Matthew Barney
The Cremaster Cycle

In human anatomy, the cremaster refers to a skeletal muscle that covers the testes. Present in the fetus even before its full development and before the individual's sex is formed, the cremaster is fully developed in men but also present (in small percentage) in women. Its function is to raise or lower the scrotum according to factors such as temperature to favor spermatogenesis.

The work "Cremaster" by Matthew Barney revolves around this little-known muscle, elevating it as an epic saga of the genital testicle, however devoid of sexual references. The objective of this saga is precisely to stimulate the cremaster through visually impactful images. There is no sexual allusion in his work: the approach is surgical, cold, and detached, treating the genital symbol as an organic and biological element.

The saga is divided into five chapters and has marked a turning point in the field of video art, which was looked down upon by many critics and cinema lovers, seen as an illegitimate child of audiovisual storytelling, incapable of truly making history. The problem with much of video art, besides a cryptic and "sly" search for symbols, is that it remains chained to its historical time, aging prematurely: today fluxus films have lost their shocking impact. If there is a video art work capable of withstanding the passage of time, it is Barney's work: current, allegorical, perpetually fascinating in its uncontrolled flow of images.

The five chapters of the saga were not released in numerical order but in an apparently random order: "Cremaster 4" (1994), "Cremaster 1" (1995), "Cremaster 5" (1997), "Cremaster 2" (1999) and "Cremaster 3" (2002). Instead, we note how the order is not at all the result of pretentiousness, but rather a search for a harmonious cycle, with five in the middle of two pairs of numbers which, when added, lead to the hypothetical concluding chapter of the journey.

If you do not seek out press releases, synopses presented by Barney himself, or keys to interpretation, it is difficult to make sense of what appears on our screen. Simpler (and more sincere) is to let yourself be overwhelmed by these non-stories, these design nightmares, these open-eyed dreams. To undergo them, remain enchanted by them, and mull over them. Barney's strength lies in the ability to chain the viewer before the indecipherable, never boring them, on the contrary, stimulating and seducing them.

A video art closer, in truth, to cinema, where the work is, in truth, reasoned and never left to chance. A baroque work, where actors exist as presences and not as expressions, where the image must tell everything, moving between various high and low references, traveling between Masonic and folklore symbols, art, photography, fashion, western, serial killers, Greek-style tragedies, classic Hollywood-style musicals, love stories, magic (the presence of the figure of Houdini) and tradition (the figure of the satyr); connecting the films with unsettling and indecipherable leitmotifs like vaseline, oil, and, in general, the color white, a color of purity and at the same time of death; a color capable of uniting opposites.

It's difficult to summarize in a few lines the complexity of the project, while it is inevitable to affirm the revolutionary charge that he brought to the artistic field, immediately becoming a media event, casting Matthew Barney into the Olympus of contemporary creative geniuses.

As cryptic as it is, "Cremaster" is a journey to be undertaken: a continuous explosion of visual references of undeniable value, with suggestions at opposite ends and narratives united by the continuous struggle for dominion (identifiable from an anatomical point of view as the struggle of two gametes with the goal of hormonal balance), a clash between natural and artificial forces, immersed in a strictly hermaphroditic environment, utopian harmony of the masculine and feminine (hence, the cremaster, a strictly masculine muscle still capable of uniting the feminine).

One, indeed, five wild yet tremendously elegant works (for a total of almost seven hours of viewing), in front of which one must let go. Let yourself be immersed in the abyss to then resurface (with difficulty) only later.