Transformational Zones and Violent Encounters. Matthew Barney’s “The Order”

Abstract

In “The Order,” Matthew Barney transforms the Guggenheim Museum into a space reminding of a computer game or sports-arena. The protagonist struggles his way through different ‘levels’ and at the heart of the setting, he is confronted with the para-athlete Aimee Mullins, a cyborg embodying the Deleuzian notion of the ani/omalous. To complete his final task, the protagonist kills the creature. The question arises, why the ani/omalous has to be violently eliminated. In this respect, it is important to know that the DVD offers two viewing options: a film version structured according to a fixed narrative order and an interactive version where one can switch between the levels simultaneously. Thus, Barney’s film also raises the question of the aesthetic order at work and invites to consider how what is shown relates to the way in which it is shown.Keywords: Matthew Barney, becoming ani/omalous, Deleuze & Guattari, violence in artMatthew Barney’s hybrid monumental aesthetic work the Cremaster Cycle, consisting of film material, but also integrating drawings, sculpture, photography and performance elements can as such be considered as a multiplicity in Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s terms. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue against Art (with a capital A) as a nominal concept and in favour of “the possibility of a simultaneous usage of the various arts within a determinable multiplicity” (331). That Barney’s work is indebted to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophy seems unquestionable. What interests me in this paper is the relation between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thinking and Barney’s own theoretical conceptions of art as well as how an example of Barney’s artistic work locates itself against the background of these frameworks. To do so, I want to concentrate on a so-called “choric interlude” in Cremaster 3 titled “The Order,” “which rehearses the initiation rites of the Masonic fraternity through allegorical representations of the five-part Cremaster cycle” (Barney 2004, par 5), and thus constitutes a microcosm of Barney’s film project (Spector 54). Comprising a self-contained narrative, the sequence is also available independently on DVD. In the context of the Cremaster Cycle, it is located almost at the very end – that Cremaster 3 is the last part of the five films already shows that a linear sequence, a conventional order of numbers is subverted. Rather than following the numerical order from 1 to 5, the Cremaster Cycle is organized rhizomatically, in the very words of Deleuze and Guattari generating “an acentered, non-hierarchical, non-signifying system without […] an organizing memory […] defined solely by a circulation of states” (23).