Order - From Cremaster 3 2003 Horror Movie Review

I’m taking Art History 309: Contemporary Art & Issues this semester and I had to watch The Order and then write an essay determining whether I was a Champion! of Matthew Barney or if I absolutely hated this film. After watching the film, I went to lunch with a classmate and we discussed it to get some ideas and to try to come to a conclusion to whether we loved it or not. She and I both walked out with the same opinion of the movie: it was too complicated. We thought: why would anyone want to rack most of their brain to try and figure out this film?


I went home and began researching. I found a great article written by Michael Kimmelman, the art critic for the art section in The New York Times and a Champion of Matthew Barney. I wanted to know why it was so complicated, why everyone in my class left scratching their heads, and why Michael thought he was the greatest artist of his generation. In Kimmelman’s “ART REVIEW; Free To Play And Be Gooey,” he writes, “If you aren’t familiar with his work, you can feel baffled by the idea of a sculpture made of tapioca and Vaseline—like the one from “Cremaster 1” now on the Guggenheim’s ground floor—and what this object could possibly mean. But that is the condition of WONDERMENT.” He goes on to say, “Peter de Bolla, in his book ART MATTERS described wonderment this way: ‘Wonder required us to acknowledge what we do not know or may never know, to acknowledge the limits of knowledge. It is, then, a different species of knowledge, a way of knowing that does not lead to certainties or truths about the world or the way things are. It is a state of mind that, like being in love, colors all that we know.’”


I believe Barney wants you to figure things out for yourself. He wants you to have some knowledge of his films before watching them and he wants you to either love it or hate it. Kimmelman explains further, “Suffice it to say, the more work you put into understanding the art, the more sense it makes. Some kinds of Buddhism are extremely occult and meant to be hard to grasp. The effort can be either a hindrance or a pleasure. The choice is yours….The satisfaction of Mr. Barney’s art is in its network of ideas, whose meanings reveal themselves in time, as all good art does.”


All of these reviews were quite helpful to me and the reviewer that compared The Order DVD to a video game was great. This may be yet another piece in Barney’s puzzle that you must piece together.


I’ve written many essays on many different artists. I believe that Barney’s art is considered very high compared to Edgar Mueller’s street paintings. Vic Muniz is up there with Barney with his literary references incorporated within his work, but Barney goes over the edge and beyond with his complicated and intertwining themes and symbolism.