Roll up, roll up, for Barney's flying circus

By GEOFFREY MacNAB

It's a faintly ludicrous image: the man on the trampoline trying to draw on the ceiling. With each fresh bounce, he reaches up and scratches another indistinct line, but gravity keeps undermining his work. This performance piece is part of a series called Drawing Restraint begun by Matthew Barney in the late 1980s. He acknowledges it was "quite crude".

But to anyone interested in how the 36-year-old Midwesterner became the New York Times' "most important artist of his generation" , the Zebedee-with-a-paintbrush routine is revealing.

It combines absurdity, narcissism, athleticism and endurance. It is comic and ritualistic, and the artist is the object of the gaze. It shares many of the hallmarks of The Cremaster Cycle, the series of five films made between 1994 and last year that have made Barney an international celebrity.

"There were other pieces in the Drawing Restraint series that were more about loading the body down with weight," Barney explains, listing the masochistic feats he performed, including climbing walls or wrapping himself in surgical latex hosing.

"All the pieces assumed the drawing would be made regardless of the restraint that was put on the act. They were all to do with the will as much as they were to do with trying to manipulate one's facility to draw."

Barney, a lean man with a thin beard, is polite, quietly spoken and earnest. Don't expect flippancy or anecdotes about his domestic life (his partner is the Icelandic pop star Bjork), or the pressures of parenthood (he and Bjork have a baby girl, Isadora).

"Cremaster" may sound like a low-budget horror franchise, but the name comes from a scientific term referring to the muscle in the male genitals from which the testicles are suspended. The Cremaster Cycle was begun in 1994. The multimedia project comprises sculptures, photographs, drawings and films. Saturated with pop, mythical, architectural, classical, movie, biological, computer-game and even masonic references, it defies easy classification.

Barney started out of sequence with Cremaster 4. He set it on the Isle of Man, and played a character called the Loughton Candidate, "a satyr with two sets of impacted sockets in his head that will eventually grow into the horns of the Loughton ram".

Cremaster 1 followed in 1995, a musical review staged in the sports stadium in Barney's home town of Boise, in Idaho. Next was Cremaster 5, notable for the casting of ex-Bond girl Ursula Andress, who plays the "Queen of Chain", the sole spectator at a lavish opera performed at the Hungarian State Opera House.

While Barney, in various guises, clambers, Spiderman-like, across the opera house ceiling or jumps off bridges, she sings arias, swoons and eventually faints.

There are several references to the Hungarian-born Harry Houdini, who also features in Cremaster 2 (1999), played by Norman Mailer. Billed as a "Gothic Western", this film flits from 1977, the year Gary Gilmore was executed, to 1893 when Houdini (reputedly Gilmore's grandfather) performed at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Gilmore re-emerges as a female corpse digging herself out of her grave in the 182-minute Cremaster 3, which is set in New York and tells the story of the construction of the Chrysler Building.

"I was having a conversation with a doctor, a friend I grew up with, and I was telling him about this project and how I was thinking about that period in foetal development before the reproductive system differentiates between male and female," says Barney, explaining the origins of the Cremaster Cycle.

"My friend suggested I look at the cremaster muscle because such a story would need conflict. Given the internal reproductive organs in the foetus are in a position that is higher than the ovaries and the testes, something needs to govern those internal organs into their final position. That cremaster muscle could be the character of conflict in the story."

Extraordinarily lofty claims have been made on his behalf since his testicular epic was begun in 1994. Following his successful show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he is being built up as the latest lion of the American art world.

So, how did a sweet, ex-high school football hero from Boise transform himself into the cynosure of the New York art world, reinventing himself as a director?

Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967. His family moved to Idaho when he was 6. He excelled at sport and became a star quarterback. He was a craftsman who dropped back into the pocket and threw long, spiralling passes downfield for his receivers to catch. He took his sport as seriously as he does his art, leading the school team to a state championship in 1983.

In a sense, Barney is still playing the quarterback role in the Cremaster movies. He remains the golden boy at the centre of the huddle. Buried in the Cremaster Cycle, you can find some oblique references to his days as an athlete.

The lengthy quote about character, temperament and commitment that flashes on the screen in Cremaster 3 isn't taken from some Machiavelli-like Italian philosopher. The words came from Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.

At college, Barney helped to pay his tuition fees by modelling for Ralph Lauren and J Crew. The strict laws about amateurism at Yale meant he had to give up football - by then, though, he had discovered a new enthusiasm.

From the outset, he approached art with the same rigour as he had sport. Unlike most kids growing up in southern Idaho - "basically an extension of the Mormon basin in Utah" - he felt no embarrassment about experimental art or the idea of non-verbal communication.

His mother, Marsha Gibney, was a painter. "Probably the greatest influence was watching my mother paint, growing up around abstract painting and seeing how it can operate as a mode of expression or as a language as well as any other mode of communicating," he recalls. Nor did he have any compunction about using his body as a tool in his work. "Having been an athlete, it was quite natural to use myself that way."

Barney cites Bruce Nauman and Joseph Beuys as key influences, but when it comes to movies, his tastes are more populist. He hasn't seen Fellini's Casanova, nor is he any great expert on the works of Bunuel, to whom he is also often compared. His real passion is for horror films.

Jaws and The Shining are among his favourites. "Films in which the antagonistic force might live in the walls of the architecture or the water around as much as in the fish itself. Those are the films that were most useful to me when I started thinking about making moving images myself."

He also enjoyed King Vidor's wonderfully overblown version of the Ayn Rand novel, The Fountainhead, which partially inspired the look and some of the characters in Cremaster 3. Intrigued by zombie movies, he says he is now eager to see Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, despite his misgivings about Trainspotting.

Barney has a peculiar enthusiasm for bagpipe music and Guinness (even if the drink of choice when he was growing up in Boise was Coors), and is fascinated by Celtic myth. One of the joys (and frustrations) of the Cremaster Cycle is the way it flits from such quintessentially American locations as the Chrysler Building or Bronco Stadium to the old Europe of 19th-century Budapest. Barney will throw in references to King Solomon one moment and to computer games the next.

While he insists the films should be seen in cinemas rather than galleries, he describes the cycle as "narrative sculpture", and acknowledges that audiences who haven't been briefed beforehand might well end up perplexed.

Whether clambering up the inside of skyscrapers, being tied to a dentist's chair, leaping off a bridge or having pigeons tied to his genitals and then being made to fly off, he is invariably the prime exhibit in the Cremaster films.

He accepts that some audiences will loathe him and the movies. That's why he doesn't take too seriously the reviews praising him to the hilt.

"I'm relieved that there is an equally present voice that is saying quite the opposite," he shrugs. "As extreme as that positive press is, there is some extremely negative press that keeps things in balance. I guess it's telling me that, one way or another, the work is getting under people's skins, and that feels right.

"If I felt like everybody felt that way, that it was superlative and important, I'd feel very, very nervous. But that's not the case." He pauses before confiding, with evident relief: "There are many, many people out there who hate this body of work."

Film

* What: Cremaster 2 and 3

* Where and when: Sky City Theatre, Wed and Thurs 6.30pm

- INDEPENDENT