Neville Wakefield

Matthew Barney: River of Fundament
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4258-2
Playbill for the production of REN, a live performance by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler
Published 2014 by Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc., New York, as an insert in the monograph River of Fundament

Situated at the edge of history, Los Angeles may be the Promised Land that never was.  Manifest Destiny would surely have led Brigham Young and the Latter Day Saints to the fecund land of the Los Angeles basin were it not for his stated ambition to find, “…a place on this earth that nobody else wants.” On July 24th, 1847, upon entering the most forbidding of lands, Young exclaimed, “This is the place!” There, amidst the inhospitable surroundings of the Great Salt Lake, he and his followers believed they would find refuge from the persecution they had recently fled. The belief system that rooted in that barren soil was one that would become threaded through the spiritual landscape of the American West. It passed through Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and on through Matthew Barney’s own hymn to the errant soul. This passage, based on Gary Gilmore’s own confrontations with mortality, became stations in a cross that led the narrative of Cremaster  from the flat horizons of Provo to the spires of New York.

Where Salt Lake was shunned for its harsh conditions, barren soil and innate hostility, Los Angeles has been embraced as the City of Angels, a place where dreams alone could hold mortality at bay. It is here that the first act of Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s “Ancient Evenings” comes to pass. Drawn from Mailer’s original text, the central character is no longer the man Menenhetet I, but a 1967 Chrysler Imperial, the embodiment perhaps, of a certain kind of man, as well as the industry and era that brought him into being. A year of multiple births, 1967 bore witness not just to the arrival of the artist himself, but also to the apogee of the Imperial marque, a car so solidly built as to have been banned from demolition derbies across the land.

This particular car – a car that would not die – is recognizable as the survivor of Cremaster 3. Wounded by the impact of others, its body bears testament to the violence of auto-infliction. The lobby of Walter Chrysler’s temple to the Pentastar was the first site that this illustrious model withheld the choreography of its planned demise. There, in the language of its architects, mortal destiny and the refusal of death might have been an enactment of Masonic creed.  Surviving carnage was also the practice of daily death.

And so, both car and author having made their appearance in previous works are fittingly resurrected in Ren, an operatic meditation on rites of burial and passage. Nor is it a coincidence that the bodies of one work pass into the bloodstream of another. This after all is Barney’s own sacrament, scripted as it were by ancient Egyptian rites and the hallucinatory musings of Brooklyn’s most notorious intellectual pugilist – a man himself, of as many lives.

Set in neither Brooklyn nor Salt Lake, Ren takes its light and cues from South Central LA. Here, the sun's arcing horizon dials the daily passage from one world to another. Cars, like myths, are traded in the rake of this particular light; a light that reaches from the sky and illuminates our desires. And just as the presence of steel made Detroit the foundry of the auto industry, so the cast of this light made Los Angeles its showroom, where fetish is written into every clear-coated surface. The car in Southern California is the true manifestation of lifestyle; a smog-tested religion whose creed of social and physical mobility has also spawned its most baroque expressions: automobiles that have been stretched, chopped, shaved and fed through a culture of continuous customization.  South Central’s own handcrafted resurrections can be found alongside the car lots and showrooms of the new. These, after all, are cars that have been actually revived from the past. Body and bones may be classic American dreamboat, but the pressure of liquids now transforms them into scrapers, newly articulated to allow one corner to kiss the ground as the other reaches for the sky. It is here, more than anywhere, that industrial regeneration has become an art-form of its own. 

Reflecting this, the Imperial of Barney’s own past comes adorned with a giant scarab. Typically placed over the heart of the mummified deceased, an amulet now crowns the V8 of an industrial past. Behind it, a great ball of dung has become the septic nutrient for another engine. This four-cylinder energy beats the announcement of its larval energy against the confines of the old. The myth of Isis and Osiris – the incestuous siblings who conceived Horus after Osiris was killed and dismembered by Set, god of destruction, only to be made whole again – is re-enacted as a tale of other transportations, betrayals and resurrections.

Markers in the migration of the soul from the deceased body, the ceremonial that originates in the Detroit of the 1960s concludes under the setting sun of contemporary LA.  With the removal of the Pentastar insignia and other nameplates, the first death of Ren is enacted.  The wounded Imperial meets its fate at the hands of Set – incarnated as a twenty-ton excavator with a rotary shredding head – but the great fecal ball of rebirth takes us elsewhere. Descending into the dusty netherworld beneath the showroom lies a golden Pontiac Firebird. As the rites progress, a pall is pulled from the loins of a naked woman and scarab-like creatures are released to roam at will through the body shop below.

But the scarab marks more than just the beating of a dying heart. Just as the beetle would roll its payload of dung along the scorched surface of the earth before pushing it into underworld burrows, so Khepera, the solar deity associated with the scarab, was believed to push the sun across the arc of the sky before depositing it below the daytime horizon. The young beetles, having been laid within the ball of dung, emerge from it fully formed. The same cycle of creation, destruction and rebirth is played out in the late day setting sun. Each day the great orb of light tracks east to west, passing over the showroom and through its shadow-less zenith to sink back into the ocean from which it came. And as the Imperial procession heads towards a dusk of its own, so the LA sun wanes. From the neighborhood compass comes the sounds of drum and bugle corps. As the bell flares of the brass instruments announce their physical presence to the cooling air, so they reveal themselves as if a hundred glinting stars, distant suns created out of their own night skies. Bugles sound; trumpets, mellophones and tubas add to the martial chorus; cymbals clash. The gold of the late day becomes the glint of night. It is also the livery of the Firebird, upon whose hood lies not the lapis, turquoise, carnelian and gold of the scarab, but the cheaply transferred decal of American patriotism.

The Book of the Dead exists in versions that are both ancient and modern. Mailer’s book, which covers slightly less than two centuries (1290-1100 BCE), is catechism to a fraction of the history that precedes it by thousands of years, and continues to this day. In as much as the tombs and pyramids of contemporary America have been built around the dynastic successions of a failing auto industry, Barney and Bepler’s opus merely refracts the same tales of death, mutilation and resurrection across a different landscape. Here the obsession with the afterlife is marked by the urgency of downsizing. Corporeal and corporate bodies face similar fates. Torn asunder they await reassembly in some other sphere where they can live again in more than spirit. Just as the ghosts of other writers haunt Mailer’s meditation on death as the bridge between two states, so elements of Barney’s previous explorations reappear in Ren as characters of transformation. The journey that migrated its own version of spiritual America west towards the Mormon basin is taken up again in the quest to trace the empire of Detroit into the showroom of the Pacific sun.  The elements he takes from previous works are, for all that they appear in Ren to reach a brutal demise, merely stations in a journey of ongoing transformation.

Mailer, for whom the spilling of ink and blood were so often intertwined, is identified in his own lucid delirium as the three times re-incarnated magician, Meni the First. And if the Freudian displacement of the writer’s body into the writer’s book holds even partially true, then the paternal body behind all of Mailer’s writing is Hemingway, whose towering presence takes the form of the great Pharaoh, Ramses the Second or Usermare, the beautiful and potent god from which he is incarnated. The passage of literary influence is marked by buggery of all sorts: first the father of the son and then the son of the father’s muse, the queen and goddess Nefertiti.  But the dialectic of sex and death, destruction and creation that course through the Egypt of Mailer’s novel may not be so distant from those that guided the Gary Gilmore of The Executioner’s Song.  Alfa males all –

Barney included – they pit the mythological vastness of religion against the mortality of the flesh. Whether evidenced by Gilmore’s embrace of the inevitable or Barney’s obsessive reincarnation of elements of his own created mythologies, the strive for immortality is the same. The Imperial, having survived the acts of the past, in Ren appears to have found its final resting place in the twilight necropolis of a Los Angeles car showroom. But then to quote a title of a novel by Hemingway, the literary father to Mailer’s patricidal son: The Sun Also Rises.