Excerpt from The Cremaster Cycle (Cremaster 3, 2002)
Still from The Cremaster Cycle
Still from The Cremaster Cycle
Still from The Cremaster Cycle
Sculptures from The Cremaster CycleBio:
Matthew Barney, sculptor, videographer and performance artist, was born in San Francisco in 1967. In high school, Barney embodied the archetypal male jock, positioned as the quarterback for the varsity team, a background which has proven to take a conceptual hold of and saturate his work. Barney attended Yale Art School, financed by a secondary career as a model, where he developed the work which connected him with the New York art scene. Barney's background, whether it be sports or modeling, infused his work with an unmistakable masculinity bordering on narcissistic self-awareness. His epic film series, The Cremaster Cycle, portrays Barney's conceptualization of embryonic sex determination while simultaneously embodying a true avante garde epic, winding throughout "extreme, visceral, and silly references to pagan mythology, architecture, pop culture, art, biology, and his autobiography." (Bozzola) The Cremaster Cycle literally refers to the " human embryo's moment of physiological limbo before the gonads either ascend or descend to create a female or male child (the "cremaster" being the muscle that controls the rising and lowering of the testicles). " Barney's iambic portrayal of raw biological, anatomical science, I think, is congruently beautiful and grotesque.
Bozzola, Lucia. "Matthew Barney" The New York Times: Movies and TV 12 Sept. 2010. Accessed 12 Sept 2010.
Relates to My Work:
I struggle with Barney's The Cremaster Cycle because, on a conceptual level, I find I can draw many parallels to my work and where I see it going. I sometimes find his execution hard to stomach, however, strangely magnetic from a viewing perspective simultaneously. I am somehow being forced to stare at the screen with intensity. Conceptually, my work relates on an over-arching level, through depiction of gender forms and theories of differentiation. I portray the male form disconnected from itself, or obscured by a species alien to human (not male or female human) to question the meaning of the male or female sexuality and identity altogether. I also use male models whose body types portray the archetypal "male" figure in visual history, from ancient mythology, to today's male models. From researching Barney's background, I found this image of masculinity an important fixture relevant to his work. The meanings this image symbolizes in the The Cremaster Cycle channel an idealization of science and anatomical truth. This, I feel, parallels what I have already created and hope to build on in my own work.
Quotations:
"The Michelangelo of Genital Art"
Bozzola, Lucia. "Matthew Barney" The New York Times: Movies and TV 12 Sept. 2010. Accessed 12 Sept 2010.
Interview :
Celebrating his Guggenheim Retrospective
I struggle with Barney's The Cremaster Cycle because, on a conceptual level, I find I can draw many parallels to my work and where I see it going. I sometimes find his execution hard to stomach, however, strangely magnetic from a viewing perspective simultaneously. I am somehow being forced to stare at the screen with intensity. Conceptually, my work relates on an over-arching level, through depiction of gender forms and theories of differentiation. I portray the male form disconnected from itself, or obscured by a species alien to human (not male or female human) to question the meaning of the male or female sexuality and identity altogether. I also use male models whose body types portray the archetypal "male" figure in visual history, from ancient mythology, to today's male models. From researching Barney's background, I found this image of masculinity an important fixture relevant to his work. The meanings this image symbolizes in the The Cremaster Cycle channel an idealization of science and anatomical truth. This, I feel, parallels what I have already created and hope to build on in my own work.
Quotations:
"The Michelangelo of Genital Art"
Bozzola, Lucia. "Matthew Barney" The New York Times: Movies and TV 12 Sept. 2010. Accessed 12 Sept 2010.
"The conceptual backbone of this epic film cycle is gender identity and the myth of masculinity."
'Barney stands as evidence of a regressive retrenchment of the masculine in these circumstances as it is that he stands for just the opposite, a masculinity that can renounce a determined mastery of a dominant role in relation to nature, women, creation, self, etc."
"But then the American artist has some of the most inventive, personal imagery ever used in art; his films are visceral, surreal, fluid and brilliantly bizarre."Gavin, Francesca. "Vaseline and Whales at Barney's UK Debut" BBC Editor Art Review. 27 Sept. 2007. Accessed 12 Sept. 2010.
Jankauskas, Jennifer. "Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle" Art Lies Issue 40. Accessed 12 Sept. 2010.
'Barney stands as evidence of a regressive retrenchment of the masculine in these circumstances as it is that he stands for just the opposite, a masculinity that can renounce a determined mastery of a dominant role in relation to nature, women, creation, self, etc."
Borevitz, Brad. "Matthew Barney and a Klein Bottle of Vaseline" One Two Three June 2003. Accessed 12 Sept. 2010
"But then the American artist has some of the most inventive, personal imagery ever used in art; his films are visceral, surreal, fluid and brilliantly bizarre."
Celebrating his Guggenheim Retrospective
Gladstone Gallery, New York
http://www.gladstonegallery.com/index.asp
Matthew Barney's Site
http://www.cremaster.net/
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