Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and the Ordeal of Value Nina Papazoglou A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy, in Cultural History Goldsmiths College University of London 2013 1 table of contents acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………3 abstract.................................................................................................................................4 CHAPTER ONE ‘Introduction and Methodology’ 1.1 Explaining the Idea Behind This Study.............................................................................6 1.2 Narrative as Form: Five Stories, One Idea.....................................................................15 1.2.1 Cremaster 4.................................................................................................................20 1.2.2 Cremaster 1.................................................................................................................25 1.2.3 Cremaster 5.................................................................................................................28 1.2.4 Cremaster 2.................................................................................................................33 1.2.5 Cremaster 3.................................................................................................................42 1.3 How Bourdieu’s System meets Barney’s World: The Field as Emblem and as Social Structure.........................................................................................................57 1.4 Matthew Barney’s Habitus as an Entry Point into the Cycle/Field..................................64 1.5 The Cremaster Cycle and the Field of Power.................................................................81 CHAPTER TWO ‘The Cremaster Cycle in Perspective: The Contemporary Total Work of Art and its American Male Hero’ 2.1 A Hero’s Journey in the Field of Mythical Production.....................................................97 2.2 Rounding Things up with a Myth: Barney as Wagner...................................................100 2.3 Genealogy: Form, Identity and Abstraction...................................................................112 2.4 An American Century................................................................................................... 136 2.5 Against or Towards the Gender Principle?...................................................................154 CHAPTER THREE ‘The Safety of Order and the Fascination for Entropic Dissolution: The Cremaster Cycle as Sociopolitical Critique’ 3.1 Ordered Subversion as Style: Conceptualcore as Decadence ...................................173 3.2 Traditional Ambiguity....................................................................................................184 3.3 A Decadent Point: The Freemasons in the Cremaster Cycle and the System of Corporate Patronage.........................................................................................................206 CHAPTER FOUR ‘Ordeal or Deal in Contemporary Art: The Cremaster Cycle as Cultural Capital Investment or the Value of Art as a Form of Collective Faith’ 4.1 Aesthetic Wars, Legitimacy and Social Groups: From Pierre Bourdieu to Ernst Gombrich .........................................................................................................................221 4.2 From Peter Bürger’ s Autonomous Artwork towards a Malleable notion of Artistic Value................................................................................................................................228 4.3 The Cremaster Cycle as a Bourdieuan Paradox and the Autocatalytic System of Artistic Value................................................................................................................................233 4.4 Disavowed Economies or Value in Numbers? From Bourdieu and into the Field Practice............................................................................................................................240 4.5 The Puzzle of Surplus Value .....................................................................................248 4.6 Kantian Disinterestedness and Contemporary Artistic Value.....................................258 concluding remarks.......................................................................................................269 bibliography....................................................................................................................279 2 Acknowledgements I owe my deepest gratitude to my supervisor/coach Howard Caygill for his golden patience and support as well as great ideas that kept me on track with this PhD thesis against all academic odds. A really big thanks as well to my examiners Peg Rawes and Craig Smith for their genuine and helpful insights that aided me to articulate my argument in the best way possible. Also I am totally grateful to all my friends and colleagues who bore with me all these years the psychological weight of pushing this carriage to the shore. And last I would like to dedicate this thesis to my family whose loss during all these years of my academic ordeal have been immense and yet they graced me with their pure love and encouragement. Papazoglou Nina 3 abstract The following thesis makes a critical attempt for approaching the concept of artistic value based on case-study of a unique in its kind contemporary artwork. A cultural production that peculiarly illustrates a paradoxical process of pre- consecration as high art, within the both the aesthetic and art professional fields it is hosted within. The Cremaster Cycle of Matthew Barney, a notorious and at the same time, enigmatic production of contemporary art, illustrates a process of contemporaneous art historical indexing and to the creation of cultural capital. Such processes, facilitated by private and institutional patronage, are understood as integral to the art production from the 1990s and onwards, making the professional field of art equally important as the aesthetic one. Within this particular frame, we will see the faithful coming together of various agents, in support of an aesthetic idea or else, a cultural product, whose form seems intrinsically bound to both a social and an economical agenda, while at the same time it expresses a very particular aesthetic one. Due to such characteristics the research and analysis of the case study was carried out against the background of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field theory’, echoing therefore the aesthetic ‘field of the Cremaster Cycle’ . Using as disciplinary pillars from one side, the abstract and idiosyncratic realm of art theory and on the other the practical world and language of commerce, the thesis will attempt to look into the specific conditions that contributed to the Cremaster Cycle’s immediate valorization as high art. In this route the question of artistic value is one of great importance and yet, it is not one that could be sufficiently answered. Though, what becomes definite through this research project, brought forward in such times when the notions of both, artistic production and value are so expanded and malleable, is an intense urgency for new definitions. Somehow, it seems that the core problematic of this necessity for reconfiguration evolves around the notion of autonomy. This time not of the artwork but of the ones that attribute its value, namely the field; And this is exactly what the Cremaster Cycle offers us in perspective. Is there the possibility of objective or autonomous artistic value within a knowingly non-autonomous art? 4 Chapter One: Introduction and Methodology 5 1.1 Explaining the Idea Behind this Study This thesis focuses upon a particular issue, which is situated within the theoretical space as drafted by the relationship between contemporary artistic production and its value, both in terms of cultural and of financial context. By employing Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle as the main case study of the thesis, I will try to show how this work of art, as a contemporary version of the Wagnerian ‘total artwork’, may offer through its resistance and ambiguity, towards presenting a definite ‘meaning’, a critical perspective upon the ‘contemporary art field’, showcasing it through its epic formulas and neo- mythological characters, as an elite institution and artists as solitary agents harshly competing for their ascent. Within this system, the establishment of value in artistic production is being disconnected from the function of aesthetic judgment while being connected to certain processes that are subject, from one hand, to social junctures and on the other , to faith and fate. One of the most important things to be made clear in this introduction is that in this thesis the Cremaster Cycle is being tagged as a novel version of the Wagnerian genre not only because it was critically categorized by the artistic field as such - thus due to its formal properties and characteristics- but also, because it owes its existence to a distinctively institutional framing, funding and celebration of its production event. So just like Wagner’s operas and their existential and practical interdependency to King Ludwig’s court and likewise to many contemporary art productions, the Cremaster Cycle could not exist without an immediate, constant and close relationship to a powerful patronage scheme. Seeing this as the essence of contemporary high art production, 6 namely its relationship to capital, as far as its aesthetic autonomy