![]() His film comprises three acts, each of which took place as a live performance before an audience: REN in a car dealership in Los Angeles in 2008, where the 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial from CREMASTER 3 endures its first death KHU in Detroit in 2010, where it is reincarnated as a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am (thus bringing the car back to its birthplace) and BA in New York in 2013. In his contemporised rendition, Barney replaces reincarnation with recycling and Menenhetet’s soul with the automobile. ![]() But in his third and final attempt to transform, Menenhetet III becomes stuck in the womb. Each time, his aim is to be reborn as something more worthy: nobleman, pharaoh, god. ![]() Mailer’s novel, criticised for its excessive nature when it was published in 1983, is set in Ancient Egypt between 1290-110BC and depicts the spiritual path of the nobleman Menenhetet I, who uses magic and deceit in order to be reincarnated three times in the womb of his wife, who then becomes his mother. Loosely based on Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings, the five-hour film-opera follows the death and reincarnation of two principal characters, Norman Mailer himself and an anthropomorphic automobile. His latest project, River of Fundament, a further collaboration with Berlin-based American composer Jonathan Bepler, likewise comprises a film (given its European premiere at the Bavarian State Opera house in Munich on 16 March 2014), 15 large-scale sculptures, several series of drawings and some “archival” photographs, storyboards and annotated books ( Libretti). Matthew Barney (b1967), best known for his Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), comprising five films, with accompanying photographs, drawings, sculptures and installations, filled with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation, is back. By ANNA McNAY “… Like a serpent whose insides have blown apart, I gave up, sued for peace, and gave birth to my bloody clotting history of coiled and twisted eviscerate.” ![]()
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