Being Barney
New documentary takes a closer look at the 'Cremaster' master
By Andy Klein
When Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 was released last year, I characterized the world therein as Matthew Barney's Own Private Japan or even Matthew Barney's Japanese Theme Park: It was less a created universe than his earlier Cremaster cycle and more a version of a few aspects of Japanese culture filtered through Barney's strange consciousness.
Barney's film/video work is abstract in the extreme, expressed in his own private visual language - a language for which he provides no Rosetta Stone, allowing the viewer to either get it ... or not. One of the great virtues of Alison Chernick's new documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint is that it gives us insights into the 39-year-old artist's motivations without ever enshrining a single, "true" reading of his work.
Most of Chernick's film transpires during the shooting of Drawing Restraint 9, on the Nisshin Maru, an actual Japanese whaling vessel that served as both set and setting. The bits and pieces of Barney's movie included here give only hints of its complete weirdness, which is contrasted nicely with the businesslike, matter-of-fact way he directs both his film crew and the ship's crew, who serve as performers and (it appears) production assistants.
Intercut with this are brief biographical bits. Chernick talks to Barney's father, as well as to various New York art-scene types - gallery owner Barbara Gladstone, who has been instrumental in promoting him to star status in that world; museum curator Richard Flood; and The New York Times's Michael Kimmelman, who is the only one to have any critical distance. Kimmelman admits that at first he suspected Barney's stuff of being absolute bullshit, until he became indoctrinated into his world.
Not only do we get glimpses of Barney's childhood pictures, but Chernick shows us glossy magazine ads from his days as a pricey New York model and a clip of high-school footballer "Matt" Barney - as the announcer refers to him - throwing a great touchdown pass. She also got permission to include little bits of footage illustrating his earlier work, including some of the first eight Drawing Restraint projects, and quickly outlines his meteoric rise in the art world. (According to Kimmelman, he was probably the first artist to be adopted by the New York art establishment fresh out of grad school.)
What is most surprising here is that Barney is relatively chatty about his work and, in a vague sense, his intentions - unlike, say, David Lynch, who is the most obvious comparison. He gives the impression of being more consciously analytical, while still only giving us general context - how he came to be interested in frozen Vaseline as a medium, for instance - rather than any detailed "meaning."
Also forthcoming is Björk, Barney's wife, who costarred with him in Drawing Restraint 9, as well as providing the soundtrack (which proved the easiest element of the project to wholeheartedly embrace).
It shouldn't be surprising that Chernick's film ends up being far more accessible than Barney's. For one thing, at 71 minutes, it's less than half the length. (More accurately, it's 62 minutes, with a closing credit sequence that includes shots of Barney preparing Drawing Restraint 10 and 11 and runs a full nine minutes, probably setting some kind of proportional record.) And there are many amusing moments with the Japanese sailors, who are politely baffled by Barney's bizarre requests for the film.
It would have been nice if Chernick had included a greater range of critical reaction. Kimmelman is the only one to be even briefly negative; surely there are those who still think Barney's work is bullshit. If not, John Simon is generally available to say something dismissive and nasty about anyone. But one suspects that this documentary was conceived as a DVD extra - a form not known for its critical impartiality.
Published: 02/08/2007
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
