The Loughton Candidate's Homepage

While the Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney is so sprawling that it requires museum-scale installation, the web site for the five part project reveals that the opus actually lends itself to online aesthetics. As gorgeous and designed as each element seems, their rhetorical and narrative contexts are complex and often hermetic, and therefore the features of the web site -- the diagramming of characters (family tree style), identification of key sculptures and the provision of synopses, video trailers, and supplemental information -- are all helpful in penetrating Barney's deliberately complex oeuvre. Makeup, prosthetics, gonadal perversity, ascension, descent -- all the Barney hallmarks are represented in this online version. Highly recommended as a supplement and learning tool for those who want to move beyond the Cremaster-hype and engage the artist's socio-biological, post-human, and occasionally Vaudevillian, mythology. -- Rachel Greene