"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."
--Art critic Jerry Saltz

Matthew Barney CREMASTER 2  1999 Matthew Barney CREMASTER 2  1999

In this installment of Barney's ongoing 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 Norman Mailer and Dave Lombardo, former lead drummer for the band Slayer.

Composer Jonathan Bepler provides the original musical score for the film, with vocals by Steve Tucker of Morbid Angel and Patty Griffin. The film is screened in a sculptural installation in the gallery that includes 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 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 his 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.

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 in Paris, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Tate Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Bern, and Portikus in 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.


The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Walker Chief Curator Richard Flood and full-color reproductions. Softcover: $45 ($33.75 Walker members).

OPENING-DAY PREVIEW SCREENING: CREMASTER 2
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 1 PM

ARTIST'S TALK/SCREENING: CREMASTER 5
INTRODUCED BY MATTHEW BARNEY
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 3:30 PM $6 ($3 WALKER MEMBERS AND STUDENTS)
In Cremaster 5,the film that immediately preceded Cremaster 2, 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 introduces the film and will take questions from the audience after the screening.

POST-SCREENING DISCUSSIONS: CREMASTER 2
THURSDAYS, JULY 22-SEPTEMBER 9, AFTER THE 6 PM SCREENING, FREE
Join Information Guides, curators, and invited guests for informal discussions after the film screening.


PLEASE NOTE: The feature-length film in this exhibition deals with Gary Gilmore, the protagonist of Norman Mailer's biography The Executioner's Song.This film contains brief scenes of violent and sexual material. It is not recommended for viewing by children.

Peter Plagens, "Barney for Grown-ups."
Newsweek. (23 August 1999).

Walker Press Release (18 June 1999).