In his earlier works, Barney utilized his body to explore the limits of endurance and their role in generating art. Later, the artist moved away from documenting actual events to employing storytelling in his work. In his series DRAWING RESTRAINT (1987–ongoing), which Barney began while an undergraduate at Yale, the artist attempts to make marks or drawings under physically strenuous conditions, like climbing his studio walls, jumping on a trampoline, or lifting weights. The resulting drawings serve as residue or documentation of the action, alongside photography and film of the process. “Central to what my project is about,” Barney says, is “a kind of sublimated violence or a kind of activation of architecture–of the body really– that has to do with resistance, or of imposing resistance onto a form as a kind of creative act.” By equating the artist to the athlete, Barney explores the role of overcoming physical and psychological resistance as a prerequisite for artistic development and creativity. 

In addition to working with his physical body to document real actions, Barney also uses his body as the medium to recreate historical events and explore mythologies. In his Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), the artist creates a series of five expansive feature-length films, paired with sculptures, photographs, and drawings. The title of the work references the cremaster muscle, a muscle in the male internal reproductive system that raises and lowers the testicles in response to external stimuli such as temperature and fear. Each of the films reflects a different moment in the biological cremaster cycle, with Cremaster 1 representing the most “ascended” or undifferentiated state, and Cremaster 5 the most “descended” or differentiated. Barney looks to different locations as the throughline for the films, focusing on places such as The Isle of Man, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and his high school football field. As such, the narratives of each film emerge in response to site-specificity, from the local mythology to the material world. Cremaster 3, the final film produced in the cycle, is set in New York and reflects on the myth of freemasonry represented through the construction of the Chrysler Tower. Whether dressed as the Entered Apprentice, a satyr, a magician, or the murderer Gary Gilmore, Barney looks to biological systems and his background as an athlete to explore body politics and their influence on masculinity.