by SARAH MUSGRAVE

A whitened and wizened Matthew Barney stalks through an ornate bathhouse in Budapest, his legs sheathed in enormous calla lily petals. He lowers himself into a viscous pool, as silk ribbons tied around his scrotum are pulled up, up, up into the air by Jacobin pigeons. Below the surface, seven sexy water sprites peer lovingly at his crotch. The music swells to a crescendo.

C'mon! Can you stand it? At least in the retelling, this scene from Cremaster 5, the concluding number in a series by the celebrated ciné-artiste, sounds naïvely narcissistic, if not absolutely laughable.

Except no one's laughing. It's partly, of course, that Matthew Barney is one of America's most wanted these days. The Cremaster Cycle, a group of visceral videos shot out of sequence from 1994 to 2002, earned him the title of most important, and possibly top-grossing, artist of his generation. It helps that this preppy athlete turned performance artist was once a model for Ralph Lauren and Isaac Mizrahi, is boinking Björk, and touts Vaseline among his favourite sculpting materials. And that, even as audiences wonder, "For God's sake, man, what does it all mean?", they're captivated by his daring delivery of allegory and anatomy.

National Geographic meets Jackass

For all its multilayered ambiguities, The Cremaster Cycle is defined by athleticism and audacity. Casting himself as leading jock and jester, Barney juggled awesome logistical and physical feats to realize his vision. He dared to stage a demented demolition derby in the lobby of the Chrysler building. He shipped buffalo to the Bonneville Salt Flats for a death rodeo. He scaled the Guggenheim Museum like a mountain climber.

"I would say the underwater filming in number 4 was probably the worst, and a lot of it had to with ignorance and lack of experience," Barney chuckles over the phone from his New York studio. "I'd taken scuba courses like a couple of days before. And I really felt it was something we had to do in tidal water, you know, under a pier that resembles a pier in the Isle of Man. We did it in Florida, so the water was nice and warm. But there were fishing lines that I was getting tangled up in, I had one safety person coming and giving me air, and I had enough weights sewn in my coat that there's no way I could've got to the surface if something had happened. That was probably really stupid."

Or really smart. Because those who might not believe in the myth of Barney certainly can't deny the man has balls.

Mister muscle

In fact, Barney's balls, or butt, make many appearances in the series. The title refers to the cremaster muscle, responsible for lifting and dropping the testes in response to fear or changes in temperature. During fetal development, it controls the ascent of the gonads to become ovaries or descent to become testicles.

This forms the basis for what could be called an "autobiological" exploration, a personal and sometimes painful attempt to penetrate the male mystique. In surveying the architecture of existence, Barney searches out stunning settings and modern-day mythologies. And he exposes his manhood to risk and ridicule, treating his former football player's body as though it were a prop.

"I think there's a thing that happens in athletics that has to do with distance," he says. "Something to do with looking at yourself from the outside in terms of performance. So I think there's an interesting thing that happens when you're performing, that you're both experiencing something in a very internal way but you're also witnessing it from the outside. Sort in two different places at the same time. And I think that's an interesting kind of objectification - not purely about being on the outside looking back, there's also the internal condition."

Creepy cavities

The result is both intimate and distant, and undeniably creepy. In Cremaster 3, for instance, Barney's mouth is stretched to bleeding to undergo a grossetating dental procedure that causes a fleshy anal excretion.

"I love horror films, always have," he says. "They're not so much in my radar any more, and I'm not sure if it's because I'm making my own, or because they're not being made anymore - the kinds of horror films I really like." He cites Open Water as an exception. "It's more along the lines of what I'm interested in, it's like a very simple condition where the antagonist is one with the environment."

It follows that using real locations is key to his work. "It's definitely something that excites me very much, to put myself in a situation like that, where at the heart of it, it's insisting to be in that place and for the conditions to be real," he says. "You know, a lot of those situations could probably have been done in an easier way." Some were inescapably tied to the actual landscape, however, like a spectacular sequence involving a bucking bull on the Salt Flats in Utah in Cremaster 2. "I don't think those conditions could have been captured in any other way. And that was a gruelling shoot. Partly to do with the physical conditions, but it was also federal land, so there were months of negotiations that went on to be able to build that structure in that place."

Butthole sculptor

Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967, and grew up in Boise, Idaho. While at Yale, he abandoned plans to be a plastic surgeon in order to pursue performance-related sculpture. "There was a certain point in college for me where I was trying out a lot of different ways of making sculpture," he recalls. "I realized that my whole life up to that point had been spent working with my body as a way of both taking things in and understanding the world, using your body as a filter of sorts, and also as a tool for expression. And so I think I started very consciously trying to find a way to take that body intelligence and translate it into an aesthetic system."

His first exhibition, in 1991, included workout equipment moulded from petroleum jelly and a video called Blind Perineum documenting his travails in setting up the space: suspended from a groin harness, he climbed the walls with ice screws that lingered dangerously close to his anus. Although some critics lamented that this new gay artist wasn't even gay, most found in the buff and bold Barney a distinctive voice for the times.

In the meantime, when the entire The Cremaster Cycle screens for the first time in Montreal, Nov. 20-28 at the Musée d'art contemporain, it will offer a glimpse not only into one man's considerable imagination, but also that of the current art establishment.