A Pop Audience Pleaser?

In 1992, when New York artist Matthew Barney first conceived “Cremaster,” he wasn’t concerned that the multipart film project cross over from the avant-garde to a popular-culture audience. But with parts four and five opening Friday for a one-week run at the Nuart, Barney’s magnum opus is showing signs of doing exactly that.

Nor did it occur to Barney--who also has an installation related to “Cremaster 5” opening Saturday at the West Hollywood art gallery Regen Projects--to exploit his movie-star looks as a means of advancing his ambitions. The 30-year-old Yale graduate used to support himself working as a model, but in “Cremaster,” he is obscured by heavy makeup and prosthetic devices.

Barney is in every respect an unusual person. His films can be ponderous, but in conversation his personality is marked by a well-developed sense of humor. Moreover, his commentary on his work can occasionally be rather startling.

“I consider ‘Cremaster’ a sculptural project, but I don’t know how much energy I’m willing to put into defending what I think sculpture is,” he says with a laugh during an interview at a restaurant near the gallery. “It’s hard for me to separate the objects I make, the installations, films, drawings and photographs--it’s sort of all one.”

For those of you who flunked anatomy, cremaster is a set of genital muscles that function as a sort of thermostat, in that they pull the internal sexual organs back up into the body when the temperature drops. Barney distills this medical factoid into a metaphor for varying differentiations of form, then subtly interweaves the metaphor throughout the five “Cremaster” episodes. The five films take place sequentially in a football stadium in Boise, Idaho; on an ice cap; in the Chrysler Tower in Manhattan; on the Isle of Man; and in an opera house in Budapest.

The films are not being shot in order, however. “Each shoot requires a year of intense pre-production, and in January we began working on ‘Cremaster 2,’ which takes place along the Canadian Rockies,” says Barney of the film, which is slated for completion next March. “These pieces are constantly adapting to the limitations of the physical world, and we begin each shoot with many question marks as to whether conditions will be correct for what we hope to achieve. The libretto in ‘Cremaster 5,’ for instance, deals with a snow-covered bridge over an ice-filled Danube, but we missed the real ice by a week and a half. So we put ice in the Danube digitally, in post-production.

“I’m still casting ‘Cremaster 2,’ but I don’t think I’ll be in it,” he adds. “I’ve never felt it necessary that I appear in all of them, and I haven’t yet encountered anything in this piece that requires me in that capacity.”

Barney is very much present in “Cremaster 5,” which also stars Ursula Andress, and was loosely inspired by magician Harry Houdini. Structured as an opera based on a libretto by Barney and set in Budapest, where Houdini was born in 1887, the film interweaves stories about three characters--the magician, the giant and the diva. All of them are played by Barney, who explains these fictional creations as androgynous states of being that are different aspects of the same character. But, hey, let’s not lose sight of Houdini, the one recognizable signpost in the strange landscape Barney evokes.

“Houdini was separated from his mother at birth, he was separated from Hungary where he was born, and he was irrevocably separated from his mother when she died,” he explains. “These things gave the narrative a structure at its inception, but it subsequently evolved into a story of separation anxiety, exploring how a single organism can betray itself. The relationship between the magician and the queen is the central one in the film, and my hope is that it reads simultaneously as a love story and a relationship between a mother and her son.”

Asked what made him cast Andress, Barney explains: “Like Houdini--who was a key figure in the physical culture that led to the redefinition of the body in Victorian England--she offered a new, athletic alternative to what was seen as a sex symbol in the ‘60s.”

Of his own performance, he says, “I don’t feel like an actor in the pieces, because one of my intentions is to design situations that subvert any theatrical mannerism in the performances by building resistances into the narrative--a physical challenge, for instance, or prosthetic or costume challenge. For example, Ursula Andress wears a dress made of rigid, prosthetic plastic that she’s unable to move in.”

Andress’ stiff dress was a minor inconvenience compared with what some of the other “Cremaster 5” performers dealt with. “There’s a scene on a bridge that was very difficult because we were shooting at night in January, and it was incredibly cold,” he recalls. “That scene also involves a horse who wasn’t too happy because he, too, was cold and we had a side-saddle on him, which he wasn’t used to.

“The scenes shot underwater were also difficult because they involved seven actresses who had to hold their breath. We positioned them underwater on scuba, then rang a gong underwater indicating the air was about to be pulled. You then have to wait for the bubbles to clear, so your window to shoot is very small. We cast the parts based on peoples’ ability to hold their breath, keep their eyes open underwater for long periods, and their height. We shot in a room dropped into a swimming pool five feet deep, so the actresses had to be small in order to fall under the water line.”

Barney’s film is inarguably ravishingly beautiful, but writing on him suggests that even his staunchest fans agree it requires some figuring out.

Barney prefers to let the work speak for itself. “I considered putting a translation of the libretto on the laserdisc edition, but I don’t want a translation on the film. I want it to remain a pure experience.”

BE THERE

“Cremaster 4 and 5” screens Friday-March 12 at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A., (310) 478-6379. The “Cremaster 5” exhibition is on view Saturday-April 11 at Regen Projects, 629 N. Almont Drive, West Hollywood, (310) 276-5424. (A translation of the libretto can be found in “Matthew Barney: Cremaster 5,” a book published in Germany last year by Portikus Frankfurt and Barbara Gladstone Gallery).