![]() As part of a project for which he traveled the route of the 1986 Hands Across America campaign against homelessness, in this sculpture Keegan reproduced historical images from the movement along with newspaper clippings, copies of artworks, and popular media images of the time. Keegan’s pieces frequently rely on appropriation, as seen in his 2009 work AMERICAMERICA excerpt #1 and excerpt #2. Whether photography, video, or sculpture, his projects typically focus on communication, investigating the ways that image and text influence and transform social relationships. Matt Keegan’s diverse work offers an illuminating and varied inquiry into everyday American culture. In these images Opie offers something deeply personal, even confessional, revealing powerful longings that are compounded by the great physical vulnerability of the sadomasochistic acts the photographs document. Like those images, her self-portraits address contemporary concerns of queer identity, while couching their content in a formal tradition recalling the 16th-century paintings of Hans Holbein. In this vein, she made Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) and Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994) alongside her renowned series portraying fellow members of San Francisco’s queer leather subculture. Throughout her career, self-portraiture has served as a marker of personal and artistic development, as well as a reminder that she, as the photographer, does not stand apart from the groups she documents. From her early portraits of queer subcultures, pristine urban panoramas, and expansive landscapes to incisive views of her own domestic life, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. Since the early 1990s Catherine Opie has produced a rich, complex photographic oeuvre that explores notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. The vitrines on view here reference these varied sources, incorporating key objects, symbols, and color schemes to suggest the core themes of each film in the cycle. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology. In Barney’s metaphoric universe, these instances represent pure potential. The project is rife with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation, repeatedly returning to moments in which the outcome is still unknown. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli. ![]() ![]() The cycle unfolds not only cinematically but also through the photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode. ![]() 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 such extreme stress on himself and his mental, social and environmental ecologies, so that any mutual support system is rendered close to exhaustion.Matthew Barney’s epic CREMASTER cycle (1994–2002) consists of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation. What Barney reveals is a man-form at the point of exhaustion, where expressions of life are composed as endurance tests, as competitions or ideal games where there are neither winners nor losers, though all parties are likely to transform beyond recognition. The anthropocene can be described as a scene carved out by ‘man’ at the massive scale of the geological, providing a catch-all term for the global extent of environmental transformation produced through ‘man’s’ seemingly inexhaustible industry, his insatiable productions and consumptions. A mutual if asymmetrical transformation takes place in the encounter between man-form and environment-world, and the feats of aesthetic labour depicted and also performed by Barney himself are prescient in their anticipation of a term that has recently gained considerable conceptual leverage, and that is the anthropocene. This essay returns to the posthuman 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. It is now well over a decade since the artist Mathew Barney’s epic work, the Cremaster Cycle was completed.
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