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50-764: The Cremaster Cycle was made over a period of eight years (1994–2002) and culminated in a major museum exhibition organized by Nancy Spector of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris from 2002-03. Barney's longtime collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the soundtracks for the films. The series incorporates

100-474: A multidisciplinary narrative that heavily references connections between real people, real places and real things personal to Barney himself, but are all fictionalized to some extent. Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector has described the Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system." The cycle includes the films as well as photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations

150-470: A dead goat's eye, or that of a dead sheep, or of a dead donkey, or other animal, in the notorious eyeball-slicing scene. However, Buñuel claimed that he had used a dead calf's eye. Through the use of intense lighting the and bleaching of the calf's skin Buñuel attempted to make the furred face of the animal appear as human skin. During the bicycle scene, the woman who is sitting on a chair, reading, throws

200-529: A hand crawling with ants. Excitedly, Buñuel declared: "There's the film, let's go and make it." The two decided to write a script based on the concept of repressed emotions. The title of the film alludes to a Spanish idiom: "the Andalusian dog howls –someone has died!” The screenplay was written in a few days. According to Buñuel, they adhered to a simple rule: “Do not dwell on what required purely rational, psychological or cultural explanations. Open

250-494: A rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." He also stated: "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis ." In his 1939 autobiography, Buñuel stated: "In the film the aesthetics of Surrealism are combined to some of Freud 's discoveries. The film was totally in keeping with the basic principle of the school, which defined Surrealism as 'Psychic Automatism', unconscious, capable of returning to

300-416: A razor and tests it on his thumb. He gazes at the moon, which is about to be bisected by a thin cloud. A young woman stares straight ahead as he brings the razor near her eye. A cut occurs to the cloud passing in front of the moon, and then to a close-up of the razor slicing open a calf's eye. "Eight years later", a young man bicycles down an urban street wearing a nun's habit and carrying a striped box with

350-606: A satyr and Gary Gilmore . Ursula Andress portrays the Queen of Chain in Cremaster 5 . Norman Mailer , Patty Griffin , and Dave Lombardo portray Harry Houdini , Nicole Baker , and Johnny Cash respectively in Cremaster 2 . Richard Serra , Aimee Mullins , and Mike Bocchetti portray Hiram Abiff , Sadhbh , and the Grandmaster respectively, in Cremaster 3 . While thematically the Cremaster films are chronological in

400-412: A severed human hand in the street below the apartment while surrounded by a large crowd. The crowd clears when a policeman places the hand in the box previously carried by the young man and gives it to the androgynous woman. She stands in the middle of the street clutching the box, where she is run over by a car. The man in the apartment seems to take sadistic pleasure in the accident, and he gestures at

450-453: A strap around his neck. The woman from the first scene hears him approaching and casts aside the book she was reading. She goes to the window and sees the young man lying on the curb, his bicycle on the ground. She emerges from the building and attempts to revive him. Later, she assembles pieces of the young man's clothing on a bed. The man then appears near the door, with ants emerging from a hole in his hand. An androgynous young woman pokes at

500-425: Is Drawing Restraint, which is also a biologically inspired multi-episode work in multiple media, also featuring the field emblem. The full series was released in a limited series of 20 sets of DVDs, sold for at least $ 100,000 each, in custom packaging and as fine art, rather than mass-market movies. In 2007 one disc ( Cremaster 2 ) sold for $ 571,000. The films are not available on mass-market DVDs, and according to

550-410: Is a 1929 French silent short film directed, produced and edited by Luis Buñuel , who also co-wrote the screenplay with Salvador Dalí . Buñuel's first film, it was initially released in a limited capacity at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months. Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. With disjointed chronology, jumping from

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600-548: Is the standard work on the Cycle and contains reproductions of production stills, concept drawings and an exegetical essay by Spector, Only The Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us . Neville Wakefield has produced The Cremaster Glossary , which is also included in the book. Nancy Spector Nancy Spector is an American museum curator who has held positions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City and

650-583: The Brooklyn Museum . Spector graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981. She received an M.A. from Williams College in 1984 and a Master of Philosophy degree in Art History from City University Graduate Center in 1997. Spector was appointed as a Guggenheim curator in 1989. Spector was adjunct curator of the 1997 Venice Biennale and a co-curator of

700-590: The Jockey Club de Paris . The de Noailles family quickly withdrew the film after it was banned by the Prefecture of Police of Paris . During the original 1929 screening in Paris, Buñuel selected music which he played live on a gramophone . Modern prints of the film feature a soundtrack consisting of excerpts from Richard Wagner 's " Liebestod " from his opera Tristan und Isolde and a recording of two Argentinian tangos , "Tango Argentino" and "Recuerdos" by

750-484: The Ten Commandments , two pumpkins, and two priests who are attached to the ropes. The woman escapes the room. The man chases after her, but she traps his hand, which is infested with ants, in the door. She then finds him in the next room, dressed in his nun's garb. At "around three in the morning", the man is roused from his rest by the door buzzer (represented by a cocktail shaker ). The woman goes to answer

800-524: The White House requested the loan of a Vincent van Gogh painting, from the Guggenheim collection, Landscape With Snow , Spector suggested instead, America - a sculpture of a gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan . In 2019, the Guggenheim hired Chaédria LaBouvier to present her exhibition "Basquiat's Defacement: The Untold Story." At the conclusion of the show, LaBouvier accused Spector and

850-723: The Vicente Alvarez & Carlos Otero et son orchestre. They were first added to a print of the film in 1960 under Buñuel's supervision. Film scholar Ken Dancyger has argued that Un Chien Andalou might be the genesis of the filmmaking style present in the modern music video . Roger Ebert called it an inspiration for low-budget independent films . Premiere ranked the opening scene at number ten on its list of "The 25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History". The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited Un Chien Andalou as one of his favorite films. The film

900-409: The apartment while sticking her tongue out. As she exits her apartment, the street is replaced by a coastal beach, where she meets a third man with whom she walks arm in arm. He shows her the time on his watch and they walk near the rocks, where they find the remnants of the first young man's nun's clothing and the box. They walk away clutching each other happily and making romantic gestures. "In Spring",

950-444: The artist produced in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle , the primary function of which is to raise and lower the testicles in response to temperature. The project is filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5

1000-480: The board, calling for them to "replace those members of the executive cabinet who have repeatedly proven that they are not committed to decisive, anti-racist action and do not act in good faith with BIPOC leaders." In October 2020, after the investigation's conclusion, Spector parted ways with the museum. An investigative article in The Atlantic , exploring the circumstances of her departure, revealed that she

1050-402: The book aside when she notices the man who has fallen. The image it shows when it lies open is a reproduction of a painting by Johannes Vermeer , whom Dalí greatly admired and often referred to in his own paintings. In Buñuel's original script, the final shot was to feature the corpses of the man and woman "consumed by swarms of flies". However, this was modified due to budget limitations, with

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1100-474: The couple are buried in sand up to their elbows, motionless. The screenplay of the film is based on two dreams of co-creators Buñuel and Dali. The idea began when Buñuel was working as an assistant director for Jean Epstein in France. Buñuel told Dalí at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half "like a razor blade slicing through an eye". Dalí responded that he had dreamed about

1150-662: The curators of Monument to Now, an exhibition of the Dakis Joannou Collection, which premiered in Athens in 2004 as an official part of the Olympics program. In 2007 she was the U.S. Commissioner for the Venice Biennale , where she presented an exhibition of work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres . In 2013 she was nominated as "Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator". In 2017, when

1200-566: The cycle, and film critic J. Hoberman panning it. Lavish praise includes: " The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney is the first truly great piece of cinema to be made in a fine art context since Dali and Bunuel filmed Un Chien Andalou in 1929. It is one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema." In 1999, when three of its entries (the fourth, first, and fifth) had been made, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times hailed Barney as "the most important American artist of his generation." It has also, on

1250-426: The door and does not return. Another young man arrives in the apartment, gesturing angrily at the first. The second man forces the first to throw away his nun's clothing and then makes him stand with his face to the wall. "Sixteen years ago", the second man admires art supplies and books on the table near the wall and forces the first man to hold two of the books as he stares at the wall. The first man eventually shoots

1300-400: The film amazed Buñuel, who was relieved that no violence ensued. Dalí, on the contrary, was reportedly disappointed, feeling that the audience's reaction made the evening "less exciting". Buñuel later claimed that prior to the show, he had put stones in his pockets "to throw at the audience in case of disaster", although others had no recollection of this. Buñuel intended to shock and insult

1350-417: The film ending with a still shot of the man and woman half-buried in the sand. The movie contains several thematic references to Federico García Lorca and other writers of that time. The rotting donkeys are a reference to the popular children's novel Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez , which Buñuel and Dalí both hated. French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch has reported that after filming

1400-591: The first Berlin Biennale in 1998. At the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, she has overseen commissions by Andreas Slominski (1999), Hiroshi Sugimoto (2000), Lawrence Weiner (2000), and Gabriel Orozco (2012), as well as organized the exhibitions Douglas Gordon’s The Vanity of Allegory (2005) and All in the Present Must be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys (2006). Nancy Spector was one of

1450-521: The first: "to present the straight and pure 'conduct' of someone who continues to pursue love despite wretched humanitarian ideals, patriotism and the other poor mechanisms of reality." This new film ultimately was released in 1930 under the title L'Age d'Or . The sequel was not a success with Parisian high society. First shown in November 1930, it was received extremely coldly. The next day, Charles de Noailles learned that he had been expelled from

1500-790: The group exhibitions Under the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Spector initiated special commissions by Andreas Slominski in 1999, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Lawrence Weiner in 2000 as well as Gabriel Orozco in 2012. At the Deutsche Guggenheim Spector organized the exhibitions for Spector has written catalogue essays for exhibitions on Maurizio Cattelan , Luc Tuymans , Douglas Gordon , Tino Sehgal and Anna Gaskell among others. Un Chien Andalou Un Chien Andalou ( French pronunciation: [œ̃ ʃjɛ̃ ɑ̃dalu] , An Andalusian Dog )

1550-496: The initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without events or characters changing, it uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of the then-popular Freudian free association , presenting a series of tenuously related scenes. Un Chien Andalou is a seminal work of surrealist cinema . The film is set to enter the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025 . A man sharpens

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1600-456: The intellectual bourgeoisie of his youth, later saying: "Historically, this film represents a violent reaction against what at that time was called 'avantgarde cine,' which was directed exclusively to the artistic sensibility and to the reason of the spectator." Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a huge success amongst the French elite, leading Buñuel to remark: "What can I do about

1650-407: The larger institution of creating "the most racist professional experience of my life" and criticized her on social media. In 2020, the Guggenheim hired an external firm to investigate her claims. It ultimately found "no evidence that Ms. LaBouvier was subject to adverse treatment on the basis of her race." However, while the investigation was under way, museum employees submitted a public letter to

1700-507: The longest (and last-made) is Cremaster 3 , at over three hours, while the remaining four are approximately an hour each, for a total of approximately seven hours – #3 alone makes up almost half the total length of the cycle. Like Barney's other works, most of the films lack any particular dialogue with the exceptions being Cremaster 2 and 5, the latter of which is an opera sung in Hungarian. An important precursor of The Cremaster Cycle

1750-668: The mind its true functions, beyond any form of control by reason, morality or aesthetics." The film was financed by Buñuel's mother, and shot in Le Havre and at the Billancourt Studios in Paris over a period of ten days in March 1928. It is a black and white, 35 mm, silent film, with a running time of 17 minutes (although some sources state 24 minutes) and a physical length of 430 meters. For many years, published and unpublished reports have circulated that Buñuel had used

1800-559: The most "descended" or differentiated. The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown — in Barney's metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality. 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 . Barney portrays, at various points,

1850-416: The numbered order, they were not made or released in the same manner. The order in which they were made is as follows: The numerical order is the thematic order, while in order of production the films increased in production quality, ambition and scope, and they can alternatively be viewed in any order, as different views of a set of themes and preoccupations. The films are significantly different in length;

1900-555: The other hand, received scathing criticism as "a mostly tedious succession of striking but vacant imagery whose effect diminishes the longer you look at it," from which "any sense of mystery or wonder is drained." The visuals are roundly praised, however, and some (Hoberman) feel that the movies work well as parts of installations, due to visuals, though not as movies, due to poor editing and pacing. The large volume by then Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2002),

1950-421: The people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?" After its "triumphant premiere", Un Chien Andalou was bought by the owner of "Studio-28". During its eight-month run, forty or fifty informers came to

2000-415: The police with a demand to ban it. This was the beginning of years of insults and threats that haunted Buñuel until his old age. A likely apocryphal account claimed that two miscarriages occurred while watching the film. Despite the criticism, however, the film was never banned. Through their accomplishment with Un Chien Andalou , Dalí and Buñuel became the first filmmakers to be officially welcomed into

2050-446: The press release for the 2010 US tour, the cycle "is Not Now Nor Will it Ever be Available on DVD". The films are primarily available via periodic screenings. Palm Pictures , the distributor, has continued to comply with Barney's request, and has not made the series available on DVD, though there were some rumors and announcements to this effect in 2003. Only a 31-minute excerpt, the Guggenheim scene from Cremaster 3 entitled “The Order,”

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2100-620: The ranks of the Surrealists by the movement's leader André Breton, an event recalled by film historian Georges Sadoul : "Breton had convoked the creators to our usual venue [the Café Radio] ;... one summer's evening. Dalí had the large eyes, grace, and timidity of a gazelle. To us, Buñuel, big and athletic, his black eyes protruding a little, seemed exactly like he always is in Un Chien Andalou , meticulously honing

2150-418: The razor that will slice the open eye in two." Among the most enthusiastic viewers of the film were the wealthy couple Viscount Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles , who commissioned Dalí and Buñuel to create a sequel, of around the same length, with sound, to be called La Bête Andalouse , in order to affirm its connection with Un Chien . Dalí stated that the theme of the new film was to parallel that of

2200-415: The script.” In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Buñuel made clear throughout his writings that, between Dalí and himself, the only rule for the writing of the script was: "No idea or image that might lend itself to

2250-499: The second when the books abruptly turn into revolvers. The second man, now in a meadow, dies while swiping at the back of a nude female figure which suddenly disappears into thin air. A group of men come and carry his corpse away. The woman returns to the apartment and sees a death's-head moth . The first man sneers at her as she retreats and wipes his mouth off his face with his hand; her armpit hair then attaches itself to where his mouth had been. She looks at him with disgust and leaves

2300-427: The way to the irrational. It was accepted only that which struck us, regardless of the meaning ... We did not have a single argument. A week of impeccable understanding. One, say, said: 'A man drags double bass.' 'No,' the other objected. And the objection was immediately accepted as completely justified. But when the proposal of one liked the other, it seemed to us magnificent, indisputable and immediately introduced into

2350-445: The woman in the room with him, leering and groping her breasts. The woman resists him at first, but then allows him to molest her as he imagines her nude. The woman pushes him away as he drifts off and attempts to escape by running to the other side of the room. The man corners her as she reaches for a racquet in self-defense, but he suddenly picks up two ropes and drags two grand pianos containing dead donkeys , stone tablets containing

2400-475: Was complete, Buñuel and Dalí had run out of money, forcing Buñuel to edit the film personally in his kitchen without the aid of any technical equipment. The first screening of Un Chien Andalou took place at Studio des Ursulines . Notable attendees of the première included Pablo Picasso , Le Corbusier , Jean Cocteau , Christian Bérard and Georges Auric , in addition to the entirety of André Breton 's Surrealist group. The audience's positive reception of

2450-509: Was released on mass-market DVD in 2003. Reaction to the cycle is sharply divided – some consider it a major work of art, on a par with Un Chien Andalou and The Waste Land , while others dismiss it as vapid, self-indulgent tedium. This is summarized by one critic as "Barney's cinematic art inspires both awe and revulsion, often simultaneously." Indeed, the Village Voice featured two reviews, with art critic Jerry Saltz praising

2500-567: Was scapegoated by the museum. Reflecting on the situation in 2023, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CiMAM) criticized the museum, stating that Spector was "a notable museum professional with a strong track record of representing and enhancing diversity." At the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Spector organized exhibitions and retrospectives. They include: She also organized

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