Ren Master - Interview Magazine

Ren Master

By Christopher Bollen

This summer, Artist Matthew Barney took death for a test ride, and it got great mileage. Composer Jonathan Bepler supplied the wicked driving mix.

Launch Mediaplayer »

On May 18, 2008, at approximately 6:30 P.M. PST, at a defunct RV dealership south of Los Angeles, artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler took their audience on a psychic road trip into the afterworld.

A few hundred guests, many having flown from New York City for the occasion, stood on the dealership rooftop overlooking a lot filled with Sebrings, Chargers, and Rams. No one had the slightest clue of what to expect. More than one person looked up to the sky. "Maybe something will drop down from above," one guest speculated. Since this was a performance by Matthew Barney, creator of the body-and-mind-distorting Cremaster Cycle film series, that guess seemed as plausible as any.

We got a hold of Ancient Evenings as a basis for a libretto, and we started kicking around ideas. It soon became clear we had a full-length piece on our hands. —Jonathan Bepler

The performance was the first in a series that Barney and Bepler plan to present over the next few years, exploring the seven stages of the afterlife according to Egyptian mythology, as described in Norman Mailer's 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. Stage one is the loss of one's "ren" or "secret name," and "Ren: Chrysler" was the title of this particular performance. It wasn't the first time Barney has used Mailer for source material. Cremaster 2 (1999) was centered around Gary Gilmore, the killer antagonist in Mailer's nonfiction book The Executioner's Song, with a cameo by the author himself as Harry Houdini.

Bepler, Barney's Berlin-based collaborator, created music for four of the five Cremaster movies and is plenty familiar with Mailer territory. "Matthew and I got together to work on something small for the Manchester Opera House as part of a group show last July," he says. "We got a hold of Ancient Evenings as a basis for a libretto, and we started kicking around ideas. It soon became clear that we had a full-length piece on our hands. Then, after a bit more, we saw that each act of this work could be its own piece. So ‘Ren' is the first stage of this longer work."