Where Salt Lake was shunned for its harsh conditions, barren soil and innate hostility, Los Angeles has been embraced as the City of Angels, a place where dreams alone could hold mortality at bay. This passage, based on Gary Gilmore’s own confrontations with mortality, became stations in a cross that led the narrative of Cremaster from the flat horizons of Provo to the spires of New York. It passed through Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and on through Matthew Barney’s own hymn to the errant soul. The belief system that rooted in that barren soil was one that would become threaded through the spiritual landscape of the American West. Manifest Destiny would surely have led Brigham Young and the Latter Day Saints to the fecund land of the Los Angeles basin were it not for his stated ambition to find, “…a place on this earth that nobody else wants.” On July 24th, 1847, upon entering the most forbidding of lands, Young exclaimed, “This is the place!” There, amidst the inhospitable surroundings of the Great Salt Lake, he and his followers believed they would find refuge from the persecution they had recently fled. Situated at the edge of history, Los Angeles may be the Promised Land that never was. Published 2014 by Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc., New York, as an insert in the monograph River of Fundament Playbill for the production of REN, a live performance by Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler
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