‘Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle’

Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle was published in March 2002 to accompany a major retrospective at the Guggenheim. The book documents a vast body of visual and editorial material about Barney’s work, allowing readers access to the artistic process and diverse media that resulted in his epic film cycle. The design deliberately mixes preparatory drawings, visual research, photography, sculptures and film stills in order to represent the five different Cremaster films in a way that unites the artist’s use of diverse media. The result allows readers to follow the storyline of the film in a way that reflects Barney’s own process of plotting the film structure on the wall of his studio. Many of the pages echo the exact compositions that were pinned to the wall of Barney’s studio. The visual, typographic, and tactile qualities of a classical encyclopedia provide an elegant interface for a perverse cosmology.