Cremaster 4

Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 4" is an excellent example of what can be achieved in the area of video art. "Cremaster 4" contains no verbal dialogue, but exists purely in the visual (with audio accompaniment). While not made with the budget and means of perhaps Barney's later "Cremaster 3," "Cremaster 4" is a successful enveiling of various processes that reference issues of gender and masculinity, sports, and Barney's own mythology/ iconography. I believe what makes Barney's work so significant is his dealing with issues from contemporary American culture that artists previously either rejected or deemed unworthy as subject material. While the Cremaster cycle of movies most directly deals with masculinity (the cremaster is found in the scrotum and is the muscle which is responsible for raising and lowering the testicles), Barney also manages to weave in his own commentary on sports (he played football at Yale), video games (see the Guggenheim sequence in "Cremaster 3"; it's self-explanatory), and gender ambiguity. Barney has a keen eye for striking images. The music provided by Jonathan Bepler suits Barney's films very well. If you like evocative images, cryptic sequences of events, and can tolerate the occasionally disturbing, I highly recommend "Cremaster 4."

Cre·mas·ter

noun 1.

ANATOMY the muscle of the spermatic cord, by which the testicle can be partially raised.

2. ENTOMOLOGY the hooklike tip of a butterfly pupa, serving as an anchorage point.

This inceptive entry of the 5-part series plays like a low-budget Charley and the Chocolate Factory with buff, nude Oompa Loompas who exist circuitously in a Teletubbies-esque environment, but if the show's creators had been on copious amounts of methamphetamines. We primarily witness a crosscutting between a tap-dancing devil figure - who eventually must crawl through a viscous, uterine tunnel, as if being born into the world - and two separate, futuristic race cars which speed off from each other in opposite directions. A Lynchian sound design plays over Cronenbergian visuals - one example of which is gelatinous embryos that ooze from the pockets of the race car drivers, whose midsections are shot at a close up to appear like separate, slimy organisms. Barney's medium combines filmic techniques, with 3D art-instillations, and stop motion to create a singular pastiche. Plotless and entirely absurdist, this series, I can tell, will be perfect for me but certainly not for everyone. The final shot is of a close up of a pair of testicles being stimulated by prolonged metal objects. Enter into the Cremaster Cycle at your own discretion.

The Cremaster Cycle 9/10 The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five films shot over eight years. Although they can be seen individually, the best experience is seeing them all together (like Wagner's Ring Cycle) - and also researching as much as you can beforehand. To give you an idea of the magnitude, it has been suggested that their fulfilment confirms creator Matthew Barney as the most important American artist of his generation (New York Times Magazine).

The Cremaster films are works of art in the sense that the critical faculties you use whilst watching them are ones you might more normally use in, say, the Tate Modern, than in an art house cinema. They are entirely made up of symbols, have only the slimmest of linear plots, and experiencing them leaves you with a sense of awe, of more questions and inspirations than closed-book answers. The imagery is at once grotesque, beautiful, challenging, puzzling and stupendous. Any review can only hope to touch on the significance of such an event, but a few clues might be of interest, so for what it's worth ...

Starting with the title. The 'Cremaster' is a muscle that acts to retract the testes. This keeps the testes warm and protected from injury. (If you keep this in mind as you view the piece it will be easier to find other clues and make sense of the myriad allusions to anatomical development, sexual differentiation, and the period of embryonic sexual development - including the period when the outcome is still unknown. The films, which can be viewed in any order (though chronologically is probably better than numerically) range from Cremaster 1 (most 'ascended' or undifferentiated state) to Cremaster 5 (most 'descended'). The official Cremaster website contains helpful synopses.)

Cremaster 4 is closest to the biological model and so sets the scene, suggesting the system's onward rush. There is a motorcycle race and a Candidate who is tap-dancing his way through the floor (weird? yes - but it is definitely art, not weird for weird's sake!)

The Guggenheim Museum (which houses a parallel exhibition) describes the Cremaster Cycle as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation." As film, the Cremaster Cycle is one to experience in the cinema if you have the opportunity to do so, or to experience and re-experience at leisure on DVD (the boxed set is promised for late 2004 and will be a gem for lovers of art-cinema fusion).

Glacial pacing and ridiculous mythopeia are more than compensated by the uniqueness of his vision, and the gutsiness of his approach. Well worthwhile for discerning viewers. Lovely music, great sets, but it's really a filmed document of his static art.

I don't know how well this - or the other four - work in a gallery, surrounded by other paraphernalia of the art and a concept. I suppose, the art is all in walking between objects and piecing together a reflection that is directly related to the way they enabled you to pace your mind. This is very much a work of art, and I have railed against that in others of my posts, art in the sterile sense of a system that solely exists to organize eccentricity. Dreary stuff.

But as a film? It has some flow and rhythm, but at the level where it's supposed to have sense - and I don't mean 'sense' as a substitute for desktop logic, the other sense that is life - all of it is puerile and self-important at best.

Please, let this not be just about maleness being swallowed by a mysterious womanhood (sea - tunnel - crawlspace filled with a doughy substance). Please, let the male drive not be represented by a mindless repetitive motor race. Reading a bit on the concept of these films, it seems to be that way.

I am willing to cut it some slack, hoping this was only the lowest level of a cosmology that is expanded in future installments.

But so far, stick with Talk to Her. This is all vaginal folds with none of that film's dance into soul.