Summer is the time when a young man's thoughts turn to metafictional devices. And no less fine a young man than Julian Sanchez is puzzling over one of Richard Powers's literary strategies. Sanchez writes:
[Powers] routinely alludes to a familiar company or institution, making it clear beyond any doubt which he's referring to, but then either scrupulously and pointedly avoids naming it, such that the absence of the name almost becomes a distracting presence itself, or else he gives it a phony name.I've never read any of Powers's work, so I can't say anything about that. For what it's worth, the author chimes in and largely consents to Sanchez's reading.
Sanchez's prompt launched my own flight of fancy: on Matthew Barney. Barney's take on brands might be the inverse of Powers's. According to Sanchez (and the author), Powers provides the reader with the context to situate a fictional institution within the world in which the reader lives; that world, the real world, runs parallel to the world Powers creates, if I understand what they're getting at.
Barney, on the other hand, presents brand symbols without any context—in inappropriate contexts, even. And his world is magical, to say the least.
Matthew Barney, Cremaster 1, 1996.Take Cremaster 1: How does the Goodyear blimp fit into a film about zygotic gender determination, featuring a Busby Berkeley musical staged on Boise's Bronco Stadium? In the narrative, the twin blimps are ovaries; inside each, a character (named Goodyear) coexists. (Right, in both of them. What'd I say? Magic.) Goodyear fiddles with some grapes, arranging them in various patterns. In one blimp, the grapes are red, and in the other, they're white. Meanwhile, the kick line on the field marches in the shapes dictated by the grape arrangements. It's a gradual but tremendous sculptural process—the magical miracle of life, you see.
Ovaries, okay—but why Goodyear blimps? It's tempting to consider this decision like any other in his series—as layered and oblique. If I consider the Goodyear brand, I might think expansively about vulcanized rubber and Hephaestus (god of sculpture, you know). But I think that when Barney selects a brand symbol, it is irreducibly that symbol, in order to open up different schedules of meaning in an object. Sometimes a blimp is just a blimp.
And these blimps are there to be Goodyear blimps. They hover over the football field; so does Barney's camera, as he reproduces Busby Berkeley's soaring, signature shots. Barney's thinking about framing, and how he can use film to develop his sculptural ideas. Inside the blimps—with the girl and the grapes—he's recording a narrative that is fundamental, microscopic, and subcellular. But outside—well, it doesn't get much bigger than a dancing chorus broadcast via the aerial blimp cam.
So the brand-name blimps have a place in the narrative, but they're also there because they line up vertically with other elements in the movie that are about film and not just a part of Barney's plot.
"Part of the point is to stop and slow readers, to make them look again", says Powers over at Sanchez's lounge. Powers doesn't want readers forgetting that they're not in the real world. Barney doesn't need to worry about this—but he is clear about the fact that he's working with cinema in a particular way.
Posted by Kriston at August 8, 2007 3:47 PMWhat other choice was there? MetLife? Goodyear blimps are famous for covering football games. I don't see a deeper meaning. You'd have a better case if Matt used more brand names in his other films.
Posted by: Henry at August 9, 2007 8:11 PMThere was the choice not to use the blimp. But hey, I don't see a deeper meaning, either. It's a structural thing that I see: about cameras, creation, and significant developmental stages in Barney and his work. I argue that it's not really about football but about cameras—hence the soaring Busby Berkeley angles. And he returns to the skies with helicopters in C2.
Barney has used other commercial imagery in his work, but I only tackled the one example. In fact I wrote but deleted a long sidebar about the lovingly poured Guinness in C3. (Sorry, but I don't feel like returning to it just this second.)
Posted by: Kriston at August 10, 2007 4:59 PMBut then, why is it in a football stadium? Does the location add anything structural, conceptual or visual? I think it's just a place he used to play himself, and he stuck to what's familiar. I could just be a flashback to the time he got smacked flat on his ass by a defensive lineman and hit his head on the turf.
He might have chosen the blimps first -- big floating ovaries and all that -- then contextualized them in a place someone would associate with blimps. Or maybe Goodyear donated the blimps as corporate sponsorhip and he couldn't say no.
If you want a deeper meaning for the Guinness, I'd suggest searching no further than somewhere that you might find a combination of potatoes, kilts, and people whose surnames are Barney. Keep posting stuff about C1-5 if you've got it.
Posted by: Henry at August 10, 2007 6:34 PMCremaster commercial-references:
Chrysler (building and Imperial, the car)
Guggenheim
Guinness*
Goodyear
Prada (C2 shoes)
Ford (1966 mustang x2 C2)
Henry, I think Barney works in the football stadium as Cremaster 1 is the first film after Drawing Restraint (numerically, not chornoligically) a series that, for the artist, connected resistance in art making (medium against canvas) and resistance in building one's body through exercise. The football field is also an orchestrated place (playbooks, refs) that gives way to chaos, in the same way a Busby musical (or the Roxette's in C3) spirals from choreographed beginnings to fountains spewing and dancers jumping.
* Disclaimer, I want a cremaster-logo shaped beer foam shaper really bad.
Posted by: adrian at August 12, 2007 7:52 PMI dunno. Interesting stuff, and I definitely see your point, but I'm still not convinced. I think there are more commercial references in an average mystery novel. (I got back in my old Ford and drove down to the Shell station to get myself a Dr Pepper near where the old Woolsorth's used to be.)
Barney's Mustangs are historical reference to the cars Gilmore and his girlfriend drove. Guinness simply extends the Celtic theme (potatoes, kilts, rock-throwing Giants, the Isle of Man). The Chrysler cars are just a rhyme for the Chrysler Building, which is the more instrumental element. Prada was a product placement (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0214605/combined). Maybe Barb Gladstone just wanted to score some new shoes.
But at the end of the day I just don't think Barney is either conceptually coherent or intellectually serious. He has visual brilliance and I'll always love the Cremaster films, but I'm not going to pick the guy to be my thesis advisor. If someone sees anything coherent in this reply in a Tate Magazine interview, they're better than I (http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue2/barney.htm).
HUO: Why in Cremaster 3 did you choose the Chrysler Building in New York as your principal location?
MB: A number of reasons. One, that it is the corporate headquarters of a maker of vehicles. And two, that it lends itself to other aspects in the project, where a vehicle is necessary to move the narrative across the landscape or to connect one story to another, almost as if the entire project was about UPS, the United Parcel Service! It would give the project a colour, brown, and an air fleet and a ground fleet that would carry the story from one location to the next. Each location could still have its own logic and story, but there would be a company in place to move it. The Chrysler Building satisfies those interests and it is also a reflector, in that it sits between the two halves of the story. The piece is set in 1929-30, when the Chrysler Building was constructed, and relates somewhat to the conflict between the stone-masons' union and the metalworkers' union. The story moves through the different floors of the building as it is being constructed, towards the top, which is effectively a transmitter. From there it moves into a space that is not really set in time. This scene was shot in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum on the different levels and feels almost like a video game. Many of the actors and characters in earlier parts of Cremaster 3 appear in this game. There are five levels, which take on five different allegories of the five Cremaster chapters [films]. Once that transmission is finished, the story is transported back to the Irish Sea, where Cremaster 3 begins, and gets involved in old creation myths of the Isle of Man, between a giant in Scotland and a giant in Ireland. We tried to shoot those scenes like a fairytale.
Oh stop.
Frankly I think Richard Serra is the biggest commercial reference in the whole series.
Posted by: Henry at August 13, 2007 12:29 PM
