CALIGULA I'm not mad; in fact, I've never felt so lucid. I suddenly felt a desire for the impossible. That's all. (Pauses). Things as they are in my opinion are far from satisfactory...That's why I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal life-something, in fact that may sound crazy, but which isn't of this world.... I'm exploiting the impossible.
Or, more accurately, its a question of making the impossible possible.... And what's the use to me of a firm hand, what use is the amazing power that is mine, if I can't have the sun set in the east, if I can't reduce the sum of suffering and make an end to death?
CAESONIA (HIS OLD MISTRESS) But that's madness, sheer madness. Its wanting to be god on earth.
CALIGULA I want to drown the sky in the sea, to infuse ugliness with beauty, to wring a laugh from pain.

-Albert Camus (1965) Caligula.

Hubris, excessive pride or defiance of the gods, is Caligula's madness-the madness of wanting to be God on earth. The boundary of the permissible, it is the will-to-power that violates the very architecture of possibility, that seeks to capture thought at the height of creative freedom, the apex of potential, the elusive state that hovers on the threshold of realization. But such Olympian heights are not readily inhabited by mere mortals. For this is a space into which we can only trespass, since the exploitation of the impossible brings with it the price of retribution-punishment for challenging the Gods-the means by which we come to accept the unacceptable. The mythological pedigree of hubris and its counterpart nemesis, the personification of divine vengeance, belongs to the Greeks. lt is the myth of Marsyas the satyr, archetype of man and symbol of the sexual poly-presence of nature, who having happened upon a set of pipes discarded by the goddess Athena, discovers the music of Gods. Angered by the satyr's temerity, Apollo challenges the goat-god to a musical contest agreeing that the winner should inflict whatever punishment he pleased upon the loser. The contest, or so it is goes proved equal, until Apollo, shifting the goal-posts, defied Marsyas, "to do with your instrument as much as I can do with mine. Turn it upside down and both play and sing at the same time." Failing to meet the challenge of the impossible, retribution was meted with the deictic Cruelty of revenge: the satyr flayed alive, his skin nailed to a pine. The Achilles heel of the demigod, hubris is both conceptual space and psycho-biological barrier-the impassable point of imagined death, the outfield of the physical. lt is the madness, lucidity, poise and glacial beauty behind the unreachable presence of Matthew Barney's sculptural extremes. Pulling like the psychic undertow of a distant event, it is a space literalized in question of the line, of how and where it is drawn, the limits that it might describe.

In the Drawing Restraint series, conceived as 'facilities to defeat the facility of drawing' the line is neither crossed nor drawn. lt is invoked. Like horizon lines which recede as they are approached, they are perceptual and physical margins held at the periphery of vision and thought. Enacting de Sade's hypothesis that, 'the true way of extending one's desires is to impose checks on them', the three satyrs of Drawing Restraint 7 ceremonialise hindrance and prohibition in the form of physical struggle enacted in the back of a moving limo. In the front of the vehicle the kid, the least developed of the three forms is in futile pursuit of it's tail, chasing elusive horizons, where the sea drowns the sky, where the ergonomic of the limo-machine engulfs the bionomic of the satyr-kid, where the body refusing to submit the law of differentiation, becomes a marker not of separation, but of potential and connection. Horns are locked and sexuality is contested. Enacted as sadomasochistic ritual, as Norman O Brown would have it, "an endless, a vicious cycle; in which the subject and object are confused; active and passive, male and female roles are exchanged, in the desire and pursuit of the whole, the combined object",01 the character of the piece gradually emerges as a lamination of all possible identities and outcomes. Refusing to accept the unacceptable, to resolve either the form being drawn in the condensation of the moon roof or the sexual identity of the organism described, the satyrs begin to punish themselves. Achilles heels aligned, the flaying begins. Fur and upholstery ripped and torn-a slow scream is impaled on silence.

This is the anal-sadistic universe where all differences are abolished, where merging of erotogenic worlds becomes an act of violence, the contestation of nature, a modification of the very order of creation. But, it is a violence that suspends the crippling effects of rationality. "This" as Sylvere Lotringer puts it, "is the function (violence) assumes in sadomasochism, which is not a gratuitous exercise in private fascism, but a highly ritualistic form of 'social therapy.' By submitting his slave to a dizzying spiral of violence and eroticism, the master promises him more than pleasure: he strips the slave of the inhibitions that prevent him from taking responsibility for his existence. Death is not the goal here, but the internal horizon (and occasionally the supreme temptation) of a subjective rebirth."02 Only through the monadic internalization of the sadomasochistic contract can the Oedipal laws of creation be subverted, objects and identities amalgamated, purpose and substance deviated-reality reinvented. But the man who refuses to respect the law of differentiation challenges the gods. The word hybrid is, after all, derived from the Greek hubris, and to hybridize the body is to undermine the world of separation and distinction, to discredit the power and rationality of the father-creator. Just as it is only the truly guilty man who can conceive of the concept of innocence at all, so it is he who diverts the flow of nature who understands its reality best. Spilled from the Crucible of action, the molten matter of a pre-genital universe, Barney sculpts the gravitational pull of a body never our own-where the language of the sculptural dimension falters on the edge of the possible, the edge of hubris.

Here, temptation, the madness of wanting to be god on earth sometimes takes the form of a pill. Too large to be either swallowed or ignored, the hubris pill is offered as the intermediary or transporting agent to the bio-sculptural space the other side of hypertrophy. Representing competition as opposed to training. Otto as opposed to Houdini, the open orifice as opposed to the closed, the steroid as opposed to placebo, the hubris pill returns to the body the conceptual space offered by the drawn form. A symbol of potential omnipotence, it might be the anabolic steroid, that has transformed the arenas of competitive athletics and body-building by taking the body through the performance-wall, past the limits of 'natural' physicality and biology. Juiced on Triacana, Ritalin and the hormone-rich fluid from the hypothalamus gland of dead monkeys, one body-builder, a former Mr. Eastern U.S.A. took the ultimate punishment for the hubris of the body. Convinced that he could stop a car with his bare hands he ran out of the gym into the passing-lane of the Hempstead Turnpike, only to be run over like a dog by a Buick Skylark-his body along with the illusion of omnipotence spattered across its fender. As Nietzsche writes in Ecco Homo, "One must pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive." In Barney's strange facilities and libidinal dreamscapes we find the digestion of this possibility translated into the compulsion of narrative. They form the archeology of an impossible space, where all discursive language is constrained to come undone in the violence of the body, where thought, forsaking the wordy interiority of consciousness becomes material energy, the suffering of the flesh, the persecution and rending of the subject itself. A visceral landscape, the body is the site of metamorphosis and transformation, a civilization no longer bound to the laws of post-genital division, but a battleground determined by the laws of movement, hybridization and migratory possibility.

Cremaster 4 is a deep safari into this body without organs. Named after the cremaster muscles controlling the elevation of the testicles, it takes the form of a narrative drawing-a dream of mutation in which the reproductive tract of the Loughten Candidate is drawn across the forehead of the Loughten Ram, the four horned sheep indigenous to the Isle of Man. As with the satyrs, where the libidinally creative flesh of the symbol takes place of that of the human, the Loughten Ram with its ascending and descending horns representing the potential of the hybridized body.

The narrative opens and concludes in a white fasciaed vanity unit at the end of derelict Victorian pier, jutting out into the Irish sea. We see the Loughten Candidate considering his reflection in the mirror, parting his hair to reveal empty sockets, a pathetic vestige of the Ram's horny outgrowth. The performance wall, the conceptual barrier of previous work, has here become the performance floor. A dance begins, this metamorphosed hooves tapping out the cadence of a world beyond the mirrored image, a state other than his own. Aided and abetted by three 'faeries'-women cross-dressed in the musculature of men-the Loughton Candidate's tap wages its war of attrition upon the floor below. The reality principle that is his literal support is gradually eroded, opening upon the floor below. The thin membrane that separates the reflective space at the end of the pier from the dynamic space of the island-organism threatens to herniate. lt is a ritual that bears all the marks of a rite of passage, the expulsion from the binary symmetry of the vanity into a world of morphological indeterminacy. Seduced by the 'faeries' into what Virilio has called the 'cosmo-dynamic dimension', the rite is initiated by movement, "a navigation of bodies and senses from something immutable towards another region in time, a space-time essentially different since experienced as mobile, conducive, transformable, as the creation of a second universe which would depend entirely upon this initial rite."03 Dropping through the prosthetic orifice at the end of the pier, the Loughton Candidate enters this second universe, where the compulsions of the body, liberated from the constraints of differentiation are felt as the dynamic forces streaking off in opposite directions around the dream-circuit. It is a fall from grace-a literal descent from the Victorian platform of physical culture and received ideas of the body-a Houdiniesque act of disappearance, which sets biology in motion, the balls rolling. "The episode in Genesis", writes Virilio of another mythological expulsion, reveals that the accomplishment of the rite of passage leading from one universe to another produces not only a metamorphosis of sight but an immediate camouflage and careful dissimulation of the body. Here one may recall Hannah Arendt's reflection that 'Terror is the fulfillment of the law of movement'. In the biblical narrative fear is simultaneous with seduction precisely because the latter is traversed in a phenomenon of speed such that the anticipation of an accident occurs instantly. Isn't the 'sin' of the first man commonly called the 'falI', the ancients thus establishing a direct relation between what us conventionally called original sin and the terrestrial pull which they considered to be the first natural motor of the free acceleration of bodies, of their projection but also of their collision."04

The scene on the pier has all the markings of such primal confrontation, where desire, tested by temptation, falls into a black hole, the picnoleptic space between events for which the rapidity of passage is registered not as travel but as escaped time-the phenomenon of pure speed. Narrative is set in motion, the three legs set spinning. In the contra-rotation of the island, the yellow and blue hacks set out to describe its unresolved form. Desiring machines metabolizing fossil fuel into energy, compulsion into propulsion, they trace lines of possibility and routes of escape across the imaginary body-the destructured territory of the island organism. This is the space of primal chaos, of mutation and hybridization, where the initial 'fall' from the world of structure and division, exorbitantly inflated by the laws of movement, renders all bodies vectorial faculties, 'events in motion'-which, as we know from the ancient Greeks, are the Gods themselves.

Immortality, beauty from ugliness and laughter from pain oppose the law that stasis is death. Seduced by the trajectory of maximum potential and the promise of action, the Loughten Candidate is drawn inexorably towards the uninhabitable sculptural space that lies beyond the hubristic threshold. But, accepting the unacceptable, with holding the final transformation offered by the Loughten Ram is, the price of candidacy: the contestation of the body and will revealed to be perhaps little more than a creative dillusion, his biology unchanged, his scrotum pulled only by the forces of the imagination. Surveying the other side, the madness of wanting to be God on earth, we are left with a poesis of quietude, a private meditation on what it might be like, to cross the line.

Notes:
01. Norman O Brown, 'Loves Body', University of California Press 1990, first ed. 1986, p.70
02. Sylvere Lotringer, 'Overexposed: Treating Sexual Perversion in America', Pantheon Books 1988, p.16
03. Paul Virilio, 'Moving Gir|', in: 'Polysexuality', Semiotext(e) 1981, p.242
04. ibid p.243





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