The performance Catasterism in Three Movements by internationally renowned US artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney (*1967) and composer Jonathan Bepler (*1959) was presented at Schaulager during Art Basel 2021, 22-25 September. The project drew on Barney’s and Bepler’s long history of collaboration with distinguished musicians in experimental and unconventional settings.

The performance consisted of various components: Matthew Barney’s sculptures and electroplated copper reliefs; implements including a surveying tripod and a camouflaged sniper’s weapon; Jonathan Bepler’s symphonic composition, performed by the Basel Sinfonietta under the baton of Jack Sheen; the choreography that Barney designed together with performance artist K.J. Holmes and Hoop Dancer Sandra Lamouche; and a 19th-century painting by the German-American landscape artist Albert Bierstadt. These interacting elements merged into a single whole, so that the performance essentially became a Gesamtkunstwerk.

The iconic architecture of Schaulager, a building dedicated to preserving and storing contemporary art, played a significant role in this process. Not only was it the stage on which the performers enacted the various scenes; Schaulager also turned into a monumental, resonating body of sound, as the musicians traversed its huge spaces and unique atmosphere with their instruments. The sculptures and objects were part of this transformation. They expanded the scope of the narration and marked the stations of the performance as it moved through space and time. In the course of the three-part performance of some 90 minutes, the audience followed the actors and the musicians on their way through the ground floor and lower level atrium of Schaulager.

The whole event did not contain dialogue or have a linear narrative; the figures communicated and reacted to one another through a choreography of movements and visual axes. Sound and motion, with minimal impulses and reduced gestures at times and expansive movements at others, created an intensely concentrated atmosphere and heightened perception.

A catasterism is the story of how a mythological hero is transformed into a constellation; in its most basic definition, ‘a placing among the stars.’ This idea, merging mythology and measuring, formed the basis for the performance at Schaulager. Other issues resonating through Catasterism in Three Movements were artistic production, the relationship between human and nature, and the transformation of matter and media.

The project continued a series of commissioned works that Laurenz Foundation, Basel, has initiated and enabled since its founding, alongside major exhibitions at Schaulager.

Barney used an experimental electroplating process to create copper-on-copper relief images to create the Diana series. This group is based on the character Barney plays in Redoubt, a US Forest Service Ranger trying to capture in pictures his surroundings and the huntress he watches. He draws a constellation surrounding Diana’s portrait into the asphaltum-coated copperplate, modeled after the constellation Lupus, the wolf. The engraving would later be used as the basis of a series of electroplated works. The Electroplater, played by K.J. Holmes, submerges the copperplates in an electroplating bath for varying amounts of time. This sets off a transformation of the engraved material, the chemical solution gradually modifying the engraving worked into the copperplate, changing it organically: The longer it remains in the bath, the denser the drawing becomes, with copper accretions growing over the exposed copper lines, so that the drawing acquires an increasingly object-like appearance. Much like Barney’s approach in Elk Creek Burn, this powerful transformation combines a traditional craft with an innovative experimental technique and plays a crucial role as a visualized metamorphosis. Diana on Shooting Bench reflects a plate on which copper growth has almost subsumed the image of Diana. The plate is supported on a cast copper tripod, modeled after the Engraver’s drawing rig from Redoubt.

In addition to Barney works, American artist Albert Bierstadt’s painting Sierra Nevada (1871–1873) could be presented on loan from the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in North Carolina. Sierra Nevada shows a dramatically illuminated scene of a deep blue lake flanked by high rugged mountains in the background; a few deer have come to drink at the lake. In the context of the performance, the dead tree trunk rising up out of the water echoes Barney’s sculpture Elk Creek Burn. While Barney brought a piece of classical antiquity to the United States with his performance, the painting represents a cultural transfer in another direction, for it applies the canon of European academism to the American landscape.

Bierstadt was one of the most important representatives of the Hudson River School, a group of artists active in the 19th century. Bierstadt was born in Germany and moved to the United States as a young child, where he developed an early interest in painting. He returned to Germany in early adulthood to seek formal training as an artist, and traveled with American painter Worthington Whittridge on a sketching tour of the Alps. Upon his return to the U.S., Bierstadt began to make regular trips to the American West, and eventually became known for monumental canvases depicting a romanticized grandeur of the mountain landscape. Bierstadt typically produced sketches and studies on these expeditions, and then later produced paintings in his New York studio blending imagery from the Western trips with sketches of the Alps to create idealized and dramatic compositions. Together with artists including Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Moran, his paintings influenced public sentiment about the West, ultimately providing a visual apologetics for the American ideology of Manifest Destiny that critics have called ‘the opportunistic sublime’.