Matthew Barney (b.1967) is an American artist with a big reputation, who is known principally as the creator of a series of films known as “The Cremaster Cycle”. Produced to an unusually high technical standard, the films in question have a cumulative running time of around seven hours, although such is their hypnotising strangeness that the experience of watching them is less oppressive than might be imagined. They amount to a kind of mythical autobiography in which the artist, fantastically costumed and often sporting bizarre prosthetic attachments, revels in a polymorphously perverse array of different roles. He plays the parts, variously, of Harry Houdini, the murderer Gary Gilmore, a magician, and, with memorable relish, a priapically active satyr. Walk-on appearance are made by, among others, the actress Ursula Andress, the writer Norman Mailer and the well-known American sculptor Richard Serra.
“The Cremaster Cycle” is named after the muscle which, in the anatomy of the human male, is responsible for the descent of the testicles as well as for testicular contractions. Reading the artist’s own somewhat gnomic statements about the intentions behind the cycle as a whole, it seems that he conceived it as a kind of mythopoetical epic about the spasmodic relationship between the sexual and creative urges. But it lingers in the memory as a carnivalesque, free-associating, darkly Gothic, late contribution to Surrealist film-making, with more than a nod in the direction of such directors as David Lynch and even, on occasion,
