Brunet's article takes a critical look into Matthew Barney's art film The Cremaster Cycle, focusing specifically on trauma from religious and sexual abuse. Brunet explains how artists are compelled to work through abuse by obsessively creating. "The artist, generally at first unaware of the cause, is driven by a sense of tension that nothing other than the creative act can seem to appease. But the void that trauma creates can never be filled, and the artist is driven ceaselessly to keep repeating himself" (Brunet,106). The lengthiness and imagery of Barney's The Cremaster Cycle, like repeated Vaseline usage, imply that Barney may have been a victim of sexual abuse. Barney's extensive art film may be an exploration of his own spiritual growth as he works through the trauma of painful religious and sexual experiences, rather than merely a enactment of the male reproductive cycle.
Brunet sees The Cremaster Cycle as a platform for understanding the evil dichotomy of people causing abuse and trauma under the guise of spiritual righteousness- specifically in Mormonism and Freemasonry. For example the religious ritual of "spinning," seen in Barney's film, is dually a method of child abuse or torture. Brunet hails Barney for the complexity in his art form and his understanding of the darker aspects of humanity. "The Cremaster Cycle could be a deep and convoluted struggle with a profound sense of trauma, even an aesthetically expressed accusation of a serious crime, enacted on a grand scale, which can tell us something about systems of control in the contemporary Western world"(Brunet,98).
What is the spiritual? Is it something external that we must let in? An untangible, subtle, prying from the ultimate good in the universe? Is it the pleading of a heart's deepest desires? Is the spirit something that must be cultivated and cared for? Is it the creative life energy within all that breathes? Is The Cremaster Cycle really a testament to Barney's tumultuous spiritual life or a bizarre and frivolous testament to the male reproductive cycle? All I know is that Barney may have made the film as means of dealing with trauma, but my experience in viewing the film was far from spiritual.
Brunet, Lynn. “Homage to Freemasonry or Indictment: The Cremaster Cycle.” Project Muse. 98-112. elearning.ua.edu
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Here is something new to me. In the past, the artist was some sort of interpreter of religious episodes, responsible through his work for dispersing a drastically important message to the public viewing the work. Then the artist was freed from the work of an interpreter and was allowed to create their own meaning to put into the work to give to the public, and was viewed as some sort of philosopher-artist. Then Barthes declared the artist to be dead, or rather silenced--no longer allowed to tell the public anything about their work or its meaning, while the public decides what it means to themselves. Here, though, the art is not even the subject. "The lengthiness and imagery of Barney's The Cremaster Cycle, like repeated Vaseline usage, imply that Barney may have been a victim of sexual abuse. Barney's extensive art film may be an exploration of his own spiritual growth as he works through the trauma of painful religious and sexual experiences..." (Brodie). The art is not being probed for some message or narrative that can touch the viewer, but it is being used as a tool to try and understand the artist. Is that just because the Cremaster series is so outrageous and crazy that people want to psychologically understand what could be going on in the mind of someone capable of conceiving it, or is the artist becoming the embodiment of something so alien to the public that their existence and mentality is more interesting than Art? I consider this choice to read the artist rather than the art to be rather foolish.
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