Hallucinatory Acts

By Steven Henry/Madoff

Few artists under 40 have the cult cachet of Matthew Barney. Part performance art, part sculpture, part film, his mandarin works are outrageous spectacles of heavy makeup and dreamworld metamorphosis. Barney, 32, has appeared before his camera as a red-haired ram in a morning coat; as a satyr squirming in the backseat of a stretch limousine; as a naked and chained Houdini in Budapest, throwing himself into the Danube while Ursula Andress, as the weeping "Queen of Chain," looks on.

Whatever his bizarre fantasies--and they are indeed bizarre, occasionally silly but always sleekly made--critics, curators and dealers have wasted no time rushing in. Barney's videos and the eccentric sculptures related to them are avidly followed by prominent collectors and museums. Three years ago, he received $50,000 for his contribution to contemporary art as the inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss Award. His shows are seen from Los Angeles to London, Tokyo to New York City.

So a new work by Barney is something of an event in the contemporary art world, and a more unlikely looking event would be hard to find than the newest installment in his projected five-part "Cremaster" series--the first three done as videos and now the latest, and perhaps grandest, finished as a full-scale 35-mm film. Never one for the obvious or linear, Barney has dropped this piece into the sequence as Cremaster 2. On view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn., through Oct. 17, the 79-min. film and the morgue-cold installation of objects that accompanies it (a mirrored saddle, miniature mountains done in salt, white barbells of salt and epoxy resin, flags, flyweight sketches and various film stills) are loosely about the murderer Gary Gilmore, who was executed by firing squad in Utah in 1977. But to say that they are simply about Gilmore is a little like saying Picasso's Guernica is a picture about a horse.

Cremaster 2 is a sprawling, hallucinatory quiltwork of gorgeously shot scenes, ominous organ music and barely a page of dialogue, all slowly unfolding a circuitous plot involving Gilmore (played with truculent wordlessness by Barney), copulating bees, members of the Gilmore clan, Houdini (played briefly and pugnaciously by Norman Mailer, author of the Gilmore saga The Executioner's Song), a Brahma bull, the Mormon Tabernacle and landscapes ranging from Utah's blindingly bright salt flats to the glacial ice fields of Jasper, Canada.

The weird pleasure of watching Barney's art is seeing whatever improbable carnival comes next. If you're willing to spend the time to untie his Gordian knot of symbolic acts and images--and they do indeed unknot--you'll find a maniacal, systematic and deeply imagined vision of a world as strangely alternate as Lewis Carroll's in Through the Looking Glass. If you dig into the swelling body of criticism about Barney, knowing references repeat themselves, from Joseph Beuys, the late German master of performance art and social spectacles, to video pioneer Vito Acconci to the powerful minimalist sculptor Richard Serra--each of whom dramatically reshaped the artistic landscape. Barney follows, doing what all visionary artists do: he creates a parallel universe that reflects something wholly novel about our own, though through a far narrower lens. His obsession, in his own words, is "to try and find a space that's free; to find that moment between formlessness and form before things get defined."

Divining this in Barney's art, you can begin with the word cremaster. The cremaster muscle pulls the testicles up into the body and is an indicator in the fetus of male gender. Everything in the "Cremaster" series swirls dizzily from there: for him, biological destiny is a prison. Escape from it is a heroic act--in fact, a spiritual right. Thus his transmogrified, half-human creatures elsewhere; his fixation on Houdini, the impossibly malleable escape artist; and now his Gilmore, who spent the better part of his adult life in prison, only to be released into the world, where he killed and was executed by his own demand in what he imagined was a transformative act of blood atonement.

It is hard to believe, watching a good deal of the freakish imagery in Cremaster 2, that Barney is serious about bees morphing into male bodies oozing sexually with honey; about a seance medium whose face is pierced with rivets. But that is one of the most intriguing things about him: in an age of slick ironists cool beyond belief, Barney is a dead-earnest symbolist plummeting through the rabbit hole of his own nutty logic. You may not get everything that you see. And certainly you may not enjoy it. But it fascinates all the way down.