Aryan Kaganof | 1995 | 23min 11sec. | 16mm | Netherlands |
Matthew Barney: Yes, what I said was that, at this point at least, I’m much more interested in thinking about these projects as sculpture… I believe that Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1 are both sculptures and I think that they’re starting to take on some of the language of film in a more conscious way, but I guess that the threshold lies in some kind of character development and in some kind of value system of what it means to make a sculpture or to make a form that doesn’t have that kind of pressure to resolve itself and in fact, when it does it dies, as a form. In that way the characters and the videos aren’t about…, in a typically narrative fashion. I think that they stop themselves, they’re doing their jobs, basically, within the world today, they have a job to do and they execute it. Certain characters have more will than others. But in a certain case, none of them have any will at all. They simply do, and… Yeah, on the other hand, narrative interests me, in a way that it pulls me further and further away from the limitations of making sculpture. In terms of feeling free to lie versus constantly dealing with gravity, and always having to tell the truth, and somehow allowing the work to become more narrative, and thinking more about storytelling is in that way really liberating.
I think the characters are aspects of a larger organism that’s been in a kind of a growth process for probably about eight years, and in that way, those certain characters are constantly in conflict with one another. Yet they describe the same organism. I mean, they’re from piece to piece as well as within a single project. This was one of the reasons for making an exhibition like this and making a pageant like we did and this notion of bringing together unlikely combinations of characters which are really likely in terms of the body of work being the single organism.
The character Goodyear (Cremaster 1, red.) was in the state of the reproductive track before the point of differentiation and the opening of the piece has the two blimps hovering over the top of the goal post at the end of the football stadium. In that way define the drawing of the reproductive track that hadn’t differentiated itself yet. The air hostesses within the blimps and the blimps themselves were obligated to do their jobs, which was to descend and to define themselves, and to grow. In that way, Goodyear was in conflict with the blimps that she inhabited, so she was in way kind of a regressive, almost a regressive virus inside this organism. But very much a part of it. So Goodyear’s projection becomes the field of choir, who execute the choreography of Goodyear, which again ends in the drawing of the reproductive track before the point of differentiation.
Well, I suppose that if the narrative is pared down and distilled down to its purest form I think what we’re really talking about are very simple notions of equilibrium, or more specifically, the impossibility for equilibrium and pure freedom. So in that way yes, as representations no, they’re not. I don’t consider them representational.
keep reading aryan kaganof's interview with matthew barney here: kaganof.com/kagablog/2006/05/16/the-matthew-barney-interview/#comments