“A lot of these angles...are really about trying to
mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene,
to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.”
“I've always thought of the project as a sort of sexually
driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer
of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by
hunger or anything like that.”
"Biological systems are really useful to look at. Literal
systems that exist have their own sets of logic and their
own sorts of pressures and conflicts."
“CREMASTER 3”—on
location at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY
ART:21:
How close does the filming process
follow the pre-written script and storyboards for "CREMASTER
3?"
BARNEY:
It depends. You've seen the
way the storyboard is structured and in certain cases it follows
how a real storyboard would be drawn. If there's a detail
of something we're shooting that needs to tell a story itself,
those tend to be drawn. Bigger,
narrative
situations are really just organized as written lists. They're
scheduled by camera setup in cases like this where the camera
car was there for a day, so we covered everything we could
from the car. A lot of these angles—aside from the moving
camera car are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports
angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize
it before it becomes
abstracted,
which is something we do often, and it happens a lot with
sports references that are made in all the projects.
This is a kind of anchor, a place, mimicking sports
cinematography.
Like NFL films. Do you know NFL films? NFL films are a real
big influence of mine. It's all 35mm material shot on all
the NFL teams. It's a fleet of cinematographers that follow
the different teams and then I believe that footage is sold
to the different teams. Highlight tapes are made and, as
a kid, we always had to watch these highlight tapes around
lunch time at football camps and stuff. We'd go to different
football camps at different universities and things, and
there was always a sort of film hour or something like that
which would be sometime around a meal. And you'd sit there
with a bunch of football players and we'd watch highlight
films from different NFL teams. But it's great... it's really
great camera work. All that stuff.
ART:21:
So many of your interests are
all-American in nature. How does this fit into your work?
BARNEY:
Well, I think a lot of the references
I make to American traditions—whether it's athletics
or a kind of car
culture—I
think those are things that I've certainly grown up with and
understand. It makes those things very available to me to
use, and I consider them as kinds of vessels. I don't think
that by the time they've been hashed through the project they're
representative of what they necessarily are in everyday life.
They're used as carriers, which is one of the reasons why
the vehicles, in general, keep reappearing in the pieces in
that they are carriers, literally. The
concept
of a vehicle draws a line between locations, such as the Isle
of Mann and Budapest. If there was a structure that was greater
than the "CREMASTER" structure, it would have to
be something like UPS—something that's fleet oriented,
that would have air transport and a kind of local transport
to really finish that line. You have a kind of consistent
color in the way that UPS is brown and the logo is gold. I
think that I have a need to make these sorts of connections
literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. So,
in other words, that's the way I would say I have a relationship
to car culture. It isn't really about loving cars. It's sort
of about needing them.
ART:21:
You also make a lot of references
to ancient myths.
BARNEY:
Yes. Sometimes I take on stories
quite directly, like with "DRAWING RESTRAINT 7."
That referred to Marsyas and Apollo. But it's also about taking
on a mythological structure and then imposing an internal
logic on it. Like if you were inside the stomach and esophagus,
you'd probably say that same thing about somebody throwing
up. You'd say, "Wow, the stomach is heroic for getting that
mutant material out." In other words, it is about taking a
structure that's mythological and putting it into a frame
that's more about something doing what it's compelled to do,
there to do. So a lot of my work has to do with not allowing
my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't
have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.
But it could also be looked at from a heroic, mythological
angle for sure.
ART:21:
Do these films grow organically
one from the other?
BARNEY:
I was working on a piece in Kassel,
Germany at DOCUMENTA IX which involved a bagpipe narrative.
It involved a parking garage and a set of elevator shafts
that first brought you from the parking garage up to the plaza
between the different museums of DOCUMENTA. And the different
elevator shafts in those museums continue this
form
with the parking garage as the bag. The first shaft was the
chanter, and then the bass and tenor drums were the different
elevators of the different museums so a story kind of took
place and exploded over these different locations, and it
excited me to tell a story that took on that kind of geography.
Around that time I started thinking about making a piece that
would do that over a great distance, and that a drawing could
be made on a map and a single piece could be made involving
these locations. So these locations were selected ahead of
time, and they follow more or less a single line of latitude
from west to east. The individual stories were developed one
by one, really, and were executed out of order. We started
with "CREMASTER 4," and as "CREMASTER 4"
was in development, some of the other stories started to fall
into place. But it did happen organically that way—that
we started the project without having the separate stories
in place. The locations were in place and a certain subtext
that tied them together was in place, but the individual stories
were not developed when we began.
For me that's to do with the fact that the stories themselves
are somewhat interchangeable. In a sense they're kind of carriers.
In other words, "CREMASTER 2" could have had a couple
of other stories other than Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's
Song" to carry it. "The Executioner's Song"
was its carrier, in that the Rocky Mountains were the real
story.
ART:21:
Do you have a conscious system
in mind before you start to write your script?
BARNEY:
In the interest of creating a
system that has an internal logic, I think there are points
in the story where biological systems are referred to or used
as art direction in a certain way. I've always thought of
the project as a sort of sexually driven digestive system,
that it was a consumer and a producer of matter. And it is
desire driven, rather than driven by hunger or anything like
that. It's a desire in the sense of a kind of sexual desire.
If that doesn't answer the question at all it does indicates
that these are things I think about—that there is an
interest in creating a kind of internal system. So those sorts
of biological systems are really useful to look at. Literal
systems that exist have their own sets of logic and their
own sorts of pressures and conflicts.
ART:21:
Could you talk about the character
you're playing at the Guggenheim Museum in "CREMASTER
3?"
BARNEY:
That character at the Guggenheim
is a sort of prosthetic manifestation of the Mason's Apprentice,
who is central to the rest of the story really. The story
has two principals, the Architect and the Mason's Apprentice.
The shift in the narrative occurs at the needle of the Chrysler
building in the form of a broadcast signal from the Guggenheim,
televising this kind of game. The Guggenheim is a kind of
flat space that's not specific to any period; it has some
of the feelings that video games have. And there are a number
of characters in that game space that are manifestations from
another part of the story. The Apprentice is one of them.
The Architect, who's played by Richard Serra, is shown sort
of as himself in the game, throwing Vaseline on the top of
"Level Five." And he's throwing hot Vaseline in exactly the
same way that he threw hot lead in the late '60s. Amy Mullins,
whose role is the Moll, is a bit of a reflection of the Mason's
Apprentice. She appears in "Level Three" as three different
characters. She keeps morphing as she attempts to eliminate
the Mason's Apprentice. To solve "Level Three," her character
has to be killed.
ART:21:
Could you explain the significance
of masons and Freemasonry in the story?
BARNEY:
The story has primarily to do
with the construction of the Chrysler tower. And, as the Architect
is described, it starts overlapping with the mythology of
the Freemasons. Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon's Temple,
is the martyr in Freemasonry, in that he was killed by corrupt
stonemasons who worked beneath him. They believed he knew
the name of God and they wanted to be told the name of God.
Hiram wouldn't tell them so he was killed by a plumb and a
level to the temple and a maul to the forehead. So "CREMASTER
3" starts to fold into some of the mythologies of Freemasonry
that way. Richard Serra's character, the Architect, becomes
like Hiram at a certain point. And the Chrysler tower is actually
never completed in the same way that the Temple of Solomon
is never completed.
