The cycle’s starting point is the world of the white, American heterosexual, where everything revolves around power and control. The title refers to the autonomously functioning cremaster muscle, which controls the upward movement of the testicles. The film’s characters are almost always of athletic, even mythical, proportions. Barney constructed his cycle as a body and constructed the bodies shown in the films as buildings, with prosthetics of fragile beauty. Aside from the first installment, Barney always has one or more roles in his own films. He has starred alongside the likes of Ursula Andress and Norman Mailer. Barney’s muse for Cremaster 3 is the twenty-four-year-old Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins. In her younger years, despite her knee-length amputations, she graced the covers of numerous sports, lifestyle, and fashion magazines.

On Sunday, October 3rd, the performance will be introduced by Jan Hoet, founder of the S.M.A.K. in Ghent and now director of Museum MARTa in Herford, Germany.

CREMASTER 3 (2002)

Barney’s The Entered Apprentice faces off against Chrysler Building architect Hiram Abiff (played by sculptor Richard Serra) in the Art Deco landmark, while battling punk bands, Rockette-like chorines, and a half-cheetah woman (Aimee Mullins) as he scales the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in an interlude.

“Endlessly fascinating… Barney’s most hypnotic work yet.” – New York Magazine