De Lama Lamina

Artist Matthew Barney's follow-up to his Cremaster Cycle is this collaboration with American-Brazilian musician Arto Lindsay, inspired by Carnaval celebrations in the Bahia region. Sexuality, ecology, myth, and politics are all threads in the complex tapestry of music and imagery. Matthew Barney astonished audiences worldwide with his epic Cremaster cycle. One of his follow-up projects is De Lama Lamina (60 mins.), translating from Portuguese roughly as "From Mud, a Blade."

Centering on a gigantic float he built for the pre-Lenten Carnival celebration in Salvador, Bahia (the heart of Brazil's African culture), and working with musician Arto Lindsay, Barney has produced a lushly suggestive parable involving three "characters": Lindsay, playing himself, the Greenman (a creature with bulbs and roots sprouting from his orifices), and environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, whose perplexing activities are intercut with documentary sequences of the float as it makes it way within the dancing and revelry of the parade.

Some of Barney's signature preoccupations are on view (such as the Greenman's autoerotic embrace of the float truck's lubricated driveshaft), but he's also forging new icons and images anchored in his beliefs about the state of the planet.