Cremaster 1

Artist Matthew Barney’s one-of-a-kind five-part series, closely integrating film with contemporary visual and conceptual art, is called “cremaster” – after the muscle that controls the testes. The starting point is a stadium in Boise, Idaho, where Barney grew up. Two Goodyear Blimps float above the arena like the airships that often transmit live sporting events via television broadcasts. Each of the blimps have four air hostesses and one white table, its top decorated with an abstract centrepiece sculpted from Vaseline and surrounded by clusters of grapes, green in the one blimp, purple in the other. Under the tables of both blimps resides the biunique beauty, Goodyear, who sets the story in motion: with the grapes, Goodyear makes figures that direct the choreographic patterns created by a troupe of dancing girls on the field below. The shifting bodies include parallel lines turning into barbells, a large circle turning into an outline of multiplying cells, and the horizontally divided field emblem that is Barney’s signature motif. Gonadal contours (and an image of life in utero) merge with the shapes of the two blimps overhead, and thus create what will become a strong motif throughout the pentalogy.

The characteristic traits of the entire Cremaster cycle emanate from the term “musical revue”. The location, objects, and sculptures themselves are characters drawn into the events, and the remarkable imagery can be interpreted altogether freely or symbolically: indeed it is the sense of allegory and atmosphere in Barney’s innovative films that help the viewer to take an open-minded approach to the goings-on.