Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Made over the course of eight years from 1994 to 2002, Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is an expansive magnum opus that spans five feature-length films and encompasses the artist's own performance, sculpture, installation, drawing, and photography. Named for the muscle that controls the male testicles' response to temperature, the work addresses metamorphosis, sexual differentiation, and the emergence of form, and is described as "a self-enclosed aesthetic system" by Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector.

This work, The Royal Cell of Baby Fay, is featured in Cremaster 2: The Executioner's Song (1999), which has been characterized as a "gothic Western" and incorporates elements of The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer. The character in question, Baby Fay La Foe, was a real-life mystic who claimed to have had an affair with Harry Houdini. In Cremaster, Baby Fay is played by an anonymous actor and hosts a seance to resurrect Houdini, who is played by Norman Mailer. View the trailer for Cremaster 2 here.