But down below is a stadium and twin choruses of girls in dancehall attire assemble and dance. So she keeps play-acting with grapes, they keep looking as though guarding against something or nonchalantly curious. Bodies of all these women are palesmooth, languid skin moving with constraint that is a frigid wish for post-coital melancholy, there is a lot of posturing and vacant looks between them like in one of those ads about perfume. Interiors are immaculately white, Barney's shorthand for purity. Meanwhile, hostesses in each zeppelin keep staring out of darkened ports in the hull. It is a simple thing, at the top we have two zeppelins - the 'ovaries' - circling the skies and in each blimp is the same woman in lingerie hidden in the cramped space beneath a table and arranging grapes into different shapes.

Nevertheless, this works because it is less about notation and more about gently sculpted abstract feel. It is still not deeply centered, in the sense that I was hoping with these films for a cosmology that folds different worlds, different facets of vision into single-pointed concentration of vision coming into being, and Barney is still consumed with grapes trickling from a shoe to take on the ground the shape of ovaries. But this works, this is something to settle in. You can see the films then read up on keys he has provided elsewhere, and that is that. Compare him to someone like Resnais or Ruiz, artists who thrive in the spontaneity and mystery of the medium, and Barney comes off as hard and fussy about trivial insights. He's fond of these stale symbolic notations where a vase supposedly stands for beauty and really labors under the weight of having some sort of layered system that explains the bulk of his work.

Additionally, he seems to have the notion that the five films taken together can also substitute for the creative process, it's really boring if you read up on what he has to say. The guy responsible for these is primarily a sculptor, so you will see often basic filmmaking but with an eye for sculpted space, emphasis on surfaces instead of narrative.

The cycle of five films released over the course of 8 years, apparently derives its moniker from a testicular muscle in the human body and is meant to represent the onset of the male gender in the biological formation of the fetus. Step the second in my voyage through the cinematic constellation of the Cremaster films.

Cremaster series matthew barney