River of Fundament

“I’m interested in abstraction.” In his long-awaited new film cycle, the artist Matthew Barney distils from the myth of Isis and Osiris subjects and figures from a disappearing culture.

River of Fundament is based on the novel Ancient Evenings (1983) by American writer Normal Mailer, a monumental work on cycles of death and reincarnation. Set in the age of the Egyptian pharaohs, the story is told from the perspective a man who has been reincarnated three times. The book appeared on the eve of a period when AIDS began to change society.

Matthew Barney and his composer Jonathan Bepler set Mailer’s portrait of a society with a cultic worship of the body, beauty, and death in modern America. The opera-like plot of becoming and passing is set in the industrial wastelands of Los Angeles, Detroit, and New York. Since 2007, Barney and his team have been staging individual chapters as spectacular, symphonic outdoor performances that announce the film as one of the most original and ambitious projects in the world of art today. 

In a key scene, where the artist had Norman Mailer’s last apartment in Brooklyn Heights exactly rebuilt, the main figure of the novel appears as the author. He is a guest at his own wake. In a virtuosic chamber piece, numerous prominent guests from Mailer’s circle of friends and intellectual surroundings meet, including Barney himself.

River of Fundament is a film, an opera, a concert, a performance, a sculpture, and an allegory all at once. Matthew Barney, one of the most important representatives of international contemporary art, has explored an elaborate network of old and ancient myths in his videos, installations, and environments over the past 20 years, including his path-breaking CREMASTER cycle.