He excelled at sport at Capital, the local high school, where he soon became a star quarterback. He was not, he says, the type who rushed at the opponents’ defence, but a craftsman who dropped back into the pocket and threw long, spiralling passes downfield for his receivers to catch. 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 in the process?Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 His family moved to Idaho when he was six. Extraordinarily lofty claims have been made on his behalf since his testicular epic was begun in 1994. Following his hugely successful recent show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, he is being built up as the latest lion of the American art world, but his persona is very different to that of such self-consciously macho predecessors as Julian Schnabel or Jackson Pollock. (At Yale, he did medicine before switching to art.) “My friend suggested that I look at the cremaster muscle because such a story would need conflict, and given that the internal reproductive organs in that foetus are in a position that is higher than the ovaries and much higher than the testes, something needs to govern those internal organs into their final position, and that cremaster muscle could be the character of conflict in the story.”Discovering the cremaster was the making of Barney.

Billed as a “Gothic Western”, this film flits from 1977, the year Gary Gilmore was executed, back 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 I was starting, 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, and sounding like the doctor he almost became. (The spectacularly long dribble of saliva that runs down the corner of her mouth was not – Barney reassures me – Andress’s own.)There are several references to the Hungarian-born Harry Houdini, who also features in Cremaster 2 (1999), played by Norman Mailer. Dressed in a black veil and ruffles, and looking as haughty as Catherine the Great, she 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, Spider-man-like, across the opera house ceiling, or jumps off bridges, she sings (dubbed) arias, swoons and eventually faints. Next was Cremaster 5, notable for the casting of ex-Bond girl Ursula Andress.

This is a multimedia project, comprising sculptures, photographs and drawings as well as 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 mature Loughton ram”. (And, no, despite his vast knowledge of Manx culture and history, he hasn’t seen George Formby’s 1935 comedy, No Limit, set against the backdrop of the TT races.)Cremaster 1 followed in 1995. This was a Busby Berkeley-style musical review staged in the sports stadium in Barney’s home town of Boise, in Idaho, with local girls playing the high-kicking chorus dames, wearing huge orange skirts.