The next sex - video art, Matthew Barney, various venues, various locations - includes related article on his work 'Cremaster 1' - Cover Story

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Jerry Saltz

Silence follows, then we see the structure at the end of the pier once more. The hack teams occupy white ramps extending from the structure on either side. Drums roll and bagpipes sound and the central pillar of the structure opens to reveal ... the artist's scrotum, seen in a close-up view, with yellow and blue threads running through it. Next, the threads are removed, one at a time, by a pair of tweezers with a three-legged Manx symbol on it.

In the remarkable final sequence, involving more than 30 separate shots, Barney himself, in a sense, turns into the Isle of Man insofar as his body now apes the three-legged Manx symbol: his own two legs are supplemented by a metaphorical third leg composed of a bundle of lines attached to his scrotum. There are four clamps on the left side and three on the right, in order to illustrate the inherent asymmetry of the body. A prosthetic device hides the artist's penis, so here Barney looks neither altogether male nor altogether female. These attachments stretch from the candidate's scrotum to the blue and yellow motorcycle teams, who slowly take up the line, simulating, I believe, a cremaster reaction.

This final sequence suggests that the candidate has been successful in his bid for "Loughtoncy" and that, after all, is what the action has headed towards. His holes have finally been filled up--just what he was trying to do in Field Dressing (orifill)--and Barney is ready for some kind of transformation: he has returned to, or evolved into, some kind of undifferentiated new sex, neither male nor female, but a third sex, or the next sex. C] Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1 were shown at the Film Forum in New York in July This month, they will be screened at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. [Oct. 3 4]. Photos and drawings related to Cremaster 1 appear next month in the Hugo Boss Award Show at the Guggenheim Museum [Nov. 19, 1996-Jan 19, 1997]. The Cremaster 1 video will be on view along with related sculpture in the "De-Genderism" exhibition at the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo [February-April 1997]. Cremaster 5 will be shown at Portikus, Frankfurt [June 1997].

RELATED ARTICLE: Cremaster 1

Cremaster 1 is altogether different from Cremaster 4. Barney is not in it; the colors are pretty pastel oranges, greens, whites and burgundies; the pace is languid; the structure more open; the mood entirely dissimilar. The theme here is female rather than male reproductive organs.

The scene takes place at night, in a lighted football stadium in the artist's home town of Boise, Idaho, and features two blimps tethered to one of the goalposts: the blimps evoke the (ascending) ovaries. Within each dirigible, four "hostesses" clad in vaguely 1930s uniforms (designed by Isaac Mizrahi) silently sit, smoke, stare at and stand around a table bearing heaps of green or red grapes. The grapes surround and adorn a Vaseline-coated sculpture that looks like a schematic model of the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries.

Underneath each table, the work's protagonist, a woman named "Goodyear," is crouched, constrained by the small space. She is played by a milky-skinned young woman known as Marti Domination, and is clad in a white teddy, white garters and silk stockings; she wears transparent, strap-on high heels which have a clear spout at the end of one toe. Goodyear slowly opens a hole in the table over her head and plucks grapes from above. The grapes appear to pass through her body and drop from the opening in her shoe onto the floor, forming geometric patterns, all of which are variations on the [symbol omitted]symbol.