Artist Matthew Barney has been much in the news with his film Drawing Restraint 9 (a collaboration with Bjork) and an upcoming exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery in New York City. In 2000 Harper's Magazine published an analysis of Barney and of his movement, Onanism, which appears below. Originally from March 2000.
With the appearance of his new film, Cremaster 2, Matthew Barney's reputation as an important American artist is secure. Barney is the author of a cycle of art films so audacious and brilliant, so potent in their symbolism and private mythology, that astonished critics, fumbling awkwardly for an apt comparison, routinely evoke some dim memory of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle. Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, has simply proclaimed him “the most crucial artist of his generation.” Barney has also garnered uncommon support from powerful arts institutions. He was the first recipient, in 1996, of the Guggenheim Museum's prestigious Hugo Boss Prize, and next year the Guggenheim will honor the thirty-three-year-old artist with a major exhibition featuring the much-anticipated debut of Cremaster 3.
Such accolades are well deserved. And yet they fall so very short. It is perhaps inevitable that the most heroic artist of our age should appear after the “death of the author,” at a time when the word “genius” has been all but erased, at a moment of unparalleled suspicion and resentment of the achievements of great men, when the very concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful have been rejected by most advanced critics. To be sure, appreciative reviewers have noticed that Barney represents a crystallization of the techniques, themes, and obsessions of the vanguard art of the last decade or so, and that he shares with his contemporaries a passionate interest in sexual politics, sexual identity, and gross primary sexual morphology. The 1990s, in the arts as in politics, were the decade of the genital, and Barney falls squarely within this strain of recent art. Appropriately, fame and fortune have followed, but Barney's fame hitherto has been limited to mere celebrity. His work, however, demands not notoriety but awe. What even the artist's most ardent admirers have failed to recognize is that Matthew Barney is the Michelangelo of genital art, the supreme master of the genre, whose work so transcends the run-of-the-mill video artist masturbating in his studio that he also may be said to bring his tradition to its unsurpassable realization.[1] All the alleged perversions and excesses of Barney's genital precursors now stand justified, for without them the Cremaster cycle might never have existed. Yet Barney's work, as it sets about redeeming genital art, also moves beyond it, revealing it to be a style of world-historical significance by both recapitulating its development and announcing its mannerist phase. It remains only to give the style a fitting name, a name of sufficient grandeur, one that will echo through the halls of future museums and not-yet-imagined artistic movements. Let us call it Onanism.
Barney emerged in the late 1980s fully formed; in retrospect, his first videos and installations were already remarkably mature genital achievements in which the artist enacted a dizzyingly significant series of actions before the camera, utilizing sculptural props such as a Vaseline-covered exercise bench, a tapioca dumbbell, and titanium ice-screws. His first major piece, Field Dressing (orifill), revealed the naked young Yale graduate sliding up and down a metal pole, carefully and repeatedly applying cooled Vaseline to all his orifices. Critics, blinded by the novelty of his conception, were unable to see that here Barney was setting forth an early draft of his Onanist manifesto; they saw only the ex-fashion model, a beautiful face, a muscular physique. Perhaps it was this incomprehension to which Barney alluded in the title of his next major work, Blind Perineum, a performance piece in which the artist used mountain-climbing gear to clamber about naked on the walls and ceiling of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery. Still, the public and the critical establishment seemed resistant to the power of the work, unable fully to grasp the radical nature of Barney's explorations. Barney replied with Radical Drill, in which he performed football blocking exercises wearing a black evening gown and high-heeled shoes; and in The Jim Otto Suite, Barney, again naked, though here equipped with a genital prosthesis, played the role of Harry Houdini as he was repeatedly punched in the solar plexus by an actor. The symbolism of these early works is an eloquent testament to the young artist's critical, almost painfully acute, self-consciousness. Other projects and actions, as he called these works, include 1991's Transexualis, MILE HIGH Threshold: FLIGHT with the ANAL SADISTIC WARRIOR, and CONSTIPATOR BLOCK: shim BOLUS, many of which contain a repeating structural element called the “HEMORRHOIDAL DISTRACTOR.” Drawing Restraint 7, which appeared a few years later in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, featured Barney costumed as a goat-boy named Kid, along with a couple of satyrs who spend much of the video wrestling in the back of a limo, repeatedly penetrating Manhattan via the island's tunnels and bridges.
By this point in his career, Barney was being heralded as the heir to the performance artists Joseph Beuys and Vito Acconci, and Barney clearly owes an aesthetic debt to Acconci, an important video artist and precursor of Onanism whose 1970 video, Open-Close, showed the artist masturbating and then plastering shut his rear end. In his early works, Barney clearly had mastered the hitherto existing formal and conceptual vocabulary of what we might call proto-Onanism; had he produced nothing else, his work would have endured as one of the high points of the genital tradition, far surpassing the reactionary pictorial literalism of a Mapplethorpe or a Koons and the simplistic performance feminism of an Annie Sprinkle.[2] His obsession with manhood was already evident, though at the time, of course, no one could have known that the elaborate makeup and prosthetics of Drawing Restraint 7 were merely a prelude to the baroque extravagance and complex masculine mythology of the Cremaster cycle.
The cremaster, for those readers equipped with neither premed courses in human anatomy nor a subscription to Artforum, is the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles. In doing so, it not only regulates the temperature of the mature male testes—letting them out when they become too warm and drawing them in when they grow too cold or when danger threatens—but is also responsible for the fetal descent of the reproductive organs and thus plays a primordial role in the genesis of male sexuality. This important if obscure muscle functions for Barney as a talisman of difference and sexual differentiation, and, like many artists of the genital persuasion, Barney makes a fetish of difference (though, unlike many academic theorists and their artsy epigones, he is not burdened with a fashionable concern for “the other”). What distinguishes Barney's Onanism from other varieties of genital art is its persistent self-regard; Onanism is all about the self, Barney's self, which he understands solely as an epiphenomenon, a by-product, of his sexual identity.
Barney has produced his films in a curious order. First came Cremaster 4 in 1994; one year later Cremaster 1 appeared, followed by Cremaster 5 in 1997 and Cremaster 2 last fall. Barney's refusal to conform to a conventional, orderly sequence in the production of his films is an important clue, a clue that traditional notions of consistency, coherence, and meaning may not be respected in them. Although each film has an autonomous formal structure, they really must be taken as parts of a whole, as parts of a sexual creation myth that, strictly speaking, makes little sense at all. There are important patterns to be found, however, and it suffices to recognize them.
The cycle begins with a performance artist named Marti Domination; she plays Goodyear, a maiden held captive in a Goodyear blimp (one of two) that hovers suggestively over the goal-posts of a football field in rural Idaho, perhaps the very football field on which the young artist played in high school. Four “Goodyear Air Hostesses” guard her as she crouches inside an elaborately quilted enclosure under a table laden with fruit and a tapioca centerpiece that mimics the position of the hovering blimps. Clamps and buttons abound, as do pearls, grapes, and manly orbs of all kinds. In the role of the famous executed murderer Gary Gilmore, Barney sits confined in a canvas tunnel that connects two cars at a gas station. Like Goodyear, he picks at his enclosure, trying to penetrate its skin; he rips the carefully quilted interior, ties bits and pieces together, produces a quantity of petroleum jelly from some hidden place, and makes a vaguely phallic shape with it before simply picking up his gun, opening the door, and murdering the gas-station attendant.
Two dancers with Slavic names dance the two-step. Norman Mailer plays Harry Houdini (a persistent figure in Barney's work) and allows himself to be stitched into a silky white cocoon. Gilmore's parents are bound together by a mysterious matron with metal bolts in her face—bound together and enclosed within the Mormon hive, a hive that surrounds them in the form of actual bees, as they conceive their notorious son, the titillation of explicit sexual penetration soon followed by horror, the horror of seeing an impressively long penis capped with a glowing beehive as it withdraws from a vagina, a vagina with wings. A bee darts out of the awful penis-hive as its owner begins to swell horribly, pulsating and excreting honey from dozens of bee stings on his splotchy torso.
The drummer for the thrash metal band Slayer makes a cameo appearance. Gilmore rides a bull in the midst of a salten rodeo ring festooned with beehives and attended by Utah state troopers wielding the twelve flags of the lost tribes of Mormon. Ten mournful buffalo attend his symbolic execution. The great Rocky Mountains appear and disappear, as do ancient glaciers and valleys. Time speeds by, the moving image of eternity.
The Loughton Candidate, a cryptorchid goatman with cruel stumps where four proud horns once grew, finds himself trapped beneath the sea floor. He struggles valiantly to pass through the Vaseline-filled tunnel, soiling his dapper white suit, which clings handsomely to his powerful physique. Three enormous naked female bodybuilders perform a series of fetching maneuvers on land as they await his emergence, after which they all retire to an impossibly long dock jutting out into the Irish Sea from the Isle of Man. Two pairs of naughty testicles make a slimy escape attempt from their master's leather pockets as they race about the Isle of Man on motorcycles. A tightly withdrawn scrotum fills the screen, painfully clamped with multicolored ribbons that stream back through the goatman's legs to a pair of motorcycles parked on ovular platforms.
The Queen's Magician stands naked and motionless atop the Lánchíd Bridge over the blue Danube in Budapest, bound with a white plastic chain, standing on great white globes; he leaps, Houdini-like, into the river, where water sprites find him in the river's muddy depths. The Queen's Giant, who may or may not be the Magician transformed, stands imprisoned in a Turkish bath. The Queen's Diva climbs up and around the proscenium arch of the Hungarian State Opera House as the Queen of Chain herself, played by Ursula Andress, lip-synchs to a Hungarian libretto written by the artist himself. Andress and Barney (who plays all the major male roles) enact a story of love and loss; the Queen mourns the loss of her Magician as we cut back and forth between images of the Queen's forlorn face and memories of better times: The Magician and the Queen in a snowy forest, he on a horse and she on foot, staring meaningfully into each other's eyes. They kiss and part. Later we watch as the Queen and her ushers peer through an orifice in the floor and witness the final transformation of the humid Giant as he slowly, carefully makes his way into the warm frothy bathwater. Pigeons flutter about, occasionally perching on his broad, manly shoulders. Lovely water sprites attend him and attach ribbons to his sacred scrotum, which he lowers dramatically into the milky liquid. Here, finally, among melancholy and delicious operatic pomp, we have the mythic descent of Man's Testicles.
Such lofty and potent imagery invites extended exegesis; it may not be too much to say that the number of dissertations devoted to the Cremaster series may someday rival those on Finnegans Wake. Although everything in the films and in Barney's occasional pronouncements attests to his obsessive planning and attention to detail—from the elegant pearl buttons of Goodyear's quilted enclosure to the grotesque slimy groin area of the Queen of Chain—the films actively resist interpretation through an astonishing inflation of contradictory and hermetic symbols, and by means of a studied, devious ambiguity. Taken together, they suggest a multiplicity of overlapping arcs corresponding to various stages of physical and emotional development, without adhering consistently to any one of them. Goodyear's confinement in Cremaster 1, for example, evokes a fetal state, though Cremaster 2 contains a conception scene, and Cremaster 4's Vaseline-coated cavity suggests a birth canal. Each film enacts dramas of resistance and overcoming, attachment and separation, confinement and metamorphosis.
The Cremaster cycle is not yet complete, but the general shape of the work is now clear, and so is its basic, twofold teaching: 1) the descent of the testicles is traumatic and somehow violent; 2) man must differentiate himself from the larger whole, though in so doing he risks being destroyed. Cremaster 2, perhaps because it is the most mature of the works, makes the clearest statement of the latter principle: the metaphysical difficulty of becoming a man. The Mormons, Barney suggests, with their weird religion and taste for polygamy, are very much like a beehive, which works to suppress the masculine power latent in any one drone. The metaphor soon extends to encompass American society. Gilmore the drone seeks to become a real man, and the hive destroys him for his hubris. Ecce homo. Such is the tragedy of Man.
The Cremaster cycle comprises a set of elaborate variations on this ancient theme of the one and the many, Man and the City, variations that constitute an idiosyncratic catalogue of twentieth-century masculine touchstones, including football, mountain climbing, cowboys, the rodeo, motorcycles, fatherhood, armed robbery, and murder. In keeping with the advanced academic and artistic consensus that gender is a polymorphous and fluid category, Barney carefully avoids limiting his concept of man either to the traditional heterosexual breadwinner (the scourge of feminism and queer theory alike) or to the tragic figure of the urban homosexual, ravaged by a plague and persecuted by latent-homosexual thugs. His art encompasses both poles of the contemporary masculine tragedy, and although it is filled with the fetishistic, sadomasochistic touchstones of queer art, Barney is said not to be a homosexual himself, a fact that has elicited both the wry observation that the best gay artist isn't gay and the obtuse complaint that Barney is making fake gay art, cynically exploiting current art-world fashions.
What is deceptive about Barney's art, however, is that despite the superficially homosexual subject matter, ultimately it stems from a much deeper and less topical interest in profound and enduring philosophical concerns. And the theoretical paradigm that, more than gay pride or queer theory, provides Barney with his marvelously fecund source of inspiration is that of the Men's Movement. Some observers have dismissed the Men's Movement, which emerged in the 1990s in the work of writers such as Robert Bly (Iron John), Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly), and Michael Thompson (Raising Cain), as a false pathos of masculine self-regard and victimization, as yet another manifestation of our culture's deep-seated sexual narcissism. Others have mocked its claims that men have been victimized somehow by feminism and its alleged excesses, pointing to continued male dominance in nearly all areas of our civilization. But surely these critics miss the real point of this crucial social and philosophical revolution, which finds its strongest and most articulate voice in the Cremaster cycle.
It is so very hard to become a man, Barney repeatedly, almost obsessively, insists. Everything threatens to beat us down, to strip us of our biological birthright, to destroy us simply for asserting our essential, metaphysical manliness. And it is this, man's fundamental ontology, man's forgetfulness of his own being, that concerns true adherents of the Men's Movement, which has so little to do with actual male dominance in the material world. Barney and the other prophets of the Movement teach us to listen to the voice of our own being, to celebrate our virility, yelling wildly as we reassert our spiritual leadership in a society that systematically neglects its sons, forcing them to sit still in our feminized classrooms, then yoking them to the rule of humorless, man-hating wives. Only thus, only by stripping ourselves of a false and feminine metaphysics, can we recover our essential masculine essence and escape the tragedy of the testes.
Onanism, properly understood, is therefore so much more than a mere artistic elucidation of hackneyed post-Freudian academic theorizing about sexual identity. It is a reflection of our culture's most important philosophical and spiritual movement, and in its highest form, in the films of Matthew Barney, Onanism is to the Men's Movement what Italian Renaissance painting was to Humanism: its purest and most noble visual expression. What stands revealed in the splendid light of Barney's triumph is the profound philosophical importance of the genital strain in contemporary art—and yet Onanism also represents the End of genital art, its sublime perversion and abstraction, genital art that has broken free of quotidian images of actually existing pudenda and achieved a state of pure, unadulterated, prepubescent play. Indeed, Onanism may be the only original and vital artistic movement in the world today.
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