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"Described with fitting grandiloquence by the Guggenheim’s curator Nancy Spector as a “self-enclosed aesthetic system”, Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five feature films of varying lengths that look, in various abstract and aloof ways, into human form and creation. Created between 1994 and 2002, The Cremaster Cycle sits precariously in an uneasy space between visual art and cinema, seven hours long, with scope, production values and access that would make practitioners from either world jealous. A singular product of a period of popular engagement and public investment in contemporary visual art, Barney’s expansive, high-budgeted work is overflowing with characters, costumes, sculptures, and stuffed with allusion, symbolism and ideas. For better and for worse, there hasn’t been much like it since, and there perhaps won’t be again."