The sculptor, filmmaker, and conceptual artist Matthew Barney is best known for his epic six-and-a-half-hour Cremaster Cycle. Befitting the project’s elliptical nature, Barney undertook the five-part film cycle nonsequentially, starting with 1994’s Cremaster 4 and closing, in 2002, with the climactic convergences of Cremaster 3. As any decent biology text will tell you, the “cremaster muscle” raises and lowers the testicles, regulating temperature to ensure the sperm’s fertility. That, as well as the fetal stage prior to sexual differentiation, is central to much of Barney’s oeuvre.

Cremaster’s mostly wordless universe includes, among other things, the Isle of Man, Barney as a red-haired tap-dancing satyr, Ursula Andress in Budapest, a giant Barney with pigeon-tied testicles, Norman Mailer playing Harry Houdini (and Barney as The Executioner’s Song subject Gary Gilmore), a zombie horse race, a Bronco Stadium chorus line decked with helium-filled Goodyear blimps, gangsters, a multi-colored ram, vaudeville passages, growling death-metal icon Steve Tucker of Morbid Angel, the Masons, motorcycle sidecar races, a swarm of bees, bucking broncos in a choreographed death dance, fairies, and the Rocky Mountains. In Cremaster 3, Barney revisits past works (Gilmore, the Isle of Man, etc.), also playfully acknowledging his standing in the art world. In the central movement, “The Order,” he echoes the five parts of the cycle, while conquering Frank Lloyd Wright, scaling the interior of the Guggenheim: the Super Mario, or Dante-style game, pits a pink-tartan-kilt-clad Barney against a number of obstacles that include the Vaseline-scooping Richard Serra, double-amputee model Aimee Mullins as a shape-shifted cheetah, and New York hardcore bands Murphy’s Law and Agnostic Front (complete with slam-dancing fans). The film also stars a Chrysler Building crash-up derby and an Oedipal battle between Serra (as Hiram Abiff) and Barney (as the Entered Apprentice). When Cremaster 3 debuted at the Guggenheim, in 2003, as a part of Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, the museum was outfitted with blue Astroturf, echoing Cremaster 1’s Bronco Stadium, the site of Barney’s high-school football games. “There was a conscious attempt to balance autobiographical material against the mythological, and the more intuitive, abstract material,” Barney told me when we first spoke. “It’s not so much about creating a portrait of an individual, but rather a complex, or a system that describes an individual form. Something like building an elaborate mirror over a ten-year period, then arriving at the mirror and being surprised to see your own reflection.”

In 2006, Barney released Drawing Restraint 9, a 135-minute film, and part of an ongoing series he began as a student at Yale in 1987. In general, the series finds Barney battling against an...