Cremaster 2 is a publication accompanying Matthew Barney’s second installment in the Cremaster Cycle (1999), a series of films, photographs, sculptures, and drawings that construct a mythological system of bodily transformation and narrative allegory.

The film and its related materials draw on the historical figure of Gary Gilmore, situating his life and execution within a speculative framework that merges American true crime, Mormon history, and fictional cosmology. Barney reconfigures these references into a symbolic structure concerned with sexual differentiation, entropy, and the formation of identity.

The catalogue documents the film’s highly staged visual world, where landscapes, interiors, and sculptural objects function as interconnected set-pieces. Performers appear as archetypal figures within ritualised sequences, and the imagery moves between documentary reference and operatic construction.