Creativity Quote by Matthew Barney

Barney is trying to smuggle “authenticity” back into performance by routing it through biology. The comparison is deliberately gross and mechanical: the stomach doesn’t workshop its feelings, doesn’t curate its image, doesn’t negotiate with an audience. It just convulses. By framing character as a reflex rather than a persona, he’s declaring war on the kind of acting (and, by extension, art-making) that feels like personal branding: the character who knows they’re being watched, the artist who can’t stop winking at their own cleverness.

The intent is less about modesty than about force. Ego, in this formulation, is a brake system: it adds self-conscious delay, explanatory narrative, and tasteful restraint. Barney wants the opposite - actions that arrive with the inevitability of a bodily function. That’s a telling fit for an artist whose work often treats the body as an engine, a set of constraints, a site where meaning is produced by pressure and release rather than dialogue. “Not allowing” also matters: this isn’t a romantic faith in spontaneity; it’s discipline, almost choreography, designed to prevent psychological interpretation from taking over.

The subtext: if a character is truly governed by need, impulse, or compulsion, the work can bypass the familiar emotional script and hit the viewer in a more primal register. It’s an anti-literary move, suspicious of motivation as a neat story we tell after the fact. In a culture trained to read everything as confession or identity, Barney argues for art that behaves like a system: messy, involuntary, and uninterested in your approval.