Matthew Barney Quotes

An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn’t have normally been interested in it.

– Matthew Barney

A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.

– Matthew Barney

I’ve always thought of the project as a sort of sexually driven digestive system, that it was a consumer and a producer of matter. And it is desire driven, rather than driven by hunger or anything like that.

– Matthew Barney

Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

– Matthew Barney

A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn’t have an ego when it’s wanting to throw up. It just does it.

– Matthew Barney

‘Jackass: The Movie’ is great. I think it’s in the tradition of physical comedy, which I’m really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body.

– Matthew Barney

I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. I have a relationship to car culture. It isn’t really about loving cars. It’s sort of about needing them.

– Matthew Barney