Matthew Barney/USA/2002; R4
Accent/Palm Pictures, NZ$49.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

MATTHEW BARNEY is my kind of artist. Well, sort of. A high-school football jock, an Abercrombie & Fitch commercial, a Hugo Boss endorsement, he's everything the art world should detest – and yet has critics and peers falling to their knees, either in glowing admiration, or from deep vein thrombosis. You see, Barney's most exclaimed work – the bulbous, 5-part Cremaster Cycle – weighs in at just under 7 hours in duration. When viewed back-to-back, with periodic breaks, that's almost 10 hours and one very raw behind.

Cremaster 3 alone represents 180 minutes in dead horses, molten-Vaseline and dental horror – the kind that makes both Dustin Hoffman and that poor kid from American History X look like victims of a mere tooth ache. This goes some way to explaining the image of Barney, tartan-clad and with a mouthful of bloody cloth on the cover of The Order – an interactive splicing of Cremaster 3's "choric interlude", complete with multi-angles, soundtrack off-cuts and an audio commentary. Likely to be the only ever licensed release of a Cremaster film to DVD, it serves as the perfect introduction to Barney's audacious, wholly esoteric universe.

Part of Barney's vision, perhaps, is that his work remains just that: abstruse, guarded, and strangely aloof. The course of The Order needn't be elaborated on for this very reason, but for those looking to orient themselves, the narrative is something of a fraternal initiation in itself. In Cremaster 3, the crux of the film is waged between two characters: The Architect (sculptor Richard Serra), and the Entered Apprentice (Barney), both of whom are constructing an unfinished Chrysler Building in New York. Thrust forward by the codes of Freemasonry, the story begins at the foot of the tower and ascends gradually to the top – at which point the film transforms into a sort of phantasmagorical game show, dictating that the Entered Apprentice must achieve Masonic redemption via five obstacles on each level of the Guggenheim's spiraling rotunda. From here, Barney has refashioned the sequence, condensing it down into a half-hour vortex of Rainbow Girl scouts, mosh pits, cabor tossing and Aimee Mullins.

Whether approached conceptually or literally, The Order probably won't mean a hell of a lot to the unprimed eye. The allegorical dots contained on each level (or degrees) of the Guggenheim won't connect either, unless absorbed at the end of the Cycle. But as a bizarre, ephemeral piece of cinema, there's something undeniably seductive about it – its density of imagery alone the stuff that dreams (and nightmares) are made of. The Cycle's tantalising allure is also down as much to its elusiveness; rationed to art institutions and select theatres, the films are often as unreachable as they are indefinable. Now as a mass-production of "art", Barney's reasons seem duplicitous, but like the cult of DVD itself, his work (be it a portion of) is at once globally accessible. And as a chiseled jawbone of a blue-eyed, all-American athlete, with Yale credentials and a baby girl by way of Björk, it's Barney himself who symbolises this clutch between commerce and art best. Like a linebacker-turned-conceptual artist, the very notion is laughable, yet for better or worse, in greater need.


AS A package, the DVD's the most blaring feature seems to be its cover, adorned with the New York Times' lofty declaration that Barney is "the most important artist of his generation." Ballooning egos aside, the film is presented in a lush 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, accompanied by DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks that do well to enhance Jonathan Bepler's specially remixed score for The Order.

For extras, Barney's audio commentary is a prime inclusion. At only 30-minutes in duration, he discusses key influences and context, yet keeps the viewer at arm's length, as if to maintain as much of hidden meaning as possible. In addition, a multi-angle feature brings the film up to apparently 2 hours; in reality, it's essentially an option that allows users to view multiple levels of the The Order simultaneously, with much of the added content seemingly taken from the footage that made Cremaster 3 in full. Further more, 10 new remixes of music by Agnostic Front and Murphy's Law are provided on the disc, with the two groups featuring as dueling hardcore metal bands (complete with mosh pit) on the Guggenheim's second level.

Finally, a trailer for the Cremaster Cycle rounds off the disc.