Outsider Cinema

Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney. Barney in conversation with Nancy Spector, 2007.
  • 2002Cremaster 3
  • 1999Cremaster 2
  • 2005Drawing Restraint 9
OC 009 · b. 1967 · San Francisco, California

He shoots films as if they were sculpture, in petroleum jelly, prosthetics and myth, and keeps them off home video.

Barney was born in San Francisco and grew up in Boise, Idaho. Yale recruited him to play football in 1985, and he planned to study medicine before turning to art. His first works, the Drawing Restraint series, were staged in the university gym: he held his body back with harnesses and ramps and tried to draw against the pull.

Between 1994 and 2002 he made the Cremaster Cycle, five films named after the muscle that raises and lowers the testicles. He made them out of order, starting with Cremaster 4 on the Isle of Man and ending with the three-hour Cremaster 3, set in the Chrysler Building and the Guggenheim. Norman Mailer plays Houdini, Ursula Andress a queen and Richard Serra a master builder, and each film came with its own sculptures, photographs and drawings.

Drawing Restraint 9, made with Björk in 2005, takes place aboard a Japanese whaling ship. River of Fundament (2014) is an opera loosely based on Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings, and Redoubt (2019) follows a huntress through the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho.

Films

Where to start with Matthew Barney, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.

  1. A still from Cremaster 4.

    Cremaster 4

    1994 · 42 min · Colour

    The first of the cycle to be made. On the Isle of Man, a red-haired satyr played by Barney tap-dances until he falls through the floor of a pier pavilion, while two sidecar teams race the island's Tourist Trophy course in opposite directions.

  2. A still from Cremaster 2.

    Cremaster 2

    1999 · 1 hr 19 min · Colour

    Barney plays Gary Gilmore, the Utah murderer executed in 1977, in a western that runs from the Bonneville Salt Flats to a Canadian icefield. Norman Mailer, who wrote The Executioner's Song about Gilmore, plays Harry Houdini.

  3. A still from Cremaster 3.

    Cremaster 3

    2002 · 3 hr 2 min · Colour

    The last and longest of the cycle, set as the Chrysler Building goes up. Its centrepiece, The Order, is a 31-minute contest staged on the ramps of the Guggenheim and the only part of the cycle ever released on DVD.

  4. A still from Drawing Restraint 9.

    Drawing Restraint 9

    2005 · 2 hr 15 min · Colour

    Barney and Björk board the Japanese whaling ship Nisshin Maru as guests at a tea ceremony, while the crew cast a 25-ton sculpture of petroleum jelly on deck. Björk wrote the score.