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"Matthew Barney: the CREMASTER cycle"; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York - Reviews - Critical Essay
ArtForum, May, 2003 by Roberta Smith
Other ambitious young artists might have been content go to the studio, tack up a poster of Harry Houdini, a postcard of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, and the famous image of Richard Serra flinging molten lead like Vulcan in his forge, and sublimate. But not Matthew Barney. For better and worse, Barney had to make a multimedia spectacle of himself, his youthful ambitions, infatuations, and oedipal urges, with various heroes, past and present, in attendance.
As is well known by now, Barney had to write and direct the five increasingly long, complex, and hermetic films of the CREMASTER cycle, 1994-2002, starring in all but one. This extravaganza recasts the moment of embryonic sexual differentiation as a multinarrative epic struggle that begins in Boise, Idaho, the artist's hometown, and ends in Budapest, where Houdini was born.
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What this project entailed has become a familiar litany. The on-location shoots, original scores, and over-the-top sets, costumes, and maquillage, the scaling of landmark architecture performed by the artist, the strange rites and tortures performed on him. The cameos from assorted celebrities and wondrous creatures, among them Norman Mailer, Ursula Andress, Serra, a seven-foot, five-hundred-pound giant, three corset fetishists, a four-horned ram, and a double-amputee supermodel. The retinue of drawings, photographs, banners, sculpture, objects, accoutrements, and regalia generated by, and sometimes deployed in, each film. The profusion of signature Barney substances--tapioca granules, petroleum jelly, beeswax, and an unusually luminous new material called self-lubricating plastic.
To my surprise, worse outweighs better at the Guggenheim's exhibition of all things CREMASTER. Barney's long-anticipated victory lap up Wright's spiral ramp was supposed to crown the magical CREMASTER tour (previous stops: Cologne and Paris). That it doesn't is a pity, especially given that the centerpiece of the New York version is an apotheosis of site-specificity: The Guggenheim's vaulting rotunda is one of the interiors Barney scales--to be precise, in the grand finale (called "The Order") of CREMASTER 3, 2002. Now playing continuously on a giant five-screen Jumbotron suspended
above the rotunda, "The Order" shows Barney, wearing a peach-colored tartan kilt and matching busby, clambering from ring to ring, interacting with a line of tap-dancing chorines, a pair of battling hardcore bands, a leopard woman straight out of Moreau, and, finally, Serra, re-creating his early molten-lead Process piece, but using Barney's own melted Vaseline.
Yet Barney's Bayreuth seems more like his Waterloo. Despite some great moments, all on video, "The CREMASTER Cycle" simply takes up too much time, space, and expensive materials not to make more sense. It throws around too many different styles and too many kinds of meaning not to provide more sustained pleasure or lasting wisdom.
The Guggenheim Barneyrama reveals a young artist who has put his development as a sculptor of objects on hold to make five of the most lavish, intermittently beautiful but generally tedious art films in the history of tedious art films and some titillating posterlike photographs distinguished by sharp colors and extreme styling. If it weren't for Jonathan Bepler's music, few people would make it through the longest films. Barney has simply been wildly successful at making his first, rather inchoate dreams of artistic power, domination, and ascendancy come true, He has created a Gesamtkunstwerk for one, enacting a fledgling artist's search for himself in stupendously extravagant, implicitly oppressive yet weirdly vacant terms.
The Barney experience, if not the Barney art, was more intense and accessible at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne last summer. The floors were carpeted wall to wall in vivid shades of Astroturf, and the films were sequestered with their sculptures in separate galleries--featured like the densely worked, fussed-over Faberge eggs that they are.
At the Guggenheim, the rococo lightness and color of Cologne have given way to a pale, distended ponderousness. The eye-thrilling Astroturf is scarce. The films look washed out on the monitors. The sculptures mostly straggle up the ramp single file, not always in tandem with their respective films. The cosseted focus of the Ludwig installation accrues only in the show's final, uppermost gallery, where CREMASTER 5, 1997, and its related sculptures are surrounded by luminous matte black plastic walls accented with artificial lilies.
The Guggenheim show makes it clear that the sculptures fail without the spectacular settings, bodily cleavings, physical movement, and the sealed-off illusion of the films. In the flesh, all but a few seem finicky, embalmed, and familiarly Victorian or Surrealist--a custom-finished grand piano filled with cement, for example. The buildings, landscapes, and people that Barney selects, adorns, and films are the best CREMASTER sculptures. The most interesting sculpture in the exhibition itself is the elaborate Maypole-like braid dangling from the bottom of the Jumbotron. Everything else is more or less leftovers.
