The Strange Sensation

Fro

m the time he first came at us 12 years ago, Matthew Barney has been the great hope of an art world always looking for hope. By now, at 36, it's routine for him to be called the best artist of his generation. Certainly, there's a captivating ambition to his Cremaster cycle, five films totaling seven hours that may have no more than 12 lines of spoken dialogue but are otherwise very full of luscious, baffling imagery — a marching band forming the outlines of reproductive organs — and hit-or-miss celebrities: Ursula Andress, Norman Mailer, Barney himself and the fashion model Aimee Mullins, who is a double amputee. At one point in Cremaster 3 she attaches complicated leg devices that allow her to cut potatoes with her prosthetic feet. You can't tell me that's not art.

Barney sees all of what he produces as both stand-alone works and pieces of his never-ending puzzle. To an art world eager for the next new movement, he's like a one-man ism. Or is he? The Guggenheim Museum in New York City is giving him the largest show of his already formidable career. The museum's spiraling dome has been made over into a recondite theme-park pavilion, filled with banners, video screens, Barney's sculptures and other artifacts of the Cremaster series. In the downstairs auditorium the films play nonstop. He has always wanted everything to be seen together. Here it is.

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And? If nothing else, Barney will forever be remembered as the man who taught us the word cremaster, which is the muscle that raises or lowers the testicles in response to warmth, cold or whatever other stimuli. His great preoccupation is the stage of fetal development during the first eight weeks of gestation, when the embryo has not yet been differentiated as male or female. As obsessions go, this might not be one you would expect from a former high school football player from Boise, Idaho. But to him this stage represents a time of pure potential. The descent of the testicles in the male fetus is a moment to be regretted. He made peace with his own anatomy sufficiently to father an infant girl last October by Bjork, the Icelandic pop star. That child is guaranteed an interesting life.

The films have their moments of pure fascination. The almost erotic demolition derby in Cremaster 3--four sedans pulverize a mint-condition vintage black roadster in the lobby of the Chrysler building — is a scene of auto-Oedipal aggression that will stay with me for a long time. Barney reminds you sometimes of a sinister voluptuary. (That's a compliment.) At other times he seems more like a gee-whiz mythomaniac. (That's not.) There are lustrous episodes all through his films, amid stretches of state-of-the-art art boredom and Surrealist touches that remind you that Surrealism can be the last refuge of scoundrels.

And the sculpture? The materials include beaver felt, cast tapioca and his signature substance, petroleum jelly. Barney may be to Vaseline what Michelangelo was to Carrara marble. Barney piles it, molds it and channels it down the spiral ramps of the Guggenheim. Then there is The Cloud Club, which, according to the wall card, consists of a piano outfitted with "black lip mother of pearl, green abalone [and] quarterbred Honduras mahogany," as if it were some comically overconceived menu item. All this strenuous delectation of materials does not quite hide the fact that this is Surrealist pastiche or that a lot of his sculptural work has no power independent of the films. There are moments when this show feels like the intelligentsia's version of last year's traveling Star Wars exhibition, with the difference that Darth Vader's helmet actually sort of gets to you.

Is Barney's work a new beginning for a new century? It feels more like a very energetic longing for a beginning, in which all kinds of imagery have been put to the service of one man's intricate fantasy of return to the womb. Something lovely and exasperating is forever in formation there. Will he ever give birth?