In 2006, after completing Drawing Restraint 9 aboard a Japanese whaling ship, and a dialogic exhibition with the work of Joseph Beuys, Matthew Barney declared himself to be at the end of his foray into feature-length fi lm-making, and his need to reconsider some of the real-time actions and performances that had preceded the Cremaster Cycle, a mind-bending epic of classical mythologies, vernacular fables, arcane allegory, and psycho-sexual exploration. Thus begins a new cycle of performances inspired by Ancient Evenings, the quixotic and highly contested novel by Normal Mailer, one of Barney’s creative progenitors and an active collaborator before his recent death. Beginning and ending in the Egyptian necropolis, Ancient Evenings recounts one soul’s imagination of its afterlife in a culture fi rmly involved with its own body, its own excrement, and its own corruption – a culture that provided Mailer with a representational universe un-Enlightened by the modern divisions between physical and metaphysical, imaginative and real, sexuality and death, critique and creation. In transposing Mailer’s mordant universe from the written word to live performance and into his own mythopoetic terms, Barney continues to display strong affi nities with the American Renaissance, so vividly embodied in the visions of those who sought their origins in “the self-dissolving voyage to the abyss” – Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and others. No doubt it is this attraction to the abyss that has time and again led him away from the comfort of the studio, gallery and theatre towards the marginal realities where to engage in the cross-mapping of site and extravagant narrative action that is so central to the process and meaning of his work. Working with Jonathan Bepler – composer for the Cremaster series who is known to create scores of a highly contingent nature – Barney transformed a car yard in remote southern Los Angeles into the locus for a funeral procession and reincarnation rite involving a 1967 Chrysler Imperial and its avatar, a gleaming Pontiac Firebird. After being hauled to its fi nal resting place inside the main showroom by a team of costaleros and capataz, the Chrysler was atomised in a display of orgiastic desecration by a huge stump grinder. Subsequently, the audience was ushered from the bright searing heat of the day into a vast, yet airless and fetid chamber lined with car wrecks to witness as best they could the mysterious and cathartic process of rebirth, before being plunged into total darkness at its end. Throughout the evening, Bepler’s aleatory score for scramble bands, soprano and mariachi converged and dispersed around the site, linking audience and action. Barney and Bepler’s conscious embrace of more extreme settings for their work invites comparison with fellow visionaries Peter Brooks – with his real-time staging of the Mahabharata in an Australian stone quarry – and choreographer William Forsythe – with his decentring of action, audience and situation in Endless House. As well there are the rituals and procedures of religious and folkloric liturgy, which Barney began to explore with musician Arto Lindsay in the context of Brazilian carnival, bringing elements of local Candomblé religion together with issues of environmental destruction and polymorphous sexual identity. Over the next few years, Barney and Bepler will expound REN’s as yet inchoate vision in an unprecedented blend of live performance, environmental art, and experimental proxemics within the givens of selected industrial sites around the world. Their hope is to awaken in their audience some kind of participatory consciousness in a larger picture – and in doing so imparting metaphysical speculations on death, art, recollection and representation in relation to a world buckling under the pressures of spiritual, political and ecological amnesia.
