The Passenger

Matthew Barney

The band had been involved in the making of CREMASTER 2 (1999) specifically in the recreation of a supposed telephone encounter that took place between Gary Gilmore - the right-to-die murderer whose execution blurred the sacrosanct division of religion and state - and Country and Western singer Johnny Cash. No one knows precisely what words passed between the convict and the man in black. It’s believed that Cash sung Gilmore a ballad, and that belief lies behind the film’s most moving elegy: a song that plunges deep into the viscera of darkness, led by Dave Lombardo, the former drummer of Slayer, the fibrillating drones of the Mormon hive and the rending screech of Morbid Angel’s front man Steve Tucker. Barney was asking the guitarist of the re-formed band what he had made of the film. His response went something like this: ‘Dude, it’s unbelievable; fucking unbelievable. I could watch it a thousand times, frame by frame and never tire of watching it, but still never know completely what the fuck it was about.’

Belief is as much the key to Barney’s work as the ability to make us believe the unbelievable is the constitution of its aesthetic and moral will. Perhaps more than anything else it is the manifestation of belief in its various forms that is the territory of Barney’s recently completed ‘CREMASTER’ cycle. While some of the mythic nutrient that feeds the artist’s biological metaphor is by now familiar, the role of character in the play of that will is less so. Character, for Barney is sculptural material. Much as he used hypertrophy to model physical systems of self-imposed restraint, so he uses hubris to model conflicts of the will. Hubris takes moral fibre to the limit only to break it down again through exertion. For Barney it is the lactic acid of character development. It represents strength through humiliation, a representation that allows Barney to create out of grand tragedy his trademark laminations of the serious and the absurd. ‘Character’ according to Vince Lombardi, giant of American football coaches and architect of the modern game, ‘is the integration of habits of conduct superimposed on temperament. Will is character in action.’ CREMASTER 3 (2002), the final installment in the series of five, is the maximum equivocation of such a will.

Even though CREMASTER 3 reaches across the Atlantic in ways that touch upon the partition of Ireland and the social consequences of the diaspora, its geographic station is New York; its navigational station lying somewhere between Barney’s birthplace in San Francisco to the west, and Harry Houdini’s in Budapest to the East. And just as it straddles locations so it exists between two types of energy systems. In front of it the dark entropic wanderings of CREMASTER 2 lead us through the ancestry of Gilmore, to draw us from the blood-atoned confines of the Mormon Ministry, backwards through the moraine of Gilmore’s own past to his execution - the final metamorphosis of a fateful conception. CREMASTER 4 (1995), on the other hand, exchanges an economy of entropy and prescribed death for one of mobility and growth in a race to describe not just the internal conflicts but the exterior circumference of a newly posited island form. Which is to say that CREMASTER 3, the central chapter of the five ‘CREMASTER’ installments, functions as a double mirror, reflecting that which precedes it and anticipating that which follows. In the language of the biological metaphor, it is the pause between the ascent and descent of the testicles: the moment before sexual differentiation is established but after all efforts at its prevention and delay have been exhausted.

The film begins as it ends amid verdant mythology, where Celtic lores, causeways, caves, babies and giants, crash into unclaimed seas. But from these hilarious caricatures of conflicts yet to unfold we are taken to the grave: the doomed foundation upon which the principle structure of the film has been built. In a sequence pregnant with the heavy menace of counter-resurrection a hand reaches out from beneath the suffocating weight of interment. Clawing through the claustrophobic darkness a figure, newborn in death, slowly emerges from within the chrysalis. Where we are and what we are witnessing is anyone’s guess, though clearly it is a far cry from the Goodyear flights of fancy that opened the playing fields of the first CREMASTER or the operatic regalities of the last. Here the rigid articulation of the figure and subterranean setting plays to the zombie genre that has latent monstrosity lurking beneath every figure of civilization. Underneath these cobblestones lies not the beach but the darker compost of ritualized betrayal.

From the vaulted foundations of a structure yet to be described a posse of juvenile pallbearers struggle with an inert form still bearing the bullet hole stigmata of Gilmore’s execution. The ascension takes us up a slow spiral staircase and into a cavernous lobby where an automotive bier - a 1930 Chrysler Imperial New Yorker - awaits. To the melancholy of the corporeal dirge is added the sound of a single wavering chord, a gradually levitating harmonic that rises upward from the ornate Deco lobby into the attenuated glissando of a distant spire. At ground level, the grand Deco entrance has been afflicted by discord. Five liveried descendants of the 1930 car - Imperials whose date of manufacture corresponds to the artist’s own - enter the lobby and prepare to meet their maker. To the boot of each is affixed a Nirosta® steel ram. The Mason’s Apprentice, played by Barney, trowels wet cement into the negative space of the tool, and addresses the cars.

In a scene reminiscent of the earlier performances of OTTOdrone (1992) and AUTOdrone (1992) Barney literally stoppers the orifices of the cars’ rear-facing petrol tanks to create five completely hermetic systems, before taking to the elevator shaft by way of escape. What ensues in his absence is a demolition derby of majestically symbolic proportions. The five cars orbit their prey. Without warning the bleeding red tail light and glint of steel and chrome carries the full force of a punch as the progenitor Imperial is pushed backwards into the elevator bay and systematically punished. Choreographed as if to the deadly eroticism of a bullfight, the escalating impact of the machines compacts the once stately vehicle into the shape of a dental implant. With the chorus established, the tragedy of the surrounding building unfolds.

Set in New York during the 1930s, CREMASTER 3 is an epic paean to a vertical empire predicated on lateral mobility. The film’s centrepiece is the Chrysler tower at the time of its construction. Its form is contentious, articulated around the figure of the Architect, played with patrician austerity by Richard Serra; the Syndicate of Metal Workers, an Irish network of organized crime whose influence extended from Manhattan’s notorious Westside to the local sheet-metal workers’ union responsible for the cladding of the building; and the Masonic order, under whose umbrella the entire structure becomes a lodge, the architectural personification of inner potential. Within this matrix a series of betrayals interrogate the fortitude of belief supporting the edifice of character. At stake is nothing less than the possibility of spiritual and physical transcendence: the possession and desecration of the body as sacred temple.

As with much of Barney’s work physiological and psychological character is marked by partition and threshold. The palette of CREMASTER 3 is derived from the orange, white and green of the Irish national flag, colours which face the Catholic and Protestant orders across the symbolism of everlasting peace. Its structure derives from the Masonic belief in a ritualized ascension towards transcendence through levels of fellowship and the separation of the abased lower self from the geometries of intellectual perfection enacted through the punitive rituals of a daily death. These are the axes of opposition that run through the spine of the piece. Barney’s own role as the Mason’s Apprentice is one of epidural infiltration in an ascent that pits him in various ways against the moral order of self-referencing belief systems. His ascent to the lofty pinnacle of those beliefs takes the form of an on-going series of negotiations with the un-negotiable.

Neville Wakefield

Neville Wakefield is curator of Frieze Foundation