Matthew Barney Performance TOMORROW - Hudson, NY

Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler will lead a performance tomorrow night (Friday, September 13) at the BasilicaSoundScape art and music festival in Hudson, NY. The organizers are being secretive about the performance, but it will apparently involve all of the bands on the lineup being conducted by Bepler. The event will be held in a converted 19th century factory two hours north of New York City (take Amtrak to Hudson station). Tickets can be purchased for Friday night only or for the entire weekend, and camping is available for $30 per tent per night. We at Cremaster Fanatic won't be able to make it, but please send us photos/video if you go.

Purchase tickets HERE

Interview with festival organizer Melissa Auf der Mar HERE

Matthew Barney Needs Extras For Film Shoot TOMORROW - NYC

Hey Cremaster Fanatics - this could be your dream come true. Matthew Barney is in need of volunteers to perform in a shoot for his new film River of Fundament. The shoot will take place tomorrow, June 29, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Volunteers will be positioned on a steep set of stairs and will be asked to participate vocally. Music director Jonathan Bepler will be directing the volunteers. If interested, you must be in good physical shape, willing to climb up and down the stairs (which may be slippery), and commit to a possible 10-hour workday. Lunch and water will be provided, and volunteers will receive limited edition signed & numbered T shirt. Apply here.

Matthew Barney Drawing Retrospective and Film Premier

New York City's Morgan Library will hold a retrospective exhibition of Matthew Barney's drawings from May 10 - September 2. Titled Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney, it will be the first museum exhibition dedicated to Barney's drawings, featuring approximately 100 works from his undergraduate years in the 1980's to more recent drawings inspired by Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings. The exhibition will include storyboards for Barney's films and videos, sketches, magazine clippings, and postcards, plus related rare books, medieval manuscripts, and drawings from the Morgan collection selected by Matthew Barney including a 2,000-year-old Egyptian Book of the Dead, a medieval zodiac and a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. After it's run at the Morgan, the exhibition will travel to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, where it is scheduled to open in October (with supplemental materials drawn from the Bibliothèque's collection replacing those from the Morgan's). On July 13 and 14, Barney and one of his frequent collaborators, the composer Jonathan Bepler, will discuss their work and premier selections from a new film called River of Fundament at the Manchester International Festival in the UK (Barney presented the performance The Guardian of the Veil at the festival in 2007). River of Fundament is a projected seven part film project that draws upon the thematic undercurrents of Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, combining the traditions of narrative cinema with elements of live performance, sculpture and opera. Each film will correspond to one of the seven stages of the soul’s journey from death to rebirth in accordance with Egyptian mythology. Barney plans to present River of Fundament at opera houses and theatres internationally beginning in 2014.

Matthew Barney Previews Ancient Evenings Film In Amsterdam

Blend reports that Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler have been working on a residency in conjunction with Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and the Holland Festival. The two recently presented a rough cut preview of the film Ancient Evenings at the Frascati theater. "Ancient Evenings consists of seven acts, which mirror the seven stages of the soul in Egyptian mythology as it passes from the deceased body to rebirth. In the novel this progression is told through a man who has reincarnated three times. Barney and Bepler have replaced the man with the body of a car. The car will pass on through three generations as well: from Chrysler Crown Imperial 1967 to Pontian Firebird Trans Am 1979, which will end up as a Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor 2001. The eventual film will be the result of taped performances in front of an audience, as well as material directly shot in front of the camera." The rough cut of the film, "opens with beautiful long shots of bubbling mud, parts of gold leaf moving in the wind, desolated factories and a man waiting in a car. The car is outside of a church, which is entered by two detectives. In the church there is the body of an American muscle car, which is thoroughly examined by the detectives, as if it were a crime scene or an autopsy. Suddenly the man who has been waiting enters the church. He moves to the altar, where an ambulance has been placed. The ambulance is covered with gold leaf on the inside, and has a man dressed in a golden straitjacket. The man is been put into the car with his arms strapped to his body and a blindfold on, as well as several top hats. As a large Egyptian wand is pierced through the car window, the car starts to drive. The detectives escort it to a bridge, where it dives in the water." Barney also showed a clip from the Khu performance recorded live in Detroit last year. Blend reports, "In front of an audience on a large boat... A huge body bag containing a car is being pulled from the river onto the boat. Various detectives on the scene are singing it to, and in a small tugboats circling around the bigger boat violin- and trumpet players are making music." Following the screening, Barney and Bepler brought live performers and opera singers (with whom they have been working during their residency) onto the stage. "It is clear that this is not your average theatre performance... The opera singers and musicians are playing a seemingly chaotic manner. Improvisations are sometimes brilliant, sometimes messy. The amazing British voice actor Phil Minton is great, singer (and actor in the film) Jennie Knaggs sings wonderfully and opera star Joan la Barbara does an interesting act."

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.

Ren Trailer

Cremaster fanatic Mark sent us a link to composer (and frequent Matthew Barney collaborator) Jonathan Bepler's web site, which features a short trailer for Barney's Ren - the first installment in his multi-part opera Ancient Evenings. Click here to watch the trailer.

Matthew Barney's Djed exhibition, featuring sculpture and drawings related to Ancient Evenings, opens at Gladstone Gallery in New York on September 17.

Photos of Il Tempo Postino in Basel

The Accessible Art blog has posted some photographs of Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler's performance in Hans Ulrich Obrist's Il Tempo Postino in Basel. We have to say, it doesn't look nearly as impressive as Barney's previous performances in Manchester and New York City.

"No Fist F***ing" For Matthew Barney in Basel

Artforum.com's review of Il Tempo Postino in Basel notes, "Some were delighted that Matthew Barney didn’t reproduce the fist-fucking scene that caused such a controversy for the British [during Il Tempo Postino's initial run at the Manchester Opera House], while others thought the work had been better with it. (This time, at the end of Barney’s contribution there was only a concert in the lobby performed with a score by Jonathan Bepler.)"

We're waiting for more reviews and photographs to surface...

Matthew Barney Edition On Sale

New York art bookstore Printed Matter is having a sale on editions and multiples throughout the month of May. Included on their list of discounted items is Matthew Barney's The Man in Black / Drone Harness, a 12" vinyl picture disc featuring music from Jonathan Bepler's Cremaster 2 soundtrack. The record, which was released in 2000 in an edition of 500 signed & numbered copies, is marked down to $220 from the original price of $275. You can order the record HERE (note: the discounted price does not appear online, but Printed Matter will include the discount before charging your credit card).

Happy New Year: More Matthew Barney Top 10's

Matthew Barney is all over Artforum's annual "Best Of" issue, starting with an image from Guardian of the Veil on the cover (circled in red above).

The next mention of Barney's work is in David Byrne's top 10 list of the best music of 2007. Byrne lists Jonathan Bepler's score for Barney's De Lama Lamina as #7 (even though the video was released in 2004, apparently Byrne didn't see it until 2007). Byrne writes, "Bepler realized the common but challenging ambition of making ordinary sounds, speech, and environmental noises into music."

Barney receives two mentions in "The Artists' Artists" section, where Artforum asked a group of artists to list their favorite exhibitions of 2007. Tatzu Nishu selects All in the Present Must Be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beus at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, "An amazing show that illuminated the commonalities between two artists of seemingly different styles and generations. Not merely the best exhibition of 2007 but the best I've seen in three years. I hope curators will emulate this approach, rather than recycle the same old themes. Be fresh, have a new point of view." Keith Tyson chooses Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint at the Serpentine Gallery, London, "Bizarre props, tales of athletic endurance, and esoteric mythologies filled the building in Hyde Park to bursting. Like some nineteenth-century explorer returning from his adventures in exotic lands, the biomythical Barney is living his dream -- that of an interdisciplinary systems analyst with an expanded sense of potential for drawing, sculpture, and human identity."

Finally, professor and critic Claire Bishop places "Matthew Barney's bull in Il Tempo del Postino" at the Opera House, Manchester, UK in her top 10. "At the end of an evening of otherwise patchy performance art by seventeen international artists, Barney, with a dog on his head, took command of the theater. Halfway through the enigmatic proceedings, a mythologically proportioned bull was led onto the stage and encouraged to enjoy sexual congress with a sculptural appendage fixed to the back of a Cadillac. The garlanded, golden-horned beast failed to rise to the occaision -- despite the presence of contortionists, balaclava-clad trumpeters, and ample quantities of Vaseline. I was left feeling ritually contaminated. Utterly inexplicable."

More about Guardian of the Veil in Manchester

Artforum.com's Scene & Herd gives us their take on Barney's Guardian of the Veil performance in Manchester today:

"Rarely in one night had the city seen the convergence of such an assortment of artsy individuals—many of whom had never before set foot in Manchester. All manner of artists, dealers (Shaun Caley Regen, Barbara Gladstone), collectors (Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Maya Hoffman), curators (Martijn van Nieuwenhuizen, Suzanne Pagé, Maria Lind, and even Japan’s Akiko Miyake), fashionistas (from Ramdane Touhami to Stefano Pilati), and actors (including up-and-coming French hunk Melvil Poupaud) were present.

[...]

Everyone was a bit uneasy about Barney (whose real mustache trumped our artificial one) and his opus. A burst of music heralded a strange procession of men sporting balaclavas and T-shirts bearing the words DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION. They carried Aimee Mullins (the actress/model/athlete and Cremaster 3 star with dual prostheses) on a stretcher, leading the audience back into the theater.

And there, Barney, with a small dog perched atop his head like the Egyptian god Anubis, proceeded to perform a kind of funeral ceremony under the hood of a crashed car. For those—like myself—who missed his apparently very similar performance in New York last April, he presented a ritual that involved contortionists who peed on stage, a young woman (alas, not Björk) who fist-fucked herself, and a bull named Ross, who made headlines by “mounting” the rear end of the car—a Cadillac, no less—thus attracting the attention of animal anticruelty agencies. Some in the audience found this all a bit too much and deemed it “macho”; I even heard the word fascist. In any event, we can safely say that Barney excels in baroque avant-drama, and—should he ever be asked—he’s well prepped to direct one of those Wagnerian operas in Salzburg."