The Cremaster Cycle

The Cremaster Cycle...where to even begin with this. These art installations/videos/mind-scramblers are the brainchildren of Matthew Barney, husband to Icelandic Queen of Pop, Bjork. I have yet to watch all of them all the way through (I believe there are some 7+ hours worth of footage/storyline spanning the different cycles). Below are some teaser/trailers for each one and a description. If you've got nothing else going on and want to take a drug-free trip, have at it. There's not a whole lot else to compare these to. Think Shakespeare meets mythology meets Hunter S. Thompson meets Pan's Labyrinth meets LSD and you've about got the jist of things.

Nancy Spector has described the Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system."^[2] The cycle includes the films as well as photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produced in conjunction with each episode. Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, the primary function of which is to raise and lower the testes in response to temperature.

The project is filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated.

The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown — in Barney's metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality. As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology.

The films were not made in numerical order (1–5), but rather in the order 4, 1, 5, 2, 3 – precisely, 4 in 1994, 1 in 1995, 5 in 1997, 2 in 1999, 3 in 2002. The numerical order is the thematic order, while in order of production the films increase in production quality and ambition, and they can alternatively be viewed in any order, as different views of a set of themes and preoccupations.

The films are significantly different in length; the longest (and last-made) is #3, at over 3 hours, while the remaining four are approximately 1 hour each, for a total of approximately 7 hours – #3 itself is almost half the total length. There is precious little dialog in any of the films; only #2 features significant dialog.^[3]

An important precursor of the Cremaster Cycle is Drawing Restraint, which is also a biologically inspired multi-episode work in multiple media, also featuring the field emblem.

Part One of Cycle One

Part One of Cycle Two

Part One of Cycle Three

Part One of Cycle Four

Part One of Cycle Five

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