Word: barneys
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From 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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...More Barney than Bacchus, last year’s Springfest brought unprecedented crowds to the MAC quadrangle to celebrate the coming of spring. Traditionally, the Undergraduate Council had been solely in charge of planning and funding this event for undergraduates. But last year, the event found a new sponsor in the office of University President Lawrence H. Summers...