Drawing Restraint 9 - Poetry in Motion

Matthew Barney and Bjork in a scene from Drawing Restraint 9

A Japanese whaling ship; a parade in traditional Japanese costumes; a long wedding ceremony; a mysterious sculpture made of petrolium; Björk’s magical music. These are the main ingredients in Drawing Restraint 9, a fantastical, artistic film and the first collaboration between Matthew Barney and real-life partner Bjork.

The couple also star as the two main characters, or “guests” as they are called in the film.

Matthew Barney, born in 1967 in San Francisco, is a highly regarded contemporary artist who has used various forms of expression, including sculpture, installations, performance and film and combined them all.
After a brief career as a fashion model, he drifted towards the arts then graduated at Yale University.

His best known work is the huge Cremaster Cycle, a magnus opus in five pieces: each piece is a film conceived as a string of poetic and/or disturbing sequences with frequent sexual references that are part of the artist’s personal imagery.
The whole cycle, shot throughout the 90s, symbolises the gender differentiation of the nine week old foetus, from a state of asexual definition to the inevitable descent of male gonads in the foetus’ groin.
This is in its turn a symbol of the artist’s creative process.

After completing the Cremaster Cycle Barney began work on the Drawing Restraint film series, a project he conceived while an undergraduate at Yale.
And once again he speaks the language of anti-narrative film: the main theme is the relationship between self-imposed limitation and creative output, inasmuch as Barney thinks that the first empowers the second, just like an athlete uses resistance to build up muscle.

 In Drawing Restraint 1 to 6 the artist tries to complete drawings while  hindered by various obstacles; the same theme reoccurs in instalments 7 and 8.

So we now arrive at Drawing Restraint 9.
It features a hint of a plot that involves the two guests’ purification, clothing and wedding ceremony: a highly restricted ritual they can shake off only at the very end: their love-making becomes an experience of death and rebirth.

Most of the running time of the film is a symbolic, poetic flow of images that doesn’t necessarily require a rational comprehension - which makes the critic’s duty a hard task.

But there is a sense of awe and majesty hovering over the work, although admittedly it’s not easy to understand where it stems from.
Nevertheless, the love story between the two guests is mesmerizing to witness.

From their separated arrival on the whaling ship, the two are washed, coiffed and arrayed in costumes that make them look like strange sea creatures.
Only at this point can they meet and sip a ritual drink made from seaweed.
Then their love encounter begins: as they kiss, the room is flooded with water; the lovers use the blades they’ve been provided with to cut each other’s flesh, but blood is hardly spilt: their bodies are full of liquid ambergris.
As they mate and eat each other’s bodies, they reinvent one another under a new shape: at the end of the film, two whales swim together in the ocean.

Drawing Restraint 9 can be read as a hymn to the power of love to create new shapes of life, new worlds to live in.

But this is only a partial analysis of a complex work full of artistic and cultural influences.
Is it an art experience for the happy few? Maybe. Nevertheless, Björk’s hypnotic soundtrack, featuring ancient Japanese instruments like the sho, could allure a wider public.

Soda Pictures in association with the Serpentine Gallery takes the challenge and is distributing Drawing Restraint 9 this week.

Drawing Restraint 9, Gate Picturehouse, 87 Notting Hill Gate, London, W11 3JZ  from September 28th to 11th November. For times visit www.picturehouses.co.uk

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