March 16, 2003
Matthew Barney and springtime in New York
Yesterday morning found me standing in line with dozens, if not hundreds, of tourists and art aficionados at the Church of Barney. When I first moved to New York, in August 2001, I learned that one could make appointments with Barbara Gladstone Gallery to view the individual Cremaster films. Over the course of three weekends, I saw the four that were then complete; when the fifth, Cremaster 3, was completed last year, I saw it at Film Forum.
It's difficult to explain my reaction to the exhibition. There's so much going on that one could make a 528 page book about it. Oh wait, someone already did.
My biggest concern before entering the exhibition was that I feared an inability to separate the sculptures—Barney has always insisted he is a sculptor—from my first encounter with them as props and set-pieces in the films. This concern was thankfully unnecessary: the most engrossing aspect of the entire exhibition is Barney's enchantment with materials and how they can be creatively employed to create sculptural form. The leather from Ford Mustang front seat that Barney inhabited while playing Gary Gilmore is here pulled off of its support and stretched like skin around the corner of Barney's prosthetic addition, snapped down with white plastic buttons. Every element used for the Masonic ritual scenes in Cremaster 3 is ornately patterned with decorative flourishes. Every ribbon seen in the exhibition—with the exception of those hanging from the five-screen Jumbotron in the center of the rotunda—is not a ribbon at all, but rather cast rubber or resin. Never before have I felt such a visceral desire to touch everything on view.
The 'Jumbotron' itself is a five-screen behemoth that hangs from the center of the rotunda skylight and continuously plays a twenty-minute selection of scenes Cremaster 3. Each screen is devoted largely to one of the five challenges in The Order, the competitive game Barney must defeat to kill The Architect as played by Richard Serra. The Order required Barney to scale the inner walls of the Guggenheim's rotunda with rock-climbing equipment and face a challenge at each level: in a move toward visual cohesion in the exhibition, relics from those scenes provide are placed exactly where they appear in the film. Visitors who do not know why the letters 'NY X HC' are taped to the floor and flanked on either side by rock-salt 'tables' can look up and watch the third challenge, wherein Barney must retrieve a hammer from the floor in the middle of a mosh pit circulating between two New York Hardcore bands. This is Barney's surest move, inviting everyone to literally inhabit the space of the film—props and all—and hopefully gain access to the very hermetic set of meanings encoded in that space. However, it simultaneously fractures this cohesion through its means of presentation: as one walks from bay to bay up the ramp, the ambient noise of five different audio channels and the dizziness created by continually looking up pollute the clarity of the visual experience.
I'm sure Barney meant for that to be the case, as everything aspect of this exhibition has been meticulously planned. He has changed the Guggenheim's lighting, adding bright white lights that makes you notice just how yellow the sun is once you've left the building. He has controlled the pacing, leaving some bays empty (notably the ones closest to the bathrooms and elevators, and good for him) and others with only one or two works of art hung off-center. He has paid attention to the smallest of details: be sure to note the white pentagon embedded in the rich blue astroturf at the center of the five vitrines displaying the films' disks or the perfection of the stretched black vinyl in the sumptuous top room dedicated to Cremaster 5 at the end of the exhibition.
In the end, I don't think that my take on the show is as rapturous as that of Michael Kimmelman or Jerry Saltz (who I saw at the show and had a nice long talk with), but I do feel The Cremaster Cycle is a major accomplishment. It should rightly enter its place in the canon of recent American art, and I will certainly be visiting the exhibition several more times during its remaining three months. I will also go to Film Forum on May 4th to watch the entire five-film cycle in one marathon viewing.
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New York is experiencing unseasonably warm weather, and yesterday afternoon I got on my bike for my first long ride since the weather took a turn for the worse in December. I love the familiar weight around my hips, the familiar ache in my calves. Seven hours went like this: Astoria, Long Island City, Greenpoint, Williamsburg, across the bridge, Lower East Side, Chinatown, NoLita, East Village, Union Square, East Village, NYU, West Village, East Village, up First Avenue, over the Queensboro Bridge, through Long Island City, over to and around Roosevelt Island, and back home. Along the way I ran into Johanna, Michael, Liz, Emily, Sarah, and Jonathan. Springtime in New York is a wonderful thing.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, Lauren.