DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2006 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
The challenge in watching Matthew Barney's "Drawing Restraint 9" is not to appreciate the artist's unique aesthetic by unraveling his themes of self-imposed limitation as set forth by the ancient religious rite of Shinto but to see how long you can hold out before you finally bust out laughing.
I made it through to the central, causative "tea party" sequence, during which Barney and his girlfriend, Icelandic pop ingenue Björk, playing "Occidental Guests," sup some green, tar-like substance infused from powdered ambergris (whale vomit) by their gracious host (Sosui Oshima). "It's very good," offers Barney meekly, in what we later learn to be about one tenth of the 135-minute film's minimal dialogue.
Prior to this revelation much has happened, but nothing of the type, texture, or temperament of anything found in a traditional mainstream film.
Disembodied hands--we never see their owner--wrap a couple of ornate gift boxes. Factory workers construct interlocking structures made from a white, resin-like substance mixed on the premises while a parade of brightly dressed revelers passes between the plant's towering twin smokestacks. Before the Japanese whaling vessel 'Nisshin Maru' sets sail its crew assembles a large steel mold on the main deck into which liquid petroleum jelly is pumped from a tanker dockside. Pearl divers make a startling discovery! Barney, sporting a heavy beard and bedecked in teddy bear-like furs, is transported by light watercraft to an arranged rendezvous on the whaler as is Björk, pixie-esque in a purple pom-pom dress, her hair trussed up like a cockatiel. In the galley a cook prepares prawns and fishy looking aspic molds. While Barney is shaved (first voluntarily, then involuntarily while he sleeps), Björk takes a bath with bobbing lemons. The two are further readied in skins and more furs, elaborate headgear and uncomfortable shell shoes, each lugging a huge and obtrusive cowrie on their back. They take their tea. The Vaseline on deck slowly solidifies, its center section removed and replaced with the ambergris sample recovered from the sea. A young boy is seasick. Like a giant cheesecake released from its springform confines, the KY mold is eventually set free--sliced, diced, and re-liquefied by fire. A storm hits, flooding parts of the vessel. Barney and Björk engage in an elaborate water dance in which they hack off each other's superfluous limbs and become as whales in their soggy-bottomed splendor. The End.
Oh, and a minimalist soundtrack comprising a thrumming bass line, atonal repetition, and Björk's uncivilized, incandescent bleatings, challenges the ear throughout. (Barney and Björk certainly deserve each other; theirs is a match made purgatorial.)
Should "Drawing Restraint 9" be considered Film or Art, however? Filmed art is probably the best way to describe the experience: Art on film, Art as film. Either way it's hard going for the uninitiated and perhaps even tougher going for those who've seen Barney's previous body of work, the colossal "Cremaster Cycle," since his latest film seems less personal, less inspired, by comparison. (Some will clearly see Barney's emperor as having no clothes, of course.)
Oh "DR9"'s got its moments all right--some verging on spectacle, some outrageous, some oblique, and some likely to invoke unintentional fits of laughter--but for the most part we should be eternally grateful that Barney has spared us Restraints 1 through 8.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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