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The Invocation of the Dead

Matthew Barney: River of Fundament

Madeleine Stack
Eyeline 83
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What we know is that Matthew Barney’s latest epic is almost six hours long. That it involved many millions of dollars and a cast of thousands. That it features Hollywood celebrities, porn stars, the upper echelons of the intellectual world. That Barney is not known for his restraint. 

Before the curtain has opened, then, there is a palpable sense of anticipation borne of rumour and controversy. River of Fundament went through a number of incarnations, beginning life as a series of performances and live events which were then woven — albeit very loosely — into the final film. One gets the sense, jumping from the canals of Brooklyn to the suburbs of LA and factories in Detroit, of an encompassing sense of continual movement through landscapes and bodies, cast here as two halves of the same whole. Barney is grappling with the stuff of life, the fact of the body, its ever-present deterioration mimicked by industrial detritus, the flotsam of a city’s slow slide into ruin and its eternal resurrection. 

Based loosely on Norman Mailer’s divisive 1983 novel Ancient Evenings, the film is set in a recreation of Mailer’s Brooklyn home, where his wake is underway for what feels like an age. In a parody of New York intellectual life, the dinner party spirals into the centuries as mouldering crockery piles up and guests come and go. This mise en scène tiptoes near total horror but retains a kernel of humour, for as luminaries and intellectuals endlessly eulogize, food on plates is left to rot, jewel-like peaches and pomegranates laced with spider webs and fat furred centipedes, and the dead — dripping in excrement — come to

Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament. Performance still. BA, 2013. Courtesy the artists and the Adelaide Festival.

Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament. Performance still. BA, 2013. Courtesy the artists and the Adelaide Festival.  

Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament. Performance still. KHU, 2 October 2010. Courtesy the artists and the Adelaide Festival.

Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, River of Fundament. Performance still. KHU, 2 October 2010. Courtesy the artists and the Adelaide Festival.