For someone who makes such strange films, Matthew Barney is surprisingly conventional in appearance. The embodiment of clean-cut American good looks, he seems much slighter than the larger-than-life screen personas he has inhabited in the four completed parts of his five-part epic Cremaster series. They are art films, but if that makes you think of jumpy action and erratic focus, think again. His films, particularly the most recent two, are made to mainstream cinematic standards. He is in Dublin for the public screening of Cremaster 2 tonight in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar.
The title Cremaster is the first indication of just how offbeat the whole project is. As he is doubtless tired of explaining, the cremaster is the involuntary muscle that controls the descent and retraction of the testicles. Its particular relevance to Barney is that it also has a role to play at an early stage of development in sexual differentiation. The golden age, for him, is literally prelapsarian, life before the testicles descend and gender is determined. His entire Cremaster cycle could be seen as an extremely idiosyncratic meditation on reproductive biology and destiny.
"Differentiation is," he agrees, "probably the primary subtext of the whole series." If this seems suspiciously straightforward, don't worry. You'll find it doesn't help at all when you are confronted with the bizarre spectacle of Cremaster 2. In it, Barney himself plays Gary Gilmore, and the action, if that isn't too strong a word for his deliberately slow, endlessly digressive approach to narrative, takes us from the moment of his conception to the murder of gas station attendant Max Jensen and Gilmore's eventual execution. The latter is reimagined as a kind of demented rodeo-to-the-death. Norman Mailer, whose book The Executioner's Song could be said to have immortalised Gilmore, appears as escapologist Harry Houdini, a pivotal figure in the Cremaster series and, oddly enough, possibly - just possibly - Gilmore's grandfather.
These facts are refracted through Barney's bizarre sensibility, which translates the everyday into an arcane, endlessly self-indulgent, entirely personal, symbolic visual language. It is characterised by baroque, fetishised objects, from shoes to saddles, by various slimy materials, by improbable prosthetics and elaborate analogues of body parts. These are not just props, but sculptural objects in their own right, and they usually end up in museums, including the new Tate Modern when it opens tomorrow.
Distorted elements of Americana, from cowboys to football players and cheerleaders, usually feature large, like the female formation riders here. Though he is "not a fan", Barney was an athlete in college and remains, as he puts it, "a team player". Tellingly, he prefers "the space of preparation" to the game itself. But mostly, he says, "the athletic model is useful in looking at the creative process". The rituals of sport certainly inform his incredibly eccentric visualisations of ordinary actions. Looking at his films it often seems as if he sets out to describe the familiar with fanatical precision but on the basis of a hopelessly skewed and fractured memory. The final product has the hyper-reality and the false, misleading logic of a dream.
Barney has a way of wrongfooting interpretation. So, you think, the narrative is in some way about Gilmore as a symbol of trying to escape one's fate, which is where Houdini comes in. To an extent, Barney agrees, and elaborates: "If you think of the whole series as describing a vector, from 1 to 5, then 2 is a kind of loop, where Gilmore stands for a state of rejection, of trying to defeat the outcome." Then he continues less than helpfully: "It's really about the landscape. It's an attempt to follow the psychology and genealogy of Gilmore in terms of . . . to overlay that story on the geological history of that part of the Rockies, which was created by a retreating glacier, from glacial desert northwards to the glacier itself." He is, as it happens, from Idaho, so that part of the Rockies is also his landscape.
Working against chronology, Cremaster 1, 4 and 5 are already complete, and Barney is already at work on the last, 3, which will take place chiefly in Manhattan but will also visit Ireland. He has just been scouting locations at the Giant's Causeway. His artistic career, which began only in the late 1980s, has been pretty much devoted to Cremaster, which will form the subject of a major retrospective next year at the Guggenheim in New York, and has led to his being described as "the most crucial artist of his generation".
Cremaster 2 will be screened in Meeting House Square tonight at 9.45 p.m. Admission is free and tickets are available from Temple Bar Properties, 18 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
