Amongst the lapiths and centaurs, the gods and men, we find footballers, boy-racers and post-Freudian gladiators playing out an ancient gameplan in the Elysian fields of art.— Adrian Searle, Independent
In the Artangel Collection
Cremaster 4 is the first work from Matthew Barney's acclaimed five-film odyssey, The Cremaster Cycle. Acclaimed as one of the most ambitious artist's films of its time, the series was completed in 2002. Cremaster 4 is a single screen film that has been presented in cinemas, galleries and museums.
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The Cremaster Cycle screened in Brixton
As an epic odyssey through the fagged-out remains of modern American mythology, the cycle traverses some of the same imaginative zones as David Lynch and David Cronenberg, the latter director being as fascinated as Barney by prosthetics, mutability and impish perversion. – Sukhdev Sandhu, The Telegraph, 31 October 2002
Matthew Barney finished The Cremaster Cycle in 2002: It was the most debated and most celebrated film project by a contemporary artist that decade and so, in the same year they were completed, Artangel presented all five of the films, in sequence and for the first time, at Brixton's Ritzy Picturehouse Cinema 25 October – 14 November 2002. Stretching from Barney's home town football stadium in Boise, Idaho, to its tragic climax in the Budapest State Opera House, via the Salt Flats of Utah and the TT course in the Isle of Man, The Cremaster Cycle offered a unique, unparalleled cinematic experience.
Alongside the only UK screenings of Cremaster 3 (the final film to be made), the Ritzy cinema also hosted Cremaster Field, a new sculpture by Barney made on site with ten tons of Vaseline and a pentagram of plasma screens. There is now a specific colour of Vaseline known as Artangel 01.
Both screenings and sculpture coincided with Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition of the films, related sculpture, photographs and drawings that toured from the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris to the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
- Cremaster 4 (1994), 41 minutes
- Cremaster 1 (1995), 42 minutes
- Cremaster 5 (1997), 55 minutes
- Cremaster 2 (1999), 80 minutes
- Cremaster 3 (2002), 178 minutes
Production still from Cremaster 4 showing two motorcycle sidecar teams, both played by pairs of brothers. The team yellow took the clockwise path around the island, beginning in the lowlands and then ascending into the mountain, the blue, descending team goes in the opposite direction. Photograph: Michael James O'Brien © Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney is an American artist who works in performance, film, sculpture and drawing.
In Cremaster 4, the work produced by Artangel, Barney himself played the Loughton Candidate, an immaculately dressed satyr who tap dances and writhes though the underwater canals of the Isle of Man while three fairies picnic on the grass above. The Loughton Ram is a native species of the Isle of Man which has two pairs of horns, one that rises and one that grows downwards.
Barney has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center and the Serpentine Gallery in London, as well as regularly showing as part of group exhibitions internationally since graduating from Yale University in 1989. He was awarded the Europa 2000 Prize, the Hugo Boss Award in 1996, the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video in 1999, the Glen Dimplex Award from the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2001 and the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award, 54th San Francisco International Film Festival in 2011.
Images: Matthew Barney playing the Loughton Candidate in Cremaster 4 (left) Production still. Photograph: Michael James O'Brien; (above) still from Cremaster 4. Both images © Matthew Barney
Queen’s Pier, two sidecar race teams, female body builders and a Loaghtan sheep are set to feature in a film being shot in the Isle of Man. And what's more, as part of the film, the island itself will turn into a body. — Paul Speller, Isle of Man Examiner, 15 February 1994
Perfect body language. — Nicola Barker, the Observer Review, 30 April 1995
Images of genitality and nongenitality dominate the work: at the beginning of the film Barney reveals two stumps on his head where he once had horns; and the gifts of the faeries are notably testicular (at one point they momentarily fit one of the sidecars with a well-endowed wheel). — Mark Sladen, Art Monthly, volume 1, issue 187, June 1995
His works are rituals and scenes of psychic and sexual conflict, of private yearnings and desires. Amongst the lapiths and centaurs, the gods and men, we find footballers, boy-racers and post-Freudian gladiators playing out an ancient gameplan in the Elysian fields of art. — Adrian Searle, The Independent, 29 April 1995
Credits
Commissioned and produced by Artangel and Matthew Barney in association with Foundation Cartier and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery.
Artangel is generously supported by the private patronage of The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels, Guardian Angels and The Company of Angels.
