Creativity Quote by Matthew Barney

Barney frames “the project” less as a tidy artwork than as a body with a libido and a metabolism. The provocation isn’t just the oddity of pairing sex with digestion; it’s the way he collapses two systems we’re trained to keep separate. Digestion is crude necessity, the engine room of survival. Sex is often romanticized or moralized, treated as symbol rather than function. By fusing them, Barney drags high-art “concept” back into viscera: intake, transformation, discharge. Art as an organism that eats the world and excretes new matter.

The key dodge is his pivot from hunger to desire. Hunger implies lack and replacement: you consume to fix a deficit. Desire is surplus, compulsion, an energy that doesn’t resolve when fed. That distinction telegraphs intent: the work isn’t about satisfying needs or delivering messages; it’s about generating ongoing propulsion. The project keeps moving because wanting keeps moving. In Barney’s universe, that’s also how images work: they don’t cure the urge to look, they intensify it.

Contextually, this sits squarely in his post-80s, post-body-art lineage: artists who treat materials (vaseline, bodily fluids, athletic exertion, industrial residue) as extensions of physiology, not metaphors at a safe distance. The subtext is a rebuttal to art-as-illustration. He’s proposing an economy of transformation: the artist as consumer/producer, the viewer as accomplice, and meaning as something manufactured through friction, not handed down like a caption.