Matthew Barney at Benefit to Purchase Norman Mailer Home

Zimbio has published an album of photos of a hirsute Matthew Barney at benefit to raise funds to purchase the historic Norman Mailer home in Provincetown, MA. The event was sponsored by the Norman Mailer Center and Van Cleef & Arpels and held in honor of auctioneer Simon de Pury (pictured with Barney above). Norman Mailer appeared as Harry Houdini in Barney's Cremaster 2 and his book Ancient Evenings inspired Barney's latest series of works, including Khu, Ren, and Djed.

Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait in France

Artist Barry X Ball (who showed an earlier portrait of Barney in Cremaster Fanatic's Matthew Barney Show) will be exhibiting a "dual-dual" portrait of himself and Matthew Barney at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris. The work consists of two busts (one carved from italian portoro marble, the other from portuguese gold marble) impaled on toothpick-shaped metal rods and suspended from the ceiling.

The artist writes, "The composite figures richly embossed, in a manner reminiscent of late-renaissance milanese parade armor, with a cornucopia of silhouetted motifs: abrahamic ecclesiastical symbols, animals, decorative flourishes, and protuberant, warty, half-spheres... differing surface treatments keyed to the corresponding swag-draped corporeal flay strata: a glistening sheen for the splayed entrails, miniature horizontal flutes for the mid-level viscera, and gnarled, ridged, sfumato-esque soft-focus ornamental relief for the epidermis, with eyes, oral features, and the mutilated face gleaming, respectively, with a moist, lachrymal / salivary / mucosal polish, with mannered, attenuated, crown-like cranium-top shatter-burst exit-wounds."

The exhibition will be on view at Galerie Nathalie Obadia from March 17th to May 16th. More photos of the work can be seen at designboom.com

Support Stupor: Matthew Barney & Drunken Ramblings!

Stupor editor Steve Hughes has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new collaboration with Matthew Barney. Stupor is a magazine featuring, "stories of drunkenness, infidelity, disappointment, and sometimes dumb luck," that Hughes collects from people he meets in bars. Each issue is laid out by a different visual artist.

Steve is soliciting funds to publish a new issue titled Washed In Dirt that will be designed by Matthew Barney (who Steve met when Barney was filming Khu in Detroit). Washed In Dirt will feature 4 stories with a, "connection to cars and the human body and dirt and blood and skin and oil and gas fumes."

A $6 pledge will get you a copy of Matthew Barney's issue of Stupor, higher donations include additional premiums. Click here to support the project.

Djed Book and Michael Leavitt's Art Army

Cremaster Fanatic ventured out for a Chelsea gallery crawl a couple of weeks ago. Of course, out main target was Matthew Barney's Djed exhibition at Gladstone Gallery. We shot some photos, but, to be honest, the official ones are much better -- there's a nice collection the on Juxtapoz web site.

We picked up a copy of a small book published in conjunction with the exhibtion. The book contains an introduction to Ancient Evenings, librettos for Acts I and II (Ren and Sekham), an essay on Egyptian mythology by Angus Cook, and, of course, tons of photos (both film stills and images of the Djed sculptures). As far as we know, this is the most complete information published to date about Barney's new series, Ancient Evenings.



We also managed to catch the final day of Michael Leavitt's Art Army Royalty exhibition at Jonathan Levine Gallery. We previously posted some photos of the Matthew Barney action figure, and it was great to see him in person. Mike was in our traveling exhibition The Matthew Barney Show a few years ago, and we're glad to see he's doing well.



The gallery was also selling a nice book with photos of all of the figures in Leavitt's Art Army. Here's a page showing some details of the Matthew Barney statue (which includes two of the Jacobin pigeons from Cremaster 5).

My Brightest Diamond on Acting in Matthew Barney's Khu

Drowned in Sound just posted an essay by performer My Brightest Diamond (aka Shara Worden) about her experience acting in Matthew Barney's Khu.

"The audition was like nothing I had ever done. Composer Jonathan Bepler sat with me and a friend of mine from my high school choir who I had dragged along. We sat in a small circle and Jonathan closed his eyes and started breathing exercises. We mimicked him and our heart rates slowed. Jonathan asked us to try different exercises in noise-making, sometimes by singing himself, then having us repeat it or at other times giving us facial expressions that we interpreted. Already I was on the edge of my comfort zone making "ugly" sounds, but it was so fun, improvising and going into the unknown, that I didn't have much time to evaluate what the sounds actually were...

I was assigned a role, a police officer aptly named Lieutenant Worden, who was overseeing a search for a missing body... My character was bossing around an all female opera chorus, which included FBI agents and local officers.

On October 2nd,2010, filming commenced as we began our investigation on the shores of the Rouge River. From the sheriff's boat on the river, we sang call and response yodel-like calls while four other boats filled with saxophones and a percussionist circled. On a barge, as the "dead body" of a car was hoisted from the river by a crane, we sang in horror as we recognized the one we had longed to find. Back on land, a procession of horn players and opera singers wailed cluster chords, walking with Butoh-like slowness, a long march to the funeral of the car. Upon mounds of black soil, the orchestra stood in rows. The temperature began to drop to somewhere around 48 degrees (8.89 celcius). Surrounding five custom build blast furnaces, we sang as percussionist hit trash cans and cymbals whipped down several stories of cable wire, a sound which was amplified over loud speakers. It began to rain, a freezing rain. We waited for over two hours for the weather conditions to be right for twenty-five tons of molten iron to pour from the furnaces into a molded pit. A string player in the row in front of me fainted. The audience was sent away as a safety precaution. Some of the other musicians started leaving voluntarily."


Read the full article here.