Matthew Barney: C/D?

cool - that is the only thing i've ever read that's made me want to see (part of) a Matthew Barney film

a few exhibits at the venice biennale had really obvious barney influence (one could almost say they were slavish imitations, but that seems to give barney too much credit) ... weird slick white plasticine objects and deformities etc. they were among the most boring exhibits there.

Finally saw Cremaster 3's The Order DVD yesterday. It was interesting, though I'm not sure how much I actually liked it. My initial reaction: Macho Jocky Artfag Mousetrap. Then, watched a bit of the commentary and learned of the rites and mythologies of the Masonic Teen Scene influences and thought that maybe he was tapping into that for a reason. Then I decided that maybe he just tapped into that because it was obviously a great source for lots of crazy fucked up bizarre shit that he could play out. I sorta liked it. But having seen none of the others yet (or the entire C3 for that matter)...

I'll have to get to it over time.

the order is the dumbest part of any of the films, I can't figure out why he put this out on dvd and nothing else. don't judge cremaster by this section!

yeah it is just stupid to release this on its own although i actually love this section most of C3.

Commenting on Cremaster from only seeing The Order = commenting on a movie from seeing the trailer.

Right on. But I was only commenting on The Order.

Yeah, not you specifically. Just in general. Many people tend to base their opinions on Cremaster solely from watching the Order (since it is most easily accessible) and it's kind of pointless ... but yes, artfag ... etc.

ive just come from 4/5th of it...and im not sure what i think. i feel abused and isolated...i took this abstract seires of notes in the theatre, and i am working thru...the fifth one (the mormon one, the gary gilmore one) was the one that killed me the most, and im worried that i am projecting my own shit...cause this film is more of an open text then almost anything else

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

best poem ever

has anyone seen the new cadillac ads that clearly rip off the car scenes from Cremaster 3? The cars drive into a lush building lobby, do a synchronized dance, and then a new cadillace comes tearing in and they all back off. Maybe Barney directed this but I doubt it. Can he sue them?

i noticed that too! how weird. i almost figured it was coincidence rather than a rip off.

i saw lots of maddin and barney in skycaptains

i welcome this mainstreaming of Barney's aesthetic. next thing you know commercials will feature oozing globs of viscous fluid.

yeah i might go see that.

It looks like a big budget student film, but still... yeah I might go see it too.

is this coming out in theaters or on dvd?

theaters/museums, he'll never put this stuff on dvd if he can help it, I don't think.

I'm a little bothered by how very DV it looks; wasn't cremaster 3 shot on film?

i think it was actually shot on an organic laminate constructed of his own intestines

do you like him now? you def. didn't at the beginning of this thread

i like him even less, if that's possible

he's just so joyless - how can movies composed entirely of oblique, luxurious symbolism be so numbingly dreary?

sometimes i feel like matthew barney is the bizarro baz luhrmann

With hindsight on Cremaster I too like him even less than I did at the time. OTM about the dreariness. Also, I'm put off by his dependence on grandiosity and big-budget spectacle.

Not surprisingly, the Village Voice spoof Cremasters cited above sound much more fun to watch than Barney's.

cremaster 1 is pretty funny

i like his shtick, in limited doses. i think i liked the installation at the guggenheim more than the movies, because it an immersion in his look and style, which i like, without having to sit still through the action (or lack thereof).

it was an immersion, i mean

looks awesome, despite bjork's participation

LOOKS FUCKIN SICK BROS.

hahahaaa... a review from imdb.com:

"What a unbelievable piece of crap! Pretentious, boring and promoting the Japanese massacre of killing whales (in the name of science, hypocrites). Japan every year is trying to buy other countries to vote for reopening the hunt on whales in the International Whaling Commission. Maybe that's where Matthew Barney got the money from to make this piece of sh*t.

I used to be a big fan of Björk, musically but also her acting in "Dancer in the dark" (magnificent) , but now she has really lost it.

Matthew Barney is her partner, and apparently makes her lose all her critical capacity.

Don't go there!"

Do NOT even go there!!!!!!!!/111111

Plutocratic, ex-model, ultra-hipster, avant-garde video-artists married to beautiful Icelandic eccentropop idols.

Oh God, did you ever make as lovable a creature? A three-legged kitten in a teapot maybe.

the equally savage dis in the new yorker might be enough to keep me away.

Link!

When in Minneapolis, which has significant and early Barney 'purchases' at the Walker, it was funny to look at who the wealthy buyer/donors were: a local real-estate magnate nobody outside Minnesota would be troubled by.

As to the art, it's relentlessly packaged but that's part of the practice. I wondered also if the practice was trying to express the ultimate self-ref/reverence and directing all that narcissism into strange and loopy places. It is very meaty as in fleshy. However intellectual they might make it sound, I can't help but think B&B sit there all day counting one another's toes and doing fuck-all.

the new yorker thing is just a brief in the film listings. hell, i can probably type it in for you:

"The Simple Life" for a pair of self-important art-world celebrities. With a combination of lavish pageantry and industrial exertion, the Nisshin Maru, Japan's last whaling ship, sails off from Nagasaki Bay. Along with its crew, it carries two guests, Matthew Barney and Bjork, who submit to elaborate rituals of tonsure, pomade, and dress at the hands of solemn bearers whose job it is to keep from laughing at their employers' airs. They partake of a classical tea ceremony in an unabashed display of Oriental kitsch that makes "Memoirs of a Geisha" look like an ethnographic documentary. As their berth fills with what might be water or whale oil, the couple lovingly carve each other up into human sushi. Barney, the director of this unbearingly empty spectacle, has in effect filmed at great expense the couple's designer-sightseeing cruise, with little more skill and vastly more pretense than the average tourist.

except the new yorker said "unbearably" instead of "unbearingly," because of their stuffy preference for real words.

i wish people wouldn't try to judge these things the way they review actual movies, because they aren't.

Even though they requires camera, audio and lighting crews, costume designers, line producers, production managers, location scouts, post-production facilities, audio and image editors, sound masterers, casting agents, insurers, etc, and all this stuff is edited in some sort of sequence, with a traditionally "seamless" audio mix, and winds up at roughly the running time of a feature length film - we're supposed to suppress the lifetime of movie memories and comparisons this context and milieu provoke in us, why? Because Barney says so?

"for my next magnum opus, i have written a play, but because i am an Artist, please refrain from experiencing it as drama or theater"

you could do that!

Contemporary fine art uses a lot of film, but it doesn't use it in the way Hollywood does. For instance, there's an excellent Pierre Huyghe film in the Whitney Biennial in which he sails to Antarctica to discover an island with a single animal living on it, then recreates the voyage with lasers, smoke and an orchestra in Central Park. Now, anyone reviewing this would have every reason to compare it to Barney's films, which it resembles in many ways, and almost no reason to compare it to any Hollywood release. The fact that it uses film crews etc is irrelevant. Genre and context are everything, and genre and context put this film firmly in the art world. (As does the fact that no popcorn is on sale in the Whitney lobby.)

Think of them as extended videos for Bepler's music(or whoever's), if it helps you to relax and enjoy the show.

what I mean is I think people criticise the films based on their understanding of narrative. And the films are not interested in narrative in the way that "movies" concern themselves with narrative. They have 'scenes' and 'characters' and occasionally even 'dialogue' but they are distinctly different from movies, in the way, say, Krapp's Last Tape is not the same as Wicked.

What the films do to my head reminds me a bit of Raymond Roussel's books, if Roussel had been able to make films, maybe they'd have been like these.

that's a good comparison actually

Sorry, kyle, the "context" for Barney's latest excursion up his own butt includes preview trailers at Apple.com, a very movie-ish movie poster, and the aforementioned Hollywood attributes, not to mention the actual style of the filmmaking, which is conventional in almost every way - did you see the helicopter fly-by of the ship, for instance? The whole thing is completely caught up in classic Hollywood filmmaking practices! (Steadicam, seamless editing style, expert lighting, the integrity of the frame, the relegated and "feminized" role of the soundtrack). Now, I love all this stuff. Barney apparently does, too. It's silly to imagine he doesn't. But, as I said way up at the beginning of the thread, if I'm sitting in a theater to watch a movie, I want all these technical, practical aspects bent towards the goal of telling a story, mainly so I don't fall asleep in my popcorn. If it's showing on some big screen in the corner of an art gallery, fine - I'll walk past it and murmur something and get onto something else.

then don't go see them!

also, they don't usually show in movie theaters. the cycle did two years ago as part of a retrospective, but i believe barney's preferred venue for these things is in art galleries. cremaster 2 was meant to be experienced sitting on saddle sculptures.