The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books, created by American visual artist and film-maker Matthew Barney.
The Cremaster Cycle was made over a period of eight years (1994–2002) and culminated in a major museum exhibition organized by Nancy Spector of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris from 2002–03. Barney's long-time collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the soundtracks for the films. Isaac Mizrahi designed the costumes. The series incorporates a multidisciplinary narrative that heavily references connections between real people, real places and real things personal to Barney himself, but are all fictionalized to some extent.
Overview
Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector has described the Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002) as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system." 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 testicles in response to temperature, and the number of films corresponds to the height of the gonads during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation. In 2007 one disc (Cremaster 2) sold for $571,000. It came in a case “made from hand-tooled saddle leather, sterling silver, polycarbonate honeycomb, beeswax, acrylic and nutmeg”
The films are not available on mass-market DVDs, and according to the press release for the 2010 US tour, the cycle "is Not Now Nor Will it Ever be Available on DVD". The films are primarily available via periodic screenings. Palm Pictures, the distributor, has continued to comply with Barney's request, and has not made the series available on DVD, though there were some rumors and announcements to this effect in 2003. Only a 31-minute excerpt, the Guggenheim scene from Cremaster 3 titled "The Order," was released on mass-market DVD in 2003.
thumb|right|Marti Domination as Goodyear in Cremaster 1
thumb|left|Matthew Barney as the Entered Apprentice in Cremaster 3
Reception
Reaction to the cycle is sharply divided – some consider it a major work of art, on a par with Un chien andalou and The Waste Land, while others dismiss it as vapid, self-indulgent tedium. This is summarized by one critic as "Barney's cinematic art inspires both awe and revulsion, often simultaneously." Indeed, the Village Voice featured two reviews, with Jerry Saltz praising the cycle, and J. Hoberman panning it.
Lavish praise includes: "The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney is the first truly great piece of cinema to be made in a fine art context since Dalí and Buñuel filmed Un chien andalou in 1929. It is one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema." It has also, on the other hand, received scathing criticism as "a mostly tedious succession of striking but vacant imagery whose effect diminishes the longer you look at it," from which "any sense of mystery or wonder is drained."