THE PIN–UP QUOTE: MATTHEW BARNEY

Matthew Barney, portrait by Chris Winget

THE PIN–UP QUOTE: MATTHEW BARNEY

A scene from BA, one of three live performances featured in the 350-minute-long RIVER OF FUNDAMENT film. Photo by Hugo Glendinning.

THE PIN–UP QUOTE: MATTHEW BARNEY

Barney's Boat of Ra sculpture seen under construction in the artist's studio in Long Island City, Queens. Photo by Ari Marcopoulos

THE PIN–UP QUOTE: MATTHEW BARNEY

My influences are as related to horror cinema as they are to sculpture making, and the horror that has always interested me most is vital horror or body horror. I think there are a number of examples in which the body really becomes a piece of architecture. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a really great example: Jack Torrance, the protagonist, really is the Overlook Hotel, and the characters in the story are aspects of the hotel’s architecture. I’m very interested in how emotion can be displaced or relocated from where you expect to find it — i.e. within the human carrier — to the environment, whether the environment is architectural or geological. I think architecture is more malleable than landscape, but I’m interested in both. So I often use architecture that way: as a carrier for an emotion that has been displaced.

Taken from an interview by Kevin Greenberg in PIN–UP 16, Spring Summer 2014.