Fantastic Metropolis

In early April 2003, my brother Steve and I took a trip to New York City, he coming from Denver, me from Atlanta. There was no structured agenda for the weekend—just hanging out with some New Yorker friends, goofing off, and enjoying the newly smoke-free bars. Walking around the Village, eating in Little Italy, lounging in Central Park, and sipping on a Belgian Westvleteren 12 at the Ginger Man pub were also definitely on the list.

And we can’t forget about museums. Steve and I are both avid consumers of art, whether high brow or low, classical or modern. Steve, though, is particularly into modern art, so he suggested we hit the MoMA and the Guggenheim. Having never been to either, I happily agreed. Little did we know that the visits to these two museums would, in a long weekend full of festivity, turn out to be the highlights of the trip. The Guggenheim stop, in fact, turned out to be a life-changing experience for both of us.

Friday’s trip to the Museum of Modern Art turned out to be the perfect setup for the following day’s trip to the Guggenheim. The MoMA is temporarily set up in a warehouse in Queens while its permanent home is under construction in Manhattan. Not having figured out the whole subway thing yet, we took a cab over the bridge through the last gasp of winter rain.

Serendipity was definitely on our side that weekend. In order to attract patrons to the more remote temporary location, the MoMA was putting on a special exhibit featuring a full retrospective of the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. This was a most pleasant surprise. The exhibit displayed works—mostly paintings, but also sculpture and drawings—by both artists in parallel chronological order, demonstrating vividly how the two men borrowed from and competed with one another throughout their careers, sometimes with affection, sometimes with animosity.

This was a first-class exhibit, not a cobbled together collection of secondary works. The MoMA had dozens of works on display: Picasso’s Three Musicians and Two Nudes, as well as The Guitar Player and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (personal favorites of mine). From Matisse’s huge body of work, the curators appeared to emphasize pieces that juxtaposed nicely with the Picassos on display, either because of stylistic, thematic, or subject matter similarities, or because of specific instances of competition, friendly or otherwise, between the artists. I particularly enjoyed Matisse’s Goldfish and Palette, Interior with a Violin, and Music, but there were many others I cannot remember the names of.

The numbing brilliance of this collection of works, including several masterpieces, would have been more than enough great art to satisfy our needs for the weekend, but little did we know that the next day at the Guggenheim our entire conception of what art can be would be exploded.

As 30-something Americans, my brother and I can mostly relate in an intellectual sense, and much less in a visceral sense, to the work of these great modernists. We are not of their time, nor their respective sensibilities. We can marvel at the genius of the ideas and the flawless execution of the handiwork, we can comment on how revolutionary that still life of a vase and fruit must have been ninety years ago, but when it comes down to it, Steve and I are children of the postmodern and pop culture ages.

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.

The word “Cremaster” comes from the cremaster muscle, which is the muscle in the male that controls the ascension and descension of the testicles in the scrotal sac in response to external stimuli such as temperature changes and fear. For example, when it is cold out, this muscle draws the testicles inward so that their ideal temperature can be maintained and the sperm within protected. Beyond this fact, however, I will not attempt to describe what The Cremaster Cycle is “about.” I just have not absorbed enough of this gigantic work to do this task justice. So I will quote Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, from her eloquent and revealing essay “Only the Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us,” as published in the exhibition catalog for The Cremaster Cycle (ISBN 0810969351):

“Taking the cremaster muscle as its conceptual departure point, the project circulates around anatomical allusions to the height of the gonads during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster I represents the most ‘ascended’ state, Cremaster 5 the most ‘descended.’ But as the cycle evolved over the course of decade, this biological mode became less prominent; other paradigms, such as biography, history, and codes of behavior, came to the fore as vessels of Barney’s narrative constructs… As a topographical map, a diagrammatic proposal, the Cremaster cycle has no definitive beginning or end, no indisputable point of departure. It functions as a loop, particularly in the chronology it subtly reveals…

“While the Cremaster cycle expands outward in time from the period of an individual life to the passage of centuries, it also describes what is by comparison almost a nanomoment: the first six weeks of an embryo’s development. During this fleeting interlude, the just-formed fetus is pure potential. Neither male nor female, it hovers in a realm of gender interdeterminacy. Free from defining pronouns and anatomical indicators, the fetus, for one brief instant, occupies the space of possibility. It lingers before the moment of difference, the ‘either-or’ that shapes all future thought and action. The Cremaster cycle imagines the prospect of suspending this phase indefinitely, resisting the inexorable impetus toward division. Its five installments ponder this internal struggle against definition, while tracing the passage from full ascension to complete descension.” (pp 30, 31, 33)

There are several ways to experience The Cremaster Cycle. One way to experience the cycle is simply to watch the movies straight through (which I hope to be able to do someday). Barney has also designed and published a book to coincide with the release of each installment in the cycle. The aforementioned newly published exhibition catalog The Cremaster Cycle also features a chronological sequence of stills from the movies, photos of the sculptures, and commentary. The web site contains a beautiful layout of the entire cycle, including trailers for the movies. In addition, there are CDs for a couple of the cycles, which feature music from the films. A lucky few experienced a live allegorical performance of the entire cycle called The Order (more on this later).

Once you have decided upon a medium, however, there is still the question of which sequence to take in each of the five levels. One way is to experience them in order from one to five, but in the aforementioned essay, Spector suggests that the best way is in the sequence in which the artist produced them: four, one, five, two, three.

However, I am convinced that the best way to experience it the way Steve and I did at the Guggenheim. For this site-specific exhibit, Barney essentially took over the entire main portion of the museum, which if you’ve never been there is a tall circular room with a white spiraled walkway along the outer wall, ascending to five levels, with a large open center. Not only did Barney display his sculptures and photographs, but he even went as far as changing the carpet, re-arranging the lobby, and adding to the structure of the interior of the building. At the top of the spiraled room he built a five sided pod which houses large plasma TV screens, and installed speakers throughout the exhibit, through which music and sound effects from the films are played.

Everything was presented in a fragmented, non-linear fashion. When we first arrived and started looking at the very strange photographs and sculptures, Steve and I had not even figured out that there was a single-artist exhibit going on. A few minutes into it, we realized that it was indeed a single-artist exhibit. A little while later we figured out that this was all part of a complete work of some kind.

All along the walkways, we encountered these strikingly brilliant large color photographs housed in custom plastic frames, often arranged in diptychs and triptychs. Flags hung from the walls. All over the floors and were very strange sculptures, often made from plastic and Vaseline. Many (all?) of the sculptures are props from the films, just as the photographs are actually stills; yet the sculptures truly are sculptures, and not simply props, just as the photographs stand on their own beautifully. On the walls, a series of TV screens showed the Cremaster films, which are bizarre and transfixing. At this stage in the exhibit, we still had no idea that there was a storyline behind this whole thing, so seeing fragments of these movies out of order gave us more hints of what was going on.

Halfway through the second level, Steve and I stopped and looked at each other in disbelief. It was clear that neither of us could believe what we had gotten ourselves into, what we had stumbled upon. Many times, we would both be laughing to tears, much to the consternation of to our equally perplexed (if not in every case equally awed) fellow patrons. I’m certain that there were many points at which I could be seen with my mouth hanging open, eyes transfixed on one of the many spectacles.

By the time we got to the top, we had seen the whole cycle from start to finish, but only in bits and pieces. For the final stage of the exhibit, Cremaster 5, Barney enclosed an entire room at the top of the spiral and painted everything black (everything up to that point had been steeped in white), turning it into a replica of a set from the fifth film. In the center of this room as a piece from the set, while on the wall a loop from the fifth movie featuring this set piece played. The sequence was somehow even more bizarre than everything else we had seen, yet not as bizarre as the side room filled with pigeons dressed in little fluffy costumes. I think Steve and I had both reached a point where we could not take much more.

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.

In the meantime, the Cremaster.net web site is an excellent spectacle and does a great job of giving you a flavor of what the whole thing is about. I highly recommend visiting every part of that site. Also, the Guggenheim web site has some nice information and pictures. If that’s not enough, the aforementioned books and CDs should provide plenty of enjoyment—at a price.

Be careful, though, for like Steve and I you might become obsessed. I’ve already purchased the hardcover edition of The Cremaster Cycle; the new book for Cremaster 3; a booklet dedicated to The Order (only available from the Guggenheim store); several postcards; an exhibition poster (which I can’t wait to get framed and on my wall); a limited edition gatefold vinyl picture disc record from Cremaster 2, featuring the Dave Lombardo drum solo and a swarm of bees, and signed by Barney (I actually bought two—one to keep and one for investment purposes); and just today I bought a mint condition copy of the 1999 book from Cremaster 2, which cost me $200, but which I have no doubt will be worth much more before long, as everything thus far released in the last eight years or so has skyrocketed in value (in fact I have already seen the book on sale for $500). My bother Steve has also purchase many of these same items, as well as a beautiful collection of patches, one for each of the five Cremaster logos.

Are we crazy? You bet.

“This has as much insight and intelligence as a 10 year old’s notebook doodles. The symbols were basic and direct and the artist expects you to see insight in nothing. The actual exhibit at the Guggenheim is worse, proving there really is no central depth of understanding, just another baby boomer mentality running amuck. Maybe if the Guggenheim stopped trying to build fancy buildings and centered on ground breaking art, we wouldn’t have to accept such meaningless work as meaningful. Then again, work like this just proves the Guggenheim is a sad institution worth dying. We should congratulate Mr. Barney for helping them along.”

—An anonymous reviewer on Amazon.com, reviewing the book Cremaster 3

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Daniel Read is a software designer and author living in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. His primary hobbies include reading, concert-going, and book collecting. Daniel’s writing efforts usually take the form of essays on the subject of software development (published at www.DeveloperDotStar.com), but he also enjoys writing about the subjects of music, art, literature, and popular culture. Daniel can be reached by email.