with whom Barney interacts. Among a host of bizarre scenes and actors in The Order (including an entire chorus line, five nearly naked hostesses, some kind of creepy Vaseline blacksmith with a gas mask, and a leopardess), the most bizarre was a competition of some kind between legendary New York hardcore punk bands Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front, playing with their instruments unplugged, with a mosh pit between them, in the center of which is device embedded in the floor which the Entered Apprentice must extract while a bunch of kids slam dance around him.

The best part is that all of the sculptures and sets from The Order were left in place in the museum, and the filmed performance was integrated into the exhibit as a whole, such that the exhibit becomes an almost recursive, looping experience—just as like the narrative of the cycle itself is both linear and circular. The realization of this while standing at the top of the spiral, reeling from all I had just seen, finally seeing the work in its entirety, was a profound epiphany.

The only thing more I will say about Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle is that you have to experience it for yourself. If you happen to read this before June 11, 2003, do whatever you have to do to get yourself to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

If you miss it at the Guggenheim, don’t despair. I hear that the movies will perhaps tour around in the future and may even come out on DVD. The exhibit as a whole may be presented in other museums in the future, but the exhibition catalog hints that this is unlikely. The complete cycle has been displayed at a couple other museums in Europe before coming to the Guggenheim, but I can’t imagine Barney will ever be able to replicate the full experience of having The Order, which was staged at the Guggenheim, integrated with it.