- Michael Kimmelman: Matthew Barney calls himself a sculptor, not a filmmaker. His Cremaster Cycle is a kind of autobiography. It's extravagance and opulence speak for themselves. The original metaphor was biological, the male cremaster muscle controls testicular contractions and Barney cryptically talked about the work as tracking a state of sexual indifferentiation that finally resolves itself at the end of the cycle. But the metaphor changed as the cycle evolved into a larger meditation on the creative process in its need to remain open-ended.
- Matthew Barney: I think if you take the composite of all the films together I think you end up with something that probably belongs to the tradition of self portraiture.
- Matthew Barney: I think what they all have in common is a kind of extreme, physical essence about them and I think their presence in the piece has the same purity that the raw material has because of the extreme physical purity of their characters.