This summer, I spent a string of rainy days exploring Norman Mailer’s Brooklyn Heights home—or to be precise—an exact replica of it, re-constructed and assembled in the artist Matthew Barney’s studio in Long Island City. From the dining-room table set on a faded carpet, to Mailer’s own library neatly installed on aging bookshelves, no detail had been overlooked. The simplicity of Mailer’s home stood in stark contrast to the flourishes that Barney, whose gallery I work for, had added—massive slabs of glistening salt, a feast caught in decay, a decadent golden throne enshrined in a room all its own—elements that in many ways conjured the spirit of Mailer, or Mailer’s work, even more than the actual interior of his home. There, I watched as Barney filmed a movie based loosely on Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, but which, more significantly, was inspired by the mythology of Mailer himself.
In the cavernous warehouse space, surrounded by Barney’s contemporary vision of Mailer’s ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, Mailer’s most difficult work of fiction came to life. “My dad said that Matthew Barney was one of the few geniuses that he met,” Mailer’s youngest son John Buffalo Mailer said in a phone interview. Mailer and Barney had worked together during Mailer’s life, most notably in Cremaster 2, a film based partially on Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, in which Mailer played Barney’s longtime muse Houdini. Mailer loathed page turners, always preferring to challenge the reader rather than giving in to more conventional fiction, a tact mirrored in Barney’s films that manipulate time, introduce multiple versions of the same character, and insist upon wholehearted engagement from the viewer.