kaleidoscope

I knew it! When I read through the entire article on Performance Art by Noël Carroll, I thought I was enlightened in how the Cremaster’s Cycle by Mathew Barney should be viewed at.
At first, I was really puzzled at such abstract things in the film. Almost nothing bound them together to make them interconnected and comprehensive. Whenever I see a movie, especially if my assessment is preempted by an information or comment by those who have already watched it; that the story is intellectually intimidating, I tend to look for meaning and symbolism in every gesture, or every angle of the scene, or in other elements of the film just to dig out the connection between these things to know the story. But I seem to find none when I was watching Cremaster’s Cycle.
However, contemporary art is a kaleidoscope of performance “numbers”, as represented by the cabaret show entitled “Lulu”. This, then, gave me the idea that Mathew Barney’s Cremaster’s Cycle, which falls under Performance Art, also presents a kaleidoscope image of what contemporary art covers. The different levels of the gallery (of which name I cannot recall) bears different forms of Art, but are all in the contemporary style. One level showcased a rock concert while another presented what seemed to be a musical, as a bunch of girls, neatly dressed with bunny headdresses, compressed with each other and pranced to a tune that only them seemed to hear. At the same time, a man seemed to be making his masterpiece of an abstract expressionism using liquefied wax at one level and a feline girl sat on an elevated corner of another level, licking her body parts while triggered by the presence of Barney who tried to climb higher towards the top of the gallery, and back to the bottom. When we look at the spiral structure of that part of the gallery from the top, we would see a kaleidoscope of performances and other contemporary art forms. For me, all of such are presented in abstract form to portray a sense of generalization or holistic approach to each field of art that they represented, considering the many categories or genres that still fall under each form of art.
For me, the whole performance basically presented a holistic view of the various contemporary arts, zoomed out from a detailed way of seeing each art form. Perhaps, it wanted to convey a message that we should not confine our appreciation of art in the frame of paintings or in the walls of a theater house, but that we should have an eye for every work of art. Also, contemporary art may be a bastardization of the classical art to many people. But we should think that art evolves through time and its content and origin, say the emotion or mood of a painter for abstract expressionism, also changes (e.g. from the popular portraits of influential people in the society to the figures of various emotions and scenes in our daily lives).