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

Matthew Barney Quotes

I don’t think my work is so strange. It’s just a matter of having the discipline to go the whole way with an idea, to stretch it as far as it can go.

— 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

I’m less interested in skin than in fascia – connective tissue.

— Matthew Barney

I have a way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it’s just that the stories become more and more elaborate.

— Matthew Barney
About Stories

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

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

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 think what interests me the most is when the two things are developed at the same time, which certainly feels natural for the way of working when there is no dialogue. You sort of depend on the music to be that, especially when there’s lyrics in the music.

— 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

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
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