Workshopping scenes and ideas became pretty useful, and I hadn’t done much of that before. The element of opera, or the one Jonathan and I chose to explore, meant that the music and visual form needed to develop simultaneously, which was challenging. In a sense, abstracting a novel didn’t feel much different from abstracting a location the way I had in Cremaster, but what felt different was the form of collaboration that River of Fundament required. So, Mailer’s book was the starting point for the libretto. After working together on The Cremaster Cycle, Jonathan Bepler and I had started kicking around the idea of making a live work, and one that would take on the form of opera in some way. He suggested his book Ancient Evenings to me and thought I might be interested in taking it on cinematically, but I wasn’t really thinking about filmmaking at that time. River of Fundamentstarted with a challenge from Norman Mailer. For sure there were logistical and financial limitations that led me to structure the project that way, but it also led to a way of working more organically, and a way of keeping the narrative more open and less fixed, leaving space for the larger project to function more sculpturally. I get the feeling that episodic television these days is often produced this way, where the production is concurrent with the writing. In that sense the narrative arc of the larger form developed more slowly and continued to mutate as each local narrative came into focus. I wrote and developed the chapters of Cremaster one by one as I produced them. I spent time in each location researching local mythologies and the places and materials they inhabited. I wanted to create a larger form that would span over a sequence of sites, where the narrative would grow locally out of each site. The Cremaster Cycle began with an interest in making a work about place and questions about site specificity. Where do you generally begin when it comes to setting out to imagine any one of these worlds? Thinking about the expansiveness of Cremaster Cycle for instance, or the depth and gargantuan scale of River of Fundament. With this-you've taken on these massive world building projects that span the screen and gallery. As the projects continued to gain scale and complexity, the network kept expanding. I started showing the films in cinemas and installing the sculpture without the presence of the film as a way of creating more space. The relationships were less direct and more of a network. The Cremaster Cycle expanded those relationships and created more space and complexity between the object and narrative. The Jim Otto installations in the early ’90s had a more 1:1 relationship, where the video and the object were installed in proximity and the relationship between the action and object were more explicit. My use of video started as a documentary tool with the Drawing Restraints, and grew slowly into a more narrative tool.The narratives were always in service of the object, though the location of the intersection has changed. In that sense, the video work has been a means toward a sculptural end. Sculpture has always been the priority for me. This interview was conducted over email and phone in 2020–21.Ĭan you talk about what it takes to work at the various scales you’ve operated in? How do you think about the sculptural process, and how do you think about film? And their intersection? MB In the following, we discuss the relationship between cinema and sculpture, what materials do even when we’re not looking, stepping over your own boundaries, and more. I wanted to speak to him because my very first task at my first job in the art world (as social media coordinator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) was to read extensively about his work when his first major solo exhibition in LA, “River of Fundament.” As a result, Matthew Barney lives in my head rent-free. His sprawling oeuvre documents an ongoing attempt to reckon with the possibility of the dissolution of categories. However, his work also exhibits an intensive materialist aesthetic that conceptually collides with the ideas explored throughout this volume of November, namely L’Informe (formless) and the abject. Stepping into the art world in the early 1990s, Barney was a part of an apparent turn to the body in contemporary art he has investigated the body and its limits-in terms of its physical capacities as well as its bounds. Matthew Barney is an American artist, known for his large scale cinematic and sculptural projects.
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