Matthew Barney’s five-and-a-half-hour epic returns to New York City this weekend (photo by Hugo Glendinning)
RIVER OF FUNDAMENT (Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, 2014)
Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York
71 West Twenty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, November 14, $70, 2:00
Public Records
233 Butler St., Brooklyn
Sunday, November 15, free with RSVP, 2:00
gladstonegallery.com
In February 2014, I experienced the entirety of Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s fecal epic, River of Fundament, in one marathon evening at the BAM Harvey, coming away impressed, confused, exhausted, and in need of a long, hot shower. And now you can feel the same as the bizarrely mesmerizing and surreal five-and-a-half-hour adventure flows into the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York for a one-time-only screening on November 14 ($70 for general admission) over the course of eight hours, including a free dinner between the second and third acts. There will be live music interventions by Bepler and cast members, and the audience is encouraged to walk around the adjoining rooms during the intermissions. To help you make sense of it, Barney and Bepler will be at Public Records in Brooklyn on November 15 for a Q&A with Andy Battaglia; of course, that also has the potential to, er, clog your mind even further. The events are presented by New People’s Cinema Club and Unsound New York as part of the Durations festival, which is appropriate, as viewing the film takes a whole lot of endurance.
River of Fundament is built around episodes in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Detroit (photo by Ivano Grasso)
“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before,” Norman Mailer writes at the beginning of his 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. “Is this the fear that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain? The oceans my mind awash? I have a thirst like the heat of earth on fire. Mountains writhe. I see waves of flame. Washes, flashes, flashes, waves of flame.” New York-based visual artist Barney and Berlin-based composer and musician Bepler have transformed Mailer’s seven-hundred-page epic about death and rebirth in Egypt into quite the cinematic spectacle. In his five-part, seven-hour Cremaster Cycle, Barney explored the ascension and descension of the cremaster muscle, which determines sexual differentiation, with a cast that included Mailer as Harry Houdini and Barney as Gary Gilmore in a section inspired by Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song while focusing on cars and petroleum jelly in others.
River of Fundament begins with Mailer’s wake at an intricate reconstruction of his Brooklyn Heights home, with Mailer’s son John Buffalo Mailer playing his father’s spirit. The second act follows the reincarnation of Mailer (Milford Graves) as he is born in the River of Feces and meets medium Hathfertiti (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and a gold 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. The third act returns to Brooklyn, with Mailer’s next reincarnation played by a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor and Ellen Burstyn taking over as Hathfertiti. The primary cast also features Paul Giamatti, Cremaster star Aimee Mullins, Elaine Stritch, Lila Downs, Chief Dave Beautiful Bald Eagle, Joan La Barbara, and Madyn G. Coakley, with a multitude of cameos by Dick Cavett, Luc Sante, Larry Holmes, Salman Rushdie, Lawrence Weiner, Fran Lebowitz, Marti Domination, James Toback, David Amram, and dozens of others as the myth of Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, Set, and Horus plays out as well.
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, production still, River of Fundament, 2014 (© Matthew Barney/ courtesy of the artist and Gladstone / photo by David Regen)
The action, much of which consists of filmed performance art presentations that were held in public spaces, moves from New York City to Los Angeles to Detroit as Egyptian mythology and ritual play out in unusual ways. Barney, whose multidisciplinary Cremaster exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2002-3 was one of the best of the decade, gave New Yorkers an advance sneak peek at the making of River of Fundament via the ”DJED” show at the Gladstone Gallery in the fall of 2011 and the wide-ranging “Subliming Vessel” at the Morgan Library in 2013. Not that they gave any real indication of what to expect, because with Barney, the only thing to expect is the unexpected. And even then, don’t expect to understand what is unfurling before you. Just know that once you take it all in, you will never be able to flush it out of your mind, where it will simmer and stew most likely for the rest of your natural life.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]