CREMASTER RISING

Matt Wallin’s doc-in-progress of The Cremaster Cycle shows no fear

By Adrian MacDonald

The cremaster is the muscle that pulls the testicles up in cold temperatures, keeping them warm. It not only responds to temperature, but like a lizard brain, to fear.

San Francisco director Matt Wallin’s documentary-in-progress I Die Daily reveals the making of artist Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle. In the film, Barney says he simply thought the word “cremaster” sounded like the title of one of the horror movies he liked as a kid. The revelation is just one of many in store as Wallin prepares the first rough cut of his film this summer.

The Cremaster Cycle, completed in 2002, stands as perhaps the most ambitious cinematic project ever completed in the gallery art world. Created over a period of 7 years, the piece comprises 5 feature length films, each lavishly wrought with detailed sculpture and costumes, locations ranging from New York to Budapest to the Bonneville Salt Flats, and a deeply involved aesthetic mythology that led the New York Times to call Barney “the most important artist of his generation.”

The full Cremaster Cycle has never been released on DVD or become widely available theatrically, although bootleg copies exist. To raise money to make the film, Barney sold each installment of the piece to art collectors in limited editions of 10 master copies, before the films were completed. Each copy of the film is contained in an individual sculpted vitrine created by Barney and packed with unique objects meaningful within the film’s mythology. A typical theatrical screening of Cremaster, normally undertaken by museums, requires a rental fee of thousands of dollars and booking a year in advance.

This summer 911 Media Arts Center hosts an exhibition of work related to the unfinished I Die Daily, which documents Barney’s elaborate creative process and his strange history as the “golden child” of the New York art world. Some 6 years after the completion of Barney’s opus, Wallin has collected over 300 hours of footage covering a period of 10 years, stemming from his intimate involvement as Barney’s visual effects supervisor for the Cremaster films.

“The hardest thing is getting the documentary to fit the running time,” Wallin says. “I think sometimes I should make 5 documentaries there’s so much material.”

Wallin once worked as a special effects artist for George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, earning a six-figure salary, before he was exposed to the first two Cremaster films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1996. He was so affected by the piece that he wrote to Barney offering to do effects and computer graphics work. Barney accepted.

“I started doing computer graphics for him on the side, and that grew more involved,” Wallin says. By 1999, Wallin’s work with Barney became intense enough that he decided to leave his job, move to New York, and work with Barney full time, both shooting the documentary on a Sony PD150 and creating visual effects for the later installments of Cremaster.

He recalls at one point scouting a location in the spire of New York’s Chrysler Building, a central character in Cremaster 3, as the production crew considered the feasibility of turning the spire into a huge maypole. “The sun was going down, I’m sitting there with Matthew, and I thought, ‘I’m not making any money right now, I’m totally broke, but I’m doing something I’m really interested in.’ It felt like the right place. I was doing what I wanted to be doing.”

Barney’s work tends to alternately inspire and bewilder its viewers, the product of an extremely fertile but often cryptic imagination. Among other things, the artist is known for his stunning meteoric rise to the top of the New York art world, beginning in the 1980s when he began showing immediately out of undergrad in major galleries and appearing on the cover of national art magazines. His biography includes being the successful quarterback of his high school football team in Boise, a sports scholarship to Yale, a stint as a male model for J. Crew catalogs, and pre-med studies with the intent of becoming a plastic surgeon. Later, after becoming the toast of intellectual New York as an artist, he married music star Björk.

For Wallin, the documentary’s title I Die Daily speaks to the core of Barney’s creative process, and to many of the themes expressed in his work. “In the language of the Cremaster Cycle, dying daily refers to the killing off of one’s lower self,” he says. “It’s a metaphor for the act of creating something. As a creative person you risk failure every day. There’s something scary about it, and something liberating about it. If life is preparing for death, then dying daily is a good way of getting used to it.”

Wallin says the phrase also extends to the concept of hypertrophy—the building up of muscles by tearing them down through athletic training—which is a key theme for Barney. As an undergraduate at Yale, Barney’s first works involved setting up weights in an art studio such that he had to exert maximum effort to reach a canvas and make a few marks before being slammed to the floor.

“Dying daily is giving your all to create art,” Wallin says. “It’s that level of commitment and drive and, at some level, of fate. It took me a long time to understand what this work was all about. Hopefully I’ve been able to make it more tangible and clear in the film.”

In the most challenging moment in the making of the Cremaster Cycle, Wallin says Barney’s crew had a tiny window of 4-5 days to shoot Cremaster 3’s climactic sequence in the Guggenheim Museum. The 30-minute scene is known as “The Order” and is the only part of Cremaster that has ever been widely released on DVD.

“It was the most difficult shoot I’ve ever seen take place,” he says. “It was a feat of endurance and ambition and teamwork. It was totally amazing.” The museum had a show up at the time, and it had to deinstall the artwork one ramp at a time while Barney’s crew shot. Meanwhile, the museum had to remain open to the public. According to Wallin, the crew worked 110 hours in 5 days, sleeping for just an hour or two every night on the floor of the museum in full costume.

I Die Daily documents the final moments of the shoot, when the athletic Barney is at last exhausted after days of shooting scenes that involve him scaling the ramps of the Guggenheim like a rock climber. “He felt like rubber, he had no strength left, but the DP said they needed one more shot,” Wallin recounts. “Matthew backed away, and then he felt this crazy burst of energy and adrenaline. He did one more shot where he climbs up 3 or 4 levels.”

Another recurring theme in the Cremaster films and other Barney work is the human fetus in the first 7 weeks of pregnancy, before it has differentiated itself as a male or female. For Barney, this stage of gestation represents the potential of a creative idea before it is put into action.

Wallin says he himself has done the same with his footage for several years, never quite ready to release the final product to the world. “Pretty much every festival in the world I could ever want to get into has requested a screener,” he says. “I just keep saying I might not make it this year. It’s just such a massive amount of material, and I don’t want to hear later ‘it works better as a DVD extra.’ I want to make it cinematic, so that it tells a story, and resonates with the larger philosophy and metaphysical exploration in the telling of the film itself.”

In the end, he hopes the film will answer some of his own questions about the meaning of Barney’s art, and how a young artist could become so extraordinarily successful so quickly. “Was it blind luck, ambition, or some Machiavellian thing? Part of the film is getting to the bottom of that.”

And still another part is to show Barney as a human being. “He’s a great subject, he’s not difficult to draw out, like say if you were making a film about Dick Cheney,” Wallin says. “He’s a surprisingly regular person, who has chosen to work in art—big art—and he puts himself into it in a very generous fashion.”