![]() The singer has alluded to him running off with another woman in her 2015. Barney’s sprawling meditation on the decline of the American dream, set in the context of life and death, power and folly, ancient and modern, operates on a level that is often built more from intuitive connections than direct narrative progression. Björk shares her daughter with ex Matthew Barney, who she parted ways with in 2013, following 13 years together. Immersed in a world that looked at once familiar and bizarre, I marvelled at the lavish sets and caustic humour. ![]() Once I relented in my initial attentive struggle to follow each and every interaction playing out onscreen, I allowed myself to simply be washed away by the experience. I vividly recall watching it for the first time at its British premiere in the campy splendour of the London Coliseum, a venue built in 1904 as a music hall and described at the time as the “people’s palace of entertainment”. The film has been screened only a handful of times in museums and opera houses around the world. A rare feat of art-making and endurance unencumbered by the requirements of ratings boards or cinemagoers, it reportedly took all of seven years to complete. The scale of Barney’s endeavour is impressive. ![]() Jonathan Bepler, the composer behind the music for The Cremaster Cycle, collaborated again with Barney on it. Released in 2014, the 330-minute film (yes, almost six hours) uses an expansive, operatic format to adapt Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings. Accused of weaving a dense web of introspective literary references, historical touchstones and mythology, which rarely give much away to his viewers, his magnum opus River of Fundament won’t have scratched his harshest critic’s reservations. Formerly in a long-lasting romantic relationship with Icelandic musical icon Björk, Barney has stirred up more than his fair share of controversy over the years, from the brutal depiction of life onboard a Japanese whaling vessel in 2005’s Drawing Restraint 9, to the violent, baroque mythology shown in his early masterwork The Cremaster Cycle, filmed in New York’s Guggenheim museum.īarney has done little to leave these provocations behind in subsequent years. If you’ve opened the pages of US broadsheets and art magazines in the last two decades, Matthew Barney’s role has consistently been that of America’s modern artist-provocateur, a seer challenging much of what the western press will have you think. River of Fundament by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler 2014.
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