"Art is unresolved, otherwise
it is uninteresting"
Matthew Barney The "Cremaster" cycle represents a canonized work of contemporary
art, which established 37-year-old Matthew Barney as a key American artist
and one of the most important figures of world art in the last decade
of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Ever since Jasper
Johns, some 40 years ago, no artist has attracted as much attention and
approval from the very beginning as Matthew Barney. After only a few
group exhibitions at the beginning of the 1990s, his sculptures and video
works caused all-round admiration in influential art circles. From the
moment he started exhibiting in the galleries of Barbara Gladstone in
New York and Stuart Regen in Los Angeles, till the great retrospective
in Guggenheim in February 2003, Barney has become a planetary phenomenon. The epic cycle Cremaster 1 - 5 (1994-2002) represents a complete and
comprehensive aesthetic system, consisting of five feature films. The
cycle develops not only cinematographically, but also through photos,
drawings, sculptures and installations, which the artist develops in
accord with each part of the cycle. With the development of the cycle,
the films were produced in a progressively professional manner, from
the release of Cremaster 4 (1994), Cremaster 1 (1995), Cremaster 5 (1997),
Cremaster 2 (1999), culminating with the last film in the series, Cremaster
3 in 2002. The key point of the artist's concept is the male muscle (cremaster),
which controls testicular contractions as reaction to external stimuli
- a central metaphor of the artist's meditation on the subject of the
mystery of the body, creation, and male principle in art. The essence
of visual extravaganza in the ambience of monstrous glamour is the moment
of sexual differentiation in the mother's womb. Cremaster 1 represents
the "highest" state, i.e. the non-differentiated state, while
Cremaster 5 represents the "lowest", i.e. completely differentiated
state. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney abandoned the field
of pure biology, exploring the world of Celtic mythology, freemasonry,
esotery, in the time frame beginning in 1874, the year of the birth of
Harry Houdini, the artist's alter-ego, until 1977, when the famous murderer
Gary Gilmore was executed. Matthew Barney himself appears in the films,
except in Cremaster 1, while in other parts of the cycle appearances
are made by Ursula Andres (Cremaster 5), Norman Mailer (Cremaster 2),
Richard Serra, as the supreme Architect, whom Barney kills in the Oedipal
manner in the final installation of the cycle, Cremaster 3. |
