The second star building in the movie is the Guggenheim, which gave itself over to Barney not just for filming but for an entire recent exhibit showcasing all five Cremaster pictures and their ancillary artworks. In Cremaster 3, it’s the builders who are destroyed, like Icarus, for their overreaching. ![]() ![]() Only in The Fountainhead, Cooper would rather destroy his building than see it rise imperfectly. Barney’s Apprentice is just as much a striver, and the Architect is just as arrogant. You think of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper raging against mediocrity and refusing to compromise his skyscraping principles. WHEN BARNEY PULLS his camera back outside for lovely aerial vistas of the landmark New York City tower, couched in a cloudy nimbus and topped with Maypole streamers, it’s a tribute not just to architecture or paganism or the creative impulse but willwill wrapped in glorious stainless-steel deco cladding. You’re not sure how, but Architect and Apprentice seem headed toward a showdown. It’s a test, perhaps a Masonic initiation ritual, and the Apprentice is intent on getting to the top floor of the partially completed building, where the Architect (artist Richard Serra) resides. The Apprentice works with silent, manly determination (there is no dialogue in the film). Next, in Cremaster 3‘s longest and most narrative section, the Entered Apprentice (Barney) dutifully pours concrete into an elevator rising through the Chrysler Building. An inscription from Vince Lombardi helps define the situation: “Will is the character in action,” and will is what keeps Barney’s protagonists always climbing and reaching and groping toward shapes and structures they only half-apprehend. The littler guy is engaged in various ritual laborsincluding the Causeway’s construction, it seems. It’s like a Led Zeppelin album cover sprung to life, and I half expected Robert Plant to start wailing (the heavy metal actually comes later). There, some kind of a shaggy giant is menacing a smaller mythical Celtic gnome figure. It’s a place that appears built, but is actually naturalan overture to Barney’s organic/artificial dyad that characterizes all of Cremaster 3. THE MOVIE BEGINS with a prologue at the Giant’s Causeway, the famous hexagonal rock formations on the coast of Northern Ireland. Matthew Barney creates an integrated world of myths, symbols, and signifiers in the whole of the Cremaster cycle, but its parts are also modulareach stands or falls on its own, and this one works for me. In case you missed the preceding Cremaster 2 when it played here three years ago, don’t worryyou needn’t see or even understand any of the prior movies to “get” this one. The last installment in a five-film cycle, produced in nonchronological order since 1994, it runs Friday, July 11, through Thursday, July 17, at the Varsity, which will then show parts 1, 2, 4, and 5 (plus a repeat screening of 3) the following week. I checked my watch a dozen times during Legally Blonde 2, but never once here. It mixes profundity and banality over three hours, yet it’s never outright dull. He was also the first recipient of the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Award.Cremaster 3 is a tall, towering art film with a capital “A.” It also happens to be quite entertaining at times, somewhat tedious at others, and even funny during its few moments of slapstick. ![]() Matthew Barney won the prestigious Europa 2000 prize at the forty-fifth Venice Biennale in 1996. His final film in the series, Cremaster 3 (2002), begins beneath New York City’s Chrysler Building and includes scenes at the Saratoga race track, where apparently dead costumed horses race through a dream sequence, and at the Guggenheim Museum, where artist Richard Serra throws hot Vaseline down the Museum’s famous spiral ramp. The resulting cosmology is both beautiful and complex. The films themselves are a grand mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology-an intensely private universe in which symbols and images are densely layered and interconnected. The title of the films refers to the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles according to temperature, external stimulation, or fear. The films generally feature Barney in myriad roles, including characters as diverse as a satyr, a magician, a ram, Harry Houdini, and even the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore. He is best known as the producer and creator of the Cremaster films, a series of five visually extravagant works created out of sequence ( Cremaster 4 began the cycle, followed by Cremaster 1, etc.).
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