Matthew Barney

ART:21: How close does the filming process follow the pre-written script and storyboards for “CREMASTER 3?”

BARNEY: It depends. You’ve seen the way the storyboard is structured and in certain cases it follows how a real storyboard would be drawn. If there’s a detail of something we’re shooting that needs to tell a story itself, those tend to be drawn. Bigger, narrative situations are really just organized as written lists. They’re scheduled by camera setup in cases like this where the camera car was there for a day, so we covered everything we could from the car. A lot of these angles—aside from the moving camera car are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted, which is something we do often, and it happens a lot with sports references that are made in all the projects.

This is a kind of anchor, a place, mimicking sports cinematography. Like NFL films. Do you know NFL films? NFL films are a real big influence of mine. It’s all 35mm material shot on all the NFL teams. It’s a fleet of cinematographers that follow the different teams and then I believe that footage is sold to the different teams. Highlight tapes are made and, as a kid, we always had to watch these highlight tapes around lunch time at football camps and stuff. We’d go to different football camps at different universities and things, and there was always a sort of film hour or something like that which would be sometime around a meal. And you’d sit there with a bunch of football players and we’d watch highlight films from different NFL teams. But it’s great… it’s really great camera work. All that stuff.

ART:21: So many of your interests are all-American in nature. How does this fit into your work?

BARNEY: Well, I think a lot of the references I make to American traditions—whether it’s athletics or a kind of car culture—I think those are things that I’ve certainly grown up with and understand. It makes those things very available to me to use, and I consider them as kinds of vessels. I don’t think that by the time they’ve been hashed through the project they’re representative of what they necessarily are in everyday life. They’re used as carriers, which is one of the reasons why the vehicles, in general, keep reappearing in the pieces in that they are carriers, literally. The concept of a vehicle draws a line between locations, such as the Isle of Mann and Budapest. If there was a structure that was greater than the “CREMASTER” structure, it would have to be something like UPS—something that’s fleet oriented, that would have air transport and a kind of local transport to really finish that line. You have a kind of consistent color in the way that UPS is brown and the logo is gold. I think that I have a need to make these sorts of connections literal sometimes, and a vehicle often helps to do that. So, in other words, that’s the way I would say I have a relationship to car culture. It isn’t really about loving cars. It’s sort of about needing them.

ART:21: You also make a lot of references to ancient myths.

BARNEY: Yes. Sometimes I take on stories quite directly, like with “DRAWING RESTRAINT 7.” That referred to Marsyas and Apollo. But it’s also about taking on a mythological structure and then imposing an internal logic on it. Like if you were inside the stomach and esophagus, you’d probably say that same thing about somebody throwing up. You’d say, “Wow, the stomach is heroic for getting that mutant material out.” In other words, it is about taking a structure that’s mythological and putting it into a frame that’s more about something doing what it’s compelled to do, there to do. So 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. But it could also be looked at from a heroic, mythological angle for sure.

Excerpt from an interview with ART21

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