Lives of the Artists by Tomkins Calvin

Author:Tomkins, Calvin [Tomkins, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780805088724
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2010-01-04T16:00:00+00:00

SHALL WE MARCH, you and I, through the “Cremaster” cycle, deciphering its cosmologies, symbolic connections, and bifurcating narrative threads? No, we won’t. Let’s go instead to the Ritzy Cinema, on the Brixton Oval, in South London, where, last October, Barney and several members of his crew were building, in the lobby, a massive object that would recapitulate the cycle in the form of an abstract sculpture. The sculpture had to be finished by October 25, three days away, in time for the London premiere of Cremaster 3. The crew should have been frantic, but nobody seemed to be, certainly not Matt Ryle, the all-purpose operations chief, or Jessica Frost, Barney’s unflappable assistant, or Barney himself, who at the moment was working on a piece of plastic material with an electric sander.

Barney wore black jeans, a black T-shirt, and black workman’s boots. He hadn’t shaved lately, and anybody’s mother would have said he needed to gain a few pounds. The project was unusual, though, because neither he nor anyone else had been staying up until three or four in the morning to work on it. One of the things that make the crew so loyal to Barney is that he works harder than any of them, doing what ever needs to be done, including scut work like sanding. But Barney and Björk had a three-week-old baby girl named Isadora, and he’d been going home for dinner. Barney and Björk have managed so far to keep their careers separate and their private life inviolate. This is no small feat, inasmuch as Björk, a musical phenomenon who released her first album when she was eleven, is an international superstar. Her solo albums sell in the millions, and her performance in Lars von Trier’s film Dancer in the Dark, whose score she co-wrote, won her an Oscar nomination in 2001 and a best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. Björk’s website makes no mention of Barney, their relationship, or Isadora.

Courteous and friendly in a reserved, low-key way, Barney walked me around the sculpture, which took up most of the lobby. It was an enormous reinforced-plywood mold with curving contours, four feet high by more than sixteen feet wide, filled with a buttery-yellow mixture of three parts petroleum jelly to one part wax—ten tons of it, Barney said, trucked in from a factory in the Midlands and pumped hot into the mold. The mixture was cooling more slowly than anticipated; they had planned to unbolt and take away the mold this afternoon, but the jelly hadn’t solidified enough. Hanging over the sculpture were five tele vision monitors, arranged pentagonally, on which the five “Cremaster” films would run continuously during the three weeks that the sculpture remained on view. “I’m taking plea sure in the fact that this is the last piece in the ‘Cremaster’ cycle,” Barney said.

When I asked him how the sculpture related to the films, Barney located a battered canvas backpack, shuffled through a mess of papers, and pulled out a somewhat crumpled line drawing of what looked like a pig lying on its back.

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