22 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.