There was one dreadful moment during my interview with the artist and
film-maker Matthew Barney when I thought I’d lost him. I was asking him why
he has felt it necessary to perform, variously, as Gary Gilmore, General
MacArthur and a kind of mythical Manx satyr. And why, in his latest film, Drawing
Restraint 9, he attends a traditional tea ceremony alongside Björk (his
real-life partner with whom he has a four-year-old daughter, Isadora) while
on the mothership of the Japanese whaling fleet, with a shell on his back
and the shoulder blades of elks clamped to his feet.
“I was educated to avoid . . .” he says, and pauses. He does this often. “. .
. to avoid the mannerisms of . . .” he says, and pauses.
Barney has come to London this week from the riverside studio he inhabits in
Brooklyn, New York, for the British premiere tomorrow of Drawing Restraint 9,
which will then have a short run at the Gate Picturehouse in Notting Hill,
West London. It’s an ocean love story, but one played out alongside a more
esoteric, emblematic narrative in which a sculpture made of petroleum jelly
is formed and reformed on the ship’s deck. It’s the first big film that he
has produced since the conclusion of his epic five-film Cremaster cycle, a
series of narratives exploring the biological process of creation, made
between 1994 and 2002, and for which he is best known.
It’s also the first screen role and soundtrack that Björk has worked on since
Dancer in the Dark,the Lars von Trier film released in 2000. And it was
while Björk was in New York promoting that film that the couple first met.
As well as attending the film premiere, Barney will open an exhibition at the
Serpentine Gallery of all his work to date on the Drawing Restraint series.
It’s a body of art about creativity and form, freedom and restriction, and
at the Serpentine it will unfold through a range of materials, from
documents relating to the first instalment in the series to the 16th, which
will actually involve Barney clambering about among the Serpentine’s
exhibits. There will be more films, drawings and artefacts and also
sculptures such as Ambergris, a recreation of the long, stony, undigested
matter that is vomited up by whales and that plays a symbolic role in Drawing
Restraint 9.
All this might seem strange territory for a boy who grew up in the American
heartland of Idaho. In fact, his mother is an abstract painter, yet it was
only after Barney gave up football, and then a medical degree, that he moved
to Yale’s art department. He matured fast, and when he arrived in New York
in 1989, he attracted instant attention; by 1991 he was international news.
The last instalment of his Cremaster cycle was screened in London in 2002,
accompanied by a display of related sculptures. Barney says it was his work
on those sculptures that seeded ideas for his latest film. “I made large
cast petroleum-jelly pieces which collapse under their own weight,” he
explains. “They were very like the Drawing Restraint sculptures in
that they were put into a completely uncontrollable situation – you had no
idea how they would behave. They each had a different ratio between the
jelly and the microcrystalline wax that it’s cut with and they’re affected
by the temperature of the room – all these factors change the behaviour of
the sculptures. It was then that I began to think about making one of these
sculptures on a boat, where the movement of the ocean would affect the
behaviour of the casting.”
For some, Barney’s success is to have found ways to talk about subjects such
as sex and gender through fabulous allegories and slick films.
Others are attracted to his persuasive yoking of film and sculpture. But for
others, Barney’s work is tediously hermetic and self-indulgent. Had he been
at all concerned about such accusations, though, he surely would not have
engaged Björk to work on this new film, but he says that it simply made
sense. “The subject matter was something we were both interested in – Japan,
the relationship to Shinto that whaling has. Also, making a love story out
of a Drawing Restraintwork seemed preposterous to me at first, but when I
decided I wanted to do that, it seemed logical to work with Björk. The
collaborative aspect of working with a composer is familiar to me, and that
aspect of working with a visual artist is familiar to her – so it felt
natural.”
Drawing Restraint 9 is actually less revealing of the couple’s relationship
than it might promise. It is a love story, and a beautiful one, but it is
also abstracted. Cremaster was far more revealing, Barney says. “It’s much
more autobiographical. For instance, Cremaster 1 features the town I grew
up in and the field I played football on from the time I was 12 to the time
I left Idaho.”
It may be autobiographical, but that’s not the same thing as being revealing,
and Barney remains intriguingly distant about some matters. It was
noticeable that that lengthy pause he took came when I asked him why, being
someone who seems reticent as a personality, he is drawn to such flamboyance
in performance. He appeared ready to respond to this – and say something
about his upbringing – but then wouldn’t, and rather wilfully bent his
answer around once again to address his sculpture.
Even in talking about that, Barney can be cautious, but he did reveal that
travel is what always spurs new work. He likes island cultures: hence he was
drawn to Japan for Drawing Restraint 9, and in the past he has filmed in
Ireland and the Isle of Man. So, any holiday plans?
“Well, I will say this about what I’m working on. I’m planning to go down the
Nile soon.” I think he’ll find some material there.
— Matthew Barney, Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, W2 (020-7402 6075),
tomorrow until Nov 11. Drawing Restraint 9 is at the Gate Picturehouse, W11
(0871 7042058), from Sept 28
i agree with jay, especially about the wrong questions... but i think its important to further point out that art is not literature, music, or poetry. its not ever enough to read a description of a work, or see a photo or even hear an artist talk about it. art exists between the art and the viewer and this is an emphemoral location that cannot be transcribed into any language but that of raw human experience.
andrew, new york,
Maybe the interviewer just asked the wrong questions. Asking an artist why they do what they do is kinda redundant. Matthew Barney's work is abstract, and therefore menacing because it can't be interpreted simply. So as viewers, we get nervous (or just lazy) and ask the artist to explain his work to us, so we'll understand and "get it right". I've listened to Barney being interviewed live before, and he's maddeningly opaque, and refuses to say what the work "means" - and rightly so, because t's a redundant question.
Jay, London,