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Matthew Barney | Jonathan Bepler

CATASTERISM IN THREE MOVEMENTS

A performance project

22.–25. September 2021
Informationen

Trailer and further information

catasterism.net


The film CATASTERISM is based on the recordings of the live performance with audience that took place at Schaulager from 22-25 September 2021.

Catasterism in Three Movements
Matthew Barney | Jonathan Bepler
22-25 September 2021


Performance project at Schaulager Basel commissioned by Laurenz Foundation; produced by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler, performed by Basel Sinfonietta Orchestra with conductor Jack Sheen, Jill Bettonvil, Sandra Lamouche, K.J. Holmes, and others.


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.

  • Playbill Catasterism(pdf, 6.49 MB)



Part 1: Cadastre

(n. A comprehensive land recording. A cadastral parcel is defined as a continuous area identified by a unique set of homogeneous property rights.)


Topics such as land use, measurement and survey determined the first part of the performance. At the beginning, the space of Schaulager was explored with the instruments. The musicians stood far apart one from each other, almost like a forest through which the wind rustles: individual tones, elicited from different strings thus found each other over several stations and connected to form sequences of notes. Three loud, consecutive gun shots formed an impressive acoustic intermezzo. Albert Bierstadt’s painting Sierra Nevada (1871–1873) occupied a prominent wall on the ground floor, while Barney’s Diana works were installed on the lower floor of the atrium. Sandra Lamouche, K.J. Holmes and Jill Bettonvil mapped out and probed the space with the use of technical devices: Lamouche, in her role as Hoop Dancer, set up and re-positioned a kind of surveying instrument; Bettonvil, enacting Diana, wielded a firearm; a sniper rifle equipped with a green laser. With a copper plate, Holmes deflected the rifle’s green laser beam to the wall allowing it to travel all the way to the ceiling/sky.



Part 2: Catasterism Suite (for Orchestra with Sculpture)

(catasterism. N. The process by which a hero is turned into a constellation or celestial object; a placing among the stars.)


The second part was determined by the theme of the actual metamorphosis or catasterism, expressed by the manifold dynamics of the music. It took place in a chamber where Basel Sinfonietta, directed by Jack Sheen, played in orchestral formation. Ushers escorted the visitors to the custom-built concert hall where the 50-member orchestra performed Jonathan Bepler’s composition as a premiere. Bepler’s point of departure was Barney’s sculpture Elk Creek Burn, which was installed between orchestra and audience. In contrast to the reduced sequences of notes and the expansive scenography of the first part, musicians, audience, instruments and sculpture were now together in an intimate space with highest concentration. The interaction between the instruments and the sound spectrum of each one created a stunning diversity and opulence of sound.


Part 3: Catastastis

(n. The dramatic complication immediately preceding the climax of a drama.)


In the last part, the musicians played on four floors, embracing the performers, the audience, and the sculptures in an ethereal, harmonic carpet of sound with their violins, percussion, and wind instruments. The three performers came together dancing in the atrium. Jill Bettonvil, as Diana, carried out a choreography of repetitive movements with her sniper rifle. Next to her, Sandra Lamouche performed a Hoop Dance, a Native American form of dance, impressively symbolizing balance and the unity of body and spirit in a holistic worldview. K.J. Holmes moved between the two, reflecting forms and figures like a mirror image, and appropriating contradictory traits.

Catasterism in Three Movements was designed for Schaulager. The singular acoustics of this iconic architecture …

Matthew Barney (b. 1967) and Jonathan Bepler (b. 1959) have been working together for over twenty years. Bepler has written music …

The Basel Sinfonietta was commissioned to perform Jonathan Bepler’s new composition. The orchestra …

For the premiere of Catasterism in Three Movements, the 50-member orchestra included strings, woodwinds, brass, …

Jack Sheen conducted the orchestra. The conductor and composer from Manchester (UK) regularly works with leading orchestras, ensembles, …

K.J. Holmes is a dance artist, actor and vocalist, based in Brooklyn (USA). In Catasterism in Three Movements, she reprised the role …

Jill Bettonvil is a professional basketball player from ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. She has played for several clubs in Europe and also plays …

Sandra Lamouche is a member of the Bigstone Cree Nation in the Canadian province of Northern Alberta. She followed up her appearance in the film Redoubt with another …

Prior to each of the four performances, the audience gathered in front of Schaulager. A sequence …

There were some 150 visitors admitted to each performance. As they entered the building …

Ushers accompanied the audience during the performance. They contributed to the overall character of the piece by adhering …

Jill Bettonvil was outfitted in a white camouflage pattern, as would be used in snow-covered mountains …

As the sounds of strings took possession of the space, the second performer Sandra Lamouche walked into the gallery wearing a checkered work shirt, …

State-of-the-art film and sound recordings were made of both the rehearsals and the performances. Three cameras running simultaneously …

Musically, the first Act (part) of the performance was carried by sixteen string players. In the spacious gallery, the musicians …

As in most of Matthew Barney’s films and performances, Catasterism in Three Movements had no dialogue. The characters communicated …

As another part of the performance, American artist Albert Bierstadt’s impressive painting Sierra Nevada (1871–1873) was presented as a loan. Bierstadt is one …

After a while, Jill Bettonvil walked away and out of sight. The musicians and Sandra Lamouche …

Three loud shots were heard. The weapon was fired out of public sight, the purpose being only to hear the reverberating shot and …

Barney had a block of ballistic gelatin cast specifically for the performance. The substance is ordinarily used in forensics and ballistics …

After the shots had been fired, the audience moved to the railing of Schaulager to watch the performance down the lower level…

K.J. Holmes collaborated with Barney on the choreography of the first and third parts; she also trained Bettonvil for the part of Diana. Rotating together, Holmes …

While the light dot of laser beam, fixed on the sniper rifle, relentlessly aimed at her back, Holmes slowly moved forward, holding the copperplate …

In the next step, Holmes confronted the sharpshooter’s laser beam. Equipped with the copperplate, Holmes …

There was a brief intermission between the first and second parts. This gave visitors the opportunity to take a closer …

The second part, a 30-minute symphonic concert with the entire ensemble took place in a custom-built concert hall. The monumental …

In the third and last part of the performance, the audience gathered in the lower level atrium, its expansive spaces …

Positioned over the four floors of Schaulager, the musicians of the Basel Sinfonietta transformed the building into a unique …

Gemeinsam mit Matthew Barney hatte Sandra Lamouche die Choreografie ihrer Figuren für den Reifentanz (Hoop-Dance) entworfen. Die Reifen hatte die Künstlerin …

This was the first time the performers Jill Bettonvil, K.J. Holmes, and Sandra Lamouche, having traveled to Basel from …

Jack Sheen, Jonathan Bepler, Sandra Lamouche, Jill Bettonvil, K.J. Holmes, and Matthew Barney (left to right), behind them the musicians of …


The shots were fired with no one else present, in compliance with stringent safety measures. Blanks were used during the performance.

Trailer Redoubt


Redoubt is the title of a feature length film by Barney, first presented in 2018 at the Yale University Art Gallery. The film interweaves classical, cosmological, and American myths in narrative strains that circle around the place of humankind in nature. Redoubt is set in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, a location that reflects Barney’s long-term inquiry into the topos of the landscape. It is a loose adaptation of the myth of Diana, the goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, a hunter who comes across the goddess bathing with her nymphs. He watches the intimate scene and is bitterly punished for his curiosity. No words are spoken in Redoubt; the film’s narrative is conveyed through the choreography and the visual power of the imagery.

The film led to a series of sculptural pieces, in which Barney draws on the visual idiom and content of Redoubt. In 2019, the Laurenz Foundation acquired several of these works for its collection. One of them, Elk Creek Burn (2018), consists of a charred tree trunk found in the Sawtooth Mountains. The Laurenz Foundation also acquired the sculpture Diana on Shooting Bench (2018) as well as four electroplated copperplates, Diana: State one, Diana: State two, Diana: State three, and Diana: State four (all 2018), which Barney made while filming Redoubt.

Matthew Barney
Elk Creek Burn, 2018
Lodgepole pine, cast copper, brass and lead, cast polycaprolactone
39 × 427 × 105 in.
Laurenz Foundation, Basel


The large sculpture Elk Creek Burn (2018) is made from the charred remains of a lodgepole pine that fell victim to a forest fire in Idaho. Barney made sculptures out of several of such ruins of former trees, having discovered them while filming Redoubt in the Idaho woods. Fascinated by their appearance and history, he poured brass and copper into the tree trunk and experimented with the organic structures that resulted from the metal oozing out of the charred bark. The two metals were not meant to melt into each other but to produce a marbled structure. The experimental, artistic intervention has absorbed the trauma and energy of the transformation imposed on these trees—rampant forces that translate into evolving shapes filling and expanding the cracks and wounds in the trees. The form rests on two polycaprolactone bases, modeled after rifle rests used for precision shooting—overlapping languages of weaponry with forms from the natural world. The Catasterism in Three Movements project began as a discussion between Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler about the form of this sculpture.


Matthew Barney
Diana on Shooting Bench, 2018
Electroplated copperplate with cast copper stand
55 × 45 × 45 in.
Laurenz Foundation, Basel

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.

Matthew Barney
Diana: State one, 2018
Electroplated copperplate in copper frame
14 × 11 × 1 ¾ in.
Laurenz Foundation, Basel

Matthew Barney
Diana: State two, 2018
Electroplated copperplate in copper frame
14 × 11 × 1 ¾ in.
Laurenz Foundation, Basel

Matthew Barney
Diana: State three, 2018
Electroplated copperplate in copper frame
14 × 11 × 1 ¾ in.
Laurenz Foundation, Basel

Matthew Barney
Diana: State four, 2018
Electroplated copperplate in copper frame
14 × 11 × 1 ¾ in.
Laurenz Foundation, Basel


Albert Bierstadt
Sierra Nevada, 1871–1873
Oil on canvas
45 ½ × 64 in.
Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, affiliated with Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina

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’.

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