Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney is known for his tangential flights of fancy about private parts, his unique cast of prosthetically augmented characters and the hybrid sculptural objects and settings he creates for them. His new film Cremaster 2 (1999) a homage to Americana and a grandiose musing on the fate and genealogy of a condemned man invites the viewer to contemplate metamorphosis, death and the desire for an ultimate escape. To some extent it is a side step away from his earlier 'impulse to undifferentiate sexuality': sex roles in this film seem set in primordial ice.
The film, extravagantly produced and over two years in the making, is the penultimate in a series of five titled after the elevation muscle of the testicles. It was screened at the Walker with an installation, The Drone's Exposition (1999). Amongst stacks of customised occurrences and characters in the work are: a stylish seance, escapologist Harry Houdini, a chic Queen bee and swarms of her subjects in unusual places (for example on the end of a penis and all over a rock'n'roll singer), a rodeo in a specially constructed salt arena on Utah's partially flooded salt lake, a posse of female formation riders dressed in police uniforms, helicopter shots of a majestic Canadian glacier, an animated version of the Mormon tabernacle choir, a pair of two-step dancers, an inverted mirror tile covered saddle and a double murderer. The cast is not arbitrary, even if the film is structured a bit like late-night channel surfing between a highly unusual nature programme, costume drama and a crime movie. These disparate things, personae and locations are unified (albeit obtusely) by two intertwined stories which aren't told so much as wildly elaborated upon. To follow the work you have, to some extent, to ape the artist's imaginative leaps and bounds, but you could be forgiven for not feeling quite so athletic.
The first story is that of Gary Gilmore, who is played by Barney. Apparently Gilmore, like Barney, was attractive, intelligent and an able sketcher. But Gilmore is best known for spending most of his life in jail after murdering two fellow Mormons and demanding that his death sentence be carried out in order to ensure his own immortality. Barney was inspired by Norman Mailer's fat and chilling best seller about Gilmore, The Executioner's Song (1979). The book is like a mammoth end note or subtext to the nearly conversation-free film. The second story transports us back a century to Houdini (played by a coiffeured Mailer) who, as strange as it seems, may have had a fruitful liaison with Gilmore's paternal grandmother, a medium called Fay Gilmore. In this Cremaster, Houdini is pitted against queen bee Baby Fay, a contest which pits psychic against physical magic. Male honey bees suffer a fatal loss of genitalia during mating, so you can understand why Barney likes them aside from a hive being his home state Utah's insignia. In this respect, the new film with its thematisation of a male subject's relation to a powerful matriarch, death and emasculation evokes a similar psychological drama to Cremaster 5 (1997).
Cremaster 2 has a big dramatic score by Jonathan Bepler and was shot by the talented Peter Strietmann. It is cold, menacing and beautiful to behold. The screen is often filled with blue and white expanses of ice and salt, while sheer reflective water is used to stunning visual effect. But the landscape isn't just a backdrop. It gives the film a transcontinental and trans-historical reach and recalls Henry James' observation that in the American imagination the landscape is something bigger than words: illegible, 'fantastic and abracadabrant'. Other scenes are engulfed by a darkness which is punctured by a harsh artificial light. One scene takes place beneath a neon-lit petrol station canopy. Barney imbues this banal venue and crime scenario (not to mention the association of cars and sex), with a powerful sense of claustrophobia, immobility, resignation and evil.
Barney has an alchemist's approach to materials and references in his fastidiously crafted works. In Cremaster 2, objects and the natural world are transformed and interbred. At the centre of this denaturalised scenery are his stylishly drawn characters: displaced, deadly serious and oblivious to their strangeness.
