"The occultist draws the ultimate conclusion from the fetish-character of the commodities," Theodor Adorno writes in Minima Moralia (1951). It may be quite logical, then, for Barney to be attracted to esoteric ceremonies and rituals. In fact this tendency has been there all along, and in his most recent works the artist has included scenes and imagery from the worlds of Mormons and Freemasons, the latter an especially rich source of hermetic symbolism. But the fetishistic desire so obvious in his productions relies on neither the charged objects of classical psychoanalysis nor the commodities analyzed by Marxism. This is a more confusing world of mutating materials, a fluid cosmos of energies and hallucinatory processes rather than stable things. Humans transform into animals, organisms blend with artifacts. What’s offered up to us is nothing less than a perverse mythology for our times, one that seems to me decidedly American but which has many precedents, literary as well as philosophical. Here is just one, more than two thousand years old, from the writings of Lucretius: "You would see monsters coming into being everywhere. Hybrid growths of man and beast would arise. Lofty branches would sprout here and there from a living body."

Barney’s CREMASTER cycle, the tremendously ambitious series of films he has made over the past nine years, has finally reached completion, and we can now see that the vicious circle thus brought into being is of a kind found in other mythological systems. This dazzling serpent not only chases its tail (as the character of the Kid does in Barney’s early video Drawing Restraint 7, 1993) but devours large parts of its body. Chewing, digesting, and excreting its own revolving essence, it represents a closed system in which each element seems to refer to other parts internal to the cycle. Each film creates its own universe equipped with its own fables, which are related to the site of production, be it the Isle of Man, Budapest, or Manhattan’s most glittering architectural phantasm, the Chrysler Building. Yet the separate episodes feed into each other, often in inscrutable ways. The works are linked in a kind of metabolic chain. Forms don’t take on life, says Barney, until they are "eaten" by the narrative.

Everything, it seems, has followed a plan, exact and grandiose. After finishing the first film, CREMASTER 4, Barney outlined, in an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve published in these pages in 1995, the entire sequence in advance: "I’m going to do number one this summer in a stadium in Idaho that has blue Astro-turf. CREMASTER 2 is on a glacier, like an ice cap. CREMASTER 3 is in the Chrysler Building in New York, CREMASTER 4 was shot on the Isle of Man, and then CREMASTER 5 is in a bathhouse—the fully descended state." The fully what? The artist has often explained his master scheme, for example on German television recently: The cremaster muscle controls the position of the testicles, which varies with temperature. If it’s cold, as it is on a glacier, they are drawn into the body. If it’s warm, as in a Hungarian bathhouse, they reach the "fully descended state." It’s as simple as that.

It’s not just the movement of the testicles that interests Barney, though; more crucial, perhaps, is the prenatal morphology of the still sexually undifferentiated fetus. The itinerary described by Barney’s cinematic "Ring" is not only the way up and the way down but also the way from sexual ambiguity to gender identity. In other words, he has updated the old Platonic myth of the sexes to fit our times, with our gender politics and our high-tech biology and prosthetics. More important, he has realized his ideas in quite amazing imagery. His ironic sophistication notwithstanding, Barney is a believer in the "meaning of meaning"—in the possibility of sense and of objects and actions to carry it. His charged substances and ritualized sequences may be ambiguous and his universe one of unrestrained dissemination, but he is a master of sense—complex, multilayered, exciting sense. He makes the kind of art that cries out for interpretation.

There are other artists of around the same generation who similarly fabricate closed systems of private mythology—think of the installations of Jason Rhoades or the paintings of Neo Rauch. But in the world of the moving image Barney appears to be a loner. Contemporary artists working close to cinema, such as Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon (do these two and Barney really belong to the same century?), are often suspicious of meaning as it is produced through narration; indeed they could be said to introduce caesuras of nonmeaning and blankness into the thick web of sense. Barney’s works convey another message. The elaborate biology of sexual differentiation in the fetus, the religious system of the Mormons, the infinitely convoluted esotericism of Freemasonry and of the ancient Irish myths—it’s all so blatantly meaningful. In fact Barney is a myth machine, to the point where, it seems to me, most writers have fallen into the hermeneutic trap, losing themselves in the idea of hidden layers of signification. (No doubt Barney will in due time get his own Arturo Schwarz—who may already have appeared, in the guise of Neville Wakefield.)