Matthew Barney, The Cremaster and the Markers of an Invisible Masculinity
Matthew Barney, The Cremaster and the
Markers of an Invisible Masculinity
By xavier_lopez_jr on
February 5, 2013 at 11:27 PM
·
What piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason,
how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how
express and admirable, in action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god.
-William Shakespeare.
The Measure of a Man
In
Hamlet, the young Danish student spends the entire play pondering the heavy
questions—life, death, and not surprisingly, what it means to be a man.
In fact, as long as there have been men who think and write, this question has
been a reoccurring one. Men have always searched for proofs of their
manliness, a measure, a marker and even a map to guide them. They nearly
hysterically know that there must be something that must alert them to their
manliness, to masculinity, something which they can use to take the idea of
masculinity outside of the abstract and make it clear, real and actual.
They instinctively know that these signifiers must exist; like baseball cards,
they collect, catalogue, trade and compare them. These markers, have
always been used by men to identify themselves, to mark themselves as separate
from the realm of beasts and more importantly to take them out of the
supposedly inferior realm of the feminine, which has, historically been marked
by the absence of these masculine signifiers.
Hamlet,
like every man, seeks the difficult answers to questions that have not lost
their significance or currency today. How is a man supposed to act? What
should a man believe? How should he face death and what kind of death
should a man die? Who does he f*ck? In essence, these are all the same
question, reiterated—“What is a real man?” For Hamlet, the answer is
found in man’s reason, his apprehension, those ways in which mankind is closest
to the gods, in which he is elevated from the beast, his nobility and his
action; later in the play, the last marker is mankind’s own physicality,
specifically the bodies we leave behind us when we die.
Today,
our markers have not changed so drastically nor do we seek to define a
different set of questions. We are just as anxious as Hamlet to find the
measures of men, and while we now find these markers in action movies, WWF
wrestling, celebrity, western steakhouses, sports bars and sporting clubs, the
importance of these signifiers, their necessity in identifying and marking the
masculine remains.
We use
masculine markers to identify, delineate and locate masculinity.
Recently, masculinities scholars have suggested that masculinity should be free
of such traditional markers—that men should be free to construct their own
senses of self, while never being forced to give up their identities as
masculine beings. But what if, rather than separating masculinity from
such socially constructed markers, we were to instead free the markers
themselves from their generally accepted gendered meanings? Is it even
possible to separate the markers from their understood masculinity? Is it
possible to purge these signifiers of their masculinity? What would
happen to our understanding and perception of masculinity when these markers
cease to function in the ways that they are expected to through custom, through
expectation? What happens if and when we can no longer depend on these
objects and their accompanying ideas to locate and ultimately to define
masculinity? What happens to masculinity when and if it becomes
unlocateable, when masculine landmarks cease to function as they are expected
to–because there is nothing for them to point to?
Matthew Barney
Contemporary,
sculptor, performance artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney expends much of his
energy contemplating questions of masculinity. Barney is, for all intents
and purposes, obsessed with gender—performing various masculine types, dealing
with several icons and images of masculinity and even, perhaps most uniquely, examining
the biology of men with the incisiveness of a physician opening up the
interiority of men to the viewer’s gaze. In doing so, he focuses on the
things that make up difference between men and women. His performance
artwork and video filmmaking turn a keen eye on the masculine, inspecting and
measuring what it means to be a man. He takes on different masculine
types and plays them out to sometimes laughable extremes. Along the way,
Matthew Barney, one of contemporary art’s “enfants terribles” points to several
issues that continually arise in masculine texts. But what he finds may
prove to be very surprising, even unsettling.
Born in
1967, in San Francisco, Matthew Barney is an artist who tends raise more
questions than he answers, blending several types of media and interweaving
many kinds of artistic language in order to carry out his examinations.
Partially because Barney can be deeply obtuse, he has also been accused of
being difficult. Like other New Mannerists, his work is often “typified
by a cerebral “dandyism” taken to the limit, (an) immoderate use of complex
metaphors, a willingness to dress up the real in rhetorical figures, (showing)
concern for the marvelous and esoteric while using stylized language refined to
the point of excess and having a taste for the strange, unusual, the
extravagant, the horrific, the repulsive and the bizarre.”[1] Because
of this and because of the scarcity of the original texts[2] (the Cremaster videos)
I will attempt to describe as well as possible what one sees when viewing Cremasters
1, 2, and 4.
Within
his work, there are three sets of signifiers that have special meaning in any
discussion of gender and how masculinity is used in the Cremaster series.
These are his frequent use of sports imagery, his performance of masculine
types–including the dandy and the serial killer–and his literal and symbolic
travels through the body.
The Cremaster Videos
The Cremaster videos
are abstract fantasies, which are devoid of language and wreak havoc with
narrativity, and as such can be difficult to decipher even for someone who has
viewed them in their entirety. Each Cremaster video is
part of a series that serves as the primary text of Barney’s artistic opus, and
each appears as part of a larger set of sculptural and multi-media
installations. The Cremaster series is a cinematic epic,
consisting of five parts. Each video ranges in length and can be very
tense as Barney uses a non-linear, non-Hollywood visual style that has more in
common with abstract, artistic video and performance art than with anything
that viewers of mainstream contemporary film might be used to. Because of
this, interpretation of his films are left to be done by the viewer without any
of the assistance that we are used to getting in normal film; instead, images
and events are left to hang, with no real closure, no comment and nothing in
the way of traditional narration.
A Sporting Male
That
sports has been used to signify masculinity goes almost without saying.
From the time of the Greeks to now, sports has been given an important position
in the creation, representation, and transference of masculinity from boy to
boy, man to man, man to boy, and from father to son. Sports holds an
extremely important place in our definition of society, especially
homosociety. It has become part and parcel of our accepted customs.
We expect to watch football at Thanksgiving, we smile when we see a father take
the time to play catch with his son. Sports have become part of our societal
expectations—the very logic that we use to define ourselves as a people—and as
men. Each man is expected to be both good and knowledgeable at/about
various popular sports. They are judged by their ability to juggle dates
and facts–“stats”—of various players and teams, just as they are expected to be
able throw and catch a ball. Those that are best at these are respected
by their peers and become popular amongst other males.
However,
while sports is incredibly popular in today’s society and is one the most
important markers (if not the most important) of contemporary
masculinity, it has not found much popularity in the art world. Matthew
Barney is perhaps the first post-modern artist to successfully utilize sports
imagery in his work. He does so by taking elements of sports—objects such
as football fields and football equipment, racing bikes, weightlifting benches,
sports stars and the (almost magical) pageantry inherent in sports matches—and
removing them from their natural contexts. In doing this, however, his
use of sports imagery is not directed towards, nor is it about sports itself.[3] His
interest does not lie in generating a discourse around sports. Instead,
when Barney presents us with football, as Renee Magritte might say, “This is
not football.”
It
would be very easy for Barney to employ the imagery he does to make work that
is about sports and continue the process of gendered enculturation that sports
is part of, or even overtly critique that process. But Barney has other
plans for the symbols of sport. He employs the language of sports, one
which most of us are familiar with, in order to make a larger statement about
masculinity.
In Cremaster 1,
the opening scene is of an illustration of an unrecognizable shape, floating in
the center of the screen as loud bagpipes play a single, droning note which
becomes louder and louder. Slowly the shape becomes a football
stadium. This space fills with dancers in yellow cheerleader-like
costumes. From the center of a parade-like scene comes a cross-dresser who is holding two ropes in their hands. They are dressed in an
evening gown and look like they might be ready to attend the opera. At
first, the dancers watch and wait; then they are directed in a choreographed
dance that looks like a Busby Berkeley routine. The camera follows the
ropes that they are holding, and we see that a large Good Year blimp is
attached to these ropes. Aboard the zeppelin, we find the same gentleman playing with pearls which they have scattered on the
ground. Below, we see the dancers follow with their eyes the upward and
downward motions of the floating zeppelin. On board again, female
flight attendants stand around smoking brown cigarettes as the larger Drag Queen attempts to keep these pearls from scattering. Using them, they slowly
build up the outline of the interior of male genitalia—specifically the
Cremaster muscle—but as the blimp descends, the outlines that they make are
disturbed by turbulence. The film ends with a complexly choreographed
dance routine, and an external shot of the football field and blimp, which
dissolves into the same symbolic drawing that we now recognize as a mix of the
football field and the Cremaster muscle.
Matthew
Barney seeks to rework and denature the signs of sports. They are
overwritten and re-contextualized; new associations are created which have
little to do with the original meanings of these signifiers. Within his
oeuvre, we will see that Barney relegates sports to the level of the symbolic
quotation, the linguistic metaphor/sign: for example, he takes objects that are
associated with sports and changes them remaking them out of new materials:
weights, workout benches or other sports objects are remade out of silicone
gels, tapioca or Vaseline, kept refrigerated, but not kept from their natural
decay. In doing so, according to Norman Bryson, Barney seeks to trip up
our expectations, hard sports equipment are made soft, physical like the flesh
and gore of the body. Our expectation that these objects should function
as sports equipment is confounded when we are confronted by these soft,
malleable, melting objects. He reworks these signs so that they no longer
function as they are supposed to and instead become about:
…a mad
interplay of forces—the storage and expenditure of energy, motion and rest (the
snap and the delay of game penalty), friction and slippage (tapioca and
Teflon), expansion and contraction (testicles), opening and closing (orifices),
bursts and sudden reverses and cliffhanging arrests (the frenetic, pointless
dash of the sidecar racers around the Isle of Man in Cremaster 4 [4]
What
Barney does not do is make work in which, say the “tapioca and Teflon” is about
tapioca or Teflon, but instead he is more interested in creating new meanings
which are generated through the interplay of new associations.
What
Barney seeks to do is to use sports as a tool: consisting of an already
existing set of icons and language through which he arranges larger
scenarios. For Barney, sports is only one element in a larger set of
signs that he uses to paint his visual tableaus. Among these other signs
are his use of Victorian feminine imagery, bees, beehives, rock music all of
which are reworked in the same ways that he reworks his sports
imagery. He ignores the commonly understood meanings that sports
imagery has, denying and actively tripping up associations that do not serve
his ends. He reworks the images and objects making them into a symbolic
iconography that serves the Cremaster, so that they become a language that he
can then control just as an artist would control the paints or brushes that he
works with. In doing this he negates and distances entire sets of signs
from their intended associations and makes them strange/estranged from their
original contexts.
Barney
plays with the complex nexus of language and meaning by disconnecting these
images from the constructed associations that they original have and making new
connections for these signifiers and giving them new nexes of meaning. By
showing that these signifiers can be made to mean something entirely different,
he questions the general perception that sports must define masculinity or that
it is a fundamental part of masculinity. Instead, for Barney, sports like
other masculine signs, informs masculinity, but need not stand in for masculinity—it
is not a metonymic association. Masculinity is only one of several
associations that sports can and does have. The signs of masculinity
become free to generate new texts, new complexities in multiple gendered
associations, homoerotic desires and dancing girls.
An
important example of Barney’s transformation of the imagery used in
sports into his own personal language is visible in his use of the football
stadium, by changing the activity that would normally go on within this site,
he not only subverts our expectations, he alienates this site from its context
and its history; it is rewritten into a fantasy space—no longer the football
field, it becomes a stage where strange and unfamiliar events can and do occur.
That this sports location is the first scene to be viewed in the entire Cremaster series
might make one think that sports will have an overpowering importance within
the series. However, while the ground that he sets up is sports-like, the
activity that takes place within is anything but. Instead of a ball game,
Barney fills the space with dancing girls and airline stewardesses. That
we are meant to see these women as exhibiting clichéd feminine behavior is
obvious, especially as they preen and prance on the field their actions become
more and more elaborately and stereotypically feminine. Then, at the
fifty-yard line, an almost dominatrix-like figure arises, holding the
guide-wires to a Goodyear blimp. Upon closer inspection, we can see that
this figure is in fact in drag. They proceed to direct the women
around him through kaleidoscopic, multi-leveled acrobatics. Here, Barney
creates a dreamlike space, which Nancy Bless describes as “a state of
potential.”[5] Matthew
Barney actively takes this masculine encoded space and makes it sexually
ambiguous, not only feminine—he specifically queers the space, because that is
part of his larger narrative on the fluidity of masculinity.
This
space has more in common with Busby Berkeley’s mise en scene dance
routines than with any actual football game. Busby Berkeley was known for
his elaborate "Technicolor" fantasy dance routines, which were placed within
popular movies of the thirties and forties. His scenes have very little
to do with the rest of the motion pictures they are set in, and the effect, as
Steve Martin highlights in his own film Pennies From Heaven, is a
surrealistic break from the narrative space of the movie. Basically a
film within a film, these scenes have their own internal logic, often turning
gravity and basic ideas of realism on their heads.
Berkeley
himself never cared much about the main story line and regarded it merely as a
convenient skeleton upon which to flesh out his fantasies, much in the manner of
Rossini draping his gorgeous solos, duets and ensembles all over the framework
of whatever hack libretto an impresario handed him.[6]
Berkeley
instead sought to create a space in which only his own logic applied and in which
the familiar was made to act in novel and at times bizarre ways, but always
with an aesthetic panache that became his trademark. For Berkeley, the
artistic space was paramount; it mattered little that characters that had been
behaving seriously in one scene would suddenly break into dance and song, or
that water suddenly poured forth and “bathing beauties” filled the
screen. Matthew Barney evokes the language, visual style and even some of
the dancing moves of Berkeley, does he seek to show us that he too wishes to
create an artistic space, where only the artist's aesthetic rules apply?
In Cremaster 1, the
scene that Barney presents us with is only casually about football, football is
the playing field so to speak, but the activity within becomes mysterious and
detached from the idea of sports. In essence it becomes clear that Barney
is preoccupied with other things. Like Berkeley, Barney ruptures the
logic that we are familiar with, giving a space like New York or a football
stadium a more mystical and magical form, in which anything is possible because
the logic of football, in fact any but Barney’s own logic does not apply to the
space he creates.
In the
words of Keith Seward, writing for Parkett Magazine, “He creates an aesthetic
of athleticism and an athleticism of aesthetics. Athletic means have
aesthetic ends…”[7] The
signs, setting and even the players are separated from their routine and made
to do what the artist pleases. Dancing girls and men in drag break the
narrative space and logic that we are expecting and the Cremaster wallows
in its own blend of the real and the surreal. In this new space the laws
of physics, logic and narrative break down and are replaced by a logic system
that is visual rather than narrative. The ends that Barney uses any means
to get to are purely aesthetic in that the playing field is separated from its
own logic and employed to Barney’s own conceptual ends.
In
another scene, this time from Cremaster 4—sports cars traverse the
rocky crags of the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man is an ancient island
situated on the Irish Sea and has been a site of myth and legend. This
works in Barney’s favor as the location serves to further take his imagery out
of the familiar context of the everyday. According to James Lingwood, the
Isle of Man is a place where mythology and topography become one.[8] Where
the space is as fantastic as the events that will happen there.
The
island is known for its annual “Tourist Trophy” motorbike races, in which
bikes race through the island’s villages and back roads. Barney utilizes
this imagery in the video, by creating bizarre sexless raggedy-Ann doll drivers
who circle the island while a bizarre Dandy watches and tap-dances
effeminately. But here again, the sporting event (the motorbike race) is
secondary to the overall narrative that Barney is trying to work with, which
instead is about the body and especially the internal muscles that control the
rise and fall of the testicles. According to Barney, “The narrative
of Cremaster is based on the stories that nearly take place
within the body. The kind of action films that go on inside the body.”[9] Here,
sporting language is used to examine a narrative structure that is based on the
internal logic of the body, which he abstracts into a narrative system, moving
the state of the story up and down. It is a narrativity that is based on
the reproductive system.
What
becomes clear is that these events are not meant to follow the logic that they
had originally been associated with, Bike-riders are meant to show the flow of narration,
a football field becomes a “Berkleyesque” stage.[10] Barney
deconstructs and rewrites these spaces (and their markers) that so many have
made into primary sites of masculinity—the wide world of sports, masculine
performance, and even the penis. Instead, Barney shows that like the
costumes that are worn by dancing women, like the advertising and marketing
symbols that appear on Adidas and Nike shoes—these are separable and ultimately
separate from the masculine. These markers do not define masculinity in any
real or meaningful way. In fact, these sports signifiers operate at the
same level as any of the other images that Barney employs and which generate
new meanings—aesthetic meanings. But there is a difference between
turning these icons into aesthetic objects–that is, into beautiful objects and
retaining their “thingness” (das ding,) which Barney is also not interested in,
instead he is attempting to move us into yet another space, a purely
conceptual, aesthetic space.
Dressing
in Daddy’s (and Mommy’s) clothes
Matthew
Barney began his artistic career as a performance artist by climbing the walls
of art galleries, recreating a mountain climber’s experiences but placing them
within an art context. Barney has always had a penchant for
performativity. He has always invested his performances with odd,
ceremonial repetitions, creating onanistic dramas, while dressing in outlandish
costumes that mesh Hollywood-quality theatrical, horror make-up and Victorian
costuming.
In
the Cremaster movies, Barney continues his interest in these
odd juxtapositions as he and others take on the roles of many bizarre
characters. From figures like the transvestite majorette in Cremaster
1, the Loughton Candidate and Harry Houdini, Barney mixes fantastic, mutant
characters from his overwrought imagination with historical people again
interacting within a fantasy space that only partially exists in the world that
we know. Of these characters, two are of extreme importance, as they are
nearly polar opposites, though upon closer inspection they are actually hybrid
characters that call into play Barney’s belief that masculinity is not a simple
venture, but a complex continuum and while one masculine trait may, on the
surface, appear to be paramount any over-simplification would be in error.
The
first of these characters—the Loughton Candidate–is one of Barney’s,
carnivalesque mutations. A mix of human and Loughton ram, this is Barney
himself dressed in a white suit and bright red fur. “The human half of
the Loughton Candidate seems to be a dandy or aesthete, with lounge suit,
leather brogues and Manx heather on his lapel.”[11] The
character spends his time surrounded by three naked, genderless creatures of
the same breed.[12] They
are intent on weighing him down with heavy pearls as he tap-dances, creating an
ever-widening hole in the floor beneath him. The Loughton candidate is
unaware that he will soon fall into the ocean finding himself both below land
and within the body, traveling through the Cremaster into the male reproductive
system and freedom.
The
second character is introduced in Cremaster 2, a film that has been
described as a “violent, heavy-metal murderous thing.”[13] The
second film is based loosely on the story of Gary Gilmore, the first person
executed after the re-institution of the death penalty. While the
Loughton candidate appears as a mostly passive, gentle aesthete, Gilmore is a
violent obsessive, exhibiting many of the most tragic masculine traits—he is
seemingly right out a country-and-western song, cigarette smoking, gun-toting,
given to hard luck, broken-hearted and ultimately, seemingly macho. A
fact that is not lost on Barney, who has one of his characters sing Johnny Cash
lyrics about loss and tragedy, while a cowboy couple line-dances in the
background.
While
Gary Gilmore is known as a serial killer, this is in fact a misnomer, as
Gilmore did not kill more than two people over the course of his release—three
being the cut-off between serial killer and merely murderer. Instead
Gilmore killed a gas-station attendant and a hotel desk clerk, all of this in
an effort to get the attention of his estranged girlfriend. He was
executed by a five-man firing squad; one man carrying blanks so that no one
would know which bullet had killed him.
The
Gilmore tragedy stands in contrast to the onanistic Loughton Candidate’s drama,
which is almost laughable in its oddness. Gilmore’s story is loud and
violent, while the other is abstracted and methodical. In one Barney dons
the robes of a regular, down-and-out American male, in the other he is a
bizarre blend of monster and man. Each however, exists in a dreamlike mix
of the real and the bizarre. When we first meet him, Gary Gilmore is
trapped in the womb of a white Ford Mustang, listening to a mix of hard rock
guitars and the loud buzzing of bees. While he moves within the cabin of
the classic car, a gasoline attendant washes and rewashes the car’s windows,
filling the tank with gas in preparation for the evening’s events. The
Loughton Candidate, named after the colorfully horned, Irish, Loughton rams,
falls through the floor into the ocean surrounding the Isle of Man and enters
into a bizarre, white, tapioca tunnel that according to Norman Bryson is a
representation of the male reproductive system. Bryson describes the
Loughton Candidate’s travel through the wet, white flesh-like tunnel as a
“gonadotrophic journey” and both men ultimately come in contact with their
reproductive selves. [14]
While
both of these men appear to represent masculine types– the Dandy and the macho
man—Barney does several things to shake them loose from any clear type.
While dressed as a Dandy, in white lounge suit and taps, the Loughton Candidate
is a hybrid of man and an extremely masculine-coded animal. The ram is
known for its violent rites of passage in which males ram into each other
sometimes causing extreme damage and even death. While the Candidate
appears unable, or unwilling to stop himself from being weighted down and
crashing through the floor—once he finds himself within the Cremaster, however,
his passivity must give way as he attempts to crawl through the bodily tunnel
in search of an opening.
Gilmore’s
story is perhaps more complex, just as it is more visually appealing and filled
with lush examples of Barney’s complicated iconography. While Gilmore is
presented as being a wildly angry masculine male, his narrative acts against
this. Barney presents us with a story that serves to make it clear that
Gilmore, the illegitimate grandson of Harry Houdini and a sorceress, is trapped
in a story of heredity and events that are seemingly beyond his control.
We are meant to see him as a man, who is, in essence, caught in a loop that
will repeat endlessly, always with the same tragic ending. Gary Gilmore
is presented as a passive zombie as he moves through the proscribed events as
if in a daze, robotically killing the gas attendant, robotically riding a large
American Buffalo as the effects of a lethal injection take hold of him and the
massive beast.[15] Gilmore
is consistently taken out of the role of actor and made to be passive under the
control of fate, heredity, history, an almost biblical sense of atonement and
killer bees.
The Un-measur(ing) of a man.
Through
each man’s voyage of genital discovery, Matthew Barney takes us to the heart of
the matter—the body, the internal machine and the location, if there is to be
any, of difference between the male and the female. While at Harvard,
Barney studied medicine and his knowledge of the inner workings of the body
invests his work throughout the Cremaster series. The
Cremaster itself is the set of muscles that control the rise and fall of the
testes, as well as being directly involved with the production of sperm.
The Cremaster responds to temperature and fear, and Barney redoubles the image
of the Cremaster–an almost ovary-like site– with the actual testes. In
many scenes the testes are placed as icons and their location in or on the body
is used to locate the narrative flow. In Cremaster 4,
the bike racers on the Isle of Man are seen to have externalized testicular
objects, which climb up or down their jumpsuits as they follow the track.
When these testes are in the upper position, climbing up the men’s chests, the
narrative flows happily along, but when these testicle-objects drop, bikes
crash, suffer flat tires and riders are severely hurt.
This
strange movement is important because the testes, rather than being safely and
easily located within the body are now seen to be literally all over the place,
even at one point crawling along a beach. They are simply put, no longer
where they are supposed to be, but instead can be anywhere, used in any way
that Barney wishes to use them. They are no longer limited to the site of
the body, nor when they are located on the body are they where one would expect
them.
Narrativity of the Cremaster
For
Barney, the Cremaster governs the narrative form within his films and the
narrative of the Cremaster is based on the stories that nearly
take place within the body –the kind of action films that go on inside the
body.[16] In
doing this Barney has stated that he hopes to break narrative free from the
traditional patterns that it has taken. He wishes to abstract the
narrative, just as he has abstracted the icons and types of masculinity–he
attempts to make films that achieve a non-hierarchical relationship between
narrative, character, image and landscape.
In
doing so, by invoking the body—like a post-modern Jack the Ripper, or
Caligula—he opens it up to close scrutiny, but what he actually finds is
surprising. In one particularly graphic scene in Cremaster 2,
a doctor uses a scalpel to cut into a male abdomen, what he finds inside,
instead of the bloody, flesh and gore of the body is a space of
transformation—the organs within have mutated into a fantastic, white, creamy,
tapioca pulp. From this space two pearl-like objects are removed, taken
out of the body for further inspection and use. While they may no longer
function as testes, they are seen to reappear in several places, most notably
on the jumpsuits of the bikers and the pearls that are used to weigh down the
Loughton Candidate bringing him into contact with the Cremaster. They
become visual, aesthetic objects. The testes are transformed into solid,
pearls that he uses as part of his artistic symbolism. They are no longer
seen to be functioning in the ways that we would expect, nor are they located
where we would expect to find them.
Barney
takes the internal space of the body, which he rewrites as a fantasy site and
externalizes it. But in this process a kind of dematerialization and
uncertainty creeps in. When Barney unearths the internal, it is changed,
replaced by near approximations, tapioca –a jewel-like pudding takes place of
the jouissance within the body, pearls take the place of the testes. The
actual internal space of the body becomes uncertain, unreal, symbolically
abstracted into signs that are further abstracted and made to act as tools that
Barney once again uses to his own ends. Any actual location of the
contents within the body becomes impossible, the internal organs are instead
replaced and a location that should make biological sense becomes one whose
sense is now under the complete control of the artist. This is a location
that is no longer represented by the actual but instead becomes available to us
only through signs and signifiers.
Penis, penis—who’s got (or doesn’t have) the penis.
Historically,
theoretically, legally etc. the ultimate site of masculinity has always been
considered to be the penis. In fact, we have even created a system to
explain the primacy of masculinity creating the all-powerful, god-like ideal of
the phallus—whose marker is the erect penis. The phallus, known
alternately as the father, the law, history and the super-ego is not free from
Matthew Barney’s deconstructive gaze. We are nearly always presented with
a theoretical ideal of the phallus as being solid, erect and non-changing.
But Barney questions this notion as well, showing us both a narrative that is
always at the point of collapse and the penis as a marker that is continually
in a state of change.
Like
the testes before them, Barney shows the penis, the supposed, final, physical
location of masculinity, to be just as uncertain. In Cremaster 2
Gilmore’s penis is often seen on the outside of his overalls, or visibly
affecting the shape of his pants. When we first see Gilmore’s penis,
shortly after he has killed the gas station attendant, we are shocked, by its
unprecedented presence as well as its horrific nature. As he moves past
the dead body, Gilmore’s penis is peeking out of his outfit, but rather than
the erect phallus of metonymic masculinity, in this first shot the organ
appears to be the size of a child or baby’s undeveloped/underdeveloped
penis. When we next see any sign of his penis, it has grown laughably
huge, crawling down his leg, testicles seemingly bloated and pushing against
his pant-seam. In another scene we can see clearly that Gilmore no longer
has a penis—his pants pushing inward into camel-toes, creating a vagina-like
image that is in fact the last view that we are given of Gilmore’s polymorphous
penis. In perhaps the most important moment in all contemporary art, when
presenting the macho Gilmore in this fashion, Barney deconstructs the ideal of
the penis, showing clearly its shifting nature. Here, it grows, shrinks
and even disappears completely. This is not the image that we expect of
the penis. As the signifier of masculinity, the penis is always presented
in a complete, non-altering, unchanging/unchangeable state. Historically,
narratively, poetically, artistically, legally, etc. men have been presented as
either well-endowed or not—there is no room for mixed messages, there is no
accounting for the shift in size when the penis is non-erect, there is no
accounting for the shifting in size from childhood to adulthood and old
age. But like his testicles, Barney’s penis is constantly shifting,
changing, altering in every way. For Barney, shape, hardness and girth
are always in motion and always uncertain. The penis becomes like
Schrodinger’s cat—so uncertain, that we cannot even be sure of its
existence. If the penis is no longer describable, shifting and changing,
even disappearing completely—what does this say about masculinity (and moving
forward, this appears to be the most important point of this
essay–linguistically, theoretically, philosophically and historically–the
phallus/penis duality has always been presented as unchanging, unmutable, and
as a solid erection–but as we all know this is far from the truth–the
linguistic signifier of law, masculinity, history etc–is endlessly changeable,
at times flaccid, small or hard–and therefore its linguistic doppleganger must
be equally changeable. I will get back to this in later papers, because
this is the crux of the argument and the most damning to the hegemony of
masculinity.)
The
Phallus, which has always been a linguistic and philosophical abstraction,
then, is joined by its signifier, the penis, into this abstraction, this
destabilization. The penis, which before has always been seen as erect,
solid and locatable, joins the other markers that we use to identify and locate
masculinity in uncertainty. Masculinity, itself, becomes invisible and
unlocateable—like a position on a map that you are certain is there, but for
which there are no longer any identifying points—we become lost in our search
for directions.
No
wonder men never want to stop and ask for directions. Finally, however,
it is important to remember that in the case of the Cremaster, it
is not masculinity which has changed, masculinity may, indeed, have always been
an uncertain abstraction—it is the markers through which we have sought to
identify and locate masculinity which have changed, they have become
abstracted, destabilized and have opened themselves to new associations, taking
on new functions, leaving us, if only for a moment with a masculinity that has
become destabilized and invisible.
This
action, rather than allowing masculinity to take on the markers of any and all
genders (in an obviously hysterical attempt at self-protection and in the
process to claim supremacy over other gendered positions,) appears to be part
of the larger pan-historical, pan-generational masculinist program, instead,
calls the very markers and any possibility of the location of masculinity
itself into question.
Invisibility,
abstraction and non-existence is intrinsically different, than the positioning
of masculinity so that it can take on and subjugate the signifiers of other
genders. If the markers that we have always associated with masculinity
have no real meaning, then what meaning can masculinity, ultimately, really have?
Is this, in fact, something that all men inherently understand from birth on,
have always understood and which creates an inherently masculine form of
hysteria?
__________________________________________________________________________
Over
the next few months and years I will be working on a few papers on
Post-masculinism, Feminism and Gender Issues, with an art twist and will
present a few articles that may deal with various aspects of this (sort of
proto-articles, or test papers, so to speak)–these are open to criticism and
the addition of ideas–so if you want to discuss this and others I present in
the future–please feel free to do so.
Comments
Post a Comment