| CAKE Byte - Gender Signs | |||||||||
What do you get when you cross several metric tons of Vaseline, Ursula Andress, a flock of barnyard animals, Norman Mailer, and a healthy portion of "self-lubricating" plastic? (And no, this is not the pretext for a bad joke...) Well, for starter you get a dynamic combination of "pre-genital oneness," "androgynous gonadal structures," and enough out of this world imagery to have your jaw dropping for a week afterwards. Ok - you are probably confused right now. You are probably thinking, "Either CAKE has flipped its proverbial lid," or "What drugs is CAKE on?" (and where can I get some!?) Well to be perfectly honest - so are we! To clear things up — we are referring to The Cremaster Cycle — Matthew Barney’s epic on display right now at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. The "cremaster" is the male muscle that controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli. If you are living in New York City (and haven’t been hiding under a rock...) you have SURELY heard the buzz about Cremaster. A series of 5 films - and photographs, drawings, sculptures and installations - created over 8 years — the entire Cremaster Cycle is quite a big nugget to digest. In fact, the Guggenheim museum has dedicated the majority of its facility for the 36-year-old Matthew Barney’s first retrospective. While we would be hard pressed to define this exhibit herein — CAKE would like to set you on the path to enlightened (or confused) understanding. To begin with, you have one of the most diverse casts ever assembled: writer Norman Mailer, sculptor Richard Serra, Marti Domination (a Jackie 60 institution), Aimee Mullins, Ursula Andress, and of course Matthew Barney himself. In "real life" Aimee Mullins is a both a successful model and a renowned Para-Olympian, setting world records in 3 events with the aid of advanced artificial legs. In Cremaster, she morphs in shape and form from a seductress to a tigress, making matters ever more complicated... The subject of last week's CAKE.Byte - Nature/Nurture - is aesthetically and extensively explored throughout Matthew Barney's epic. In Cremaster One, we witness the undifferentiated reproductive system — rendered as a pair of Blimps and a flock of chorus girls, parading about on an electric blue athletic field. Of course, this is symbolic of the purist embryonic state! In Cremaster 2, we are witness to the sexual phase of fetal development, albeit rendered as a gothic Western. The rest? Well, you will have to see for yourself — but trust that it will examine the struggle between biology, the potential of sexuality and human life, and the pressures of self-definition. Back down to reality, we need only look around us, every day, to witness how our culture expresses difference, and how each of us plays with traditional gender signs to express our own sexuality. As noted previously - "We do not exist in a vacuum and our sexuality is defined by our experiences in the culture around us, so one way to start examining female sexuality is to explore sexual reference points already present in our culture." If we observe our culture, we see that WE ARE ALL responsible for defining these reference points - and should be especially responsible for changing them as we evolve. What signs do we all think of and read as defining each gender - and what do each of us do that perpetuates or mixes up the gender assumptions around us? For example, we can easily look at fashion to check out visually enforced gender roles. Certainly what it means to look like a "straight" sexual woman gets overemphasized by every magazine on earth and actualized by millions of women every day. On the other hand, cutting edge and alternative communities have always used fashion as a sign of sexual identity and differential from the norm. Gender differences are also used less literally to symbolize qualities usually assigned to one sex or the other - like romance, strength, financial power, and sexual power. Artists, musicians, fashion designers, artists, filmmakers, photographers and even adult moviemakers have long explored the chicness of gender bending. To further the point, this month's Interview Magazine depicts a fashion shoot with a throwback to "romantic" masculinity - where the male model's sexuality is emphasized by lace, trim, pearls and frills meant for a female and male audience. This layout (with the subheading: beware - these are not your typical male work clothes) transcends the traditional model of the magazine world where women's magazines depict women as sex objects for other women to emulate, and male magazines depict women as sex objects for men to fuck. But that’s fodder for another CAKE Byte, indeed... As one CAKE member notes - "If it was a perfect world "female" would be seen as a bearer of life, the co-manager of family, the sexual goddess she is, and the respected member of planet she deserves to be. I know that women can be this, and CAKE helps many achieve it by letting us live/talk/envision our true selves." Though we work towards equality every day - being female in our culture is an undervalued attribute - and traditional ways of assigning sexual difference has a distinct way of demonstrating our inequalities. Visual symbols of what it means to be a man or a woman have changed, and through exhibitions like that of Matthew Barney’s, we see the lines blurring...go check it out for yourself. The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney at the Guggenheim Museum — 89th Street and 5th Avenue through June 2003. If you can't get to the Guggenheim, go to http://www.cremaster.net. Love,
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