Portland's Cinema 21 is going to show the entirety of Matthew Barney's "The Cremaster Cycle," from Sept. 24-30.
The series of five films were made from 1995-2002 by the acclaimed Barney and last showed in Portland, Oregon in 2003.
Many collector members of ARTKABINETT social network remember when the New York Guggenheim exhibited the entire work several years ago.
You won't believe your eyes when you see Matthew Barney's astonishing five-part film series, "The Cremaster Cycle," opening Friday at Cinema 21.
A sweeping visual carousal influenced by too many cultural mythologies and histories to name, the films revel in spellbinding and excessive imagery.
There is a re-enactment of the execution of Gary Gilmore; statuesque chorus girls performing on an empty football field made of blue Astroturf; a pancake-faced satyr climbing out of a slimy, Vaseline-covered womb; and a mythic tale about the Chrysler Building that unbelievably unites the dark clubby world of Masonic rites, an indoor car-crash derby and a cheetah-like woman played by Aimee Mullins, an athlete who runs on artificial legs.
"The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Hulk," move aside. The year's strangest and most stunning visual feast is this incredibly surreal, almost wordless quintet of independent art films made by the New York-based Barney, who's been labeled one of the most important artists of his generation by The New York Times.
Selected films in "The Cremaster Cycle" have been screened in numerous museums and art house theaters since the artist began the series in 1994 with "Cremaster 4." (The films were shot out of sequence and can be seen in no particular order.) But when Barney finished the last of his movies ("Cremaster 3") in 2002, the entire cycle was ready to be released theatrically.
With the release comes the opportunity to measure the true scope -- and meaning -- of Barney's Baroque fusion of mythology, biology, crime history, Western lore, kitsch, pop culture, and sports, among a short-list of influences.
It's an indication of Barney's purposeful obscurity that he made the films out of sequence and that they can be viewed in any order. Still, an order exists -- albeit a labyrinthine, often inscrutable one.
Literally, the films are about the cremaster muscle, which controls the ascent and descent of the male testicles. For Barney, who was an athlete and studied biology before turning to art, the cremaster is really a symbolic way to explore the nature of creationism and indulge his obsession with the fleshy, bloody workings of the body.
Each film presents a series of narrative stories and images that are ultimately connected to one another.
But with the films mostly free of dialogue, you'll need Cliffs Notes for each scene to figure it out. "Cremaster 2," for example, somehow combines the story of Gilmore, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, a swarm of bees and Harry Houdini (played by a grim Norman Mailer) into a narrative described as a "gothic Western," one that in terms of the cremaster cycle corresponds "to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins."
Though its story line defies reason and logic, "The Cremaster Cycle" will awe by virtue of Barney's virtuoso images that extend familiar boundaries of time, place and sexuality.
With simultaneous references to 19th-century Budapest, '30s-era Germany, the American West and a futuristic England, to name a few, the pieces suggest a pan-historical time. Filmed in such disparate locations as a football field in Idaho, New York's Art Deco Chrysler Building and England's scenic Isle of Man, the films -- despite such easily recognizable settings -- transcend the feeling of a specific place.
Featuring a slew of androgynously dressed and stylized actors and such stars as former sex goddess Ursula Andress, model-athlete Mullins, pugilist-writer Mailer and macho sculptor of steel Richard Serra, the movies embrace sexual ambiguity, moving easily from kitschy, homoerotic pageantry to stern, heterosexual manliness.
Though he wrote and directed all of these films (and stars in most of them), Barney regards himself primarily as a sculptor. Slow and deliberately paced, the images aren't so much filmed as they are constructed like a statue -- but one that includes gobs of Vaseline and bloody props.
Barney wants to make sure that the mostly silent images, coupled with at times annoyingly dissonant music, settle on the mind, that they linger like one of the fevers taking over the body depicted in his movies.
There's clearly brilliance of a kind at work here. But what's further catapulted Barney into art world celebrity is the cult of Matthew Barney.
He has a weirder imagination than the stilted and bookish David Lynch, but the thirtysomething, San Francisco-born Barney has the lean good looks of a movie star, too.
He worked as a model, though none of his handsomeness is apparent in these films, where he's covered in grisly makeup and costumes that include fake genitals, tartan kilts and white suits.
Barney also played football and attended Yale University.
And he is the boyfriend of pop singer Bjork, with whom he fathered a child.
