Matthew Barney: C/D?

"too many references, my dear Barney"

look how singualr, hermetic, epic and perverse his vision is, how it is almost cobbled together, and how it mantains its own symbol set.

this is harvey danger at least. (vyvvan girs. have then ame wrong)

we know what's going on, don't we. ;] ;]

and re:narrative--do you bitch to joyce about those things?

it may be resepcted for his unique vision, and balls out ambition-his world creation, but hated for his lack of plot and narrative, for what many assume to be an elabortate wank job.

Are you sure?

Jump Cuts
by Michael Atkinson
August 13 - 19, 2003

Renaissance man Matthew Barney is such a busy artistic powerhouse these days (Cremaster 3's climactic movement, "The Order," is out this month on DVD), we thought we'd lend him a hand with the scenarios for the next Cremaster "cycle." No, thank you, Mr. Barney!

Cremaster 8

Wearing a bronze jockstrap, an astronaut's helmet, and a coat of mango-peach latex paint, Barney scales Angkor Wat while the Green Bay Packers sit in an empty swimming pool, taking turns to blow up a used-car-lot balloon figure of Uncle Sam through a valve on its crotch. Cambodians slowly fill up the pool with cups of guacamole. By the time Barney finishes his climb and sings "If I Can't Sell It, I'll Keep Sittin' On It," the Packers are immersed.

Cremaster 6

Whoopi Goldberg reads the Magna Carta over the Yankee Stadium PA system, as a boa constrictor slowly slithers around the bases after a remote-control toy car with a real mouse in the driver's seat. In the outfield, 30 naked women play 30 grand pianos wearing cardboard Dalai Lama masks. When the boa makes it home, fireworks erupt, spelling "I LIKE IKE" in the sky.

Cremaster 7

Strapped together with bungee cords, Barney and a proboscis monkey run through a shopping mall as members of the Bolshoi Ballet and the cast of Mummenschanz battle each other with paintball guns. Barney is dressed as Elizabeth II; the monkey is completely shaved. In Sears, they meet Udo Kier, who's trimming dwarf juniper trees with a toenail cutter. Together the trio make it to the parking lot, board a circus elephant, and ride into the sunset.

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_Film_of_the_week/0,4267,1064264,00.html

?

Cremaster 3 is good AND bad the order section in the guggenheim is magnificent and there are some genuinely disgusting and shocking images which are quite jolting. as tracer said though its slightly let down by the beauty of the images themselves they seem too gorgeous to be anything other than superficial - the chrysler section (the bulk of the film) goes on far too long.

Cremaster 2 i thought was the strongest - he gets the balance just about right - the gary gilmore murder sequence at the garage and the honey/cum fucking are good - really engaging, as are the salt flats sequences. its let down by the weakness of the relationship of these sections to the Harri Houdini/ Norman Mailer bits - the ending woth Mailer's speech pretty much ruins everything that has gone before it though.

Haven't seen 1 or 4 but i intend to. Overall they are extremely patchy but definatley worth checking out simply because they offer something you will never see the likes of at the movies. Except 5 which is like a bad Peter greenaway film.

The one thing i think that lets the cycle down overall is that the narrative is TOO STRONG. Seriously.

jed u R being high

but that one was my favorite! maybe even for the reasons you didn't like it. i was even very moved by it.

1 & 4 are ugly boring crap. fuck them and their ideas.

I'll have to get to it over time.

notes directly:

bagpipe music in the isle of man one is all scratchy and noisy
i really like the colour of testicles
centuar with shorn horns, ron perlman in hellboy,
escape thru tunnels, vas deferens/wombs
all this fucking lubricant
isle of man makes me reconsider girl on a motorcycle-!
swimming thru pearls, like fish roe
cod peices
doves (jacobian doves !?)
couteiers in crimson and orange--twins ?
ribbons all over the place
the lights like ovaries, the angels bless the house
opera=high code for low emotion
pink slit betwixt black leather
drums on empty stage
stuffed/inflatable
pools of water
lillies ribbons
4(goat,excess, servents, centaurs)
dancers,doves,mistresses)
baubled pairs
climbs the bean stock
black leather bodice
hand peice of two glass spheres connected by gold
two pennies
love on stage as an assumed 3rd audience, this does not
orchestra as audeince
like a whistler painting
underwater, baptism/drowning
min black on a black horse, are they dying together
winter field, black trees
emph. on footwear
naked under his cloak, white bone futursitc goves and manacles
langourus cuts
tragic, almost camp, so over time (does it realize this?)
germanic (remake of wagner)
horse rides alone (western)
dives off bridge in mantacels naked (houdini and the water sequences in 4, the centuar dives beneath the floor, handcuffed or weighted)
swelling strings
greygreen river much like the forrest (intercessional ?)
strange biomechincals (pool, shoe, robotic vaginas and anuses, unrelated or pseudorelated to ursla andress)
broad silent acting more kabuki then gish
18th centuy polychrome itaalian clupture of angelic kids
4 mermaids live under roe
full size, with fetal faces
marie attonies, wating to rise to coutiers
saphhic
barney comes in, as neptune, with red tulip feet, walks into the water, the attendants come and tie ribbons to genderless gentila, and then doves take the ribbons and fly it to the celling, pulling out (cremaster) his cock
majorettes/busby berkley one idea taken too far
sex--bees over whelming
houdini
salt flats
norman mailer (who wrote about gilmore, and gilmore is in this one)
rythimic
sacred/secert rituals in rooms shaped like honeycombs (lds deseret)
rock and roll (slayer--inside joke--cf blood revenge(ww) lds (think laban)
Brahma Bulls
rock and roll as GGs first break w. the church
Desert
wax phallus
everything overwhelmed w. bees (work, efficency but also groupthink)
matthew barney and his ego
does everything have subliminal meanings ?
(dino gas)
two cars connected by honeycomb (replacement, intercessary again, conduit)
slc tabernacle, w. 12 men--scale model
petrojelly everywhere (in the flapdown wind visor)
old fashioned american gothics (the gilmore murder/the architechture of slc)
12 apostles, 12 tribes, 12 riders, 12 flags, latter 12 bison
american/canuck flags
rodeo (angola + gary on the bull, bull dies as gary rides, sacfricial)
circle of salt,
4 beehive sentinals
cops on mounts in atheltic patterns
2nd half about drones and queens,
mounties, lakes, rocky mtns, banff springs

surreal in its most litearal sense

What's the deal with River of Fundament?

sounds typically insane

i admit to finding the idea of this guy's movies--or more like, sections of the movies--more pleasant than watching a whole part of the cremaster cycle :(

i watched all of cremaster over the course of about a week, it was totally fun

Best review I've seen of it yet

:)

i guess i just felt, when watching them, that the shots don't seem to have any large-scale interaction that would make them more than the sum of their parts. it's like a series of maximalist images, one after the other like a slide show. but i admit i saw them years ago.

Re: the DVD issue, these all seem to be on Youtube. Any point watching them there?

should i see 'river of fundament' in london in a couple weeks y/n

i might go on the monday. Just thinking it through.

I will see anything this dude does ever.

Just saw Fundament in Los Angeles. Thought it was excellent. Not as complex, dense, or conceptually interesting as Cremaster, but very visceral and immersive. The art-kids were down on Barney's hubris, as they always are, but truthfully I have a lot of trouble thinking of anyone else who does "blockbuster art films" like these. Are there any?

Visionary artist Matthew Barney makes his BAM debut with the world premiere screening of River of Fundament, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

hahaha one of the absolute worst books, and i say that as a big mailer fan

now i want to see this, though ... how long was it?

It was 6.5 hours (including two 30-minute intermissions). So not that far off from the entire Cremaster Cycle. The Mailer thing is a pretty good send-up of his obscurantism: a novel no one has ever read, and an author who is world-famous but (at least from the perspective of academia) is hardly read nowadays, even in the United States, aside from White Negro and American Dream. And I imagine Mailer's profile is even lower in the mostly European countries where this has been screening?

Not related to River of Fundament, but I'd be really interested to learn what if anything Barney's said about Lynda Benglis. I'm finishing a paper on Benglis (undergrad, nothing fancy or probably even particularly good) and it really seems like there's a connection between her beeswax lozenges (here or here or etc) and Barney's "field emblem," especially the Vaseline version in Drawing Restraint 9.

Probably either not really or totally obvious, but fuck it, why not...

Sorry, that second link should be:
https://www.wellesley.edu/sites/default/files/assets/departments/davismuseum/object%20imgs/benglis-1991.2.jpg

Not sure I see the connection to the Field Emblem, though you may be on to something with the materials. Cremaster used Vaseline/plastic/beeswax (very explicitly in Cremaster 2), and Fundament moves over to gold leaf and metals, roughly following Benglis's trajectory. And I should maybe also add that Fundament features many gold-leaf phalluses and turds.

The general "lozenge" shape with a horizontal division at the center- it's not as apparent on all of Benglis's beeswax paintings but there's a line where she started brushing outward vertically.

I'll have to check out River of Fundament if I can.

6.5 hours?!? no thanks

saw this exhibit tday, p cool - https://artgallery.yale.edu/exhibitions/exhibition/matthew-barney-redoubt