"Matthew Barney: the CREMASTER cycle"; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York - Reviews - Critical Essay

The CREMASTER cycle is a quest for originality more than originality itself. It's a flailing, unending struggle in which, like most young artists, Barney never gets it all right at the same time. CREMASTER 5 is the most emotionally and narratively coherent of the five films, due in part to Barney's vaguely romantic interactions with Andress, but it has the least compelling score. In the emphasis on bodies, buildings, and landscapes as sculpture both extant and in formation, CREMASTER 2, 1999, and CREMASTER 3 make most credible Barney's claim to being a kind of ur-sculptor, regardless of medium. But they are ultimately hard to take as films, despite being moved along, like silent movies, by some of Bepler's best music.

Most of the impact of Barney's CREMASTER derives from '80s collage accelerated into a form of perpetual distraction, of sudden cuts, incomplete tales, side trips, dose-ups, inexplicable juxtapositions, and delectable morsels that draw the eye from one element to another before the mind starts asking too many questions. Which is to say that Barney compensates for the immature, unresolved nature of his individual activities by presenting them all together. This tactic worked in the compressed, jewel-box presentation in Cologne. At the Guggenheim it is stretched to the breaking point and all the more visible for not working.

But perhaps Barney has redefined the visual artist as movie director/rock star/stuntman/set designer and become a middlebrow emblem of artistic difficulty, seriousness, and ego whose popularity renders critical opinion mostly moot. The arbitrariness of his juxtapositions, costumes, and settings seems not to bother young off-art-world admirers raised on music video (which Barney has already influenced), video games, horror movies, kinky fashion ads, and, now, The Lord of the Rings--all narratives that don't always make much sense themselves. Still it will be too bad if this spectacular playing out of youthful talent, ambition, and self-absorption is as good as it gets--most of all for the artist himself. Not that this is likely. Now that Barney has gotten CREMASTER our of his system, anything could happen.

Roberta Smith is an art critic for the New York Times. (See Contributors.)

ROBERTA SMITH has served as an art critic for the New York Times since 1986. A reviewer for the Village Voice from 1981 to 1985, her writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and Arts Magazine. Smith's study of Donald Judd appeared in the artist's 1975 catalogue raisonne. A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1975 and 1980, she is the 2003 winner of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism. In these pages, Smith joins Artforum senior editor Tim Griffin in offering a set of considerations of Matthew Barney's CREMASTER cycle, currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

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