He is best known as the producer and creator of the Cremaster films, a series of five visually extravagant works created out of sequence, Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967.

The Cremaster films generally feature Barney in myriad roles, including characters as diverse as a satyr, a magician, a ram, Harry Houdini, and even the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore. The films themselves are a grand mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology—an intensely private universe in which symbols and images are densely layered and interconnected. The resulting cosmology is both beautiful and complex.

“A system that has an internal object, Freudian narratives—consumer and producer, violence, sexually driven, NFL films—these are the things I think about,” says Matthew Barney on Art21.”

Matthew Barney was featured in the “Consumption” episode of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century’s first season in 2001. The segment follows Barney and his crew on the set of CREMASTER 3 at the Saratoga race track and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where artist Richard Serra throws hot Vaseline down the Museum’s famous spiral ramp.

Watch Matthew Barney in “Consumption”

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Image credits:
Production still from the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 1 episode, "Consumption," 2001. © Art21, Inc. 2001.