HIS BODY, HIMSELF.(Matthew Barney, multimedia, Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York)

In today's somewhat somnolent art world, an artist who brings what Victor Hugo once described as a "new shudder" runs the risk of immediate and unthinking acclaim. Matthew Barney encountered this at his New York debut, in 1991, when crowds packed the Barbara Gladstone gallery to watch a video of the artist, naked, scaling the gallery's walls and ceiling with the aid of a rock climber's harness and titanium ice screws, and a sort of critical euphoria has attended his career ever since. Instant recognition, however, seems to have left this young man's very real talent unscathed. At the age of thirty-five, he is about to have a vast, multimedia exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum (opening February 21st) called "The Cremaster Cycle," focussing on the last eight years of his work in film, video, sculpture, drawing, photography, and music. A full-fledged apotheosis is at hand, although, in truth, what Barney has brought us is still something of a puzzle.

If you ask him, he will tell you that his work is sculpture. The five films in the "Cremaster" cycle are vehicles for the sculptures he makes for them, he has said, and the strange, nonverbal, and sometimes impenetrable stories that each film tells are also sculptures--narrative sculptures, or maybe sculptural narratives. To most of his admirers, however, Barney is primarily a filmmaker. The five "Cremaster"s, shot on video, were transferred to film and shown in movie houses and museum auditoriums here and abroad, and Barney soon gained a following as a new kind of auteur, one who uses autobiographical material, landscape, biology, architecture, dramatic actions, private fantasies, classical myths, elaborate costumes, prosthetic devices, and transforming makeup to create worlds that are unlike any you'll see at the multiplex. In "Cremaster 3," for example, there is a horse-racing scene at the track in Saratoga Springs, where, as the camera moves closer, we become aware that the ten trotting horses in the race are flayed, their muscles, tendons, and viscera rotting away from their fast-moving bodies. Another sequence in the same film shows Barney (who appears prominently in four of the five films), wearing a voluminous kilt and a huge, Shocking-pink shako, climbing the interior walls of the Guggenheim Museum, using handholds to hoist himself from tier to tier, and encountering bizarre obstacles at each level: a Rockette-like chorus line of girls in lamb suits; a mosh pit between two violently duelling heavy-metal rock bands; a beautiful fashion model who turns into a fanged cheetah-woman; the sculptor Richard Serra (played by himself) flinging molten Vaseline against a parapet wall. Every scene connects in some way to the dreamlike structure of the "Cremaster" cycle; although the connections may not be clear to an untutored viewer, the cycle's hermetic aspects have not impeded its acceptance, by a significant segment of the international art and film worlds, as a major work of art.

One thing Barney has certainly done is draw attention to a word that was not in everyday use. The cremaster, as any Barney fan now knows, is the muscle that raises or lowers the testicles, in response to changes in outside temperature or involuntary reflexes. Ascending and descending actions of one kind or another have figured in Barney's work since his undergraduate days at Yale, but in the "Cremaster" cycle it is not the muscle itself that really concerns us. It is, rather, the process of sexual differentiation that takes place within the womb. For the first eight weeks of pregnancy, a fetus exists in a state that is neither male nor female. During the ninth week--barring the sort of complications described in Jeffrey Eugenides's "Middlesex"--the internal gonads begin to move either upward, to become ovaries, or downward, to become testicles. The underlying motif of the five films, whose combined running time is just short of seven hours, has to do with the organism's struggle to resist that fateful moment of sexual definition.

To those who might wonder how this struggle--undocumented so far in medical literature--could serve as the basis for a five-film epic, the answer is simply that it has. Barney's "Cremaster" films have been compared by more than one critic to Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle, as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk of the multimedia age. It should be added that Barney does not take himself or his work that seriously. An extremely engaging young man whose clean-cut looks and quiet good manners tend to veil the intensity of his ambition, he occasionally bursts out laughing at the more ridiculous aspects of his epic. But this doesn't mean that he thinks it's a joke; irony, the postmodern calling card, has no place in Barney's thought process, or in the "Cremaster" cycle.

"There's nothing disguised about Matthew," Chelsea Romersa, the associate producer of the last three "Cremaster"s, says, but even she finds him something of an enigma. For someone who frequently uses his naked body as a material for art, Barney in person reveals very little. He resists talking about himself, and Romersa and the other members of the closely knit team that works on his projects guard his privacy as carefully as he does. None of them will say much, for example, about his current liaison with the Icelandic rock star Bjork, except that Matthew, who had been totally submerged in his work for the last decade, seems happier now. Barney will talk about his work, when pressed, but the long and sometimes excruciating silences that punctuate these conversations (excruciating for the listener, not for Barney), while he thinks about what he wants to say, suggest how difficult such discussions are for him.

"In the impulse to make something," he said to me last fall, "there's an assumption that you can finish it, and that it can be a resolved thing. I think what the 'Cremaster' project is suggesting is that this is impossible." Barney revels in unresolved endings, in unfinished stories that turn back on themselves to offer alternative or competing visions. In "Cremaster 5," which takes the form of a nineteenth-century opera, the Queen of Chain (Ursula Andress, coaxed out of semi-retirement by Barney for the role) is in love with her court magician (Barney), who also seems to be Harry Houdini. At one point, the magician throws himself, naked and manacled, from a parapet of the Lanchid Bridge, over the Danube, in Budapest. The Queen believes that he has leaped to his death, but this, Barney says, is her misunderstanding. "I was interested in the need to have a dramatic ending," he explains, "but in terms of the 'Cremaster' cycle I also wanted the story to ...