THE CREMASTER CYCLE
The Ancient Greeks had a word for it, schmaltz, (that’s loosely translated from the vulgate). Indeed, after a cursory viewing of The Cremaster Cycle mounted at the Guggenheim Museum, one is supremely aware of the debt Matthew Barney owes to the Greeks, as well as, to the Romans of Antiquity, 1960’s underground experimental cinema, Genghis Kahn (pronounced Cohen), Astrology, and the motion picture, The Cell. His work demonstrates his great affection for the mythology and idolatry which populates art from 4000 B.C. to present.
As Chieftan-priest, Barney has become an incarnation of the pagan dieties he serves. His Stonhenge is the primitive temple now called The Guggenheim whose concentric circles form a modern cromlech acquiring, with Barney’s constructions and primordial ooze, new significance as a House of some kind of zany God. This one, however, may be a God of Infertility. His
allusions to mythological figures such as Osiris who rises from the waters of death and destruction get pretty shop-worn as one descends from the upper Skylight level of the Guggenheim. In his films and throughout the installation are a compiliation of iconography of antiquity updated with a potent dash of contemporary trans-gender non-specificity.
The photographs that punctuate each level of assemblages act have the
function of acting like Ancient Egyptian ideographs, symbols of the regal and the amorphous. From Mesopotamia, he has appropriated the striking image of The Snake Goddess (ca. 1500 B.C.) and the more modern Wounded Lioness ( ca. 650 B.C.) who is performed by a naked painted lady on the rotunda video mural.
Barney’s characters are full of archaic cynical smiles first made popular in Greek "Appollonian" sculpture around 600 B.C. Like the works of the ancients, Barney’s work doesn’t suggest much personality, but is concerned with bodily structure and appearance. He is a curious Hellenistic fashionista. Likewise, as in archaic art, the whole is implied in the rhythms of the parts. The five parts of the Cremaster Cycle define reality only in terms of what can be grasped by the senses-the concrete and the tangible. But even what could be seen was not real if it implied something that could not be seen.
What is terribly lacking in these fantastic works that borrow also from Pan-Hellenistic art created after the Death of Alexander the Great 323 B.C., is imagery that embodies a noble and dignified conception of humanity. In appropriating the formal supernatural beauty of Venus and Aphrodite and converting much of it to hermaphroditic constructions and personnae (in drag), Barney waves a cynical wand over the history of art and conjures up a somewhat disrespectful mockery of the conventions of the past.
