Review: Drawing Restraint 9

In Drawing Restraint 9, artist Matthew Barney stuffs two hours and twenty minutes of abstract art imagery inside the husk of a faux-narrative, no more deeply sketched than a music video concept, in which both he and human question mark Bjork are visitors on a Japanese factory whaling ship that has just put to sea. Arriving alongside the ship in a dinghy, in raggedy clothes and with a full beard, Barney is first hoisted up the side of the ship in a people-bucket and thereafter led around by silent, servile Japanese who are either a) steering into the concept of themselves as human fetish objects for their own amusement or b) existing to add a layer of Shinto complexity to Barney's ongoing thesis on pent-up energy and its consequences. For anyone who has not taken the trouble to view Drawing Restraints 1 - 8, they are art projects centered on the search for an artistic corollary to the physical condition known as hypertrophy, whereby muscles gain in strength when they meet resistance.

Like the British exhibitionist-artist Tracy Emin, Barney often uses his own body in his work, presumably to add some immediacy to his ideas about the relationship between artistry and energy. In one of the prior Restraint exhibitions he drew a self-portrait on a ceiling while jumping on a trampoline. In another, he staged a videotaped scene of wild animals fighting in the back of a limousine riding through Manhattan. Drawing Restraint 9 has two "stories" which proceed independently of each other until the final passages of the film. "The Guests" (Barney and Bjork) and their journey into the bowels of the ship account for one half of the film. The motifs of this section include the following: static cameras fixed on sparse ship interiors; The Guests being thoroughly bathed and then suited up as elaborate ornaments; The Guests sitting quietly on tatami mats and staring pensively off into space.

Throughout this section of the film, there's an emphasis on the pleasures of quietude and politeness, as well as the energy-buildup involved in not speaking. Whenever characters enter rooms and threaten to greet other characters verbally, it produces an air of potential disruption - the threat that words might actually rupture the silence, which would be a violent act. At one point, after at least an hour of non-verbal communication, words are finally exchanged - just simple pleasantries - and it comes as more of a shock than you'd expect. To accompany this and other sections of the film, there's a Bjork score that careens between random, incongruous samplings of arcane Japanese instruments to spoken word poetry set to harp, to her familiar post-Sugarcubist a capella yelps and unpredictable swings into percussion-heavy electronica. The soundtrack feels at times as dense as a James Joyce novel, with just as much attention and prep required to enjoy its pleasures. Without a guiding narrative, the burdens on the music to provide an emotional through-line in the film are intense, and something simpler and less transparently experimental could have elevated things.

The other half of the film occurs on the deck of the ship, where a massive work project appears to be underway. At first, to our untrained eyes, it seems to be normal ship business; some kind of whaling byproduct is being processed and packaged. But the work soon reveals itself as non-productive. What the workers are actually doing is constructing a giant sculpture of what appears to be foamy, liquified petroleum jelly, which is to be poured, shaped, bisected and re-arranged over the course of the film. After being allowed to sit and semi-harden, the liquid sculpture which forms a giant U on the deck is eventually disassembled. Its metal sidings are pulled away and it begins to ooze across the deck like a melting snowman. This will impact on The Guests in their quarters in a way that isn't clearly understood by me. I think the idea is that the liquid spills over into the guest quarters and inundates them with raw energy. We are never given any indication that the ship itself is in peril, but the relatively minor spillage takes on a life of its own and begins to flood the inner decks of the ship.

What occurs next is wrenching, and it's the one time in the film when Barney takes advantage of the camera's ability to not only report and observe, but also to trick the eye. This is the film's visual centerpiece, where some real, if gruesome filmic panache is demonstrated. The Guests begin to cut away each others' lower limbs with flensing knives, at first shearing away feet and then digging into thighs, hips and legs. The water/oil slosh fills not with blood, but waxy gore as The Guests' upper halves bob upright and uninjured. Eventually their lower halves are sculpted completely away, revealing the beginnings of whalish vertebrae, which they use to swim away to safety. Did the infusion of whale oil act as a kind of amniotic fluid that re-birthed The Guests? Did their strict attention to Shinto grooming and dressing rituals earlier in the film see them rewarded with some kind of metamorphosis, transforming them from body-souls into object-souls? Has an imbalance of energy been restored by the washing away of the humans in favor of a liquid-friendly form? I know the answer to all of these questions, but I'm not going to tell you.