‘If the race itself is a competition ... so, in a manner of speaking, have been all the competitions in tall buildings from the time when Pharaoh vied with Pharaoh matching tomb against tomb, to the pious rivalry of the cathedral builders, each seeking to raise a pointed arch or a spire nearer to God’ H.I. Brock, ‘New peaks in tall Manhattan’s range’New York Times Magazine, 9 February 1930
In Greek mythology hubris, or overweening
pride, was the moment when mortals, demonstrating their contempt for the
limits governing human action, over-reached themselves and were subsequently
chastised. For example, Xerxes was guilty of hubris when he constructed a
bridge of ships that stretched across the Hellespont, an act that flaunted
the divine order of things by turning sea into land. This compulsion to
transcend certain conditions – be they environmental, biological, or
psychological – is precisely that which prompts the actions, and in some
cases ensuing downfall, of the main characters in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster
3, the final instalment in his epic Cremaster cycle.
Set largely in the Chrysler Building in New York, Cremaster 3 conjures up a
world inhabited by mobsters, ‘broads’, Masonic circles, and the mostly Irish
immigrant workforce that constructed the building. Designed and finally
completed in 1930 by the architect Wilhelm van Alen, the legends behind the
construction of the Chrysler Building also provide Barney with a conceptual
seam within which to develop his own concern: specifically, the unleashing
and harnessing of hubris. Prior to finishing the building, for example, van
Alen procured a number of permits which allowed him to add a 90-foot
stainless steel spire, secretly constructed within the building itself, and
thus establish the Chrysler Building as the world’s tallest. This act of
hubris was dealt a revealingly swift blow by the completion of the Empire
State Building a few months later.
The two main characters in Cremaster 3, the Entered Apprentice and the Architect, are played by Barney and Richard Serra respectively. Both commit similarly audacious acts of hubris and both are duly punished. Confined in one of the building’s lifts, the Entered Apprentice moulds an ashlar, a symmetrically hewn stone used in Masonic ritual to symbolise moral rectitude and correctness. However, by moulding rather than sculpting the ashlar, he effectively compromises not only his own apprenticeship but the integrity of the building itself. For this display of hubris he is ceremoniously restrained and has his teeth smashed out. These teeth will later be replaced by the Architect, a commanding figure who goes by the name Hiram Abiff, the supposed architect of Solomon’s Temple – a temple which, crucially, remained unfinished. It is, of course, no coincidence that the part of the Architect is played by Richard Serra, an artist not known for the modesty of his own constructions. Lest we forget, it was Serra’s own monumental Tilted Arc (1981), erected in the Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, that was infamously destroyed by a government-funded body in 1989.
The Chrysler Building not only provides Cremaster 3 with a symbolic and allegorical context, but also functions as a structuring device for the film’s narrative development. After a brief prologue set on the Giants Causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland, we find ourselves in the building’s foundations where a figure is unearthed and carried by pall-bearers up to the magnificent Art Deco lobby of the Chrysler Building. This emaciated and otherworldly figure is secured in the back seat of a 1930s Chrysler Imperial New Yorker; the entire car is then compressed into a compact metal square by five 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperials (the latter also being Barney’s birth date). This metal ‘plug’ becomes the aforementioned, if somewhat unorthodox, denture of the Entered Apprentice, its insertion resulting in the immediate prolapse of his rectum. This purgative act implies both punishment and redemption at one and the same time. That the figure in the car is a reborn Gary Gilmore – the protagonist of Cremaster 2 – would seem to suggest that Cremaster 3 represents a rite of passage, so to speak, from one state to another, and the Entered Apprentice would appear to be the conduit for such a transformation, being both entered physically and also entering into some other, perhaps more exalted, state.
The allusion to ascension and transcendence is furthered by the Entered Apprentice’s audacious negotiation of the building’s innards after his dental restructuring. Following a slapstick encounter with an accident-prone barman in the aptly named Cloud Club on one of the uppermost floors of the building, he finally enters the structure’s inner sanctum. There, in a scene that directly echoes van Alen’s secretly constructed spire, Abiff is shaping two towers. Standing astride these towers, festooned with green, white and orange maypole ribbons that unfurl beyond the spire, Abiff becomes one with the building: a condition that is no doubt his innermost desire.
At this pivotal point in the film, Barney engages in a form of visual transcendence as we abruptly leave behind the vertiginous heights of the Chrysler Building and move to the curvaceous, tiered interior of the Guggenheim Museum. Here in the foyer the Entered Apprentice re-emerges as a frenetic rock-climber and proceeds to scale the museum’s five tiers, each of which has been decked out with the colours and motifs of the five separate Cremaster films. This section of the film is a veritable tour de force, affording an opportunity to view the breadth of Barney’s overall conceptualisation of the Cremaster cycle from the choreography of Cremaster 1, the ascendant violence of Cremaster 2, the onward and yet descending rush of Cremaster 4 and the poignant dénouement of Cremaster 5.
Concerned with its own hermetic cosmography, as is the whole of the Cremaster cycle, Cremaster 3 is both the cycle’s fulcrum and a Janus-faced swivel-mirror that references what has occurred in episodes 1 and 2 and simultaneously anticipates what is yet to happen in 4 and 5. Its characters, moreover, refer us through one figure – whether historical, mythological or metaphorical – to another figure that, in turn, refers us to yet another, all of whom share an affiliation with Barney’s idiosyncratic system of references.
Returning to the upper echelons of the Chrysler Building, the Entered Apprentice resumes his former role and ritually murders the Architect – reprisal for the latter’s hubris and, no doubt, the fulfilment of the axiom that the apprentice must one day usurp the master. The Apprentice is, in turn, impaled by the spire of the building, his head cleft in two: an act which nonetheless symbolically unites him with the building, which, like Solomon’s Temple, will remain unfinished.
In keeping with Barney’s interest in interstitial and indeterminate states, the film’s conclusion is both an epilogue and a prologue. Reprising the opening scenes, we return to the Giants Causeway where the figure of Finn MacCumhaill – a third-century quasi-historical figure in Irish mythology who is purported to have constructed the Causeway – is seen surveying his domain. The Giants Causeway, a natural result of the stresses and pressures that result from the cooling of lava flows, returns us to another of Barney’s metaphorical concerns – namely, hypertrophy and the effects of gravity, heat and pressure upon the body or, as in this case, a particular landscape. The mythological and the archaeological come together here in a series of interlocking ideas and allusions that posit the landscape as evidence of what has come before, or what is yet to happen. Incensed by the destruction of the Causeway by his Scottish enemy Fingal, legend has it that MacCumhaill cast a gigantic sod of earth out to sea in the vain hope of killing him. The sod missed but thereafter became the Isle of Man, the stepping stone not only between Ireland and England, but between Cremaster 3 and Cremaster 4, the Isle of Man being the latter film’s location.
Containing no dialogue as such and at over three hours long, Cremaster 3 is not only an exploration of the notion of hubris, but an act of hubris in its own right. Moreover, given that these films were made out of chronological order over an eight-year period, it would appear to be tempting fate to put them together into a cohesive, if highly discursive, whole. Through the exercise of an arch sense of both artistic restraint and excess, Barney has, nonetheless, managed to do exactly that, capping an eight-year project with a film that functions both as a point of entry to the Cremaster cycle and a fitting ending to an endeavour that could be seen to be every bit as hubristic as those that Hiram Abiff, the Entered Apprentice, or Wilhelm van Alen embarked upon.
Anthony Downey is currently completing his PhD at Goldsmiths College, London, and is the Programme Director on the part-time MA (Contemporary Art) at Sotheby’s Institute, London