Creation commotion

Can a big museum show of movie memorabilia cement the international reputation of the young artist who also made the films? That’s one question posed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where “Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle” is on view until early June.

The answer isn’t optimistic.

For the Rip Van Winkles in the crowd, “The Cremaster Cycle” is a much-publicized, lavishly produced, nonlinear, five-part movie epic -- combined running time: 6 hours, 38 minutes, 15 seconds -- which meditates on gender identity. Its extravagant style might best be described as Baroque Surrealism. Ever since the first of the five was completed in 1994, the individual segments have been shown to mixed reviews at prestigious international art venues. (All the films will be shown at Santa Monica’s Nuart Theater beginning Friday.) Shot out of chronological order, the cycle’s grand three-hour centerpiece, “Cremaster 3,” was completed last year.

The enormous Guggenheim installation fills all the museum’s ramps and side galleries, and it’s crowned by a massive pentagonal projection screen suspended from the skylight, where clips from “Cremaster 3” are shown. (The Guggenheim interior provides the film’s climactic set.) The show features elaborately framed stills from different episodes, together with displays of props and portions of the sets Barney built for the films. Like the epic movie and the really big show, the exhibition catalog is also huge -- 528 pages, detailing what seems like every frame of film produced by the artist, who’s barely 36.

Barney has designed vitrines to display the sculptural props and a number of his feathery, medical-style pencil drawings. This display device, with its anthropological overtones of sorting and classification and its religious aura of the reliquary, was hugely popular in the second half of the 1980s, especially among European artists. Barney was an undergraduate at Yale then, and his work relies on numerous period motifs: the morphing of gender and identity in Robert Gober’s queer sculpture, the ritual pageantry and art-object fetishism in Mike Kelly’s work, the photographic costume dramas of Cindy Sherman and more.

On a less exalted plane, Barney’s arch fantasy also recalls the vintage stagecraft of David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars meet Hiram Abiff at the Diamond Dogs Masonic Lodge -- so to speak.

This may explain why the presentation feels so dated. The Guggenheim’s great spiral ramp, partly covered by Barney in bright blue AstroTurf, blithely chews up the movie memorabilia.

The AstroTurf is intended to evoke the competitive aura of an athletic field, which is one of two main themes that run through Barney’s work. The other is fashion. Barney was a high school football star, and he put himself through college working as a model. Autobiography is a source, but it’s given a dizzying spin.

The “Cremaster” epic ends with the artist, dressed in a hilariously outrageous pink kilt and tall feathered hat, scaling the ramp’s spiral walls like a mountaineer on Everest. Why? Because it’s there. Along the way he encounters a line of Rockette-style dancers garbed as bunny rabbits doing high kicks, two downtown garage bands (Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law) wailing in front of a ragtag mosh pit, and a beautiful woman with crystal legs who suddenly transforms herself into a cheetah. (Aimee Mullins, a double amputee who is also an athlete and fashion model, seems to be Barney’s female alter ego.) At the top of the ramp, sculptor Richard Serra splashes molten Vaseline against a wall, exchanging his famous alchemical material, lead, for Barney’s trademark goo.

Make something eye-popping to look at, all this seems to say. And when you do, compete only against yourself. Such is the stuff of art.

“The Cremaster Cycle” is a creation myth. Every human culture has stories that try to explain its origins -- Greco-Roman tales of Titans emerging from chaos, the leech-child of Japanese Shinto, Christianity’s book of Genesis. Logic and narrative coherence are never essential ingredients. Awe and astonishment are. Barney manages some of that, but there’s a lot of tedium and imitative posturing, too.

The five “Cremaster” movies are pastiches of familiar genres -- musical, western, horror, gladiator -- and what better material than movies for fashioning a modern creation myth? Barney regards himself as a sculptor, and the time-space continuum being what it is, I’m ready to accept that a time-based medium like film can engage sculpture’s spatial dynamics.

Barney’s Industrial Age myth is rooted in biology. Cremaster is the name given to the muscle that retracts the testicles when responding to outside stimulation -- cold, fear, arousal, etc. In the womb, a moment of truth arrives for the gender-neutral fetus when its sexual organs rise to become ovaries or descend to become testicles. “The Cremaster Cycle” is a six-hour riff on the undifferentiated wonder of our aqueous origins before sex solidifies.

Not a bad conceit -- and not without consequence, either. The field is studded with land mines.

Take one of the more outlandish bits, a lengthy sequence in “Cremaster 3” in which five vintage Chrysler New Yorker Imperials engage in a raucous, tire-squealing, exhaust-filled demolition derby inside the lavish Art Deco lobby of New York’s Chrysler Building. (The slam-bam scene was actually shot on a set built in Queens.) Talk about athleticism dressed up in high-style fashion!

The chrome-laden cars pulverize one another, ending with a small, pathetic pile of crumpled metal. But the crash-and-smash episode, initially gleeful, slides from thrilling to interminable. Barney, like many avant-garde filmmakers, discards traditional narrative, which can indeed be coercive. Instead he uses outlandish imagery as imagination’s springboard. Scenes run on and on, to open up a space in which the audience can daydream.

To work, though, the hand of a genius editor is essential. Barney doesn’t have one. Daydreaming during the repetitive Chrysler crackup, I mostly marveled at how trite the choice of the world’s most phallic skyscraper is as a symbol of hyper-masculinity.

Barney exaggerates masculine and feminine forms throughout his work, often blending them to unexpected ends. The hyperbole extends to his choice of actors -- macho sculptor Serra (he plays Hiram Abiff, ostensible architect of Solomon’s temple); tough-guy writer Norman Mailer; uber-babe Ursula Andress, title character in the camp-classic movie, “She,” and a James Bond Venus who rose from the sea in “Dr. No.”

But Barney also has a bland affection for exhausted motifs and obvious genres, including creation mythology itself. Modern art was jump-started by artists who, in the sanguine face of a brand new 20th century, went in search of cultural origins to make anew -- Cezanne’s bathers in a new Arcadia; Picasso’s prehistoric women; Matisse’s nods to Giotto, father of the Renaissance. For them, the golden age lay in the future, not the past, and creation myths proliferated.

Barney’s gender-centered creation myth derives from Marcel Duchamp -- art’s most strip-mined source of the past 40 years. Duchamp’s famous window-like construction expressing the futilities and frustrations of sex, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-1923), is the Ur-object of post-1960s art. Barney is Duchamp on steroids: You loved the sculpture; now, see the movie!

Scholars have produced voluminous detailed interpretations of Duchamp’s enigmatic lovemaking machine, and Barney’s elaborate, testicular epic is likewise destined to provide dissertation fodder for decades’ worth of imaginatively cramped graduate students. (The catalog includes a 20-page “Cremaster” glossary, which starts with “anus-island,” runs through “Mormon Doctrine” and ends at “zombie.” As if decoding the arcana matters.)

When the Guggenheim show opened, local critics fell all over themselves taking credit for the artist’s discovery and promotion -- a spectacle that says more about a certain desperation amid the Manhattan art world’s lengthening doldrums than about Barney’s middling work.

Barney’s first solo exhibition was held at Stuart Regen Gallery in West Hollywood in 1991, and six quick months later the novice catapulted to a solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (collectors in that city had snapped up work from Regen). The high-flying contemporary art market having recently crashed, deep anxiety reigned. In a battered art scene, Barney’s instant-superstar career became its own creation myth.

Now, with the Guggenheim extravaganza, he’s being positioned for an even bigger role -- as the first great American artist of the new millennium. The only hitch is the work, which stands as the last gasp of the 20th century.

Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

‘The Cremaster Cycle’

When: “Cremaster 3,” Friday-May 22 and May 29; “Cremaster 1 and 2,” May 23-25; “Cremaster 4 and 5,” May 26-28

Where: Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A.

Contact: (310) 478-6379

Also

What: “Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle”

When: Saturday-Wednesday, 10 a.m.-5:45 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Ends June 11

Where: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,

1071 Fifth Ave., New York

Price: Adults, $15; seniors and students, $10; children younger than 12, free.

Contact: (212) 423-3500