![]() I arrived half expecting something to match the weather: another claustrophobic biopsychological phantasmagoria, maybe, or one of his rococo exercises in mythic exegesis. Walking through the acrid haze toward the pier where the video installation is on view-in the artist’s former studio, the same cavernous warehouse on the Queens shore of the East River where it was staged and filmed-it started to feel like Barney himself might well have orchestrated the unheimlich atmospherics, the sort that have populated his work for some thirty years. I went to see Matthew Barney’s Secondary on the first Wednesday in June, the day New York was reduced to a blur by smoke fuming south from the Canadian wildfires. Matthew Barney: Secondary, Matthew Barney Studio, 4–40 Forty-Fourth Drive, Long Island City, through June 25, 2023 Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Regen Projects, and Sadie Coles HQ. In its highly stylized, Surrealist-tinged examination of nature, sexuality and the frequent absurdities of life, River of Fundament at times recalls early films by Luis Buñuel and Peter Greenaway it also corresponds to Barney’s own Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), although the new film is the artist’s most ambitious foray into cinema.Īnyone can appreciate River of Fundament as a sumptuous and adventurous spectacle however, the film demands considerable intellectual participation and a surprising emotional commitment to comprehend its depths.Matthew Barney: Secondary, installation view. ![]() Near the beginning, Barney renders semen as mercury flowing along cracks in a floor. He demonstrates a preoccupation here with alchemy, especially the transformation of shit into gold. In one of the film’s most spectacular moments, cascades of lava-like molten car metal stream from an enormous furnace down a hillside in the midst of a torrential rainstorm.Īs in the past, Barney graphically explores bodily functions and their resultant fluids. Battered, dumped in rivers and eventually melted down, the cars also serve as a metaphor for the demise of the Industrial Age. ![]() A 1967 Chrysler Imperial, a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and a 2001 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor are driven and dragged by hand through the streets in rather spirited funeral processions, accompanied by brass bands and hundreds of costumed extras. Footage from three outdoor performances that Barney filmed over the past several years, in Los Angeles, Detroit and New York, feature cars as ritual objects. ![]() The third motif is the automobile, which Barney has used in the past as a symbolic representation of the soul. In several of the film’s last scenes, presided over by actress Ellen Burstyn as Hathfertiti from Ancient Evenings, Mailer’s home is re-created on a barge cruising down the East River, with the Manhattan skyline looming in the distance. In fact, the apartment itself becomes unmoored. For instance, a nude female guest urinates on the dining room table while doing a back bend, and a couple engages in a rather prolonged demonstration of anilingus. The wake scenes perhaps come closest to conventional narrative, until Act II, when the dinner party seems to degenerate into debauchery and mayhem. Elsewhere he plays Osiris (the Egyptian god of the dead) as well as the late artist James Lee Byars. Barney himself appears here as Ka-the ancient Egyptian name for the human soul’s vital essence. Attending the dinner, a stellar cast-including Salman Rushdie, Fran Lebowitz, Luc Sante, Dick Cavett, Deborah Harry and Elaine Stritch (some of Mailer’s real-life friends and acquaintances), as well as artist Lawrence Weiner and Mailer’s son John Buffalo Mailer-speak and sing about episodes in Mailer’s life, his writing and the mythological and historical figures in Ancient Evenings. An imaginative reenactment of Mailer’s wake, a dinner party of sorts, shot in the writer’s Brooklyn apartment, serves as the second motif. Some of the sequences, such as several in which characters cross a river of feces in order to be reincarnated, directly correspond to episodes described by Norman Mailer in his 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, set in pharaonic Egypt. One theme centers on ancient Egyptian mythology, with fanciful interpretations of the journey of the soul from life to death, the underworld and rebirth.
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