Cremaster 3

[sharplittleteeth]

Hmm...

All the reveiws said Cremaster 3 was the best of the cycle. They were wrong.


I came out of Cremaster 2 with my mind on fire, burning with desire to understand, to see the whole Cycle. Cremaster 3 killed that dead.

I don't actually have a lot to say about this one. There's a synopsis on the Cremaster website that offers as much insight as I can. All I can add is that while I could find a clear thematic development between C1 and C2, C3 seemed unconnected.

And that Matthew Barney is hit and miss as a filmmaker.

He composes some incredible images. But he has no grasp of pacing. The first half of C3 was (with some remarkable exceptions) simply boring.

I know this isn't Hollywood. But if you choose to work in a time-based medium, you have accept that timing is part of your aesthetic effect. Barney doesn't get that his audience is visually literate. We don't need to be beaten repeatedly over the head with an image for it to register. We grew up on MTV, man.

Maybe that's the problem. Maybe the Role of Tedious Repetion in Video Art is simply to cover the artist's insecuirities. "This is High Art," he screams, looping an image for the seventh time, "Not some lowbrow video-clip."

(Something similar happened during the early day of photography. Photographers would recreate famous paintings for the camera, in a bid to be regarded as a serious art form.)

Whatever the reasoning, it doesn't work. It robs the film of emotional impact. And makes me question the competence of the maker. There are ways of expressing boredom, without being boring yourself.

And while we're talking incompetance: can the Guggenhiem Museum please set up a fund to pay a bouncer to follow Mathew Barney around, and punch the mutherfucker if he ever tires to film slapstick comedy again? That bar scene is just cringeworthy.


The second half is better. There's some actual pace to the pacing, some more great images, and a duel between hardcore bands Agnostic Front and Murhpy's Law. But it still lacks the visceral punch of Cremaster 2.

Linky Goodness:
Racing Dead Horses. Dental Torture. The Usual. -- New York Times review of Cremaster 3, lots of insight.

Self-Portraiture Meets Mythology: Matthew Barney Talks About His "Cremaster Cycle" -- like it says, an interview with Mathew Barney.

Comments

Re:

[morgan303.livejournal.com]

My feeling is- if you walk out on stage and start banging the keys of a grand piano, the audience will respond to the noise. It doesn't matter if you say you're a painter, not a musician. The noise is there, and the audience will respond to it.


The audience would probably respond differently if the pianist was a painter, especially a well-known one. They'd be looking for elements of 'visuality', maybe neo-expressionism, that sort of thing, or use the music as an aural cue for accessing the art, because they're linked at least contextually. They'd be more forgiving of technical inadequacy, knowing the pianist was primarily 'something else'. Similarly, Barney's vision mediated by a 'professional' film director would contextually root the film within cinematic paradigms for the audience, aside from the *actual* difference made by the presence of a mediator in the production of the film.

As far as the subject of creative 'interference' - art not created necessarily by the hand of the artist - is concerned, you simply can't go past Marcel Duchamp's readymades. He began exhibiting them in 1914 (or thereabouts, have to check that one), and the idea was that Duchamp would go down to the shop, buy something mass-produced like a wine rack or snow shovel, sign it and exhibit it. The result was a powerful and controvesial statement on the artist's presence within the artwork, the transformative power of the Gallery, and of the artist's signature as a statement of conceptual authorship. It got even more complex when he gave them titles (like "In Advance of a Broken Arm" for a snow shovel, which recontextualised it completely) and made multiples, as he did with his famous urinal of 1917. The art world still hasn't recovered.:)
Duchamp was an amazing man - he got into art largely for fun, was one of the 'inventors' of Cubism, a chess Master, cross-dresser, habitual punner, and a multi-lingual sex-god. I have a crush on him a mile wide.

There's a lot that can be said about the idea of the artist as auteur, as it's still a major thematic concern in the art world today, and has been since Duchamp.Appropriationist artists like Mike Bidloand Sherrie Levine address this sort of thing interestingly, as do the 'conceptual' artists like JOseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt, whose work I can go into a bit further if you're interested. But I don't want to ramble too much here, and there's a character limit.:)

Re:

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

They'd be more forgiving of technical inadequacy, knowing the pianist was primarily 'something else'.

"They" might. Not sure I would.

I'm not saying our hypothetical painter has to be a concert level pianist. I'm just saying if you're going to make noise part of your art piece, it has to be good noise. It has to add to the emotion.

And that was my problem. On occasion, Barney's handling of pace subtracted from the piece.