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Abstract.
Analyzing the connections between Matthew Barney's Cremaster series and a double genealogy-performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and blockbuster film and museum culture-this essay argues that the series' investment in the blockbuster serves to spectacularize performance in ways that undermine its historical relations to protest culture.
Over the last ten years, Matthew Barney has produced the five-part Cremaster cycle, culminating in Cremaster 3 (2002), a three-hour film shot partly in-and shown at-the Guggenheim Museum in New York.1 Barneys work, we are told, somehow metaphorizes "the embryonic processes of sexual differentiation,"2 and of course we are all grateful that we now know that the cremaster is the muscle by which the testicles are suspended. Barney himself refers to the work as sculpture,3 and although he is consistently regarded not as a filmmaker but as an artist working with film, Cremaster is symptomatic of the blurring of a number of institutional boundaries in current neo-avant-garde film and video practice.4
Our intention here is to investigate Barneys Cremaster cycle ( 1994-2003) in relation to a double genealogy: performance art of the 1970s and its documentation and the Hollywood blockbuster.5 On one hand, Cremaster opts for a relatively "marginal" heritage: the work of performance artists including Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden, whose ephemeral "pieces" remain only as relics and documents in the form of film, video, photographs, and artifacts. On the other hand, Cremaster's lush aesthetic is shot through not just with references to but nostalgia for the film styles of a number of Hollywood moments-including some that are themselves similarly nostalgic. In addition, its epic running times, monumental sets, and huge budgets place Cremaster clearly in line with a blockbuster cinema that starts with Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) and has reached its apotheosis, so far, in Titanic (James Cameron, 1997).6 Deliberately numbered out of order, (it starts with Cremaster 4, 1992), the cycle offers up the apparent paradox of the neo-avant-garde blockbuster franchise. This paradox simultaneously invests in and negates the institutions the films reference.
Mining the history of performance for monumental ends, Barney's work largely strips that history of its critical reflections on the mediation of the body (reflections perhaps born of a relation to the protest culture of the period)....