Matthew Barney Turned Down Directing Stockhausen's 29-Hour 'Licht'

Matthew Barney nearly added the most demanding commission in opera to his résumé — then walked away. As he explains in a newly published New York Magazine profile, he declined to direct Licht, Karlheinz Stockhausen's seven-opera cycle, because the commitment was simply too long: "I don't think I can quit my job for two years," Barney told the magazine's Zachary Woolfe.

Licht is not a normal opera cycle. Stockhausen wrote it between 1977 and 2003, and it consists of seven operas — one for each day of the week — running roughly 29 hours in total. Parts of the score call for actual helicopters, and the New York Times once described one of its creatures as an "intergalactic camel." Deutsche Oper Berlin staged the complete cycle for only the second time in history earlier this year, and portions appeared at New York's Park Avenue Armory in 2024.

On paper, the fit looks obvious. Barney built his reputation on extravagance and monumental scale, from The Cremaster Cycle to River of Fundament. But the profile suggests something has shifted.

Is Barney done with epic-scale work?

He hinted that he may not make projects as vast as The Cremaster Cycle again. That five-film series, loosely structured around the development of sexual organs in the embryo, remains widely debated and is rarely shown in its entirety. Its three-hour centerpiece, Cremaster 3 (2002) — a film featuring the Chrysler Building, the Guggenheim Museum, Richard Serra, mysterious rituals, and a memorable sequence with cars and bikes — landed on ARTnews's list of the best artworks of the 21st century so far.

Barney himself traced the change to the experience of living inside those works. "Being trapped inside something for many years, I think that really used to be a driving force," he said. "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."

What's on view now?

Barney's 2014 film River of Fundament, nearly six hours long, returns to New York this weekend in a rare screening at the Masonic Hall on Saturday. Based loosely on a Norman Mailer novel, it divided critics at its debut, partly because it foregrounds vomiting and defecation. ARTnews executive editor Andy Battaglia will lead a discussion with Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler on Sunday.

As New York notes, that film marked a turning point in how audiences saw Barney, who had been regarded as one of the great American artists of the 1990s and 2000s. He regained momentum with Secondary (2023), a video installation about football and American violence — and, tellingly, it lasts just one hour. If the Licht decision signals anything, it's that the era of the decade-spanning Barney epic may be over.