Cremastery or Cremasturbation?

This past week I attended a private press screening at the Roxie Theater of two of the five Cremaster films by Matthew Barney, in addition to a 2004 collaboration with Arto Lindsay entitled De Lama Lâmina. Barney’s work is certainly not the most conventional way to start the day–the three-hour screening began at 10:00 am–but such an oeuvre on the big screen is a difficult invitation to turn down. The films were being shown in advance of the Roxie’s July 30th two-week engagement where the film cycle will be shown in all its 7.5 hour glory. The screening’s press release says that you haven’t been able to do this since 2003, and the thing will never be available on DVD.

For better or worse, I’ve always regarded Barney’s practice with a bit of skepticism, partly because of the hyperbolic praise heaped on him by critics like the Times’ Michael Kimmelman, but also because of what I found to be the profound waste of his Drawing Restraint show in 2006 at SFMoMA. Lots of hardened white goo and whaling detritus. Almost souvenir shop-like. Big on matériel, small on ideas. Nevertheless, I’d only seen parts of the Cremaster Cycle, and I’d always wanted to see more. Many people I’d spoken to insisted that, all his work aside, the Cremaster stuff needed to be seen.

Barney’s work, even for the most devoted acolytes, has always remained a bit elusive, and it’s usually easier to peg the referent–Bernini to Beuys–than it is to figure out just what the hell is going on. That said, it might help to know that the cremaster is the muscle which controls the movement of the testicles within the scrotum. There, I said it. Now the scene in Cremaster 5 where seven Hungarian bathhouse naifs lasso the Giant’s alien scrotum to a flock of Jacobin pigeons makes a tad more sense. But only somewhat.

The Cremaster movies can be likened to a sort of meditation on reproduction, sexual morphology, and–this being art–death. Barney clearly prizes the fully realized form in these works, and it’s his obsession with material detail, athletic precision, and classical and mythic images of beauty that make the Cremaster films such eye candy. The rest of the fun, of course, is figuring out what you’ve just watched.

I only watched two of the films, and I can only imagine what the cumulative effect of watching all five might be. Revelation? Revulsion? Fatigue? How about profound confusion?

De Lama Lâmina, a sort of addendum to the Roxie’s festivities is a 2004 collaboration with the guitarist Arto Lindsay, which he and Barney filmed during Carnaval celebrations in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Part musical documentary, part myth-entranced and materially elaborate feature work, the film struck me as a bit lopsided. To get the full effect of Barney’s m.o., you have to fully bow in to his world, which surely helps to explain the project of viewing his 7.5 hour film cycle. For De Lama Lâmina, I much more thoroughly enjoyed seeing Lindsay atop a giant Carnaval float singing in Portuguese and jamming over guitar squalls, than I did trying to decipher what a New York Times reviewer described as Barney’s repeated “cuts to the undercarriage of the vehicle, where a Caliban-like man-beast, covered in dirt and vegetation, hangs by his arms and legs in a wheel housing, masturbating against the drive shaft and pausing to dote on a stuffed toy monkey that he cradles like an infant.”

Catch the wunder of Barney’s work beginning July 30th at the Roxie Theater.