Catasterism
In September 2021, Barney and Bepler presented a live performance at Schaulager titled ‘Catasterism in Three Movements.’ CATASTERISM draws from documentation of those performances and expands the narrative with cinematic scenes filmed in the galleries and workspaces of Schaulager. The film elaborates on the characters’ private rituals and deploys forensic examinations of artworks within Schaulager to evoke connections between the material qualities of art objects and the ephemeral qualities of the music. The project continues Barney’s and Bepler’s long history of collaborative projects with distinguished musicians in experimental and unconventional settings.
Matthew Barney
Director
Matthew Barney
Writer
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Matthew Barney
A "video action" in which Barney crosses the ceiling of the Gladstone Gallery using a harness and ice-climbing screws, propelling himself by the forces of muscle and will.
CREMASTER 4 (1994) adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore ...
Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.
The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto
CREMASTER 2 (1999) is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1 ...
Matthew Barney, in a harness suspended from the ceiling, leaps around a room and lowers himself onto gobs of petroleum jelly.
The goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. The characters communicate through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.
Presented as part of the exhibition "RIVER OF FUNDAMENT", Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Hesitation to recover a dropped pearl results in a delay-of-game penalty play.
Commissioned as part of the Destricted Short Film Series, 'Hoist' was shot in Bahia, Salvador. It's described by the director as "a juxtaposition of sexuality and industrial machinery".
