Matthew Barney | Art21 | Preview from Season 1 of "Art in the Twenty-First Century" (2001)

Matthew Barney is best known as the producer and creator of the "CREMASTER" films. The title of the films refers to the muscle that raises and lowers the male reproductive system according to temperature, external stimulation, or fear. The films themselves are a grand mixture of history, autobiography, and mythology—a universe in which symbols are densely layered and interconnected.

Matthew Barney is featured in the Season 1 episode "Consumption" of the Art21 series "Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century".

Learn more about Matthew Barney: http://www.art21.org/artists/matthew-barney

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[intro music]

[inaudible]

Okay. Let's do it.

Three, two, one. Start the boom.

and action.

The architect is played by Richard Serra

is shown filling vaseline on the top of level five

and nearly exactly the same way he threw hot lead in the late 60s.

Of the types of work that I would gravitated towards in art school,

those were of the first pieces a truly understood.

and three, two, one, and action.

Characters like Harry Houdini, Gary Gilmore, Norman Mailer,

Ursula Andress in certain ways

have a kind of physicality in common,

about the way that violence is sublimated into form, somehow.