Interview by Jonathan Jones

Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 is a deathly evocation of American landscape and American ways, a mythological, murderous masterpiece that confirms what his fans have been saying for some time - that Barney is a Great American Artist. Suddenly, the biggest art star to come out of New York in the 1990s looks like a lot more than that. Cremaster 2 has something dark and grand about it that transcends everything we expect of video installation, art cinema, whatever you want to call it. He calls it sculpture. At 78 minutes, the latest Cremaster can be enjoyed as a feature film and is as weirdly pleasurable as watching David Lynch or David Cronenberg. It has a story in which Gary Gilmore, played by Barney, kills a gas-station attendant and is executed by his own consent in a savage rodeo at an arena on Utah's salt flats. Norman Mailer, who mytitified Gilmore in his best-selling book The Executioner's Song, plays the escapologist Harry Houdini. There are eerie songs whose lyrics are from Gilmore's writings. Any attempt to reduce this film to narrative, or even describe it as cinema, fails. Its images roll under your eye and shards lodge in the unconscious: Gilmore nestling in the space station-like tubular space of his car, the gas-station attendant dead on the gas-station floor, blood pumping out of the hole in his head. I spoke to Matthew Barney just before the British premiere of Cremaster 2, and we began by discussing the film's landscape and how it relates to his own childhood.

You were born in California but you grew up partly in the mid-West.

In Idaho. Southern Idaho and northern Utah are sort of the same territory. The Mormon basin, I would say, starts at the north edge of Utah and heads over into southern Idaho.

What does that landscape mean to you?

Well, I think what Norman Mailer's book The Executioner's Song does so elegantly is it describes the psychological state that landscape creates : the pressure of the vertical fact of the mountain range and then the vast amount of space that lies out in front of it. And the way that the Mormons settled up against the mountains kind of makes it - well, it puts that community somewhere between having the pressure of that mountain range and the kind of emptiness of everything to the west of it. He describes the great gap of time between things that people say from that area. You'll have people taking long pauses in the way they speak. He structured the book that way. I think there's a psychological dimension to the way landscape imprints people from that area. I guess formally I'm sort of interested in that.

Is there an autobiography in the Cremaster project?

Well I guess there is an autobiographical layer that I'd say isn't one of the primary layers, but it's do with the fact that, you know, the field in Cremaster I - I grew up on that field, playing football. And the Rocky Mountains in Cremaster 2 are kind of a critical hurdle for me, sort of psychologically. Growing up in a valley environment like that and the sort of isolation about being in a conservative environment, I think it affects everybody who lives there.

You played football - you were pretty serious about it?

Yeah, I went to school to play and ended up not continuing to play because of problems with eligibility, actually [he was too small] Yeah, I was pretty serious about it.

So you had a pretty regular childhood in the Midwest and you played football. You were not an artistic outsider.

Let's say the majority of my time was spent in a team.

You refer in Cremaster 2 to the Ten Lost Tribes of Mormon. How did they get lost?

The Mormons have great philosophies about the tribes and where they, um, where they are, and their articles of faith state that as they create Zion in North America what they are actually trying to do is create a safe environment for the ten lost tribes to come back and reunify. Some of them believe that they're in the North Star, some of them believe that there is an inverse hollow under the North Pole. (Showing a drawing in the Cremaster 2 book) This is based on a drawing by Joseph Smith who founded the Church. He believed that at a 22 degree axis between the sun and the moon, the lost tribes existed on Polaris the north star and that there was a narrow passage that they cold take and come back to Deseret, once it was complete. Deseret is the Mormon basin in Utah, southern Idaho. Deseret describes the beehive - as they were migrating the symbol of the bee became important to them. Their only strength was the adhesive between the individuals as a group rather than the strength of the individual. Which interests me a lot in terms of the way that sculpture can be built by creating systems. The beehive's a useful model for me as well.

Is Harry Houdini a hero of yours?

He's a model. He continues to be useful I think as a character. Houdini's made of secondary forms for me, which makes it easier to overwrite a narrative onto him - not unlike Gary Gilmore really, for a couple of different reasons. Gilmore spent his entire life in prison so he doesn't have a developed life in the world. Conceptually he's more of a vessel than would be somebody who lives in the world. He never did he was in juvenile institutions and then in prisons, had very little time in the world.

What does Norman Mailer stand for in the film?

I think he has (qualities) not so different from this idea of Houdini having himself chained and locked and blindfolded and thrown in a box and this is the procedure to make a light, creative gesture. There's a brutality in there that appeals to me in the same way. There's a brutality and a physicality... that combination of accuracy and speed and violence.

Did Mailer make Gilmore a mythic figure, or was he one already?

It was a huge story in America; it was in the news everyday and it was on the cover of Newsweek and Time. This was the first execution in ten years, happening at a time when it looked like execution would be no more. It happened in

Utah and it Probably happened because the Mormons controlled the government there. And because they believed in blood atonement, they were happy to kill him. He wanted to die - they were very happy to help him. Somehow it got past the federal stage and it happened, and then there was a landslide of executions after that. 300 people were executed in America last year.

How was he killed?

Four shots to the heart.

Did he believe in blood atonement?

His mother was Mormon. He never practiced Mormonism, but I think that he probably had some residual guilt or... I think, somewhere in him, a part of his desire to die that way was to do with his relationship to the religion. On the other hand, it gave him power to do what he did.

You have him executed on a bull in a rodeo. Why did you use this sacrificial image?

I guess with the several layers of paternal relationships that the story has, with Mailer, with Houdini, with Gilmore, that it felt like an elegant way to solve that problem in the way that the piece deals with reflection. Nicole isn't described as a character, she's described as a reflection of Gary in the image of the white car and the blue car and the way that she had a blue 66 and he had a white 66. Originally I didn't have any intention at all of even having an on-screen presence for Nicole, and she would just be represented by the car and the gas-station, and the way that she and the gas-station attendant and the gas station itself were a space that Gary couldn't successfully seal off and deal with at all and so he had to kill it. I think the bullfight has a similar relationship to the character of Gilmore as a paternal reflection of himself.

Do you expect a viewer to read all this into the film?

No... I have a pretty specific way that I put these things together and they do function as a tight narrative for me, but I don't expect that to penetrate perfectly for somebody else. Although I feel that between the books and the photography and the sculpture and the film there are plenty of indicators to how my system works, I wouldn't expect them to function that didactically. They don't, I know they don't.

But the system is important to you. It's all I can hold on to. Cremaster 2 is about landscape, the kind of landscape that you grew up with, a pressure from landscape. It's a fairly imprisoning landscape.

I think it is, but I think it's incredibly seductive, not unlike the idea of embracing a resistance that can help you gain creativity. I think I have a love-hate relationship with that landscape. What Houdini's monologue at the end says, where the walls that contain you become one with you at a certain point and they can become something else... There's a quote from Hans Bellmer that I really love - it's part of an anagram, which I don't even understand, but one of the lines in it is really lovely: "To learn to laugh beneath the knife." I think it's really beautiful. There's a similar quote from Joseph Beuys about healing the knife that cuts the wound.

Beuys is one artist I wanted to ask you about.

He's very important to me. Continues to be. I think it's something to do with the belief in materiality and object that he has. You may be left with a rod but the rod has passed through such an explicit narrative that it's truly transformed. I think the thing I find most useful is the way that his narratives are distilled to quite simple forms that are much more specific than minimalism. It's about distillation.