Looks like I'm Going to CREMASTER 3!

That's right, it's been a long wait -- my entire lifetime, in fact. But I finally get to see the most phenomenal movie ever made, and I get to see it tonight. Matthew Barney's final film of the five-film Cremaster Cycle (yes, they are out of order because he is so cool and, well, arty and stuff).



Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle writes:
"... But viewers of Barney's crushingly self-indulgent spectacle will see nothing in it to match the ordeal of sitting through it. The word 'cremaster' names a muscle that governs the impalpable rise and descent of a man's testicles. Its use as a title forewarns audiences of Barney's peculiar mix of sexual morbidity, inarticulate emotion, fetishistic paralysis and squandered athleticism."

And David Finkelstein of Film Threat writes:
"Five vintage Chrysler Imperial New Yorker cars inside the Art Deco lobby of the Chrysler Building repeatedly smash a black car until it is destroyed. A woman (double amputee, special Olympics athlete and model, Aimee Mullins) in a silver lamé dress, inside an ovary-shaped room, uses specially designed shoes to slice potatoes into hexagon-shaped pieces which she places in a designated slot. Maypole streamers are woven around the tower of the Chrysler Building in a solemn dance of white-gloved men. Two male punk bands (Agnostic Front and Murphy's Law) and their fans collide on a ramp of New York's Guggenheim Museum, while, on the ramp below, the Rockettes perform precision drills."

Wow! I can't wait!

 

Okay, don't everyone express their jealousy at once.

Since you're all clamoring for more information, you should visit the Cremaster Cycle website to learn more. (Don't think it's slated for Atlanta, rimbaud. heh heh).

by the way, I appreciate that you admins haven't locked this. I'm not kidding for once, even though I used the "looks like..." title.

 

So will you be busting rhymes or what-not for NGA, or are you going to throw your hands at a camera for their new video? Amazing skills and versatility, especially for a sub-genius.

Seriously, DC sounds like a big step up, but I've never spent time in Atlanta. I like DC, get to do boring grant review panels blah-blah there a lot.

By the way, I got to view Cremaster 2 (twice) inside the Barney-designed auditorium, a simulated beeswax sort of thing where the back-supports all leaned about 5 to 10 degrees forward. An eerie sort of uncomfortable, to say nothing of the actual movie.

 

Okay, thanks everybody for waiting patiently (and quietly) in suspense.

To be honest, CREMASTER 3 was not the best film of all time. The Man With Two Brains is still best. That being said, I have to recommend C 3 to anyone who might get a chance to see it. (It may eventually visit Houston, for instance). It's 3+ hours long with an intermission.

The first 90 minutes are by far the strongest and to me the most important. The Chrysler Building segments are simply amazing.


This is a shot from the Cloud Club of the building. This is a guy that plays music by opening and closing the elevator doors ever so slightly so that wind whistles through at differents speeds and pitches.

The apprentice, played by Barney, infiltrates the building and sabotages the elevator system by filling one with cement.


(He's bleeding from the mouth in this photo because the master architects didn't like the cement trick, so they removed his teeth and installed a chunk of remnant metal from a 1938 Chrysler Imperial. The 1938 Imperial was attacked, gang style, in the lobby of the building by five 1967 Imperials. I took that to be a bunch of art critics, and the whole installing that beat-up chunk of metal in his mouth was probably something about the art world telling him what kind of artistic voice he could have, but I tend to get too literal.)

At any rate, those are the highlights. The 2nd-half of the film chronicles "The Order," where Barney got to basically play with the entire Guggenheim museum in New York City. (The exhibit is still there I believe). This was pretty lame, aside from the odd line dancers, the battle of punk bands Agnostic Front and Murphy's Law, and this leopard woman. It just seemed so much like Matthew getting to fart around now that he's a big cheese. Boring. Over my head. Whatever.


There's Barney as a contestant in some mind-numbing game. Actually, the sculpture he made (two pieces shown here) were phenomenal. But him using the museum as a jungle gym didn't communicate much to me -- maybe him climbing the art world again, but it was so much better in the Chrysler building. The leopard woman was hot -- I'd post a photo but she's pretty much nude. (Seems like I should be able to post art, and she's kind of wearing pasties). Okay, well you're warned. Here's the link:
.leopard woman, or cheetah, or whatever. a foxy double amputee.

I'm not mentioning the whole Irish frame story with these pentagonal basalt pilings everywhere (they're really like that, and they mirror the Chrylser five-sided symbol).

Okay, finally, I can let the world's most completely boring thread, a thread in which I made 80% of the posts, die. But if anyone got interested in Matthew Barney after all of this, I think it's a good thing. I used to think he was just yanking everybody's chain, but no, it's just too obsessive, meticulous, and consistent. He's got a lot to say, and I'm now one of the chumps that thinks his work is pretty durn important.

edit: okay, 60% of the posts. Thanks, rimbaud. And you're welcome. so much more to recap -- especially an amazing corpse scene -- but enough is more than enough here already.

 

Good question(s). I don't know the answer(s).

So why is art good? There are people here better able to answer that than your humble BBS physicist here. But I'll go with a version of the "I know what I like" cliche. Some of Barney's stuff really hits me on a visceral level that no other art form or artist has done. When I watched Cremaster 2, I felt a sort of fear that I had never felt before (or since). It was not the fear of a pscyho-in-the-dark-with-an-axe-coming-to-get-me, or fear of heights, or fear of getting killed. It was a sort of fear that was somehow more basic -- as if I was a brainless amoeba but was somehow newly aware that I was about to be obliterated by a bigger amoeba. I was really moved somehow, emotionally, so that's art for me. Whether it's fiction, painting, or these sorts of massive installations with film accompaniment (?), it all boils down to the same criteria for me.

The purpose for Barney? Some think it's just his own career. But he's clearly talking about many many topics and aspects of the human condition through metaphors. I'd argue sometimes the metaphors are so lucid (when he's on his game, when he's en fuego) that he gets to a deeper truth or new aspect of the truth or a new way of considering it at least.

I personally like him because he's doing art about the condition of being a man, and specifically a man in the modern world. The cremaster is the muscle that basically tells your balls to drop. So what the hell is it to be male in our world? Is it about violence, competition, what? I love that he's thinking about these things and makes art full of more sports references and scientific references than it has art references (to my eye, anyway). So why is it good, as opposed to a random bunch of crap from some flunky art student? I guess the answer is his obsessive consistency and master craftsmanship (like the sets he constructs, etc.). His mythology is nearly as evolved as something like Tolkien's or Herbert's fantasy worlds, but Barney's just trying to talk about our world.

There's also the fact, that the camera work and compositions of shots and cinematography are freaking gorgeous. But hey, that's really just my take. I'm not just trying to be weird. I enjoy seeing this guy's work and thinking about it. But I still laugh a lot at it, and I think it's totally legit to say "this is pretentious crap. Forget it."

whoa. don't ask me any more questions dude. holy **** I can blather.

 

He has exhibits too, but yes, these are actual movies. For now, they don't get widely released, but they will be available on DVD soon, if they're not already. If you go to the website, you can at least watch the trailer, and it gives you some tiny notion of the whole five-movie work.

I'm a pimp for the Cremaster Cycle!

 

To be honest, I don't think it matters, but ideas and characters do reappear. Given the choice, I'd go in order. At least the first one's really short -- it's set in a football stadium in Barney's hometown of Boise, Idaho I think.

Ottomaton ... that's the spirit.

 

This is the fulcrum experience of Trader Jorge's life. It will change him forever. In years to come, we will all speak of Jorge BC, Before Cremaster.


Here, a motivated businessman spends days creating those helical columns you see behind him. Each column is painstakingly built of large but thin basalt slabs, layered by the businessman to create the helical structures (DNA anyone?). By the end of Cremaster 3, he climbs one helix to reach the very top of the Chrysler building. All the films speak of the (quixotic?) search for male prestige and symbols of power.

edit: but there is no gum-smacking secretary in the film.