A Whale of a Tale: Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint Now Showing at SFMOMA

For starters, he has a four-year-old daughter with his partner, the ever-eccentric singer Björk, which explains a lot. His previous series of films, the epic Cremaster Cycle, has been an international success and we are huge fans. Huge. So let’s just say the bar was set rather high for DR9. Not that it didn’t deliver.

The plot goes as follows, Matthew Barney and Björk are Occidental guests taken aboard the Japanese whaling ship, Nisshin Maru. While there, they are groomed, bathed and dressed in fur as dictated by traditional Shinto marriage rituals. Björk wanders around looking something like a sheepdog and we catch a full frontal shot of Matthew Barney’s mildly impressive, uh, manhood. The two distinctive guests find themselves falling in love and take part in a traditional tea ceremony. It is here where we hear the only lines of dialogue spoken in the film and learn the history of the ship from the tea master, who reveals it has been targeted by anti-whaling protesters. The climax of the film occurs when the tea room floods with liquid Vaseline during a violent thunderstorm and we watch as Björk and Barney, locked in a romantic embrace, take flensing knives, commonly used to strip the skin and blubber from a whale, and slowly cut each other’s legs off.

We warn you: this is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it’s downright gruesome. However, it becomes apparent that these two are not your average visitors, revealed in place of legs are two whale tails, suggesting the beginnings of change. The final shot shows two whales swimming away from the boat amid gigantic icebergs. And that is really what this film is all about. Not whales and icebergs, but complete transformation.

On board the ship is a large sculpture made of liquid Vaseline in the shape of the Field, the artist’s symbol for restraint on the body (fans of the Cremaster Cycle will recognize this immediately). Over the course of the film, we watch the construction and transformation of the piece which is molded, poured, hardened, bisected and collapsed, mirroring the metamorphosis of our two protagonists.

The film draws upon many rituals which were informed by Barney’s careful approach to observing and researching the choreography, costumes and etiquette that preserve Japanese tradition and shape social interaction. There are many rich and carefully stylistic scenes in the film which depict these rites, such as a sequence of a procession of Japanese dancers in colorful costumes escorting a tanker truck to the ship and the Shinto whaling procedures demonstrated by the crew on board, not to mention the elaborate marriage costumes (imagine Björk wrapped in squid with sea urchins stuck to her elaborate hair, up and tied an a complicated knot) and the ocean-inspired tea ceremony.

It just wouldn’t be a Matthew Barney film if there weren’t so many layers of symbolism that you couldn’t digest it for months afterward. This film in particular dealt with a myriad of themes including consumption, restraint (both physical and metaphysical), destruction and renewal, release, transformation and ritual. It would take us days to fully dissect everything for you, dear SFist reader, so we won’t try. We’ll only say that the whale poop, or “ambergris” as they call it, pulled on board makes it all worth it.

While the film on its own is beautiful in a stark, esoteric way, it’s difficult not to compare it to the Cremaster Cycle. Barney is known for taking very famous locations like the Chrysler Building in New York and transforming them into some kind of other-worldly environments full of strange characters and mysticism. In DR9, most everything seems grey and the ship itself is sort of dull and expected. In other words, this film is a departure for Barney in the way that it’s primarily based in reality and things that already exist. This is really too bad because there was so much opportunity to really push the bounds of the ordinary in this film.

The music that plays throughout was composed by Björk which mostly consists of the eerie sounds of sharpening knives and the songstress wailing in that particular way she does. However, several tracks are made with the sound of the shō, a Japanese instrument which contains 16 reeds; with performances from Mayumi Miyata, one of the world's greatest shō players. She also appears in DR9 with her instrument while draped in strings of pearls.

We’re still torn about Björk’s presence in the film. The avant-garde costumes, hairstyles, screeching melodies and mutual face-licking between her and Barney are what we imagine to be a typical day in the life. And thinking about what these two crazy kids do in the bedroom in real life was a constant distraction (hey, we know you were thinking it too!).

Yet regardless of whether Björk may or may not be the Yoko Ono of the art world, the film is but one piece of the Drawing Restraint series which began in 1987 and has continued through the present. There are 14 iterations of the project where Barney often pushes himself to his physical limits to create drawings. Documentation from each piece in the series is on view at SFMOMA as well as DR14, where Barney climbed beneath SFMOMA’s fifth-floor bridge to draw on the walls of the center oculus. In addition, on view are artifacts from DR9, including the massive Vaseline sculpture and whale excrement. A must-see, trust us.

If you only know Barney via his Cremaster Cycle, this show will give you a broader portrait of this prolific artist, who grew up in San Francisco and Idaho, played football and wrestled in high school and remains very interested in the biology of the body, athleticism and rules of engagement. And if you don’t know Barney at all, then go see this film and embark on a journey of absolute wonder at his genius.

Drawing Restraint
June 23 – Sept. 17
Film shows daily (except Wed.) at 2 p.m.
Free with admission
SFMOMA
151 Third Street

Images: Film still, Matthew Barney in Shinto marriage costume, Film still, Björk bathed in accordance with Shinto ritual