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Nurture boy
ArtForum, Summer, 1999 by Katy Siegel
AS MATTHEW BARNEY COMPLETED THE FINAL CUT OF CREMASTER 2, THE SECOND FILM IN HIS EPIC QUINTET - EPISODES 1, 4, AND 5 ARE BEHIND HIM; NO. 3 IS STILL TO COME ART HISTORIAN AND CRITIC KATY SIEGEL MET WITH THE ARTIST IN HIS NEW YORK STUDIO FOR AN EARLY PEEK. HER PREVIEW ANTICIPATES THE FILM'S JULY DEBUT AT MINNEAPOLIS'S WALKER ART CENTER.
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It's mildly annoying that so many reviews and articles about Matthew Barney's work begin in a confessional mode, with a ritual throwing up of hands. (Aren't critics supposed to use their expertise to help us engage difficult work?) But it's also understandable. The "Cremaster" series layers biology and history, multiplies and divides; like any thick, opaque text, it drives the critic either to wax vaguely lyrical or to perform iconographic contortions, numerology, advanced exegesis. But beneath all these spectacular particulars (and with work like this, you always run the risk of the artist rolling his eyeballs at your "insights"), the art revolves around a fundamental conflict.
Matthew Barney is better than you - and he's sorry. His studio feels like a high school woodshop, and he dresses down, not in the worker drag of the artist flaunting his machismo, but rather in the T-shirt-and-jeans camouflage of the seriously above-average guy. Writers often note, with varying degrees of suspicion, his aw-shucks reluctance to claim the public sphere, to play the part of the great artist in either the sullen or the glamorous mold. Barney is elaborately nice, despite the fact that he is much better looking than you, much more successful, a much better artist with a much more interesting life (inner as well as outer, apparently). At the same time, he obviously has a riotous urge to excel, to succeed, to play and act in the world. The clash of these contrary, impulses - reticence and self-assertion - is central to his work.
But the role of this "real world" psychic conflict may not be apparent at first glance; you have to tease the opposing personality traits out of an elaborately allegorized, primal drama of sexing. Barney makes no secret that the series' raw subject matter is the ascending and descending of the testicles, a process controlled by the cremaster muscle. As prosaic as it seems, this tension between up and down, between pregenital versus genital physicality, is the initial biological register of sexual difference. In the beginning, we all have the same equipment; when the testicles are fully descended, the subject becomes fully male, fully itself. For Barney, the physiological process is reconfigured at a decidely more complex (and ambiguous) level, as social difference, the chasm between individual and group identity. Again, the subject fights (for and against) its final form. These straggles frame the series' large, loose narrative: a perfectly homogenous system in Cremaster 1 follows a path of differentiation through the first four episodes, until, in Cremasters, an individual entity breaks away from the larger organism and self-destructs.
Along the way, we catch glimpses, prefigurations of this ultimate self-definition. When I spoke with Barney recently, he articulated a strain of autobiography connecting the new Cremaster 2 and the (projected) Cremaster 3, which take place, respectively, in the American West and in New York City. The sequence echoes his own move east, his own rejection of and by his origins (he hints that the completed project will extend this autobiographical line). But for the most part, whatever is personal in these elaborate visions is figured in the form of a more general emotional dynamics. You could say that Barney makes art about the reluctance to occupy the role of the individual adult male in the modern world, a role destined for friction. In his fantasy world, the body eludes rigid form, finessing the boundaries between genders and even species with the aid of liberal lubrication. This fluidity promotes what Sigmund Freud (and Norman O. Brown) called polymorphous perversity: a sexuality diffused throughout the body, directed at no particular object, channeled into no particular activity.
In escaping final definition, the individual body not only refuses to be pinned down, but often retreats into the frictionless collective. Barney fills his work with scenes of organized group activity: the football field, the chorus line, and in the new work the prison, the church, the beehive, the riding team - all are versions of the mass ego, from which no one element protrudes. He also repeatedly treats us to the spectacle of twins (most notably the Rha sisters of no. 5), threesomes (the redheaded fairies of no. 4), and quartets (the icy Robert Palmeresque hostesses of no. 1). Juxtaposed with these models of synchronization are various stars and superheroes: football MVPs, a giant, a diva, Houdini, and more than one queen.
The original site of conflict between the one and the many? The family, of course, the subject of Barney's latest work. After sitting with the artist and watching Cremaster 2, with all its references to parents and progeny, my first question was obvious: How would he explain it to his own father? "The relation between the geological recession of a glacier and the backward movement of tracing a family genealogy." He means it quite literally. The period of the piece alternates between 1977, the year Gary Gilmore came to national attention, and the 1890s, when, according to family legend, Gilmore's grandmother Fay met Harry Houdini - a longstanding Barney obsession - and conceived Gilmore's father Frank. The action unfolds amid the Rocky Mountains, the product of said glacier, moving between and linking the United States (Salt Lake City) and Canada. Cremaster 2 is Barney's first talkie, and also the first of the series to borrow from a specific history and text. Recommended reading: Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979). For those too young to remember, Mailer's deadpan masterpiece offers a minutely detailed account of Gilmore's murders and his quest to be executed for them. In real life, Mailer ended up playing an almost paternal role to the cold-blooded killer; in Barney's film, the author reenacts the part, taking on the role of Houdini, Gilmore's purported grandfather.
