The Cremaster Cycle
Barney's magnum opus, The Cremaster Cycle, is comprised of five high-budget, films. Here he employs the narrative modes of mythology, history, and (auto) biography to explore complex biological, artistic, geological, and geographical themes. The films make use of dense, surrealistic, and highly-sexualized imagery, married with vividly-colored and elaborate props, make-up, prosthetics, and costumes. They are filmed in locations ranging from a palace in Budapest, the Isle of Man, and the salt flats of Utah - meanwhile, actors in the series include the actress Ursula Andress, the sculptor Richard Serra, the athlete Aimee Mullins and the writer Norman Mailer. The film's also star chorus girls, tap dancers, Canadian Mounties, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, helicopter pilots, bee trainers, and heavy metal bands.
Viewed in order, the films follow the embryonic process of sexual differentiation, beginning in Cremaster 1 with the "ascended" or undifferentiated state, and ending in Cremaster 5 at the most "descended" or differentiated state, about nine weeks after conception, when the male sex is fully realized. For Barney, the films simultaneously allude to the process of creative development. He explains that Cremaster 1 represents the spark of an idea; Cremaster 2 is the rejection of the idea; Cremaster 3 is the artist falling in love with the idea; Cremaster 4 is panic at the knowledge that the idea is about to come to fruition, and Cremaster 5 is the final resolution.
Barney, however, produced and released the five films non-chronologically, beginning with Cremaster 4 (1994), followed by Cremaster 1 (1995), Cremaster 5 (1997), Cremaster 2 (1999), and ending with Cremaster 3 (2002). This discontinuity would seem to underscore Barney's view that these processes (the biological process of becoming, and the artistic process of creating) are complex and non-linear. Even though each film follows a different set of mythological and historical characters, they continually cross-reference (they are "inter-textual" in other words). The production designer Matthew D. Ryle asserts that "anyone can access [the films"> from any point; from fashion, horror movies, architecture, drawing, photography, football, plastics - or just story-telling". But not everyone was won-over by Barney's extravagant vision, with arts journalist Matt Turner describing the series as "an exhausting experience, demonstrating a weirdness that is wearying, a dedication to a provocation that comes to feel laborious, and much material that feels like baggage".
