The Cremaster Cycle plus De Lama Lâmina

From July 30 to August 8, 2010, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) and De Lama Lâmina (2004) are screening at The Roxie Theater in San Francisco.¹ Whatever one’s personal feelings about Barney’s cinematic works or his larger oeuvre, this event at the Roxie is a noteworthy occasion, because the Cremaster Cycle has not been screened nationally since 2003, and is not, nor will ever be, available for general purchase or rental on DVD.

Completed non-sequentially between 1994 and 2002, the Cremaster films operate as a progressive, but nonlinear, amalgam woven from interrelated narrative threads. Stylistically, they run the gambit from the Busby Berkeley-like buoyancy of Cremaster 1 (1996), to the dark, baroque romanticism of Cremaster 5 (1997). While each possesses unique tropes, they are linked together by Barney’s consistently disquieting aesthetic and the title, which references the muscle in the male scrotum that controls testicular ascension. In the developing fetus, the latent cells that eventually become the male cremaster also participate in sexual differentiation by either pulling the developing genitals into the body to become ovaries or lowering them to become testes.

As a whole, the cycle resonates with both the adult and embryonic implications of its title. Overt testicular symbology appears throughout, but the five Cremasters also progress from the sexually undifferentiated Cremaster 1 to the gender bifurcated Cremaster 5. In between, the films trace a distinctly male sexual evolution fraught with uncertainty and aspiration.  

Many people viscerally dislike Matthew Barney’s art. Quite understandably, the sumptuous, often creepy, fleshiness exuded by his films, sculptures, and installations, can be off-putting. However, it is unfair to ascribe such personal dislike to an inherent failing of the work. Barney’s pieces are intended to disturb. Their opulent visuals and seductively repulsive aesthetics cast viewers into uncomfortable terrain. Such works do not always create pleasant experiences, but they are often haunting—surfacing again and again long afterward.

Cremaster 1, 1996; film still. Courtesy of the Artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

If fault is to be found with Barney’s films, it lies in their occasional laziness and consistent narcissism. A good example is De Lama Lâmina (From Mud, a Blade), a collaboration with legendary musician Arto Lindsay. The piece, created for the Carnival de Salvador da Bahia in Brazil, shares several aesthetic qualities with the Cremaster films, including sexualized mechanical apparatuses, lots of petroleum jelly, and an unplaceable mythic quality.

The piece seeks to “portray the duality between nature and technology,” through characters based on the Candomblé deities of war and the forest.² However, these roles are problematically played by a naked, vaguely ethnic, and primitive “Greenman,” and a REI-clad, female nature sprite based loosely on eco-activist Julia Butterfly Hill. The respective position of each within the giant tree-uprooting vehicle that bears them—coupled with their sexual interactions with it—raise troubling, and seemingly unintended postcolonial and gender-equity issues. While ostensibly collaborative, the project never coheres; the carnival crowd dancing to Arto Lindsay infectious music and Barney’s cryptic performance work remaining oddly disengaged.

The Cremaster Cycle and De Lama Lâmina are on view at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco through August 8, 2010.

NOTES:
1. http://www.cremaster.net
2. From the Roxie Theater press release.