If you make it through those hundred pages, then it starts reading like The Naked and the Dead. “He would no sooner pick a favorite book than he would a favorite child, but Ancient Evenings was a labor of love”-it took more than ten years to complete-“and it was heartbreaking the way it got, I don’t want to say ‘written off’ … The truth of the matter is the first hundred pages of that book are incredibly tough to get through. “He loved that book,” says John Buffalo Mailer, the writer’s son, who plays one of three incarnations of his father in River of Fundament. Though his review thrills over elements of a story that “pulls its reader inside a consciousness different from any hitherto met in fiction,” DeMott found the bulk of the book a dire mess, populated by characters who came across as “ludicrous blends of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade.” Other less-than-charitable dismissals cast the book as “pitiably foolish,” “impossible to summarize,” and blighted by “pointless, painful, unintended hilarity.” “It is, speaking bluntly, a disaster,” wrote Benjamin DeMott in the New York Times. The novel Ancient Evenings, however, had not met with the reception Mailer thought it deserved. That book, about the crime-scarred life and complicated execution of Gary Gilmore, was an established classic from its release in 1979. The idea to adapt Ancient Evenings came from Mailer himself, whom Barney had cast to play Harry Houdini in Cremaster 2, which also enlisted elements of Mailer’s nonfiction masterpiece The Executioner’s Song. “I couldn’t work with the same level of physicality that I’m used to. The strictures of the stage did not exactly suit him, Barney says now. I like thinking about a character on stage performing inside another body.”Īfter the first performance, a critic for the Guardian puzzled over what to make of a show that featured a live bull and, in its human cast, a “pair of incontinent contortionists, one of whom arcs her body and pees all over the stage.” Another character came across as a “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.” You feel like you’re inside another body when you’re in an opera house. It’s like the resonant chamber in your body. “I don’t have much of a relationship with opera,” Barney says, “but I’m interested in opera houses, the way organic spaces are designed acoustically to receive the human voice. The first was a performance at his studio that later went public, in 2007, at the Manchester Opera House. “That’s not where my head was.” Instead, after an eight-year period devoted to directing films for his phantasmagorical Cremaster Cycle, Barney conceived River of Fundament as a premise for more immediate experiments and events to be presented on stage. “I really was not in the mood at that point to make a film,” Barney says of the earliest stages of the project. Shoots lasted for days, doubling as rituals or séances, with characters performing for an audience that would come to be part of the work. It draws on a series of site-specific performances and elaborate happenings-live actions related to the project date back as far as 2007-and all of them, however cinematically presented in the end, fit as sensibly within the traditions of theater and opera. The story would not seem to be eminently filmable.īut River of Fundament is not exactly a film. The film was inspired by Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings, set in ancient Egypt and invested in stages of reincarnation that come after death. It was here that Barney completed River of Fundament, a new epic film project premiering this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with a running time of nearly six hours (including two intermissions) and passages that play as extravagantly abstracted and absurd. A staff of a half dozen studio hands oversees projects of enterprising kinds, from building and bracing large architectural oddities to disrupting and destroying sculptures and letting objects rot. Football jerseys hang on a wall, including one for the fabled Oakland Raiders center Jim Otto (his number, 00, puts Barney in mind of extra-bodily orifices). Inside are forklifts to move things like six-ton blocks of salt and sculpturally abetted Trans Ams. Alongside the studio the mercurial river flows, its current changing direction several times a day. On the streets stroll workers whose sturdy coats solicit calls to 888-WASTEOIL, for the service of all waste-oil wants and needs. A couple blocks down is a garage for cast-off food carts in states of obliteration and disarray. Matthew Barney’s studio, the birthing place of some of the biggest and most ambitious art of our time, sits in an industrial New York netherzone by the East River in Queens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |