Art: Hallucinatory Acts

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The weird pleasure of watching Barney's art is seeing whatever improbable carnival comes next. If you're willing to spend the time to untie his Gordian knot of symbolic acts and images--and they do indeed unknot--you'll find a maniacal, systematic and deeply imagined vision of a world as strangely alternate as Lewis Carroll's in Through the Looking Glass. If you dig into the swelling body of criticism about Barney, knowing references repeat themselves, from Joseph Beuys, the late German master of performance art and social spectacles, to video pioneer Vito Acconci to the powerful minimalist sculptor Richard Serra--each of whom dramatically reshaped the artistic landscape. Barney follows, doing what all visionary artists do: he creates a parallel universe that reflects something wholly novel about our own, though through a far narrower lens. His obsession, in his own words, is "to try and find a space that's free; to find that moment between formlessness and form before things get defined."

Divining this in Barney's art, you can begin with the word cremaster. The cremaster muscle pulls the testicles up into the body and is an indicator in the fetus of male gender. Everything in the "Cremaster" series swirls dizzily from there: for him, biological destiny is a prison. Escape from it is a heroic act--in fact, a spiritual right. Thus his transmogrified, half-human creatures elsewhere; his fixation on Houdini, the impossibly malleable escape artist; and now his Gilmore, who spent the better part of his adult life in prison, only to be released into the world, where he killed and was executed by his own demand in what he imagined was a transformative act of blood atonement.

It is hard to believe, watching a good deal of the freakish imagery in Cremaster 2, that Barney is serious about bees morphing into male bodies oozing sexually with honey; about a seance medium whose face is pierced with rivets. But that is one of the most intriguing things about him: in an age of slick ironists cool beyond belief, Barney is a dead-earnest symbolist plummeting through the rabbit hole of his own nutty logic. You may not get everything that you see. And certainly you may not enjoy it. But it fascinates all the way down.