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

Performance Art at Matthew Barney's Studio

We recently discovered some videos of last Spring's performances by Jonathan Meese and Michael Rees at Matthew Barney's studio. Unfortunately, we haven't found any videos online of Barney's Guardian of the Veil performance, but you can see some of Barney's props in the background of the other performances (and a quick glimpse of Barney and Bjork in the New Art TV videos). Meese brandishes a biography of General MacArthur at one point, perhaps a prop he discovered among Barney's things at the studio.

Michael Rees - Live Life! (New Art TV)
Jonathan Meese Performance (New Art TV)
Jonathan Meese Performance (Contemporary Fine Art, Berlin -- cleaner soundtrack, less of the "scene")

More on Matthew Barney's Ren in Los Angeles

We found some more pics and descriptions of Matthew Barney's Ren performance in Los Angeles last weekend in the blogosphere.

The Gessel On blog reports:

"It was a very impressive show, fun to watch and at moments quite exciting, though largely staged for the cameras. The former RV sales lot was converted to an amazingly convincing Chrysler dealership complete with stationary on the walls, sales targets, car dealers and pictures of the employees of the month.

The performance started with the synchronized arrival of sections of a marching band which aggregated in the parking lot. The effect was pretty cool, with timing and distance and location of the different elements spread over a huge distance and slowly coalescing, all lead by marching band leader (and composer) Jonathan Bepler, who I’ve known since grade school but hadn’t seen in person for decades.

An iconic Chrysler Imperial was revealed as a funerary casket, a procession pulled by a few dozen strong men, as Egyptian slaves might have hauled stone blocks, down from the roof of the building and through the parking lot.

The imperial wended its way into a showroom to trade places with a gold firebird and then to its demise at the teeth of a deforestation machine, the showroom fitted with bullet-proof glass and lots of crickets for the purpose. The glass, amazingly, proved strong enough for the flying car parts and crow bars, but was not quite proof against the stabilizer feet of the gigantic excavator. We were perfectly located for that moment.
The remains of the imperial were ritually collected and we joined the staff in the parts department for the final procession involving scarabs, a beautiful woman, and a surprisingly large funerary drape, especially surprising given the orifice from which it was extracted.

The depth of detail of the performance was extraordinary. No simple write up can do it justice and I can’t imagine that even a small part of every carefully prepared element can make it to the final film. The details made walking through the performance an exercise in discovery - from post-it notes in the office, to the illuminated Chrysler signs as tunable Taiko drums, to the dealer tags on the cars in the lot everything was meticulously prepared over four weeks. Then a day later it was gone."

Lipstick Tracez has some good photos and the information that there were 18 cameras filming the action and that they filmed the set for three days before the performance. They also spotted, "Spiderman actor and art lover James Franco, literary beauty Sophie Dahl, designer Jeremy Scott, artists Catherine Opie, [and] Agathe Snow," in the crowd of onlookers. Of the car pictured above, they write, "In case you can't tell, thats a Chrysler Imperial with a giant porta potty welded into the trunk followed by a giant septic tank shaped as a globe filled with the nastiest blue septic fluid."

Matthew Barney Performs Ren at Los Angeles Car Dealership

Above photographs from shweool's Flickr photostream.

Last weekend Matthew Barney performed Ren - the first in a series of seven live performances that will be filmed and edited into a single video - at an abandoned RV dealership just off I-5 in Los Angeles. For the performance, the dealership was transformed into a Chrysler auto showroom called "Ren", apparently a contraction of "Re" (the Egyptian sun god) and "Renaissance". The storyline is based on Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer (who starred in Cremaster 2) and also appears to relate to Cremaster 3 and the recent Guardian of the Veil.
Artforum.com's Linda Yablonsky reports there was a cast and crew of 140, plus over six hundred art-world insiders including, "Barney reps Barbara Gladstone, Shaun Caley Regen, and Sadie Coles, ... artists Mike Kelley, Shannon Ebner, Raymond Pettibon, Doug Aitken, Amy Adler, and Jack Pierson, dealers Jose Freire and Tim Blum, LACMA director Michael Govan, and curators Paul Schimmel, Ali Subotnick, Clarissa Dalrymple, and Klaus Kertess. (Collectors were conspicuously absent.)"

"The performance officially began at 6:40 PM, when a drum-and-bugle corps approached the car lot from surrounding roads and sprinted up the ramp to the roof, playing Bepler's percussive music. With the audience lined up on either side, the trucks parted to reveal a lime-green 1967 Chrysler Imperial with a Barney seal (both familiar from Cremaster 3) on the hood and a large, eggshell-white orb covered in dirt and roots on the back, chained to a smashed-up Port-a-San. Cremaster 3 star Aimee Mullins, who plays The Entered Novitiate, was interred on the roof, under a mound of rock salt and Idaho potatoes....A salesman-actor appeared to intone a nearly unintelligible monologue involving piss, feces, mud, gas, and other typical Mailerisms, like "Isn't time itself born in shit?" Led by the musicians, a thick complement of burly men accompanying the car began to pull it down the ramp like Volga Boatmen....The two-story showroom had double-paned glass on three sides; parked in its center was a gold Pontiac Firebird with its windows blacked out. Interspersed among the spectators, the musicians carried on while the Pontiac drove out and was replaced by the Chrylser. From under the hood came plumes of smoke, cuing the great Oaxacan singer Lila Downs to appear with a mariachi band on the balcony above to perform a haunting dirge. When they were done, the salesmen thanked us for our "business" and asked us to leave so they could clear the smoke. (Mullins was also carried out.)

As a nearly full moon rose above, an interior garage door opened and out came a front loader with a big steel wheel attached to its crane. Six hundred noses pressed against the windowpanes, only to be repelled by the smack of debris thrown by the carnal wheel as the machine tore at the car like a mad, lustful dog humping and grinding its prey. It took about thirty minutes to exhaust itself in the most erotic machine-sex act in recent memory.

[Later, in the "tomb",] the Firebird, now bearing Mullins, was parked between two long rows of Chryslers in need of service. Mouse, the British performance artist, was standing naked at the center, leaning on one of Barney's signature white resin canes and holding a white snorkel-like thing that was sticking out of her vagina.

Lila Downs reappeared to sing another dirge, a cappella, and one of the dealership's "mechanics" reached up between Mouse's legs to draw out a long piece of black plastic turd. With majestic patience, the mechanic and his cohorts slowly unfolded it into a large shroud that they placed over Mullins—and the performance ended in a blackout."

LA Times critic Christopher Knight was critical of the performance, calling it "corny", "obvious", and "cliche". He gives the following description of the performance:

"On the lot's upper deck, three taco trucks pulled away to reveal the smashed-up Imperial, painted scarab green and resting on the back of a flatbed truck. A pair of feet protruded from a shroud-draped lump on the roof, strewn with potatoes, while a huge, dirty black sphere protruding from the car's crumpled trunk turned the holy Egyptian bug into an industrial-strength dung beetle, feeding on feces.

A car dealer made rambling remarks. Then, in sweltering heat, nearly four dozen dirt-smeared laborers used thick ropes to drag the funeral bier off the flatbed, down a long ramp, across the asphalt and, after dismantling some parts, into the glass-fronted showroom.

This ritual procession was followed by industrial-strength intercourse between a backhoe and the Imperial, which smashed up the showroom interior. Glass and metal went flying and three audience members sustained minor injuries.

When paramedics left, the crowd filed into the tomb -- actually the car-lined former service bay. Lila Downs, the great Oaxacan ranchera singer, wailed at a corpse laid out atop a golden Grand Am. A "menstrual shroud" was extracted from the loins of a masked nude woman. Somebody said that locusts were released in the parking lot, but I didn't see them."

Read More:
LA Times
Artforum.com Diary
Photos

Matthew Barney Awarded "Best Show of 2007" by Critic Jerry Saltz

New York Magazine's senior art critic Jerry Saltz named Matthew Barney's Guarding of the Veil performance the "Best Show" of 2007. Saltz writes:

"On a Sunday afternoon in April, in a raw ground-floor cold-water loft 20 feet from the East River, Matthew Barney staged an extraordinary performance. A spellbound crowd watched him walk around slowly with a dog on his head; two half-naked women bent over backward in order to urinate in an arc, a marching band wore terrorist masks; a huge bull attempted to mate with a 1967 Chrysler. What made all this so great, in addition to Barney’s relentless attempt to plumb his own inner cathedral, was how homemade and speculative the whole thing was. There were more art-student types there than art-world A-listers. Most important, it wasn’t an overproduced glamour event full of celebrities -- just an artist trying to figure something out in front of a grateful audience."

Read the rest of Jerry Saltz's Top 10 List at http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz12-17-07.asp

Harvest Moon Guarding The Veil

From ernest.borg9's Flickr photostream here are some photographs of burleque performer Harvest Moon preparing to perform at Matthew Barney's studio. Interestingly, the performance is identified with the title Guarding the Veil as it was in Jerry Saltz's article for artnet.com/New York Magazine, although the performance in Manchester was titled Guardian of the Veil.



The above photos show Harvest being dressed by Gabi from ThreeAsFour, who presumably designed the costumes.


Finally, here's Harvest with the infamous "cow vagina" Chrysler.

Guardian of the Veil in Manchester

Matthew Barney performed a new piece called, "Guardian of the Veil" (not, apparently, "Guarding of the Veil" as previously reported) as part of "Il Tempo del Postino", a selection of contemporary performance art (18+ -- see ticket photo!) held at the Manchester Opera House last weekend. This is the same piece he performed recently at his new studio in Long Island City, New York. It's unclear whether the performances in Manchester were filmed, but I would speculate that scenes from Manchester will be edited in with scenes shot in New York for an upcoming film.

From a local blog:
"A paraplegic woman is carried through the foyer on a stretcher, accompanied by an orchestra dotted around the building dressed in combat gear and balaclavas. She is then taken onto the stage where she is lifted on top of a car. There is a woman on stage clad in an enormous piece of PVC that has been stretched over her body down to her waist. She has her finger up her bum. Matthew Barney emerges from the auditorium with a dog on his head. He takes pieces out of the car and places them in Egyptian alabaster jars, (this is a parody of Egyptian burial rites; removing body parts and putting them in jars. And of course he is meant to be Anubis.) As he does this two women, naked from the waist down, but masked and covered in frills, walk through the auditorium. They walk up onto the stage and go back into the crab position, urinating as they do this. The loading door at the back of the stage opens and a live bull is led down a ramp onto the stage. The bull circles the scene twice and is then encouraged to mount the car. The PVC woman removes the finger from her bum and the performance ends."
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=51010658&blogID=287549350

From The Guardian:
"Barney, whose head has been replaced by a live dog for the performance, plays high priest and car mechanic, fiddling about under the hood of a crashed car. For some reason, there is a corpse on the roof. The dog looks bemused. It is all very slow and portentous. Later, the bull, whose name is Ross, is invited to mount the rear end of the automobile. A discerning pedigree, Ross demurs. Nor does he appear interested in the pair of incontinent contortionists, one of whom arcs her body and pees all over the stage at one point. Another static, naked odalisque spends almost the entire performance with her head hidden under a black rubber veil, and with a hand up her own bottom. And then there are the balaclava-wearing, baglama-playing paramilitaries."
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2127473,00.html

From The Manchester Evening News:
"Many figures from the international art scene flew into Manchester to see the distinctive works acted out.

Attracting most attention is Barney's show, which features a live bull, a car and naked women. Audience members are restricted to over-18s and warnings about the controversial content have been issued.

Barney, an avant-garde US artist married to quirky pop star Bjork, appears in the show with a mongrel dog sitting on his head as the bull - complete with a garland around its neck - is paraded around the stage by handlers in berets and balaclavas. Women wearing only face veils strike explicit poses, another lies on top of a wrecked car with a life-size model of a cow's rump attached.

Manchester graphic design artist Peter Saville, who was involved in planning Barney's performance, said he didn't think audiences would be shocked.

He said: "Not everybody understands Barney's work when they first see it, but it can often become clear later.

"It's similar to reading Shakespeare at school and then understanding when you're older."

Use of the animals in the show - particularly Ross, the Highland bull kept under control with a harness attached to the ceiling - has already attracted RSPCA concern."
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1011/1011259_bizarre_night_at_the_opera.html

There is also an interesting feature on Ross, the Highland Bull featured in the performance, HERE