Matthew Barney, the artist behind epic film projects such as The Cremaster Cycle and River of Fundament, very nearly took on yet another gargantuan project. But he declined the opportunity, fearing the time commitment involved, according to a freshly published New York Magazine profile.
That project would have been an opera cycle by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called Licht. Written between 1977 and 2003, Licht is composed of seven operas, one for each day of the week, and calls in parts for actual helicopters and what the New York Times once described as an “intergalactic camel.” The cycle was staged in its entirety for the second time ever at the Deutsche Oper Berlin earlier this year, while portions of it appeared at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2024.
Licht may seem like a natural fit for Barney, whose projects are characterized by extravagance, ambition, and their monumental scale. But he told New York’s Zachary Woolfe that Licht required more time than he had. “I don’t think I can quit my job for two years,” he said.
Moreover, he signaled that he might done making projects so big as The Cremaster Cycle altogether. Widely debated and rarely shown in its entirety, that cycle is composed of five films loosely centered around the development of sexual organs in the embryo. The three-hour-long Cremaster 3 (2002)—a film that involves the Chrysler Building, the Guggenheim Museum, Richard Serra, mysterious rituals, and a memorable scene involving cars and bikes—appeared on ARTnews’s list of the best artworks of the 21st century so far.
No longer, it seems, will he take on projects quite like that one. “Being trapped inside something for many years, I think that really used to be a driving force,” he told New York. “I remember deciding before Cremaster started that I wanted to make something that took a long time and would take place over many locations and that structurally was much bigger than any exhibition. But being inside something for that long is intense.”
One of Barney’s more grandly envisioned projects, the nearly-six-hour-long 2014 film River of Fundament, is making a rare return to New York this weekend in a screening staged at the Masonic Hall of New York on Saturday. (Andy Battaglia, the executive editor of ARTnews and Art in America, will lead a related discussion with Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler on Sunday.) Based loosely on a Norman Mailer novel, the film divided critics upon its debut, in part because foregrounds such abject activities as vomiting and defecation.
As New York points out, the film led to a shift in the perception of Barney, who was viewed by many as one of the great American artists of the 1990s and 2000s. But he appeared to regain some of his momentum with Secondary (2023), a video installation about football and American violence. By comparison to past Barney pieces, that work is modest, lasting only an hour.
