Last weekend, my friend Jonathan and I went to see Matthew Barney's new bunch of arty movie goo, Drawing Restraint 9. Barney's known mostly for his Cremaster (see title of this post for definition) Series with which I was somewhat familiar when I was in college in New Jersey. During Drew's New York Art Semester, I remember seeing some of Barney's weirdness at the MoMA and thereabouts. So now, he's teamed up w/ Bjork, his main squeeze, for a curious piece about petroleum jelly cured in the manner of ambergris and a Japanese tea ceremony, all happening aboard a Japanese commercial sea-vessel of some sort.
Jim Ridley, in his review for The Nashville Scene, compares the movie to (ha!) The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. I'm not sure which audience of the respective movies would be more galled by the comparison, but it's amusingly apt. Ridley's point is that they're both purely sculptural, visual films in which plot, dialogue and character development are primarily irrelevant. However, unlike F&F (okay, yeah, I have no intention of seeing it), I must say, that DR9 provided me with a unique experience such as I've never really had in a movie theatre-- that experience being primarily tactile. There is so much goo, so much that is familiarly textural that I could feel this movie on my skin, in my body! How does an artist manage to do that? How does he take film media and fill an audience (me) with so much sensory memory? I mean, the scenes in which Barney and Bjork are flaying each other in preparation for what I gather was their transformations into whales(?), I swear I knew what they were touching as they buried their fingers deep within gashes in each others' legs-- or ate each others' knee-pit flesh. None of it seemed particularly graphic once I realized that the gashes they inflicted upon each other weren't going to bleed but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was my own leg- and feet-muscles being probed. And the parts where the goo sculpture is torn apart, well, reminded me of eating panna cotta. So, really, I've never endured anything quite like that at a movie and I'm basically just glad that stuff like this still exists-- stuff that surprises and grosses out its audience for all its newness. However, for my friends who think Lynch and anything Mulholland-y is masturbatory and merely a self-involved projection of the inside of a why's-he-so-special-after-all sort of artist, well, this is only moreso. Jason, why does your not liking Mulholland Drive make me feel like such a voyeur for getting a kick out of this kind of movie?
Having said all that, there's still a lot I didn't get. What was that white spinal column thing and the rock that melts into a mirror (or lover) of it? The tied-up kid vomiting concrete? The shrimp? The shrimp-and-concrete-vomit mold made from the melting rock? The elaborate wrapping of some ammonites in the opening sequence? Okay, I did make the connection between Bjork's dressing rituals with the gift-wrapping stuff and, man, did I think I was clever for catching that! There is certainly a rather large portion of this film that I simply allowed to sweep over me.
Oh, but Barney's symbol. It looks a little like, maybe, a skating rink bisected by a skinny horizontal rectangle. According to the Cremaster website, it might be gonadal in nature? An openness, a resevoir for projection of your own ideas, perhaps? It's the paper seals with which the packages in the opening sequence are closed. The ship's kitchen staff creats a *delicious*-looking black Jell-o dish of the same shape. The petroleum jelly is poured into a huge mold of the same shape. It's like Barney is stamping his name in every frame of this damn film. However, there is something enigmatic and compelling about the symbol's monolithic simplicity. Perhaps it functions in the way that we recongnize it because it's like when we perpetually bump into and are spun around by images of ourselves in our own dreamscapes. Though, I hate to be so reductive as to concieve of Barney's pieces as though they are merely hallucinatory, merely someone else's sleepy lands. What I mean is that I know he's putting this work out there into the world to get at something other, something more, than his own internal conversations-- but, dammit all, I just can't put my finger on what that "more" is. Other than making me want to take a bath in my mom's creme anglaise. Other than reminding me of that scene in Moby Dick where all the sailors are breaking up the thick parts of ambergris (and getting off on it).
3 comments:
I think whales are the main characters--the soon to be whale humans and the fossil thing that perhaps was once a whale, and then maybe, lets see--whale fat that is part of the sludge-petroleum sculpture. There must be a free willy joke in here some where. There's a circle of life thing going on here as the humans are eating eachother and dying, but becoming whales which will die and become whale fat petroleum and maybe fossils, which don't ever really go away--maybe they become fuel for the ship.
Just kidding, texture it is! I think this is a tip of the hat to art with the exclusive purpose of the experience of art. By the end of the film I was convinced that the whole thing was an experiment in rhythym, repitition and yes--feeling and hearing as well as seeing the art. Perhaps the whole thing happened just so the ship workers could release that sludge sculpture at the end so the audience can see, hear and feel the sludge come apart.
Anywhow I also heard that the fast food industry of America commissioned this film to discourage Americans from wanting to eat sushi and seafood.
jb
Oh, interesting. I didn't actually think about the rock thing being a whale fossil. Somehow, it looked more like your garden variety piece of barnacle encrusted,floating pumice to me... but I don't know.
Re: Sushi-- yeah, I got a post-movie ick on that too!
I'm coming back to this post, nearly a year later, with more information about what a cremaster actually is and why Barney's symbol looks like it does. The cremaster is actually a little strip of muscle that runs between the testacles. So, if you've got a bifurcated skating rink image, you've got one ball on each side with the geometric representation of the muscle inself running thru it. It all makes perfect sense now.
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