Art Criticism
Blarney at the Guggenheim
A review of a one
day visit to the Guggenheim's Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle, June
2003.
The
Cremaster Cycle exhibition is a project of five
films with some of the sets and props that have
doubled as installations. A few of the more unique
mediums he works with are tapioca and Vaseline. The
cremaster is the involuntary muscle that
creates the rising and falling of the scrotum.
A Jerry Saltz, art critic for the Village Voice,
comments that he has loved everything Barney has done since a 1990 group show:
“Suddenly, this 22-year-old appeared naked, in a videotape,
climbing ropes, then lowering himself over a wedge of Vaseline
and applying dollops of it to his body.”
He continues: “Since then, Barney has
been able to do no wrong by me, which is exactly the kind of
unequivocal wet kiss from a critic I hate.”
Nancy Spector, the curator of the
Guggenheim, wrote the synopses of the five films of the Cremaster
Cycle. Here is an
excerpt:
Cremaster 2
embodies this regressive impulse through its looping narrative,
moving from 1977, the year of Gary Gilmore’s execution, to
1893, when Harry Houdini, who may have been Gilmore’s
grandfather, performed at the World’s Colombian Exposition.
The film is structured around three interrelated themes—the
landscape as witness, the story of Gilmore (played by Barney,)
and the life of bees—that metaphorically describe the
potential of moving backward in order to escape one’s
destiny. Both Gilmore’s kinship to Houdini (played by
Norman Mailer) and his correlation with the male bee are
established in the séance/conception scene in the beginning of
the film, during which Houdini’s spirit is summoned and
Gilmore’s father expires after fertilizing his wife.
She steers clear of
evaluating the work in print, merely cataloging the
content.
A scene from the Cremaster 3 film was
set inside the Guggenheim. It is loaded with references to Las
Vegas showgirls, game shows, mythology, blood, and ambition.
Barney,
dressed in Scottish garb, climbs artificial mountain panels on
the outer ramp-walls of the Guggenheim rotunda, reminiscent of
televised athletic contests. Could be symbolic of competing for and
scaling the heights of the art world? Along the way he solves a
spatial puzzle, showing aesthetic savvy.
He overcomes a challenge by a half-woman half-tigress
that bites him on the mouth, drawing a substantial amount of
blood. Implied might be the double symbolism of Barney being Christ and the half-woman
representing the predatory nature of dealers and
agents? The wound to the mouth might also be suggestive that it is better to
remain silent if you are to pursue your ambitions no matter how
much of your life force it drains? The climax is when he reaches
the upper most heights of the Guggenheim to find a zombie-like
Richard Serra, monumental minimalist sculptor, decked out in
industrial garb shoveling boiled Vaseline onto the top of a
mini-ramp. Then there is a close-up shot of the oozing
lubricant’s downward path. Either due to the spectacle of
Serra at the top of the Guggenheim or to this artist shoveling slime on the
inner ramp-walls of the Guggenheim rotunda, Barney falls over the ramp to splash
into a bubble bath filled with showgirls. Falling to success then leads to the denouement
in which he takes revenge on the woman/tigress and kills her.
Barney is following in the wake of the
anti-art aesthetic of the Dadaists, but he is dangerously close to
taking his expression seriously. Barney is more
like a filmmaker, but being just incoherent enough to qualify as a postmodernist. In other
rooms of the Guggenheim, Barney displays props from
the film’s sets, such as the scores of
plastic 6-foot pillars.
Also on exhibit are some of the quite
brilliant still photographs taken from the films. A great deal of
credit must go to the cameraman, Peter Strietmann. He has a great
eye for composition and essential details.
After viewing
this superficial spectacle, I think it is a good time for us to step back,
way back, and question the viability of postmodern art. There is
a shift of attitude by the contemporary postmodernists such as
McCarthy, Huyghe, and Barney, a nuance of difference between them and the
Dadaists. Duchamp had an overpowering sense of cynicism but he also had his wits
about him. He knew and played with the fact that he was an anti-artist, note his
use of a Rembrandt image as a cover for an ironing board. These post
postmodernists don’t have this type of awareness. They sincerely express, as if
it were a value, chaos, morbid states, unintelligibility, temporal mediums, and
an overall negative view of humanity without any sense of irony.
David Rockefeller speaking of MoMA, though
he could be speaking of museums in general, says: “As for
the polemics over whether MoMA should choose a period and just
not collect beyond it—maybe Abstract Expressionism; Modern
but not post-Modern—I feel the museum has an obligation to
continue to collect into the present, to identify the best, most
creative artists of today.”
Might curators and critics reevaluate the
meaning of postmodern aesthetics in light of human values? Perhaps then, we would see more than “blarney” at the
Guggenheim.
