Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2: The Drones' Exposition, the fourth
installment in the artist's ongoing series of Cremaster works, will be on view
at the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art (SFMOMA) from May 20
through September 5, 2000. An artist who works in diverse media, Barney considers himself primarily a sculptor; his films, sculpture. Thus, the installation includes sculptures, photographs and drawings that reference and elaborate themes and motifs explored in the 35-millimeter film. An anteroom with nylon cabinets filled with crystallized barbells (dipped in concentrated saline), a salt sculpture of a mountain range, flags and a silver mirrored riding saddle opens into a room-sized installation containing a suite of photographs of glaciers and a set of self-lubricating bleachers where visitors view the film. The SFMOMA presentation of Cremaster 2 will be the West Coast premiere of the film and installation.

The film which runs 79 minutes long, will have scheduled daily screenings in SFMOMA's fourth floor media arts galleries at noon and 3 p.m. on Tuesday through Thursday, with an additional 7 p.m. screening on Thursday evenings.The film is an elliptical narrative that traces the rise and fall of antihero Gary Gilmore, convicted killer and alleged grandson of Harry Houdini. Loosely based on The Executioners' Song, Norman Mailer's 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of Gilmore's life and death, the film moves from the sweeping vistas of a glacier field in the Canadian Rockies to the Bonneville Salt Flats, from Chicago in 1893 to Utah in 1976. Critically hailed as one of the most crucial artists of his generation, Barney peoples the hallucinatory landscape of his film and installation with bees, bison, heavy-metal drummers, magicians, mediums, Mounties, murders and two-steppers.

Featured in the cast of Cremaster 2 are Mailer (as Houdini) and Dave Lombardo, former lead drummer for the band Slayer. Barney himself takes on the role of Gary Gilmore. Composer Jonathan Bepler created an original musical score for the film, with vocals by Steve Tucker of Morbid Angel and Patty Griffin.

Barney's work moves between boundaries-both geographical and temporal-to create a tale of resistance and growth. Like a two-step dance, the narrative shuffles between Houdini's meeting with Gilmore's grandmother and a surreal prison rodeo in which Gilmore serves out his death sentence as a rodeo bull rider. The artist merges these parallel universes with recurring symbols. Bees and wasp-waisted women, for example, figure prominently and represent the state of Utah and Mormonism (bees and hives are prontitient in the iconography of both).

Gilmore-the first person to be executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty-was perhaps the most infamous Mormon and Utah resident. Recasting actual historical events-the real Gilmore was executed by firing squad, by his own request, as a type of blood atonement-Barney exploits the character of the Western landscape with photographs, sculptures and cinematic narrative. Canadian glaciers, which are the prehistoric source of the lakes that created Utah's salt fields, function as a metaphor for the transformation of individual characters and a pentirnento of their generational relationships. As Barney describes, Cremaster 2 explores "the relation between the geological recession of a glacier and the backward movement of tracing a family geneology."

Throughout the Cremaster series-named after the muscle that controls the ascending and descending of the testicles-Barney layers diverse landscapes and characters, biography and history to create his own mythological universe. Creinaster 4' 1994, filmed on the Isle of Man, is full of androgynous fairies and satyrs, a rare four-horned sheep and a figure known as the Loughton Candidate (half man, half sheep, played by Barney). Cremaster 1, 1995, sho in Boise, Idaho, featured Goodyear blimps and hostesses on a football field. With Cremaster 5, 1997, filmed in Budape and starring Ursula Andress as the Queen of Chain in a lavish "opera" with Jacobin pigeons, Barney ushered in ornate costumes and played a magician on horseback.

Matthew Barney, born in San Francisco in 1967 and raised in Idaho, received a B.A. from Yale in 1989, had his first solo museum exhibition at SFMOMA in 1991 and was featured on the cover of Artforum shortly after that. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions at SFMOMA; the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris; the Tate Gallery, Londor Kunsthalle, Bern; as well as a full survey exhibition at the Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1995. In 1993, he won the Europa 2000 at the Venice Biennale and in 1996 was awarded the first annual Hugo Boss Award by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The complete installation of Cremaster 2 premiered at the Walker Art Center on July 18, 1999.

Cremaster 2 is accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Walker Art Center Chief Curator Richard Flood and full-color reproductions. Available for 545 in the SFMOMA MuseumStore, it is distributed by D.A.P.(Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.)