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When people look back at the work of the American artist Matthew Barney in 100 years time -- and they will, Barney being one of the signal artists of our times -- you have to wonder what they will make of it. His Cremaster Cycle is an epic series of five films, and it is nothing short of hallucinatory, a seven-hour-long immersion in one of the most dazzling imaginations any of us is likely to come up against any time soon. Toronto audiences will soon have the opportunity to see for themselves -- the series will have its Canadian premiere at the Cinematheque Ontario from April 23 to May 2 -- and they'll discover a ravishing and often baffling roller-coaster ride from the majestic desolation of the Columbia Icefield to the lush green hills of the Isle of Man, from an ornate Budapest opera house, haunted with history, to the steely flanks of the Chrysler Building. The series famously takes its name from the muscle which regulates the position of the testes, playing out in allegorical form the dramatic differentiation of the genders in utero, the moment at which maleness first becomes distinguishable from femaleness. This should be our first clue. What is the Cremaster Cycle really about? It's about masculinity.
Barney places himself at the centre of this investigation; the films, made between 1994 and 2000, are self-portraiture on an epic scale, with the 37-year-old artist presenting himself as a Masonic handyman; as a dandyish tap-dancing goat man in a white suit and spats; as a kilt-clad Highlander scaling the balconies of the Guggenheim rotunda like a chimpanzee; as a gothic cape-clad Romantic hero; as the depraved serial killer Gary Gilmore; and as the triumphant man-creature who rises from the waters of the Gellert Baths as pale as an orchid, his legs fluted with giant fleshy flowers, an exultant uber-phallus rising like Venus from the waves. (Barney also provides us with author Norman Mailer in the role of Harry Houdini and sculptor Richard Serra as the architect of the Solomon's Temple, Hiram Abiff, re-imagined as the creator of the Chrysler Building.)
Given this spectacular panoply of male identities, one can be forgiven for not knowing quite what to expect when you meet Barney face to face, as I did last week in his New York studio. Gracious, polite and a bit shy, with intelligent, diamond-drilling eyes, he turns out to be a thoughtful person who answers questions carefully and often obliquely in curiously open-weave sentences, sometimes jumping up to show me a picture of a work of his by way of responding. On the morning we meet, he's wearing a scruffy black windbreaker. His physical person is precise, nimble and elegant, and his build is that of a guy you'd meet selling mountaineering equipment to support his weekend habit. Mountaineering has, in fact, been an important part of his life growing up in the West, but his art career has curtailed that for the time being. Stanley, Idaho, a quiet town to the north side of Galena Summit, is, he says, his favourite place on the planet.
Barney has explored masculinity in just about every way possible, both in his art and in his life. Growing up in Boise, Idaho, he was a college football player before deciding to be an artist. (His parents split when he was a boy, and his mother left to become an abstract painter in New York.) Barney also worked for several years as a fashion model in New York, and the influence of that exposure can be felt in his lavish and utterly original decorative sense of costume and fantasy. It's hard to imagine a more polarized array of male roles.
Before embarking on the Cremaster Cycle, Barney's early works were hybrids born of these multiple masculinities. In one early performance, recorded in his video Blind Perineum (1991), he scaled the walls of Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York with the help of his rock-climbing equipment, traversing the ceiling and then descending a staircase into a chilled room equipped with a weight lifter's bench sculpted from Vaseline -- a staple of the locker room and one of the artist's signature materials.
(Barney's love of Vaseline is matched only by his interest in plastic prosthetics and foam padding, which he crafts in exotic mutations that echo the protective and corrective gear worn by athletes.) In one of his Drawing Restraint performances, which he began while still a student at Yale in the late 1980s, he struggled to make marks on sheets of paper pinned to the wall while tethered in midair. In Barney's practice, drawing had been reconfigured as an extreme sport.
The idea of extremity continues to fascinate him, he says, mentioning a current exhibition of Vito Acconci's performances at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. (Chris Burden, another master of the body in extremity, is also important to him, he said, and likewise Bruce Nauman, whose work often conveys a sense of emergency, of the human subject pushed to the limit.) As we tour the studio, I notice some black crayon marks on the ceiling, high above our heads. "How did those marks get there?", I ask. A small training trampoline is resting against the windowsill, and he describes for me how he was running and jumping from the trampoline last week, bouncing high enough to hit the ceiling with the crayon. It's the newest incarnation, he says, of his work Drawing Restraint #6, originally performed in 1989. I look at the trampoline. I look at the ceiling. It's not possible, I say. "Oh yes," he says with a smile, "it is."
On the subject of the gender, Barney is mum, though he does describe the Cremaster Cycle as a "theatre of masculinity." Asked earlier on the phone how his work sits in relation to the radical redefinitions of maleness and femaleness going on all around us, he was cagey, finally laughing and saying, "How long have you got?" In the studio, too, he is reluctant to be probed -- a little like someone protecting a wound, or perhaps just safeguarding a valued source of inspiration -- but he finally allows that his Cremaster identities were "like trying something on and finding out that it doesn't work. There was an approach taken there to turn back toward the problem, and to go straight through and out onto the other side."
As we talk, he reaches for an art magazine containing images of an earlier piece titled Cremaster Field (2002). An enormous mass of Vaseline has been congealed into a vaguely piano-like shape, constrained by a number of white polyurethane dividers. As we thumb through the pages, the photographs show the shape loosening and spilling out, the dividers splayed in a formless disarray, a total collapse. "That piece was really important to me," he says, "because of its willingness to admit that it could not stand. It could not be upright."
Around us as we talk are four or five studio assistants, who are completing work on an artist's multiple; each of these black, square wall panels features a pelvis-shaped, thin wood-veneer cutout, conjoined with a little slab of metal and a block of wood. Pale-green nylon flocking has been sprayed into one corner of the assemblage, providing the organic effect of mould growing. (In the past, he has used this same material to adorn his delicate erotic drawings, which he frames in white, self-lubricating plastic, another of his favourite materials.) The sale of the multiple works will be timed to coincide with the release of Barney's new film in mid-June, sparked by a collaboration with Brazilian-American musician Arto Lindsay. This February, Barney and Lindsay entered a float in the annual Carnival parade in Salvador, capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia: an enormous tree-cutting logging truck with monstrous jaws.
"I began to think about someone being under the truck," Barney says, and a character started to take shape, informed by Barney's knowledge of the Candomble religion imported to Brazil by the African slaves. A story then began developing in his mind. The figure of environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill will be a major player in the film, and he has created a hybrid of the Candomble gods Ogum (God of war and iron) and Ossaim (a "herbal medicine man with one eye and one leg who spoke through a ventriloquist's dummy").
When we talked earlier on the phone, Barney had said, "I wanted to make an explicitly political work," but he laughs when I point out today that we are back again in the terrain of boys and their toys. Man the eco-destroyer and creator is considered against the backdrop of ancient myths and beliefs. He directs me to a book on African religion titled Flash of the Spirit, by Robert Farris Thompson."All of his books are good, but this one has been the most helpful for me," he says. "I attended some of his lectures when I was at Yale. He is a brilliant teacher," he adds, but he slips this in quietly, as if bringing up his own intellectual pedigree might come across as a trifle showy.
After the extravagant grandiosity of the Cremaster Cycle and the typhoon of media attention it has engendered, Barney seems determined to come across as human-scaled, as just plain folks.
This may be his most challenging role yet.
Screenings of the Cremaster Cycle begin at Cinematheque Ontario in Toronto on Friday, and continue until May 2. For tickets and schedules: http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest or 416-968-FILM.
Cremaster 1 and Cremaster 2 move to Toronto's Carlton Theatre April 30 with the rest of the films in the series opening May 7.
The Cremaster Cycle opens wider later in Canada.
