Society and spectacle

In case you hadn't heard, Matthew Barney has created of some of the most visually stunning and intellectually challenging art of the last few decades, including his major works, The Cremaster Cycle, and the Drawing Restraint Series. Both creations are mixtures of filmmaking, live filmed performance art and collaborations with such composer as Jonathan Bepler and Bjork. Within the films you'll find sculptures and costumes created by Barney and his team, each a separate artwork of its own: petroleum jelly casts, arena-sized salt installations, hand-blown glass corsets and so on.

One of a few contemporary artists to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, Barney seems to pick up with film where James Joyce left off with literature, deftly combining myriad disparate images and visual allusions to tell stories in an attempt to engage his audience in a deeper and more direct way than simple dialogue. He stages his films to focus on processes, orchestrating the biggest set pieces as experiences of live art that can stand on their own as art performances.

And it's eclectic stuff. In a single frame of Barney's latest film, the audience will see visual language that refers to ancient Egyptian mythology, the life of Harry Houdini, the performance art of Detroit native James Lee Byars, the history of U.S. auto manufacturing, and the geology of southeastern Michigan.

In fact, Matthew Barney has just spent the past two years in Detroit working on Ancient Evenings' second act, "Khu," a collaboration with composer Jonathon Bepler. Given Barney's longtime commitment to "using landscape as character or architecture as character as much as humans as character" (he says as much in the 2006 documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint), he has tried to bring together historical, musical, geological and performative elements of our city as no other artist has.

The film

Khu is the second of a seven-part series based on Norman Mailer's 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. The seven pieces of Barney and Bepler's film version refer to the seven stages of the soul's departure from the deceased body in Egyptian mythology. In Mailer's novel, Menenhetet I (the main character) passes through all these stages and is reincarnated twice in the process. Mythologically speaking, Khu is "the light leaving the body."

Typical of Barney's work, he portrays the thrice-living Menenhetet I as one character — a car — manifested in three bodies: a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial, a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am Firebird and a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. The "Khu" episode will be the only one of the seven parts to feature all three cars.

"Khu" combines both traditional filmmaking — in the form of a delicately composed "prologue" — with a gargantuan live performance. The prologue establishes elements of the story — the tragedy of Osiris, Isis and Set modernized as a CSI- style crime drama. Beautiful shots of the Zug Island skyline and the wastewater treatment plant on the Rouge River close in on the "crime scene" — inside a church with the body of a car wrapped in mortuary-like plastic. Barney — as the embodiment of Osiris, Houdini and artist James Lee Byars — is seemingly embalmed in a gold straitjacket, within an ambulance whose interior is all in gold leaf. A detailed investigation commences, culminating in Barney racing through Detroit — alone, blindfolded and straitjacketed — in the 1979 Pontiac Firebird. Finally, the car rockets through a guardrail on the MacArthur Bridge to Belle Isle and sinks slowly into the water.

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