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."

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.

I liked this Cremaster movie the best. First of all, it's nice and short. Second, the visual imagery is simple, yet interesting, not the overkill of Cremaster 3. Lastly, it's probably the most "fun" of the Cremaster films to watch (if you can describe any of them as fun). There's no plot, of course, and it's extremely pretentious, but it held my attention for all 42 minutes, and I'd recommend it as a stand-alone art film. 8 out of 10.

I'm seeing these in numeric order, which I must assume was some sort of intent. So far, the first was important and effective. It mattered to me. The second was overloaded with storysense that showed flat stupidity. The third was similar but overloaded with random symbols. Along the way, I saw "Drawing Restraint" and it was every bit as good as number 1.

The advantage of this is that the symbols are few, the symbolic structures simple and obvious, the posturing plain. Its still uninteresting. He's still not a deep man unless he thinks in images, environments rather than objects.

In this case, there's a race, an underground vagina and a sterile terminus for both.

Boring.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

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.