Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament:Khu , 2014. Production Still. Photo: David Regen © Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney’s new film opera, “River of Fundament”, a collaboration with Jonathan Bepler and the English National Opera, had its UK premiere on June 29th at the Coliseum in London. He has created another bloated epic breakdown of myths. This time Egypt meets America in a scatological reinterpretation of Egyptian mythology, loosely inspired by Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, “Ancient Evenings”. The first part, set at Norman Mailer’s wake, involves cameos from a host of cultural icons, including Salman Rushdie, Fran Lebovitz and Debbie Harry. Set to Bepler’s unbeatable, genre-skipping avant-garde score, talk turns to Egyptian orgy. Think “My Dinner With Andre” on ayahuasca.
Like Mailer – from whom the film takes its narrative cues, “River of Fundament” is an exercise in will: the will of the artist to enact mastery over matter. Not content with small sets or enclosed spaces, Barney’s artistic vision exerts its force over landscape and industry; as Germaine Greer says, this is the artist’s fantasy achievement, except here made flesh. Matthew Barney is probably best known for his epic “Cremaster Cycle”, a six-hour cycle of films envisioning a modern mythology for the 20th century. Like the “Cremaster Cycle”, the camera soaks up these grand vistas – mountain ranges, the New York skyline, dockyards in Detroit. He creates a meticulous replica of Norman Mailer’s house and floats it downstream on a tugboat. He shoots a smelting scene in Detroit in real time over eight hours. From the macrocosmic to the microcosm of orifices, he shows us glorious beasts at the point of death: giant dead animals, peeled back to their entrails. On an enormous scale, Barney breaks down the American landscape to its symbols of industry and capitalist power via Detroit’s past: those shiny American cars, the art deco modernism of the Chrysler, the power of big machinery. These symbols of modernity prove to be both powerful and destructible. Crushable. Unstable. They come apart. This is Big Art for Big Money.
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament: Ba, 2014. Production Still Photo: Hugo Glendinning © Matthew Barney
This instability of matter is visible in Barney’s repeated resort to ooze. Again, as with the Cremaster, “River of Fundament” is interlaced with the artist’s love of fluids: droplets of metallic liquid secreted for sperm; the primordial matter of molten iron, bodily effluvium. There’s so much here, it’s like fishing out gunk from a plughole. Barney’s fecopoetics, his poetry of shit, is here literally figured as a mystical River of Faeces running underneath Mailer’s apartment. In the opening scene, a Ka spirit played by Barney himself fishes out an old blackened turd and covers it in gold-leaf, before placing it back in the toilet. Moments later, he’s being sodomised by the spirit of Mailer (played by his own son, John Buffalo Mailer), colostomy bag and gold-etched penis intact. This is art which wants to shock – even now. I note nods to Georges Bataille and maybe even the Chapman brothers. Or possibly just Barney’s own overbearing personal mythology.
“River of Fundament” is joyful and imperious. It’s also irritating, ecstatic, overlong, heavy-handed, unruly and obscene. Yet so much of his work derives from this practiced and deliberate study of ritual and performance, it feels problematic to attack the vision by saying: “it should be shorter.” and “Cut out the smelting passage, love”. Like the scene in the Guggenheim in “The Cremaster Cycle”, or the anthropomorphic car smashing sequence, “River of Fundament” needs these bloated passages, this domineering symbolism and on-the-nose metaphor: this unattainable, butt-clenchingly uncomfortable running time. It also demands the proscenium arches in which the artist intends you to see the film, and where I saw “River of Fundament”: London’s Coliseum. One of the largest and most luscious theatre houses in the city, the Coliseum is a cavernous auditorium draped in velvet and gold, home of the English National Opera. Only the day before, the Whitechapel gallery had put on a day-long screening of “The Cremaster Cycle” – (there were many familiar, weary-looking faces from the day before, back for another six hour stab at his work) – and while an impressive event, the white cube of the gallery, and those hard gallery chairs don’t quite do it justice. The golden arches of the theatre house are another matter. Bepler’s score, in its out-there ingenuity, reaches you behind the ears, circling you in sound. This is art that forces you to take notice, whether you like it or not.
See below for more film stills from River of Fundament
Text by Sophia Satchell-Baeza
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