Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2, the fourth installment in the artist's ongoing series of Cremaster "operas," will premiere at the Walker Art Center, along with a related installation of sculptures and photographs, July 18-October 17, 1999. In this installment of the Cremaster cycle, an elliptical narrative unfolds around the film's anti-hero, convicted killer Gary Gilmore, who is played by Barney himself. Loosely based on the life of Gilmore as chronicled by Norman Mailer in his book The Executioner's Song, the film moves from a glacier field in the Canadian Rockies to the Bonneville Salt Flats, from Utah in 1976 to Chicago in 1893. Bees, bison, magicians, mediums, murders, heavy-metal drummers, two-steppers, mounties, and others inhabit the film's hallucinatory landscape.

Featured in the cast of Cremaster 2 are Mailer and Dave Lombardo, former lead drummer for the band Slayer. Composer Jonathan Bepler provides an original musical score for the film, with vocals by Steve Tucker of Morbid Angel and Patty Griffin. Cremaster 2, shown in 35mm, will be screened once daily at 3 pm in Gallery 7; Thursdays at 3 and 6 pm. Informal discussions follow the Thursday evening screenings beginning July 29. On view in an accompanying sculptural installation will be a nylon cabinet with saline saturated barbells, a model of a mountain range sculpted in salt, a mirrored riding saddle, and a suite of portrait photographs of glaciers.

The artist will introduce a screening of his Cremaster 5, the film that immediately preceded Cremaster 2, and be available for questions after the screening at 3:30 pm Sunday, July 18, in the Walker Auditorium. Tickets for the opening-day talk and screening are $6 ($3 Walker members and students).

New York-based artist Barney has become well known for his provocative works that unite ideas of physical transformations with a highly personalized mythology. New York art critic Jerry Saltz has described him as "one of the most interesting artists to emerge in the 1990s, and hands-down...the most interesting when it comes to the way he works with video." Crossing from sculpture to film to video, Barney seamlessly creates dramas of compelling compulsive force that inhabit a zone between the psychological and the physical.

The development of Barney's unique mythological vision can be seen most clearly in his series of Cremaster films, which have been his primary artistic focus since 1994. In the three previous installments of these cinematic "operas," Cremaster 4 (1994), Cremaster 1 (1995), and Cremaster 5 (1997), the artist conceived a highly stylized motorcycle race on the Isle of Man, a Busby Berkeley-inspired performance on the football field of the University of Idaho in Boise, and a fantastic voyage through Budapest.

Matthew Barney graduated from Yale University in 1989 and has had major exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Tate Gallery, London, Kunsthalle, Bern, and Portikus, Frankfurt. In 1993 he won the Europa 2000 award at the 45th Venice Biennale and in 1996 received the first annual Hugo Boss Award from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Matthew Barney: Cremaster 2 will be accompanied by a softcover catalogue with an essay by Walker Chief Curator Richard Flood and full-color reproductions. Available for $45 ($33.75 Walker members), it will be distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 155 Sixth Avenue, Second Floor, New York, NY 10013, (800) 338-2665 (phone), (212) 627-9484 (fax) as well as in the Walker Art Center Shops at the museum, (612) 375-7638 (phone), (612) 375-7565 (fax), and at the Galleria in Edina, (612) 928-9690 (phone), (612) 928-9691 (fax).

Cremaster 2 will have its New York premiere October 13-November 4, 1999, at the Film Forum; the European premiere, sponsored by Pitti Immagine, Florence, Italy, will take place September 22, 1999. Following the Film Forum screenings it will be shown at The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, November 4, 1999-March 26, 2000.

Related Event
Artist Talk and Screening of Cremaster 5
Sunday, July 18, 3:30 pm
$6 ($3 Walker members and students)
Walker Auditorium
In Cremaster 5, the film that immediately preceded Cremaster 2, Matthew Barney creates an elegant meditation structured around two locations in Budapest--a baroque opera house and an equally atmospheric bathhouse. Cremaster 5 stars Ursula Andress as the "Queen of Chain," while the artist himself plays her three suitors. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has said of the film: "He continues to push the envelope of his eccentric ideas about beauty, sexual ambiguity, symbolic narrative, and in the way he propels his characters through space, in their startling physical acts, transformation, and inspired costumes." Barney will introduce the film and will take questions from the audience after the screening.

Funding
Matthew Barney: Cremaster 2 is made possible by generous support from Pitti Immagine, Peggy and Ralph Burnet, and Astrup Fearnley Museum for Modern Art, Oslo. The exhibition catalogue is made possible in part by Pitti Immagine.

Major support for Walker Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dayton Hudson Foundation on behalf of Dayton's, Mervyn's California, and Target Stores, The McKnight Foundation, the General Mills Foundation, Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the American Express Minnesota Philanthropic Program, the Honeywell Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, The Regis Foundation, The St. Paul Companies, Inc., U.S. Bank, and the members of the Walker Art Center.

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