Experimental film-maker Matthew Barney's Cremaster movies have a lot in common with dreams. But if you go to see the five-film cycle (in Dublin from tonight) you may be more confused at the end than the beginning, writes Aidan Dunne.

Temple Bar's Outside Visual Art programme offers a rare chance this week to see all five parts of Matthew Barney's cult Cremaster art-film cycle. The final film to be completed, Cremaster 3, is screened on Wednesday and repeated next Saturday. Perhaps you have already seen one of the others in the cycle that have been screened here in Meeting House Square; or perhaps you're going to take in the whole Wagnerian extravaganza in one go. Be warned though; while they are all thickly packed with narrative and visual detail, by the end of the whole thing you may well be no wiser as to what it's all about than you are at the beginning.

You will certainly feel that you have immersed yourself in a very particular, consistent and - let's be honest - very strange, imaginative world. A weirdly narcissistic Barney-world of bizarre athletic feats, long, drawn-out, obscure, obsessive rituals, Heath Robinson-like sculptural devices, and a fixation with representations of messily ambiguous biological processes involving sticky, viscous fluids and fleshy textures.

A hallmark of Barney's approach is that he draws on familiar elements and iconography, such as American football, cowboys, chorus girls, motorcycle and horse racing, or even the execution of Gary Gilmore, and makes something altogether different of them. The films have a lot in common with dreams. For much of the time, for example, characters are urgently and plausibly engaged in activities that initially seems reasonable but transpire to be nonsensical. There is a constant slippage between forms and places.

Barney in person is an embodiment of a clean-cut, personable, all-American. Born in San Francisco in 1967, he went to Yale to study medicine but switched to art. He was an athlete, made the college football team and worked as a model.

His real artistic début came when he did a videotaped, all-night performance at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in 1991 that involved him climbing naked across the ceiling, ending up in a fridge. More recently, the fact that he and Bjork are having a baby has found its way into the papers.

The Cremaster films have occupied him since 1994. The title refers to the involuntary muscle that controls the descent and retraction of the testicles. At an early stage of development, it has a role to play in the determination of gender, and Barney's interest seems to lie in this general area. There are indications that the films express a desire to preserve this early stage of being, prior to gender determination.

Barney is more than willing discuss the Cremaster cycle and its meanings. A couple of years ago, when he was in Dublin for a screening, I interviewed him. At first his willingness to explain is encouraging. Then it dawns on you that his explanations are leading nowhere. They say everything and nothing. They do not relate to a consistent or coherent scheme of meaning but to endlessly discursive possible meanings. What throws you is that Barney uses the language of explanation - "The main subtext is probably . . .", "one of the main unifying ideas is . . ." - but never builds a cumulative interpretive argument.

And, indeed, why should he? Cremaster 3 is as strange as any of the cycle, and notable for its Irish dimension. The Giant's Causeway features in both prologue and epilogue in a pantomime replay of myths associated with it, and Irish and Scottish symbols recur throughout. Then there is singer-songwriter Paul Brady, who plays a significant supporting role, sings very well and turns out to have real screen presence.

The heart of the film is set in the Chrysler Building in New York, which stands in for Solomon's Temple. In Masonic myth, Hiram Abiff, architect of the temple, held the key to the ultimate mysteries of the universe. Murdered by three apprentices, he was resurrected and uttered a meaningless phrase which stands for lost knowledge.

Here Abiff is played by the distinguished American sculptor Richard Serra. Barney plays his apprentice, who intends to short-circuit his apprentice-ship by casting rather than carving a perfect construction block.

This involves a great deal of clambering around in a lift shaft in a manner popularised by Bruce Willis in Die Hard. In a way, the first half of Cremaster 3 could be seen as a homage to Die Hard, in that it's a symbolic struggle enacted in the innards of a sky-scraper under construction. By comparison it is, though, excruciatingly slow. Everything takes forever and you are never quite sure what anyone is trying to accomplish.

Despite his increasing budgets and growing experience, film is not, so to speak, Barney's first language (there is a long slapstick sequence, for example, that is seriously bad). Rather, he brings to film the values of performance art, one of which is that it demands a level of endurance of its audience.

Still, Cremaster 3 is a game of two halves and in the second half, he suddenly wakes up. If you manage to survive the doldrums of the first you'll find the second flies by - not perhaps, a horrible dental torture scene with lingering closeups of Barney's bloody mouth, not to mention his anal misfortunes. But in an extended sequence set in the Guggenheim Museum, his imagination takes flight.

Here, Masonic initiation rites are recast as a wonderfully bizarre cross between a TV game-show and a video game, with Barney, clad in what looks like a pink fright-wig, flesh-coloured kilt, blue socks, and with a cloth stuffed in his bloodied mouth, climbing frantically between levels to complete a series of obscure tasks.

Incongruously installed on the various levels are a grinning chorus line in little lamb outfits and fishnet tights, two terrific hard-core NY bands - Agnostic Front and Murphy's Law - in deafening competition, double amputee Aimee Mullins (who plays several roles in the film, allowing Barney to indulge in his fascination with prosthetics, but is most strikingly incarnated here as a cheetah), a giant set of bagpipes and, finally, Richard Serra.

This time, Serra appears as himself, shovelling liquid vaseline onto a chute - by the time it reaches the ground, Barney must have completed his tasks. A moment's reflection is enough to confirm that this is all completely insane, but Barney invests it with a crazed, exhilarating, momentarily convincing energy.

In her long, heroically sustained text on his work, and the Cremaster cycle in particular, written for a forthcoming show at the Guggenheim, Nancy Spector offers, among other lines of interpretation, a psycho-social one. Cremaster, she suggests, can be seen as relating to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's free-floating "desiring-production" model of being. This as against Freudian and post-Freudian ideas of the desiring subject perpetually caught in the gap between desire and its objects. For Deleuze and Guattari, the Freudian developmental model, with its focusing and policing of desire, bolsters repressive social structures. They propose, instead, the "body without organs," a molecular, non-hierarchical mode of being.

There is a certain logic to this in relation to Cremaster. Barney's epic struggles in symbolically charged spaces can be seen as an ongoing battle to remain a "body without organs." At the same time, it is also true that the cycle suffers from an imaginative overload. It is over-abundantly rich in potentially significant detail, a thick, eclectic alphabet soup of symbolic systems. It's like a machine for generating possible interpretations.

It's interesting that the architect at the centre of the film is played by chisel-featured Serra, a minimalist sculptor. The point aboutminimalism, as Frank Stella put it, is that what you see is what you get. After puzzling about Cremaster 3 for a while, I was reminded of a scene in a film I saw a few years ago. It was set in Arizona and in it, at a certain point, a man pulls into a petrol station.

While the Native American pumping gas is filling his car, thunder rumbles ominously in the background. The Native American looks towards the mountains and shakes his head gravely. What does that mean? The man asks the Native American, presuming that Native Americans, being in touch with nature, know such things. The Native American throws him a look. Sometimes, he says, a storm is just a storm, and sometimes a Native American is just a Native American. And, in a Matthew Barney film, it could be that sometimes an artist got up in a pink fright wig, a kilt and blue socks is just an artist in a pink fright wig, a kilt and blue socks. What you see is what you get. Which is probably the most fruitful way to approach Cremaster.

Cremaster 1,2,3,4 and 5 are screened from tonight until Fri, at 9.45 p.m. in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar. Cremaster 3 is repeated on Sat at 9.45 p.m. and Matthew Barney discusses his work next Sun at 3 p.m., Ss Michael and John's Essex Street West, Dublin 8. Screenings are free but ticketed - tickets from Temple Bar Properties, 18 Eustace Street. Tel: 01 6772255 www.temple-bar.ie