ANGELAKI

journal of the theoretical humanities

volume 20 number 1 march 2015

introduction: aesthetic labour

towards post-human becomings of
man

A man in a hot pink tartan kilt and elaborate

feathered headgear with a bloodied hand-
kerchief shoved down the hole that was once
his mouth enters into an embrace with a
woman with glass prosthetic legs who promptly
transforms into a wild animal as she attacks
him. The man-creature, seemingly in compe-
tition with himself, climbs the interior walls of
an illuminated atrium as though it were a rock
face. Meanwhile, on another level of the
atrium, which could also be apprehended as an
architectural orice, a rock concert takes
place. There are two competing bands perform-
ing a play off, each attempting to overcome the
noise produced by the other. All the partici-
pants the musicians, bouncers, concert atten-
dees are wearing the white cloth gloves of
archival researchers. And to the side, some-
where on yet another level of this strangely fam-
iliar interior, a workman equipped with safety
gear ings large scoops of what appears to be
heated wax into a corner. By slow increments
the viscous heated material dribbles down a
slowly spiralling gutter. Way down below, ve
lovely ladies in bathing caps enjoy a bubble
bath while a long choreographed line of Busby
Berkeley showgirls wearing bunny-ears tap
their collective heels and toes. In brief, these
lmic visions offer a glimpse into the biotechno-
logical pluriverse that is created within artist
Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle, a magnum
opus that combines lm, drawings, photogra-
phy, and the mixed media of sculptural props.
Together these settings and props compose a
mise en abyme of post-human landscapes and
hlne frichot
MATTHEW BARNEYS
CREMASTER CYCLE
REVISITED
towards post-human
becomings of man
things, prepared for the competitive striving
of man amidst his environment-worlds.
The cremaster is the muscle that controls
the ascent and descent of the testes in relation
to external, environmental stimuli. The cycle
of Barneys title draws attention to questions con-
cerning a life, both of the individual, and of the
species. Barneys pluriverse presents multiple
scenes of agonistic striving associated with this
muscular contraction and relaxation, commen-
cing from the moment of pure potentiality
wherein the chromosomes of the embryo are yet
to arrange themselves into a determination of
sex. The setting of the lmic vignette described
above is organised around the ramps of the
interior atrium of an iconic modernist

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/15/010055-13 2015 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1017376

55
 barneys cremaster cycle
monument, Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim
Museum in New York. Between spiralling ramp
and aesthetic performance, what appears to be
produced is a superimposition of one aesthetic
expression of heroic masculinity upon another,
drawing the tropes of modernist architectural
expression together with turn-of-the-millennium
performance and installation art. In what
follows I will argue instead that masculinity
comes to be provocatively reformulated through
Barneys feats of aesthetic labour, which transver-
sally transgress otherwise incompossible worlds.
Looking back at the Cremaster Series from a ret-
rospective point of view that now identies the
geological impact of human toil on the earth as
the Anthropocene, what can be seen to be at
work is a mortal struggle for the very viability
of a man-form amidst global ecologies in crisis,
as well as a presentiment of post-human land-
scapes witness to the redundancy of this form.
What this essay proposes to explore is how a
logic of sensation the assemblage of aesthetic
persona, effects (and affects) and materials,
including the crucial role that architecture as
an aesthetic gure plays dynamically com-
poses Barneys incompossible series of worlds
to produce masculine becomings that venture
novel, biotechnological reformulations of a
post-human man-form otherwise threatened
with exhaustion, even extinction.1 A series of
concept-tools derived from the work of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, including those of
the ideal game and the bachelor machine, will
be deployed to examine the battles of sense
and sensation that animate Barneys work. The
story of the Cremaster is now twenty years old
and has well and truly reached its maturity
against the backdrop of a world-historical
scene that has meanwhile plunged further into
both political and ecological distress. What
Barney pre-emptively explores is the accelera-
tion of the performance of a man-form as
though to test the limits of our geologic age,
the Anthropocene, so named to acknowledge
the massive impact that man-made and globally
distributed processes of industrialisation have
irreversibly wrought. Revisiting Barneys Cre-
master 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.
the five-tiered cremaster cycle
The Cremaster Cycle is the culmination of over
eight years worth of work (19942002) and is
composed of ve cycles, with settings that
cover regions that span from the Giants Cause-
way in Northern Ireland, to the Isle of Man, to
New York, to Budapest.2 Barney explains that
the work commenced from a site-based fascina-
tion.3 Like the geologic and atmospheric
phenomena of the Anthropocene, the settings
depicted are global in scope and demand the
consideration of a geophilosophical diagnosis.
The object of fascination of the Cremaster
Cycle centres around the sexual differentiation
of the gonads of the embryo, and the subsequent
relaxation and contraction, suspension and
retraction, of the testicles in response to their
immediate environment, specically to temp-
erature and affects that produce the emotion
of fear. The cremaster is the muscle that con-
trols this movement, and the logic of sense and
sensation that unfurls across Barneys con-
structed pluriverse is one of contraction and
dilation, together with the extreme exercise of
the muscles in contact with a series of environ-
mental milieux. In short, the central theme of
Barneys work is manhood, the struggles man
must undertake to create his niche amidst his
environmental surrounds, and the risks he
faces as he adapts his environment and, in
turn, adapts himself. Architecture plays a
central role here because of its capacity to bio-
technologically alter and augment environ-
ments, and create compositions across what
can be called the immanent plane of Nature-
thought.
Barney himself plays characters in all but the
rst cycle, which is peopled entirely by women.
Slender threads tie the motifs of one cycle to
the next, often through the gural ciphers of gro-
tesque and fascinating corporeal transform-
ations or through Barneys xation on such
56

viscous materials as petroleum jelly. It is across
the perpetually reinvented body of the artist and
in the specic region of the genitalia, often ren-
dered unrecognisable, that much of the action
pertaining to the struggles of manhood can be
witnessed. Beyond this fascination in the geni-
tals and the work, or else the thwarted, even
failed workings of sexual reproduction, and
amidst the innumerable themes and inuences
that this work explores, there persists the recur-
rent motif of competition. The competition of
the ttest, perpetually threatened with failure.4
Fitness articulated through the double sense of
demonstrations of tness, such as rock climbing,
car racing, marathon tap dancing, and other
physical displays of prowess, and tness in
terms of how well the organism ts its environ-
mental niche. Barney presents the agonism of
competition by stipulating Sisyphean tasks,
and elaborate, often fruitless games. These
games can be compared to the creative yet
anti-productive (un)workings of a bachelor
machine, which operates according to the logic
of sense of an ideal game, which in turn produces
a circulation of affects towards the construction
of a sensory, masculine becoming in contact with
its architectural-environmental milieu.
Barneys Cremaster Cycle presents an elabo-
rately cross-referenced pluriverse that unfolds,
or rather contracts and relaxes like the muscular
rhythm of a bodily organ. Barneys body of
work, and it is certainly the body that
demands to be addressed here through various
stages of formation and deformation, follows a
perverse logic of sense and sensation character-
ised by a mythology that draws on invented gen-
ealogies creating improbable relations between
quasi-historical gures, as well as between reim-
agined geographical locations and architectural
settings. It is a lmic epic of overwhelming pro-
portions supported by an archive of sculptural
artefacts, which might also be read as a series
of relics of a past age or perhaps the improbable,
speculative or ulterior relics of a post-human
future yet to come. There are also instructional
diagrammatic sketches and photographic por-
traits that portray some of the main characters
and scenes. Barney creates a carefully cross-
referenced aesthetic system, an exhaustively
57
frichot
detailed geological-biological hybrid series of
worlds that are operationally rhizomatic.5 The
rhizome, which to some might be apprehended
as a near exhausted concept in its own right,
describes an open system, a horizontally orien-
tated and immanent network of relations that
draws on an analogy with botanical life. Perplex-
ingly, any point of a rhizome can be connected
to any other6 and its organisation is structured
with an emphasis on the exteriority of relations
and their ourishing development, so that
subjects and objects emerge and dissipate
again as temporary moments of transcendent
subjective or objective capture amidst vibrant
networks of immanent relationality. Impor-
tantly, the rhizome as organisational complex
is not merely life-like but hooked up with tech-
nologies, it is a biotechnological assemblage,
and any assumed natural expression of life
tends to be entangled with cultural technologies.
If the Cremaster Cycle operates like a rhizome it
must be apprehended as an assemblage under
extreme, meta-stable stress. Rather than a uni-
verse, Barneys set of incompossible worlds pre-
sents a conictual pluriverse, a rhizome
threatening to alter its connections, passages
and thresholds beyond recognition.
Mere description will not sufce to retell the
story of the Cremaster Cycle, and on account of
its immense scope, and due to an interest in dis-
cussing just one architecturally relevant
sequence, I will commence with the third of
the ve Cremaster Cycles called The Order,
where the interior atrium of Frank Lloyd
Wrights Guggenheim Museum is used as a
setting for feats of endurance and struggles for
the securing of existential territories. Cremaster
3 features two architectural icons as aesthetic
persona: the Chrysler Building, New York and
the Guggenheim Museum, also in New York.
The sculptor Richard Serra plays the part of
the mythological architect of King Solomons
temple, Hiram Abiff, to Barneys struggling
apprentice. The story of Abiff the architect
tells how he was murdered in an unsuccessful
attempt to force him to reveal the Master
Masons secrets, and it follows that iconography
borrowed from Free Masonry plays a large role
in the third Cremaster Cycle, as well as
 barneys cremaster cycle
initiatory acts, and violent rituals that emulate
the sacricial rites of secret societies.7 It is not
incidental that the setting of The Order, within
the third Cremaster Cycle, is located within an
iconic modernist interior. As I will argue
below, the struggles undertaken here, per-
formed as the travails of an apprenticeship,
seek to establish new rules for a post-human
becoming of man in contact with his architectu-
rally augmented environments.
the order: ideal game and
apprenticeship
The lmic sequence that belongs to The Order
more or less occupies the central vortex of the
Cremaster Series, and to complement this
location its action takes place in the interior con-
tainment of an atrium organised around a des-
cending ramp, a circulatory passage around the
deepest, most sheltered interior where life
battles to secure its longevity. It is crucial to
note that Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim
Museum is never viewed from its exterior, so
enforcing an inversion of its iconic and civic
gesture. Instead, the spiral ramp of the interior
of the Guggenheim Museum is imagined by
Barney to produce a ve-tiered pluriverse, a
series of worlds operating at the threshold of
incompossibility and teetering on the brink of
contradiction.8 An instructive diagram drawn
by Barney describes this ve-tier organisation
and depicts the descent of a viscous material
over a series of balustrades into the atrium-
orice, so transversally reorganising the logic
of the slow downward spiral of the ramp. This
means of contravening a given spatial logic is
also at work in the fourth cycle of the Cremaster,
and the rst that Barney completed, which fea-
tures a racing car event set on the Isle of Man.
Here the rules demand that the two so-called
competitors set off from the starting line in
opposing directions, and proceed at breakneck
speed towards a head-on collision. Meanwhile,
Barney, now a smartly dressed hybrid creature
with oppy, goat-like ears, and two extra
orices hidden away beneath his thin orange
hair, squirms along a lubricated passage
underground, as though navigating the living
entrails of the island. He seeks a passage
through the earth that presents the greatest chal-
lenges, so disrupting the common-sense logic of
following a ready-made path overground.
The apprentice, also played by Barney, who
features as a central protagonist in The Order
must succeed through ve worlds out of a poten-
tially unlimited set, each determined by another
segment of the ramp of the Guggenheim
Museum. He must confront a series of phys-
ically arduous initiation tests, and through his
labour he challenges the notion that there is
one world that can be selected as best.9 One
crucial test depicted not in the specic sequence
of The Order, but elsewhere in Cremaster 3,
involves a partial disembowelment administered
in a dentists chair, and also the widening of the
oral orice so that a large serviette now aug-
ments the hole that was once the apprentices
mouth. The entire alimentary canal undertakes
a relative deterritorialisation, as an exterior
relation is constructed between the mouth and
the anus, producing a passage that passes
through the earth and its territories. A biologi-
cal, erstwhile natural passage is denaturalised
and technically augmented, though according to
functions that remain undetermined.
At play in the vortex of the Guggenheim
Museum is the logic of an ideal game of life,
where rules are invented as one proceeds and
nothing is nally achieved. In his attempt to
climb the atrium, Barneys apprentice necess-
arily suffers setbacks, falling back through the
levels only to have to commence over again.
The ideal game, Deleuze explains, has a great
deal of movement, appears to have no precise
rules, and allows for neither winners nor losers,
somewhat like the caucus race in Lewis Carrolls
Alice in Wonderland.10 The caucus race is con-
vened in order that Alice and a cluster of small
animals, having fallen into a pool of Alices
tears, can subsequently dry off. They have two
choices, either they can listen, immobilised, to
the Mouses dry tale, which isolates sense in a see-
mingly empty it, or else they can run around in
a circuit of indenite proliferation from one
proposition to the next.11 Deleuze dramatises
the paradoxical threshold between sense and
58

sensation by explaining that what is represented
in this choice is two forms of stuttering, demon-
strating how effects of sense-making also
produce spasms in the embodied subject who
struggles to produce sense. The ideal game oper-
ates in contrast to conventional games, which
commence with pre-determined rules, and only
retain chance at certain points. The ideal or
pure game is a game reserved for thought and
art.12 It operates at the cutting edge of sense,
between things and propositions, at the
threshold between the logics of sense and sen-
sation, both of which are co-constituted in
necessary contact with nonsense. While the
game may only exist in thought, and become
manifest in art, Deleuze asserts that it also
holds the capacity to disturb reality, morality
and the economy of the world.13
In relation to Barneys early work in the
Drawing Restraint series, the curator Nancy
Spector explains that the game itself is of
lesser interest than the accumulation, storage,
and release of energy in this controlled corporeal
environment.14 In this early work Barney also
incorporated his body into the production of
his performative pieces, which, somewhat like
the machine in Franz Kafkas short story In the
Penal Colony, created athletic obstacle courses
articulated through an implicit instructional
matrix whose outcome was less the drawing pro-
duced than the pure expenditure of energy.15
The third Cremaster Cycle extends this relation
of the body to itself into its architectural-environ-
mental surrounds, as well as exploring the inti-
mate relation between mixtures of bodies and
the sense they express. Sense is the thin lm
at the limit of things and words;16 it owns an
unstable, volatile, and atmospheric quality.
Sense is an event that is produced less as the
result of the habitual and often retrospective
relationship assumed between cause and effect,
than as an effect of light.
matthew barneys bachelor
machine
Sense, importantly, cannot be reduced to
meaning, or to signication, connotation, and
59
frichot
denotation. Its not a question of meaning but
a matter of use, and the questions that need
to be asked are does it work and, if so, how
does it work? Given the conjunction of mor-
phologically perturbed genitalia and the
agonism of competition, the logic of sense
and sensation at work here can be compared
to the conceptual diagram of a bachelor
machine. With respect to the formulation of
the bachelor machine, Deleuze and Guattari
assert The question becomes: what does the
celibate machine produce? What is produced
by means of it? The answer would seem to
be: intensive qualities.17 Alice Jardine
explains the history of the bachelor machine
as a set of literary and artistic practices begin-
ning at the end of the nineteenth century,
extending through Dada and Surrealism to
the present time (being the late 1980s at her
time of writing).18 She stresses the masculinist
basis for a related strand of ction employing
bachelor machine logic, which includes the
writings of Thomas Pynchon, Samuel
Beckett, and William Burroughs. Marcel Duch-
amps artistic production is also famously
associated with this conceptual machine,
specically his work The Bride Stripped Bare
by her Bachelors, Even, also known as the
Large Glass. The bachelor machine has been
employed by the architect Rem Koolhaas in
his reinvention of the theme park history of
New York in Delirious New York.19 Michel
Carrougues has a denition of a bachelor
machine which includes a taxonomy of
examples, all of which are caught up in their
peculiar short-circuits of sense. And the bache-
lor machine has also been discussed at length
by Michel de Certeau.20 The bachelor
machine (machine celibataire), for Deleuze
and Guattari, shares many qualities with all
of these machines in being anti-conjugal, and
anti-familial, but their machine works speci-
cally to produce desire.21 It produces an assem-
blage of desiring production that promises to
make a contribution to a newly imagined
world of human, non-human and post-human
actors. At the same time, there persists the
risk that the nonsensical process of the bache-
lor machine may also release violent forces.
 barneys cremaster cycle
Spector suggests that a trajectory of shared
sensibilities, or what I would prefer to call a
genealogy of infectious inuence, proceeds
from Duchamps Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even (191523) to Barneys work
via a community of creative practitioners such
as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and Richard
Serra, all of whom share an onanistic
impulse that short-circuits the productive
stage of desire, plugging it instead into an
auto-affective universe. Spectors specic argu-
ment is that Barney has arranged his work
according to three stages that reect the devel-
opment of the gonads from a moment of pure
potentiality before the sex of an embryo is deter-
mined, what Barney calls the situation; to a
second stage, which is denominated condition
and conceived as a disciplinary funnel based
on the alimentary canal; and then a third
stage, production, which makes the force of
desire manifest in a world. According to
Spector, Barney specically skips the third
stage, that is, production, in order to create
his own bachelor machine, or a self referential,
autoerotic cycle.22 In Barneys own words If
Production is bypassed [] the head goes into
the arse.23 Following Spectors account, a
self-enclosed organism is composed as a
system of narcissistic gratication that empha-
sises a cyclic connection between the mouth
and the anus, as seemingly demonstrated in
the augmentations to the apprentice in the
third Cremaster whereby his mouth and anus
are violently altered.24 I argue instead that this
self-enclosure does not produce an entirely her-
meneutically sealed infrastructure, but one that
is leaky, apt to affect, and to be affected in turn.
That is to say, the bachelor machine can be
cracked open into an ecological system, and, as
Deleuze and Guattari stress when they discuss
their geophilosophical approach, becoming has
less to do with history than with geography
and milieu.25 As such, the bachelor machine,
when placed in immanent contact with a
milieu, promises to give birth to a new humanity
and a new earth: The bachelor machine forms a
new alliance between desiring machines and the
body without organs to give birth to a new
humanity or a glorious organism.26
Barney wilfully recomposes the genealogical
line of his precursors, and incorporates
Richard Serra into his own work as the gure
of the architect, Hiram Abiff, in relation to his
role as an apprentice. While this might seem
to respect the micro-relations of power
between Barney the artist and his creative pre-
decessor, Serra the sculptor, Barneys perform-
ance demands that the relation is opened up and
not over-determined by its terms. He reinvents
the role of the master, and reverses the relations
of inuence by capturing Serra in his pluriverse.
The apprentice Barney suffers the violent sever-
ing of the inferred circuit that would conjoin his
mouth with his anus, and this alimentary canal
is exteriorised, creating, quite literally, a kind
of Body without Organs. The role of anti-pro-
duction does not have to mean that nothing is
produced, for Barneys bachelor machine
creates new relations that are external to their
terms, and that manifest as previously unima-
gined atmospheres of affect. He follows the
materials of a beleaguered world, and it is no
coincidence that his hybrid man-forms and
their monstrous alterations interact with
viscous materials derived from the non-renew-
able resource that is petroleum, including the
petroleum jelly and moulded plastics that
compose his many props and prostheses. The
striving or conatus, to borrow a term from
Baruch Spinoza, that animates the ve cycles
of the Cremaster Cycle depicts the struggles
that unite the man-form with his diverse
worlds, and demonstrate how the man-form
comes to be deformed at the same time that he
deforms and ravages his own world.
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guat-
tari describe such transformations in terms of
a new earth and a new people, thus emphasising
the crucial relationship between an organism
(peoples) and its environment (the earth which
comes to be formalised or territorialised as so
many worlds). Organism plus environment is
what Gregory Bateson has identied as the
basic unit of survival.27 The geophilosophy at
work here imagines new formations of peoples,
a new earth, and new productive relations
between these terms, even though the artist
or the philosopher is quite incapable of creating
60

a people, each can only summon it with all his
strength.28 How much strength will sufce?
In this context, Barneys work can be revisited
as a striving with all his might towards the possi-
bility of new congurations of life, which some-
times require a detour through what at rst
appears to be monstrous, which is simply that
which we are unable to recognise, comprehend,
and so classify. What happens when you break
open the Mobius strip of sense, break open the
organisation of man in relation to his territories
in order to return these territories to the
earth?29 If we are no longer t for this world,
then we urgently need to be able to imagine
another.30
There are two sides or two directions that the
bachelor machine can follow, one towards the
modulations of societies of control, and one
opening towards potential sites of creative
resistance. The bachelor machine also produces
a relationship between sense and sensation, or
between material mixtures of sensory bodies,
and incorporeal events of sense, like the dust
that is stirred up over a battleeld, or the mist
that rises over the prairie. What the bachelor
machine produces as a desiring assemblage is
simultaneously a sensory becoming and a con-
ceptual becoming. Where the sensory becoming
is the ceaseless process by which one becomes
something other than what one was, while main-
taining something of what one has once been,
and can be described as otherness caught in a
matter of expression,31 the conceptual becom-
ing is the action by which the common event
itself eludes what is.32 That is to say, sense
(the common event) is never identical to the
state of affairs it is supposed to denote,
connote, or signify (what is), it exists neither
in the mind nor in things, but is a surface
effect that is produced, and continues being pro-
duced.33 In relation to Deleuzes study of
Francis Bacons paintings, Tom Conley explains
the logic of sense in sensation can be taken accumulation, the useless labour of shifting
as an implicit inection of direction and serial-
ity. Different series of forces are driven
through the oeuvre.34 Bacons and Barneys
oeuvres share certain qualities, such as the pro-
cesses of deformation suffered by their subjects,
the circulation of repeated motifs or a kind of
61
frichot
seriality, the agonism of encounters between
human and non-human actors, and an incipient
post-humanism. And Deleuzes logic of sen-
sation can be readily applied to Barneys work.
The logic of sensation is, as Conley argues, an
operative concept, which is to suggest that it
can not only be reapplied in other aesthetic con-
texts, but with each application it promises to
transform our encounter with the aesthetic uni-
verse, or pluriverse, in question.35
becoming-man?
If we are to strictly follow Deleuze and Guat-
taris general logic it would be a nonsense to
talk of becoming-man, because man is the
primary, hegemonic, majoritarian and dominant
force, and man himself is in need of becoming-
other, preferably by rst following the passage
of becoming-woman. In what situation can a
scenario be imagined in which man is, after
all, the minor voice, the minor force? At the
moment when the death of man has been
decided, when the line that represents man has
been drawn in the sand and risks being
washed away by the incoming tide.36 We are at
the exit threshold of the Anthropocene which,
as Jill Bennett explains, demarcates a brief geo-
logical period wherein human-designed indus-
trial activity has produced vast changes at a
planetary scale.37 Not only do we face species
extinction, ageing populations, global
warming, post-peak oil, and the wholesale
exhaustion of worlds, as a corollary we face the
dramatic realignment of our mental, social and
environmental ecologies. Barneys experiments
in becoming-man, despite the seemingly oxy-
moronic formula this suggests, can be seen as
a series of extreme experiments that enable an
imaginary of these new ecologies to emerge,
but only by placing the man-form under
extreme duress. He depicts scenes of surplus
stockpiles, the movement of matter from one
place to the next, the efuent of gloop and
gunk travelling its slow way down the spiral.
The prescience of Barneys exhaustive endur-
ance test is a struggle for man, not a reied
image of man as he once was, but instead a
 barneys cremaster cycle
new kind of man. It is a risky endeavour, and,
nally, on which side does Barney rest? With a
man-form near exhaustion, or with the emer-
gence of a new kind of man that includes a
becoming-woman in its assemblage as well as a
multiplicity of other little sexes and their
expressions? Barney practises an undecidability
between the sexes, and at the same time invents
a mythology for a new series of worlds popu-
lated by characters that represent the affective
qualities of mans capacity for: evil (the serial
killer); creativity (the architect); strength and
endurance (the car racer) these aesthetic
gures are all heroic in some way, but all
occupy a perilous threshold at the brink of
exhaustion.
The post-Second World War gure of the
new man and his universalising world,
guided into existence by the heroic gures of
architects, planners, politicians, and economists
spruiking a shared social conscience, relies on
the assumption that social change can be
achieved when the environment is appropriately
designed. Spector similarly asserts that the
ritualised realm of organised sports compe-
tition, exhibitionism, and idolisation is associ-
ated in our collective cultural unconscious
with masculine identity.38 The purportedly
failed modernist social project sought to
produce new architectural environments mod-
elled after the man-form, as clearly demon-
strated in Le Corbusiers over-scaled Modular
Man. In the process of the emergence of moder-
nist architecture, Marion von Osten explains,
the Modernist architect was thus born; his
gender male. Osten points out that it was
assumed that a brave new world of modernism
would be achieved primarily through the
proper distribution of light and air,
accompanied by a rm belief in a universal
access to and desire for democracy.39 Osten
draws attention to the movie The Fountainhead
where masculinity and architecture are drawn
into an explicit connective synthesis, and
where building elements are used to present a
form of manworship.40 We are strong, we
are in control, we transform our environment,
and thereafter it transforms us. As Denise
Scott Brown argues, the heroically original,
Modern architectural revolutionary with his
avant-garde technology, out to save the masses
through mass production, is a macho image if
ever there was one.41 Deleuze and Guattari
identify this expansive and territorial gure of
Man par excellence as European, a gure
that Barney as a New World American must
also struggle to distinguish himself from.42
What has been forgotten in this formulation of
modernist Man is the subsistence of more
complex ecological systems, delicate feedback-
loops that circulate between man, his environ-
ment, his social relations and his ideas.
lubricated openingclosing and a
future of shit
What Barney succeeds in doing is disrupting
this modernist logic by performing an arduous
rite of passage, an apprenticeship that manifests
as mans precarious and uncertain relationship
with his environment. Barney has inverted the
dominant image of the exterior form of the
famous modernist icon, the Guggenheim
Museum, to work upon its celebrated interior
through the deployment of liberal smearings
of Vaseline. This may at rst seem a standard
shift from the masculine civic exterior into the
feminine domestic interior, a binary well estab-
lished through histories and theories of architec-
ture, but it would be misleading to suggest that
the Guggenheim Museum expresses a masculine
form externally. In fact, it confounds the
orthogonal logic of the Manhattan street grid
and disrupts the organisation of its neighbours
by presenting a smooth, curved faade to the
street that is divided by the horizontal dark
strips of the negative recesses of its windows,
bearing more of a relation to Central Park
across the road than to the city grid. Like
Barneys work, it is a building that begins to
dream its own autopoietic imaginary series of
worlds. As one well-known architectural histor-
ian relays, in his notes near the time of his death
Wright reects on the vulva-shaped pool in the
foyer of the Guggenheim and its relationship
to seeds and other vessels of vital reproduc-
tion.43 Wittingly or not, Barney has located
62

the rst level of his pluriverse in an environ-
ment of foam and laughter, where bathing
Venuses blow soft bubbles before ceremonially
opening the competition for the apprentice.
Frank Lloyd Wright is renowned for his specic
architectural interpretation of organic form as a
logic of form generation. It is not about a
restricted application of biomimicry, which
predominantly operates according to appear-
ances; the Guggenheim does not look like a
natural object. Instead, it is about an investi-
gation into natural systems and their endless
buddings and unfurlings, cycles of growth,
decay, growth, and the intricate patterns that
come to organise this systematicity. The archi-
tecture is not simply about an organicism that
relies on complex notions of growth, but is
rather more cybernetic as its design logic is
also mixed with the promise of an increasingly
technologically advanced age, and a growing fas-
cination in the biotechnological imbrication of
machines into everyday life. It is worth remem-
bering that Venus is no product of a natural
birth. Her name translates as foam arisen,
and she is born out of the genital remains of
Uranus and the foaming waters of the sea off
the coast of Cyprus where Cronus, having cut
off Uranus genitals, threw them behind him
into those waters.44
Wrights architecture can be seen to align
with Barneys emphasis on the interior of the
Guggenheim as the germinal space in which
explorative action can take place, and yet
Wright maintains far more control than that,
and the exploration of this interior world at
the Guggenheim is highly curated. The
planned circulation demands that the visitor
enter the foyer atrium and directly ascend to
the top oor of the museum by way of a lift.
From this vantage point, and with comfortable
ease, the visitor slowly descends, turning
around and around the illuminated atrium by
following a slowly descending ramp. On one
side a view is ventured into the void and down
towards the vulva-shaped pond, and on the
other a sequential array of aesthetic artefacts is
consumed. Barney violently contravenes this
logic, and can even be seen to go against
nature, or else what is perceived, in a highly
63
frichot
curated fashion, to constitute the natural.
Barneys apprentice breaks the logic of sense
at work by scaling the interior of the Guggen-
heim in a strenuous rock-climbing feat. He
breaks the gentle downwards trajectory of the
sloping ramp and imposes onto this interior
ve distinct, even incompossible, worlds, each
straining at the threshold of exhaustion. Follow-
ing a Leibnizian logic, the co-presence of incom-
possible worlds leads to a nonsensical universe
that is chaotic and labyrinth-like, where every
point of view is equally indeterminate, and any
direction you choose to take may well lead
nowhere, or else everywhere.45
With the event of Barneys performance in
The Order, the struggles of deterritorialisation
taking place in the architectural orice of the
Guggenheim Museum atrium pit two orders
against each other, the one transcendent and
the other immanent. These orders are entwined
in an embrace that works itself around a spiral.
And yet it is not as simple as suggesting that the
modernist architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
achieves a transcendent order and Matthew
Barneys performative event an experiment in
immanence. Both systems work internally
against themselves, torsioned in contrary direc-
tions: the Guggenheim leads the visitor swiftly
upwards according to the transcendent vertical
ascension of a lift, only to allow them to
slowly descend a wide ramp, and Barney
struggles upwards from level to level, only to
meet his post-human counterpart in the form
of a hybrid woman-beast near the summit,
only to topple back down again. A struggle for
transcendence leads again to the immanent
occasion, and the vertical is restored to a hori-
zontal organisation according to the logic of a
spiral. Deleuze and Guattari describe this
diagram of the counterpoint articulation of
transcendence and immanence in the following
way:
When it is transcendent, vertical, celestial,
and brought about by the imperial unity,
the transcendent element must always give
way or submit to a sort of rotation in
order to be inscribed on the always-imma-
nent plan of Nature-thought. The celestial
 barneys cremaster cycle
vertical settles on the horizontal of the
plane of thought in accordance with a
spiral.46
Between the struggle for transcendence and the
restoration of the here and now of immanence, a
rhythm of sense and sensation is effectively pro-
duced, a contraction and dilation much like that
of the cremaster muscle. This is the rhythm of
the ideal game played out by the bachelor
machine with its seemingly inexhaustible expen-
diture of energy.
The man-form only persists in so far as he is
assembled with so many other diverse forms
with which he enters into relations that either
diminish his capacity or increase his capacity
to act in a world. Spector explains that the Cre-
master operates in such a way that Characters
transmogrify into multiple versions of them-
selves, cars perform ritual sacrice, islands
have digestive tracts, buildings have dia-
phragms, bees pollinate people, and playing
elds have reproductive systems.47 Another
way of explaining this strangely animist uni-
verse is in terms of the immanent horizontal,
though uneven, relations that persist between
human and non-human actors who all assemble
together to form ecologies of varying sorts, all
intricately interconnected, from the bacterial
relations that churn the gut to global ows of
information and trash. Barney forwards a geo-
philosophical and ecosophical construction of
concepts and affects around the problem of
the fundamental relationship between organism
and environment, performing the near exhaus-
tion of this relation. It is by placing the man-
form under extreme duress, by speeding up
his circuits of production, consumption, pro-
duction, that Barney is able to throw up new
possible visions of precariously secured
relations between our future organisms and
future environments. He follows the materials
of a man-form in strife in order to imagine
other relations and forms of life, other environ-
ments and atmospheres of affect. Perhaps his is
the last cry of the anthrops in anticipation of
post-human becomings of man?
A nal note needs to be made here because of
the time that has passed since the completion of
the Cremaster Cycle. Another work of near
equal ambition has recently been completed by
Matthew Barney part opera, part lmic epic
of ve hours duration entitled River of Fun-
dament. It is based on an idiosyncratic reading
of a Norman Mailer novel called Ancient Eve-
nings, which was, in turn, much inspired by
the Egyptian Book of the Dead.48 Here,
rather than the jizm-like gunk that lubricates
the openings and closings of Barneys Cremaster
Cycle, there is a river of shit. It is the aftermath
of expenditure, an excess of
waste, the heavy odour of a
world gone bad. Or else, could
it be a world reconstituting
itself in anticipation of other
forms of life?
notes
1 On the theme of extinction see Claire Coleb-
rooks double volume entitled Essays on Extinction:
Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman; idem, Sex
after Life.
2 The Cremaster Cycle was first shown in its
entirely at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 6 June1
Sept. 2002, and then at Muse dArt Moderne de
la Ville de Paris, 10 Oct. 20025 Jan. 2003, and
finally at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York, 14 Feb.11 May 2003. See Matthew
Barney: Cremaster Cycle (New York: Guggenheim
Museum, 2002) opening publication details page
(n. pag.).
3 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJfI1LRK0tc>
(accessed 6 Jan. 2015).
4 Spector explains that the five cycles of the Cre-
master imagine the possibility of equilibrium and
symmetry between differences or opposing
parties, only to result in failure: the underlying
theme of a system in conflict with itself to remain
undifferentiated, when all determining factors
point toward differentiation, informs the Cremaster
project as a whole (Spector 18).
5 Spector wrote a thorough catalogue essay for
Barneys Cremaster Cycle, and explains that it has
at least two sets of beginnings, at least two
endings, and many more points of entry. It is a poly-
morphous organism of an artwork, continuously
shifting guises and following its own eccentric set
64

of rules. Reference is made briefly to the work of
Deleuze near the conclusion of her essay, but is not
explored in any depth (Spector 4).
6 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 36.
7 Caillois 150. See also Verwoert.
8 See Gilles Deleuze/Leibniz Cours Vincennes, 15
Apr. 1980, available <http://www.webdeleuze.com/
php/texte.php?cle=50&groupe=Leibniz&langue=2>
(accessed 4 Sept. 2012).
9 See Barneys diagram in Matthew Barney: Cremas-
ter Cycle 301.
10 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 58.
11 Ibid. 32.
12 Ibid. 60.
13 Ibid.
14 Spector 5.
15 Carrougues constructs what he calls a com-
plete series of bachelor machines, citing examples
that include Duchamps Bride Stripped Bare by her
Bachelors, Even, also known as the Large Glass;
Kafkas In the Penal Colony; Raymond Roussels
Locus Solus; Lautramonts Chants of Maldorer, and
its famous formula as beautiful as the chance
encounter between a sewing-machine and an
umbrella on a dissecting table; and Edgar Allan
Poes The Pit and the Pendulum. See Carrougues,
Directions for Use 2138. See also idem, Les
Machines clibataire; Szeemann and Clair 21.
16 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 31.
17 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 18.
18 Jardine 153.
19 Koolhaas describes a ficto-critical architectural
construction that is a floating swimming pool, a dis-
placed body of water paradoxically supported
amidst a larger, oceanic water body. The pool has
been constructed by Russian constructivists who,
feeling disillusioned with the ossification of the
revolutionary project in Russia, use the floating
swimming pool as a vehicle of escape. They have
discovered that if they swim towards the place
they hope to escape from, Russia, then the pool
will move inexorably towards their desired desti-
nation, that is, America, and more specifically,
New York. As Koolhaas explains: they had to
swim away from where they wanted to go,
65
frichot
toward what they wanted to get away from
(308). When, after forty long years they finally
arrive at their desired destination, their swimsuits
in tatters, they find that New York has come to
resemble characteristics of the place they had
hoped to escape. Their ficto-critical narrative as
imaginary architectural construction demonstrates
the forestalled consummation and desiring pro-
duction that is characteristic of the bachelor
machine (Koolhaas).
20 Certeau explains that a celibatory or bachelor
machine is an apparatus that is built around an
internal difference (for instance, between the
sexes) and is composed of interconnected
systems; it accumulates inscriptions, and circulates
backwards during the night and forwards during
the day, and produces energy through this move-
ment (de Certeau 157).
21 Le Bot et al. See also Szeemann and Clair 21.
22 Spector 56.
23 Barney qtd in Spector 6.
24 Spector 56.
25 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 110.
26 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 17.
27 Batesons expanded definition of ecology is
manifested in his insistence that the basic unit of
survival must be considered as a combination of
organism plus environment (Bateson 459, 460).
28 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 110.
29
It is only by breaking open the circle, as in the
case of the Mbius strip, by unfolding and
untwisting it, that the dimension of sense
appears for itself, in its irreducibility, and
also in its genetic power as it animates an a
priori internal model of the proposition.
(Deleuze, Logic of Sense 20)
30 See Hughes.
31 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 177.
32 Ibid.
33 Deleuze, Logic of Sense 20.
34 Conley 133.
35 Ibid. 130.
 barneys cremaster cycle
36 Deleuze writes:
We must take quite literally the idea that man
is a face drawn in the sand between two tides:
he is a composition appearing only between
two others, a classical past that never knew
him and a future that will no longer know
him. (Deleuze, Foucault 89)
37 Bennett 34547.
38 Spector 4.
39 Von Osten 22627.
40 Ibid. 227.
41 Scott Brown 261.
42 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 97.
43 Frampton 188.
44 Sloterdijk 6376.
45 See Lambert 12852.
46 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 89.
47 Spector 23.
48 See Searle.
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Helene Frichot
Critical Studies in Architecture
School of Architecture
KTH (Royal Institute of Technology)
Stockholm 10044
Sweden
E-mail: helene.frichot@arch.kth.se
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