2008
BFA in Studio Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
2004
Undergrad in Sculpture & Painting, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Milwaukee, WI
2007-2008
Lois G. Roberts Painting Scholarship
2002
Continuing Tuition Scholarship, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
2011
Juried Show, Wisconsin Artists Biennial, Kenosha, WI
2009
Terminal Screens, Solo Exhibit at Electric Earth, Madison, WI
2008
Progress: Landscapes of Illusion, Solo Exhibit at Electric Earth, Madison, WI
Future Leftovers, UW-Madison Print Portfolio Exchange, Madison, WI
2007
Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibit, Arts Night Out, Madison Gallery Night, Madison, WI
Life in a Box, UW-Madison Print Portfolio Exchange, Madison, WI
7131, Advanced Painting Workshop, 7th Floor Gallery, Madison, WI
2006
Color Matter, Advanced Painting Workshop, 7th Floor Gallery, Madison, WI
78th Student Art Show: A Juried Exhibition, Porter Butts Gallery, Madison, WI
2004
Gallery Show at Cheryl’s Fine Art and Framing, Wausau, WI
Gallery Show at Studio E, Wausau, WI
Gallery Show at Back to the Grind, Wausau, WI
2003
Wausau Festival of Arts, Featured Artist at Back to the Grind, Wausau, WI
Contemporary Visual Culture Exhibition, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
2002
Art in the Park, Donated 3 large-scale murals to Wausau Library, Wausau, WI
Outstanding Artist of the Year, DC Everest Senior High, Wausau, WI
Zirbel Memorial Art Show, Wisconsin Visual Arts Association, Wausau, WI
Wausau Festival of Art, 2nd Place & Scholarship, Wausau, WI
Waupaca Fine Arts Festival, 1st Place in 3D & 3rd place in 2D, Waupaca, WI
Young Artist Show, Gold Palette, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum, Wausau, WI
Regional ARTS Contest, Honorable Mention in Short Story, Poetry, Visual Arts
2001
Summer Art Program Scholarship, Wisconsin Valley Art Association, Wausau, WI
Summer Scholarship for Art Majors Program, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design
Waupaca Fine Arts Festival, 3rd Place in 2D, Waupaca, WI
1999
Boylan Young Artists Show, Excellence in Art Award, Rockford, IL
Juried Young Artist Show, Rock Valley College Library, Rockford, IL
Juried Young Artist Show, Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL
ARTIST FABRICATION:
My artwork explores themes of obsessive industrial progress and the vicarious, televised experiences that disorient a sense of place or home.
I attended Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) my first 2 years of college, majoring in sculpture and painting, on a tuition scholarship. There I had some excellent classes, where I gained a good grasp on technical knowledge. These are just a few examples of art pieces that were memorable from that time.
These are some paintings and drawings to show I can do all that traditional representational stuff. This is a stone carving where I abstracted an insect abdomen to resemble a mountain or a magic water slide or anything other than an insect butt jutting out of the ground, which is what it is. Below that is a piece where I made fun of ideal body images of the breast and my unfailing ability to see sex in everything. They are bronze chimes cast from various household items: a candy dish, ashtray, and glue bottle. The next piece is a bed with a hole in it. It was a response to comments made by my painting professors at MIAD, Michael Howard and Ron Bitticks. They viewed painting was a "metaphoric slip of reality." It was about the impossible task of seeing through visual metaphors. Mostly, it was a joke about art being so open-ended.
During my time at MIAD, I went to an exhibit at the Chicago Art Museum featuring Juan Munoz, who is an installation artist but dabbles in all things. Basically, his body of work floored me. He activated space through tricks, illusions, and architectural perspective in drawing, painting, and sculpture. He created these sinister narratives about what is hidden in communication and he sculpted these maniacal characters that seemed to exist in the same place I did. They could be laughing and pointing at me. He left out what the viewer could then fill in, like a magic trick. There was an implication of space through illusion, or just lack of information like in his floating figures and balconies. In an interview he said that painting's great claim to fame was its creation and activation of space. That concept made a lasting impression on me. Too bad the exhibit was in memory of his death in 2001.
Then I transferred to the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where I also received a large scholarship from the Lois G. Roberts Scholarship Fund. I took classes with Gelsey Verna, Aris Georgiades, and TL Solien. I also took on a 2nd major in Communication Arts in Rhetorical Studies as I saw similarities between various tropes of language and fine art; tropes being figurative or metaphorical use of words and images.
Increasingly, I thought about the influence that rhetoric and mass media had on public opinion, which was a beginning interest in propaganda. From a mass media and human behavior class, I learned a theory about how mass media doesn't dictate what the public thinks but rather provides the issues the public has to think about. Mass media also frames social issues in a way that can advance questionable agendas. The most recent example would be photographs of Hurricane Katrina survivors. In a photograph depicting an African American survivor, the caption would characterize their activity in a negative light---for instance unlawfully breaking into a store to steal food. While a Caucasian survivor doing the same activity would be described as simply looking for provisions in a desperate situation. These manipulative tactics used to frame images were subtle, yet very significant to the meaning of the subject represented in the image.
The next metal sculpture was an investigation of this manipulative use of language, particularly charged metaphors, in a book called "Sexology" from 1906. This book had some real gems of outrageous pseudo-science written by a certified MD---one being the claim that masturbation causes blindness in both men and women. I felt that through the good doctor's use of metaphor and language he was being just as deceptively provocative as a book by Marquis de Sade. So, I censored the pages of this book to exaggerate rather than lower the sexual or risqué elements of the content.
From there, I began amassing many images that I connected with propaganda, deception, or pompous dogmas in books, mass media, magazines, newspapers, everywhere basically. I looked at religious icons, pop culture icons, mapping systems to sickly sweet patterns I connected with consumerism. I appropriated these images and attempted to undermine them in some way and point out their silliness. So, this next group of paintings dealt mostly with satire. Ironically enough, things that disturbed me became what I put in my paintings. In some ways, it was a way for me to understand the power of these images as well.
My pink hero painting pointed out similarities between the flamboyant posturing of religious and pop culture with the use of horribly nauseous pink tones and an oversimplified style. The next painting appropriated a 15th century Christian engraving, cowheads, and a figure using sign language. The painting talked about the conformity of social groups, religion, and the dialects of speaking that can separate people. The next is about me feeling like a child playing with adult toys and the danger of innocence. The next is about how consumerism could take over my memories of childhood. In all of these paintings I was also experimenting with different techniques I had never used before: directly projecting images from primary sources, glossy and matte enamel paint, thin washes of bright colors, cutting out figures and pasting them on the canvas, and using non-traditional materials like tacky contact paper. I liked paring down a painting to its essentials to see what a specific application of color could signify.
Major influences were Sigmar Polke and Jane Hammond. Both of these artists appropriated and layered imagery in bizarre ways that were liberating for my own ideas on composition. They had a similar obsession with collecting all sorts of imagery from history. A quote about Sigmar Polke from Wikipedia is a good description of why I respond to his work: "His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils." I don't think I could say it better than that really. And I just like Jane because her paintings are visual riddles and I don't know what to make of them, but I enjoy her play with the painting square, her bright colors, her graphic style, and her odd suggestions of narrative.
That brings me to my year in Advanced Painting. I continued to explore themes of propaganda and framing images. This time I focused on one book that was the object of my obsession, The Book of Knowledge, a 1950s home encyclopedia. Not only was I amazed at the presumption of the title, this book also awed me because of the contrived and constructed nature of many of the photographs. It seemed to me the book was such an innocent piece of American 50s propaganda. In the book, the progress of America was so certain and I couldn't help but want to believe in America's benevolence across the globe and at home. In my paintings I wanted to deconstruct this "progress" propaganda and discover how it was visually structured as a published document of human history and as a set of national beliefs. Themes of self-prophecy and unrealistic ideals were all present in my artwork, often the characters in the paintings would be constructing what was in the painting or actions in the painting would solely involve the space of the picture. As I worked, I began to question painting traditions as well (which involved illusion, perspective, traditional color theory, composition strategies, and the framing of painting). Again I pared down and experimented with painting techniques that I knew. In general, the color palette I chose was pretty muted with a lot of warm tones to reference the old book. I wanted my paintings to look yellowed or faded, like the colors were just beginning to wear thin from age. I also used flat planes of color to emphasize the artificiality and constructed nature of the subject matter, but also to keep the perspective flexible and disorienting. If you keep colors flat, you can use perspective lines and size changes to shift the sense of space within a painting. I was interested in how sight could shift because of the combination of abstraction and representation.
My favorite painting of this series is the last painting, even though no one else seems to because of all the white. This last painting was about the framing of art ideas for political agendas, specifically how the CIA encouraged abstract expressionism in other countries to show off American freedoms in WW2, that Americans were doing a service to mankind by our mere existence as freedom fighters without flaw. The painting is about the blindness and dangers of that assertion.
Artists that I was looking at last semester were Mark Tansey, Neo Rausch, and Vernon Fisher. I like these artists because of their related subject matter: a general deep distrust or disbelief and a questioning of their national icons and what gets disseminated to them through mass media. I also liked how each artist used pictorial complexities and contradictions (elements that do and don't make sense together). From there I've been in a transition that is kind of hard to explain. I have gotten to a point where I am so in the habit of over-analyzing everything and packing way too much into my paintings. The habit of being overly critical is a hard one to break. I felt very removed from what I was working on and I think this is a big problem.
Right now I'm trying to find a balance between my ideas about painting and actually creating a painting. Recent tragedies, personal as well as in this country specifically related to family deaths, the Iraq war, and the recent shootings in schools, have shifted my focus to the reality, or more like the unreality, of catastrophe and how I have experienced catastrophe many times, often through vicarious means.
So these current paintings are an effort to destabilize the materials I combine: painted images of manmade disaster and desolation that I have experience through news media or the internet and decorative patterned fabric. To me, these are like mirages or nightmares on a tablecloth or dress, but the punch line is they're authentic. I think of these as a piercing of the memory that the fabric activates with these charged images. I feel like humans are in a perplexed state right now. There's not much left to conquer, so we're continually building and layering on top of existing things.
Artists that I'm getting these ideas from because I definitely did not think all this up on my own have been coming from a new book I'm fascinated by "The Undiscovered Country," that Nancy Mladenoff kindly provided. Not only is it a surprisingly readable book on painting theory and history, it's also practically useful as well. Gerherd Richter's paintings depicting the action of painting over a pre-existing image was influential for my current body of work. Also, Peter Doig is a painter I enjoy because of the back and forth between abstraction and representation in his work and the way he uses color patches. Also, I like the beautiful colors and hopefulness in Chinese Propaganda posters. All of this art brings up similar ideas for me of a culture built on layered information and a dystopic vision of the modern world that makes life seem like a dream.
The impetus for these paintings came from obsessively paging through The Book of Knowledge, a handbook for the family that presumed to provide worldly education and American morality in the 1950s. This handbook promoted a kind of innocent propaganda, a set of beliefs for endless American expansion and innovation at home and around the world. The articles and photographs recorded the dominant, if ever misguided, ideology of progress in the 1950s era. America was always cast in a benevolent light, a gleam that appeared very contrived to me, but I was also awed by the self-fulfilling prophecy at work in this recording of history, for better or worse. I imagined this book as a spiraling edifice upon which America's future was erected. The book constructed its future as it recorded its past for the future generations. However, the historical writings never pointed out problems to the concept of basing any system on continual progress. The edifice was unaware of its own gaping holes. This was a fascinating aspect of the documentation of history and the impossibility of escaping ideology. I explored this in my artwork to examine my own ideologies about painting and ideas about my country. Often, my paintings act on each other purely in the context of the painting. One figure will be constructing the landscape or objects within the painting while another figure will be pointing or indexing its own framework or limits thereof. Other paintings will depict manmade catastrophes, such as coal mining holes or military bombing, painted on a backdrop of decorative fabric patterns, so as to distract from the image of disaster. Ultimately, these paintings explore the idea of vicarious experience and how so much of our modern experience and knowledge about the world is based on the gatekeepers of televised news, newspapers, and the agendas of government leaders. My paintings explore the problems of that vicarious experience and the disorientation of obsessive progress.
Contemporary life, especially American life, has developed into a world where experience is largely vicarious through words and imagery. Kenneth Burke, in his theory of "terministic screens" or mental lenses we use to interpret the world, states that life is merely a sliver of personal experience. The rest of what we know involves seeing through others, whether that be people, books, images, video, newspapers, etc.
In painting, the advent of photography has been a major influence on the way painters paint. Composition, color palette, subject matter, as well as the very integrity of a painting, have been called into question because of this new and more accurate way of capturing a living moment. There is a question of how necessary representational painting is, what it now means in the wake of such a precise medium as photography. Some say photography stole the throne from painting, in terms of efficacy and cultural use and influence. However, it would seem photography might have freed painters from the obsession with mere copying. The experience of painting comes more to the foreground and what the paint itself can mean, aside from exact representation. How much abstraction of the image, in terms of off-color and generalized representation, reveals the process or autonomy of painting?
In my work, I experiment with various ways of representing a highly charged photograph, normally from newspaper or internet sources. I choose photos that are highly evocative, politically, emotionally, or disaster-wise, that seem so near and so present, yet I have never experienced them in my own life. I abstract and combine these photos with patterned fabric that has a very American domestic feel to it. Usually I try to chose fabrics that induce a personal memory for myself. The juxtaposition of the 2 contrasting images convey a sense of absurdity, docility, and unease. A dangerous mirage placed onto this harmless, home-y backdrop gives the painting a certain eerie tension. I hope to play off of collective human memory by using the sources and the fabric that I do. The fabric functions as a "home" space, while the image is often a dark shadow over it. As well, the photos mostly depict holes in the ground, as if I am piercing this home space with the reality, or the peculiar familiarity even, of the image.
In my screen printing, I’ve been exploring themes of nature’s decaying effect on industry. I say nature first because I don’t think industry alone corrodes and impedes on nature. Nature has its own attitude about things. My screen prints reflect my fascination with how nature can be mechanized and these efforts at industrialization are, in turn, slowly deteriorated back into nature or something more organic. I experiment with multiple layers of colors, often dripping and brushing ink right onto the screen without using stencils. This often results in a visual or actual texture to the print. Working in this manner, my prints echo rust and a spotty decay aesthetic – signs of the natural cycle turning back upon itself. I use highly polished/abstracted, technical or educational drawings of nature, such as records of bird flight, breathing systems, x-rays, embryonic morphology, patterns of animal behavior, and a lot of wildlife illustrations from old text and science books. I start with these clean-cut images and through different techniques of screen printing slowly break them down to a rusted echo of the image’s early years. To accomplish this, I do multiple experiments with paper dye, wash-out monoprinting, waxes, shincolay glueing, sewing on fabric materials, and flocking. I think it is interesting that to understand nature we must abstract and simplify it to such a high degree (like many of the technical illustrations I work with) that the orginal thing the illustration referred to becomes something else. And when I do my screenprints they take those images and rough them back up to an organic beauty they may have lost in the first abstraction.
I enjoy a hands-on approach to screen printing and many of my screen prints are painterly monoprints. Editions usually have a little variance in detail to make each one original. I think I get the urge to make every print a little unique from my paining background.
Sigmar Polke is an artist whose work I’ve gone back to looking at this semester. He combines screen printing with painting techniques and I think our methods of working coincide quite a bit. I would have liked to do more printing on fabrics and combining the painted image with the screenprinted one, but that will have to be for the future.
HELL'S BELLS: GIRLY WITH A BACKLASH
The all women, all wonderbra-inspired art exhibit in Lucky Star’s closet-claustrophobic one room showroom has roared and licked their chops over today’s culture of big breasted, G-string women stereotypes. It’s twistedly poetic, vaginal pink, domestically bruised purple, loud, chaotic, sexual, rebellious, wickedly ironic, an organ-filled dementia as most women’s culture backlash art ought rightfully to be. Each artist uses stereotype-friendly imagery packed with reverse psychology to dispute the horrid ways in which women are portrayed in mass media culture, but is it still a stereotype? Sort of like compulsively lying about how many people you’ve slept with to prove women can be just as ruthlessly promiscuous as men—in the purely hunter gatherer sense. Which is the point, of course: that debate is getting old. I can be violent and blunt and estrogen glorious, too, without all the hype. If I knew as many words for the male penis as I did for women’s sex organs all of them would be popping into my head right now attempting to describe this exhibit, and is that really necessary? It reminds me of this man I stumbled upon in a gay pride march who was singularly pressed in cellophane around his flaccid member, and the choice of decor (or lack there of) could not be mistaken for anything less than a statement, but what kind of statement is that and what is it saying? Is that what it means to be homosexual? It seems like the same sort of trick even a heterosexual guy would perform at parties when they have an excuse: drunkenness. Does one have to expose all and rebel against all to find freedom? What about respect? Is this indulgence in the outrageous a necessary evil to be heard, to lend your issue a voice that people always seem to be interested in? Slash and burn stereotypes that have already been slashed and burned to the point of cultural over saturation? By using such imagery to challenge the stereotypes with which they desire to dispel from womanhood, aren’t they cementing them evermore to our culture? Or, is this a new kind of “proud to be a woman” shout where women now take on female stereotypes to refute the female stereotypes to be ironic to make one think we care but really don’t and that is not what women are about, but somehow they are still? What? Bad publicity is still something people will remember, so let’s exploit it. This sort of thing is overdone feminism, saturated with predictable homemaker / prostitute items of identification, especially in the sculptural wall assemblages of Patti McCartan: a stuffed rabbit with a detailed vaginal opening in its stomach, the end of a pie roller, jutting out like a loudly screaming “touch me” female breast with a rather hard protruding nipple. These are relative associations, but relating all of the sexual connotations used by a majority of these artist I must ask: are women defined by our sex organs?
What truly is ironic and most entertaining—possibly enlightening—is the juxtaposition of these artist with each other. Some of the artists give in to the situation I was ranting about earlier but others give homage to this point: feminist culture is becoming in a new kind of way what it wanted to slap down. A very difficult and relevant issue tackled by Amy O’Neil in her simple compositional pictures with witty catch titles (“Certain Ways of Coping are Stressful and Absurd”– a woman juggling and “It’s Unclear where to go from Here”– a women hesitates on the next step at the end of her hop-skotch game). Nearly naked women struggle in silly, little girl games over serious, yet vague issues. This probing psychological art is situated right next to the purposefully shallow, playfully cutesy-wootsey cartoons of Lisa Petrucci, Isabel Samaras, and Kristen Orgera. Each of these artists create small illustrative and digital pictures that feature visual commentaries on Betty Boop, Ken/baby dolls, the pin up girl, big screen icons, Kickass Kuties pins, and a Hawaiian Honeys series. This conflicting difference of what feminist art can portray is more apparent in the works of Caroline Fischer Siegfried and Bridget Griffith Evans alternately placed between the works of Ilse Klink and Shauna Peterson. Siegfried ponders the roles of nurturing, and fertility in her images of female mythological idols, while Evans wants to capture that little girl innocence and naiveté present in pink stars, white lambs and stiff, doll-like children with no eyes. Picture these idealistic icons next to Peterson’s crude, wickedly ironic figures of prostitutes, strippers, members of the underdog culture and Klink’s warped, pessimistic view of sexual relations featuring the depravity in the back rooms of Nazi Germany. One gets the sense this is an ever-digging pit of multi-layered mud that we all enjoy wallowing in—all enjoy squirting between our toes— no matter how much we want to dispute this dirty fact.
What is for certain among the various visual opinions on mass communicated images of women? They are strange and maddening combinations of all of it: sensitive, precarious, touching, distorted, neurotic, nurturing, good housekeeping, bitchy, curvaceous, mythological, beautiful, a little girl, a grown women, a sexual object, a glossed over icon that has been used, abused, brushed off, and generalized so many times we really don’t know what we are. But, why limit the definitions of such a wonderfully complex, ever-changing thing? So, proceed with politically-correct caution; chins pointed down, picking G-strings out of our ass cracks, gleefully giving in to what we love and hate most.
You can indulge in this charade on the exhibit’s Gallery Night: Friday, October 24th, from 5PM to Midnight or go to their website at http://Lucky Star Studio.com. See if the show matches the buzz.
CREMASTER CYCLE IN 5 PARTS
“A true metamorphosis … Transformation past mere physicality … ” Baby Fay La Foe, Cremaster II.
Matthew Barney desires to initiate you into this transcendence, desires to crack open the cocoon of everyday observation and let the heights of artistic potential spill in slowly, purposefully, meaningfully. Among the paradox-prone layers of contemporary artistic experience and the cynicism which is becoming an ending variable to its unfocused culture, Matthew Barney’s epic body of aesthetics, the 5 film series: “The Cremaster Cycle,” exists, patiently weaving the pathways of how artists of today can and will reach out beyond these barriers to our audience.
It is quite a shock that such an attempt could be made and past that succeed without being presumptuous or falling into pretense. What is more surprising still are the many who do not fully realize what this means, or that it even exists. Hell, most do not have the slightest clue what a “cremaster” is. In maturity, it is a muscle in the scrotum that reacts to external stimuli, e.i. pulls up or down on the sack in response to temperature changes. In fetal development, it is responsible for the ascending or descending of the sex organs, contingent upon the presence of an X or Y chromosome. In this moment, where all is possible, where nothing is definite, here is the moment of pure potential that Matthew Barney wishes to capture in his five speculative installments, in which sculpture, performance, and cinema clash and enfold upon each other in a great whirlwind of fetishism and creativity. Throughout these pieces, the focus is of a becoming, the tension prolonged and probed to fully appreciate all that a suspended moment has to offer. Not only does Barney break new ground as far as concept and material goes (hardened petroleum jelly? anal birth? procreation ending in the release of bees from the glans penis?). But he actually does show, visually and metaphorically, how he is killing modernism, exemplified in the image of the surprisingly cooperative Richard Serra. In doing so, Matthew Barney frees up aesthetic culture from itself again, asking what are the boundaries to art and how is art found in everyday objects and situations? How can these be risen to the heights of artistic expression? The answer Barney is giving us is a complex weave of past and present, of our mental and biological physiology, of a melting pot of culture. Essentially, he is giving artists—and people who will have the appreciation to watch with an open mind—a portal into a new kind of artistic freedom, where anything is possible. He is showing us that moment of potentiality expressed again and again as he plays with the imagery of sex organs and androgyny, of patterning and narrative, of action and sequence. And he weaves in cultural elements as he sees fit, anything from Celtic giants to modernist architects to satyr women to a punk mosh pit. Basically, he is showing how the boundary to art is our imagination and how far we will push ourselves—as artists— to go, which is as complex as human culture has become and as limitless as we will allow ourselves to be. And Matthew Barney seems to be just as perverse and crazy a man to accomplish this task and succeed, transforming his fascinations of pure potential into beautiful fruition.
The first episode, “Cremaster I,” is the initial moment of potential, the evolving theme to all the Cremaster movies. It represents a self-contained system of inner equilibrium that must begin in grace, in a suspended atmosphere of perfection, unity, and continuity. Barney sets up this realm of narcissistic idealism as a starting point and as his abstracted vision of a develpoing fetus still sexually undifferentiated. With all its brightness and forced happiness, its focus on echoing patterns, diagrams, and choreographic formations, one senses that this pillar of perfection is only made to tumble. Such predictable states cannot be sustained forever.
The second Cremaster is the point at which there is a disruption of the order in the system and hints at the process unfurling before our eyes: the differentiation of the fetus and the conflict which arises when the conformity of a community is threatened. It is also the state at which the system is in a complete self-denial at the inevitable changes within itself. He imagines that the fetus would naturally rebel against this and attempt to retain its state of equilibrium. Barney uses several devices to show this process: a narrative running backward that involves Houdini of all people, a beehive as a metaphor for the challenged system, and Mormon religious beliefs and rituals as causality relationships to reveal an ending desire for self-transformation. Throughout this second film, Barney’s imaginative metaphorical constructs of imagery and performance refer back to the first film and suggest what is to come, both in concept and in visual perceptions for the next installment.
The halfway state for the sexual differentiation process of the fetus is reached in the third episode of the “Cremaster Cycle,” and it is best to view this as the center point to which both forward (Cremaster 1 & 2) and backward (Cremaster 4 & 5) directions reflect back on each other like the mirrors in a kaleidoscope. This is the longest, newest, and most involved of all the Cremaster episodes, and only when I saw this film did I come to fully appreciate and comprehend the ones that came before it. The tension of resistance continues to escalate as the system must now prove itself worthy of moving forward into an unknown realm of self-realization and differentiation. The grand procession of imagery, ritual, narrative, and metaphor all work together to describe the fully erupting conflict in the system, now understood as a component of itself. Resurrection, Masonic rites of passage, Celtic mythology, the construction of the Chrysler Building, the apotheosis of will between student and teacher, creation and creator, add up to a resultant force of a sudden unbalance of inner self that must be reckoned with in the system for progression to continue. This is also the episode which includes The Order, or basically Matthew Barney scaling the walls of the Guggenheim outrageously dressed and acted out as an initiation into the rite of passage to transform into what it is the system will become. As in the first two, an anxious feeling of unraveling a great mystery or place within oneself intensifies, so then one begins to want to witness this process of becoming as well. Watching these films parade before my eyes I felt it stirring within myself, as if I were not just an observer but a part of this metamorphosis.
The Cremaster 4 is again rich in detail, allegory, metaphorical imagery and performance that advance the themes along at a faster and more purposeful pace. A half ram, half man tap dances for a cluster of androgynous, red-haired, pink-faced fairies and falls through the floor as two motorcycles race in opposite directions on the Isle of Man, the place where the third Cremaster begins and ends. Gelatin, gonadal balls slither their way up the suits of the motorcycle drivers, one going up, one going down, corresponding with their respective teams. This relates back to the underground journey of the half ram, half man tunneling his way beneath the race in a strangely amorous and vaginal, petroleum jelly passage. The race and the film ends where the tap-dancing ram/man began. A retracted scrotum is connected to both the Ascending and Descending motorcycle teams, guaranteeing that full differentiation will occur.
The fifth Cremaster is slow in coming, melodic black and romantically forlorn for all that it has experienced to come to this finalization. The operatic and orchestral background descends languidly through each musical measure to prolong the ending, quite an opposite to the fast paced race sequences that came before. Now the system has reached the point to decide, to finally become what it has fought for. It hesitates on the threshold, even exhibits apprehension for what it could mean. Is this a beginning or an ending? Is this suicide or a transcendence? Is it creation or destruction for one to want to finally fall from grace and become an individual? The answers to which the viewers are left to contemplate in the end.
Of course, there is always room for speculation as to the imagery with which the viewer of these films is attacked and seduced with. There is no guarantee my reflections on the Cremaster Cycle is entirely correct, and indeed, Matthew Barney would prefer it that way— for each to reach their own self-development in watching this epic enfold upon itself to a state as yet unknown. It becomes then a personal metamorphosis, induced and performed by Barney himself. How could one not feel some sort of gratitude for the artist that in the end wishes for the audience to develop right along with him and come to an understanding that is wholly personal, even if experienced collectively in the dim lights of a crowded theater.
