Cremaster Cycle

If you were to collect all the symbolism, totemistic allegory and florid metaphor fashioned throughout the history of art into something tangible, and, say with careful precision you placed it on a scale next to Mathew Barney's five-part feature length drama the Cremaster Cycle, it would be a difficult task to measure which one weighed heavier than the other. This is a body of work that rivals Wagner's most ostentatious orchestration, advertising's most glossy and coordinated arrangement, or even pornography's most obscure genital fixation. Meaning becomes a slippery spectacle, the body becomes ritualized, and we find ourselves in an imagination that is relentlessly mythological and acrobatic.

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle - named after the muscle of the spermatic cord which allows the testicles to be partially raised or lowered - is a little like discovering an alternative version of Darwin's Origin of the Species in a precise parallel world. Here we watch as Busby-Berkeley style chorus girls display a choreographed rendition of the reproductive organs inside a sports stadium, a videogame-like ascent in the Guggenheim (featuring sculptor Richard Serra as the 'big boss' melting and splashing fat as Barney climbs each spiraling level of the museum), animals and humans in their embryonic or transitional stage, as well as objects that are both magnificently odd and disturbing for that very reason. This Cremaster Cycle season at the Chauvel is worthy of some attention since its bound to produce some questions.