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Abstract:
It is now well over a decade since the artist Matthew Barney's epic work the Cremaster Cycle was completed. This essay returns to the post-human becomings of man that populate Barney's elaborately cross-referenced, aesthetic pluriverse, in particular addressing how the man-form labours amidst and on his environment-worlds, inclusive of the architectural augmentations that assist in the production of such worlds. Revisiting Barney's Cremaster Cycle now offers the opportunity to ask what becomes of the exclusionary and exhaustive world-making performances of the Anthrop once he has placed extreme stress on himself and his mental, social and environmental ecologies, so that any mutual support system is brought to the threshold of exhaustion.
Notes
1 On the theme of “extinction” see Claire Colebrook's double volume entitled Essays on Extinction: Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman; idem, Sex after Life.
2 The Cremaster Cycle was first shown in its entirely at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 6 June–1 Sept. 2002, and then at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 10 Oct. 2002–5 Jan. 2003, and finally at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 14 Feb.–11 May 2003. See Matthew Barney: Cremaster Cycle (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2002) opening publication details page (n. pag.).
3 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJfI1LRK0tc> (accessed 6 Jan. 2015).
4 Spector explains that the five cycles of the Cremaster imagine the possibility of equilibrium and symmetry between differences or opposing parties, only to result in failure: “the underlying theme of a system in conflict with itself to remain undifferentiated, when all determining factors point toward differentiation, informs the Cremaster project as a whole” (Spector 18).
5 Spector wrote a thorough catalogue essay for Barney's Cremaster Cycle, and explains that it “has at least two sets of beginnings, at least two endings, and many more points of entry. It is a polymorphous organism of an artwork, continuously shifting guises and following its own eccentric set of rules.” Reference is made briefly to the work of Deleuze near the conclusion of her essay, but is not explored in any depth (Spector 4).
6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 3–6.
7 Caillois 150. See also Verwoert.
8 See Gilles Deleuze/Leibniz Cours Vincennes, 15 Apr. 1980, available <http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=50&groupe=Leibniz&langue=2> (accessed 4 Sept. 2012).
9 See Barney's diagram in Matthew Barney: Cremaster Cycle 301.
10 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 58.
11 Ibid. 32.
12 Ibid. 60.
13 Ibid.
14 Spector 5.
15 Carrougues constructs what he calls a “complete series” of bachelor machines, citing examples that include Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, also known as the Large Glass; Kafka's In the Penal Colony; Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus; Lautréamont's Chants of Maldorer, and its famous formula “as beautiful as the chance encounter between a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”; and Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum. See Carrougues, “Directions for Use” 21–38. See also idem, Les Machines célibataire; Szeemann and Clair 21.
16 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 31.
17 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 18.
18 Jardine 153.
19 Koolhaas describes a ficto-critical architectural construction that is a floating swimming pool, a displaced body of water paradoxically supported amidst a larger, oceanic water body. The pool has been constructed by Russian constructivists who, feeling disillusioned with the ossification of the revolutionary project in Russia, use the floating swimming pool as a vehicle of escape. They have discovered that if they swim towards the place they hope to escape from, Russia, then the pool will move inexorably towards their desired destination, that is, America, and more specifically, New York. As Koolhaas explains: “they had to swim away from where they wanted to go, toward what they wanted to get away from” (308). When, after forty long years they finally arrive at their desired destination, their swimsuits in tatters, they find that New York has come to resemble characteristics of the place they had hoped to escape. Their ficto-critical narrative as imaginary architectural construction demonstrates the forestalled consummation and desiring production that is characteristic of the bachelor machine (Koolhaas).
20 Certeau explains that a celibatory or bachelor machine is an apparatus that is built around an internal difference (for instance, between the sexes) and is composed of interconnected systems; it accumulates inscriptions, and circulates backwards during the night and forwards during the day, and produces energy through this movement (de Certeau 157).
21 Le Bot et al. See also Szeemann and Clair 21.
22 Spector 5–6.
23 Barney qtd in Spector 6.
24 Spector 5–6.
25 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 110.
26 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 17.
27 Bateson's expanded definition of ecology is manifested in his insistence that the basic unit of survival must be considered as a combination of “organism plus environment” (Bateson 459, 460).
28 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 110.
29
It is only by breaking open the circle, as in the case of the Möbius strip, by unfolding and untwisting it, that the dimension of sense appears for itself, in its irreducibility, and also in its genetic power as it animates an a priori internal model of the proposition. (Deleuze, Logic of Sense 20)
30 See Hughes.
31 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 177.
32 Ibid.
33 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 20.
34 Conley 133.
35 Ibid. 130.
36 Deleuze writes:
We must take quite literally the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides: he is a composition appearing only between two others, a classical past that never knew him and a future that will no longer know him. (Deleuze, Foucault 89)
37 Bennett 345–47.
38 Spector 4.
39 Von Osten 226–27.
40 Ibid. 227.
41 Scott Brown 261.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 97.
43 Frampton 188.
44 Sloterdijk 63–76.
45 See Lambert 128–52.
46 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 89.
47 Spector 23.
48 See Searle.