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Cremaster 2
Fluid Talk

a conversation with Matthew Barney by Amy Jean Porter

This interview took place on the occasion of the public outdoor screening of Cremaster 2 in Dublin's Temple Bar in May 2000. It first appeared in Circa Magazine

Just in case you hadn’t heard, Cremaster is a series of video work by American artist Matthew Barney which enthusiastic critics are comparing to Wagner’s Ring cycle. Just in case you didn’t know, the cremaster is a set of muscles in the male that raises and lowers the testes with the change in temperature outside. Cremaster 2, the most recent installment in the five-part series, is slick with the most finely licked of production qualities. It is faster than the rest, a two-step at speed, with fewer obsessions and more words. It is also a violent, heavy-metal murderous thing. Based loosely on the story of Gary Gilmore, Cremaster 2 will add a dark very sharp edge to the series. And that edge might inspire something akin to what Beuys said about healing the knife that cuts the wound. Narrative is marginally stronger in Cremaster 2, following the lead of Norman Mailer’s novel on the Utah murderer Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song. But even if Mailer himself appears on screen and speaks dialogue based on his book, even if the story of Gilmore alone is rather renowned, and even if it all seems easier to follow because of a few words and a few names, Barney might say the narrative is just a coat-hanger for something else. And it’s that something else so very ambiguous that makes it involuntarily captivating. Matthew Barney came to Dublin and brought his Cremaster, but like any good artist (especially one who would consider the magician Houdini a role model), he gave none of his secrets away. But I did get to chat a little with the soft-spoken, easy-smiling but intense Mr. Barney. We began with that now infamous term itself.

Cremaster

Amy Jean Porter
Would you consider the term ‘cremaster’ as one of the major clues to understanding the series?

Matthew Barney
No. It’s part of one of the structures within the sort of biological model--it’s one of the structures that I’ve taken and abstracted into a system. In this case, the cremaster muscle sort of expressed the male, and it also kind of controls the height of the internal reproductive system. What we’re asking it to be is the sort of will and narrative to move the state of the story up and down, within a system which is undifferentiated--whether the cremaster doesn’t exist yet or within a system which is not necessarily male. It’s just a system.

AJP
When did you first discover the cremaster?


MB
I think it’s something that I had probably read right past in anatomy. And then I was at a wedding and was talking to a doctor about the sort of idea I was trying to develop at that time--the idea of a reproductive system before form differentiation which could be attached to some of these stories. He started talking about the cremaster muscle and suggested I look at those drawing again. And I did.

AJP
What were you working on at the time?

MB
Well, it’s an interesting thing that happens in the way that (the cremaster) responds to temperature or fear, and around that time I was making these pieces which dealt with temperature--walk-in refrigerators in which vaseline was cast in a particular form that was held in place by temperature. I was also thinking a lot more at that point about the kind of stories that nearly take place within the body, the kind of action films that were going on inside a body or an abstracted body.

AJP
The word ‘Cremaster’ is very striking in that for most people it would be unfamiliar. I think perhaps it’s even stronger in relation to a series of work which avoids vocabulary--there are very few words in the Cremaster series. But there are a lot of fluids. Would you be inclined to say that fluids act as a kind of replacement for words in your system?

MB
Possibly. I’ve always thought of the way that Vaseline worked as a transitional element in moments of friction between two objects. Yes, I’d accept that in some way.

AJP
You’ve been called a body-artist, a genital artist, even the ever-spectacular ‘artist of onanistic desire’, but in fact it seems you often begin with landscape or place--would you in a sense consider yourself a kind of landscape artist?

MB
Well, I think of it as sculpture. I start with place--place in this case has something to do with object relationships for sure, whether it’s architectural like the bath-houses or land-mass like the Isle of Man. It is sort of objectified, that place or landscape.

AJP
How does this relate to the characters and a sense of narrative?

MB
I’m interested in something that kind of appears to be narrative motion-picture, but with something close to a non-hierarchical relationship between the architecture and character or the landscape and the character. It’s difficult to do that. It requires pulling back in ways unnatural to that form--not allowing characters to develop in ways they want to develop, or in ways a viewer wants them to be developed.

AJP
What is the most memorable scene in a film for you?

MB
Maybe when the lightbulbs start bleeding in Evil Dead II--it’s a real classic, cabin-in-the-woods horror film. That would be very influential to me in the sense that the evil lives in the architecture rather than the person. Even if there is some antagonist circumnavigating the cabin, it’s the cabin which is still the vessel that holds the psychology.

AJP
How do you imagine your audience?

MB
I think it changes. It’s different from place to place, it’s really hard to say--that’s exciting. A lot of it came from having done these like this, as films shown in a cinema. The audience isn’t particularly a fine arts audience...I think the best way to show these pieces is in a cinema, in an environment where it looks right and sounds right and it’s seen from beginning to end. As a result of that some really nice things have happened--like a new audience, and a younger one. And with that, our little conversation was restrained from development--it seeped back into the woodwork of the residents’ lounge of the Clarence Hotel. All that remained to be imagined were a few dollops of vaseline oozing out from architectural orifices and a lone lightbulb dripping with psychology.

Amy Jean Porter

The Official Cremaster Site

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