POL Oxygen / Multimedia Artist / Matthew Barney - shonquismoreno

IF ANYONE EVER INVITES YOU 

TO PARTICIPATE IN A FLENSING RITUAL 

(YOU FLENSE ME, I FLENSE YOU) 

IN A SMALL ROOM FLOODING WITH 

PETROLEUM JELLY AND WHALE SHIT, 

THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU DECLINE. 

To flense means “to strip the blubber or skin 

from” and involves carving something up (usually 

a sea mammal) with a knife, plucking at tendons 

and exposing oozing pockets of subdermal fat. In 

artist Matthew Barney’s latest film – a love story – 

he and real-life partner, singer Björk, flense each 

other with expressions that suggest that they are 

making love with tender earnestness. 

Violent, grotesque, stylised, lush, Matthew 

Barney’s films have been compared to the video 

game Donkey Kong (by an admirer) and Barney 

himself to the former Republican US president 

Ronald Reagan (by a critic). Most of his films, 

which form only one part of much larger 

multimedia works, resemble rock operas without 

the music. Generally wordless, silent except for 

ambient sound, choreographed to the point of 

ritual, they are filled with opaque, self-referential 

symbols, and make abstractions out of the human 

characters and creatures out of, say, buildings. In a 

sentence: Barney’s films are impenetrable if you 

approach them as film. Nothing is ever what it 

seems to be: a bowl is a ship, a ship is an island, a 

knife is a pencil, obstacles are opportunities. 

Combining and recombining scores of familiar 

emblems – metaphors (beehives, cowboys, 

skinheads); historical characters and icons (Harry 

Houdini, executed murderer Gary Gilmore, the 

Chrysler Building); and celebrity actors (author 

Norman Mailer, sculptor Richard Serra, actress 

Sophia Loren) – they are simultaneously baffling 

and provocative. And the more you research what 

they are about, the more worthwhile they become. 

In Barney’s squat brick Brooklyn workshop, an 

industrial pizza oven holds racks of shallow green 

baking sheets heated at 250 degrees. They contain 

translucent beads of petroleum jelly, melting into 

a shallow pool that has the consistency of taffy. 

Half a dozen men and women are assembling the 

sculptures that will accompany Barney’s followup 

to the cult Cremaster Cycle films (1994–2002), 

which earned him the first Hugo Boss Prize from 

the Guggenheim Foundation and a solo show at 

the museum. Wearing his curly salt-and-pepper 

32 POL OXYGEN 

PREVIOUS PAGE Matthew Barney dressed in an elaborate costume of skin and fur that resembles 

traditional Japanese Shinto wedding garments, in a still from his latest film, Drawing Restraint 9. FACING 

PAGE A strange clown-like figure, whose costume is based on traditional Japanese Kabuki theatre, that 

appears at the end of Drawing Restraint 9 (this is what I can figure out but check with Shonquis to confirm.)

© MATTHEW BARNEY, 2005. PHOTO: CHRIS WINGET/COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK

"Every one of Matthew’s films or sculptures is an 

exploration of the creative process, whether it’s making 

an artwork or making a universe…It’s about the idea of 

potentiality, an individual or a system realising itself." 

< N A N C Y S P E C T O R , G U G G E N H E I M C U R A T O R >

POL OXYGE 

FACING PAGE Is this the tea ceremony or something else Check with Shonquis. 

RIGHT In another scene from Drawing Restraint 9, the crew members on the 

Nisshin Maru assemble a giant sculpture made from 25 tonnes of hot petroleum 

jelly called The Field. As the sculpture’s mould is removed and the molten liquid 

cools, the ship’s passengers are engulfed in a stream of liquid jelly. 

hair in a ponytail at the nape of his neck, Barney is 

bent over a half-scale section of the whaling ship 

that acts as one of three main characters in the 

film, Drawing Restraint 9. At 39, he has an aquiline 

nose in a narrow face, whorls of stubble and greyblue 

eyes that are partitions rather than windows 

into the man. He is married to Icelandic singer 

Björk, who acted in and scored the film, and with 

whom he has a three-year-old daughter, Isadora. 

DR 9, which premiered in New York in 

February, forms the centre of a multimedia 

exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern 

Art (SFMoMA), and is supplemented by 150 pieces 

of video, film, drawing, photography, sculpture (in 

petroleum jelly, latex and thermal plastic), and 

other artworks from the 12 ‘Drawing Restraint’ 

projects Barney has completed since 1987. 

Unlike Cremaster, the title of DR 9 places this 

film explicitly in the context of Barney’s nearly 20- 

year-old series, which he began at Yale University. 

(The five Cremaster films, which took 10 years to 

make following his 1989 graduation, are also part 

of this series.) DR 9 is shorter, at two hours and 15 

minutes, and more watchable than the baroquely 

layered and wildly disjunctive six-hour, 20-minute 

epic that is The Cremaster Cycle. Set in Nagasaki 

Bay aboard the last real-life, controversial whaling 

ship, the Nisshin Maru, DR9 continues Barney’s 

exploration of the transformative and creative 

power of resistance to self-imposed restraint. In 

the film, while crew members assemble a 25- 

tonne petroleum jelly sculpture on the deck, two 

western guests (Barney and Björk) embark, bathe 

and are dressed in elaborate Shinto wedding 

costumes. They then participate in a tea ceremony 

and are finally deluged in a urine-colored flood of 

petroleum jelly as they flense each other stoically 

in a physically transcendent act that transforms 

them into whales (yes, whales) as the storm abates. 

DR 9 departs from Barney’s earlier work in 

several ways. Firstly, it has a script in the form of 

Björk’s highly textured soundtrack. “One of the 

reasons I don’t use dialogue is because I can’t write 

it and I can’t direct it,” says Barney. “Music takes 

the place of dialogue in this film. Often, as the film 

was written, the music was written.” Another 

difference: where Cremaster consists of many 

pieces working together to describe a single whole, 

DR9 describes the relationship, on a number of 

levels, between two things. Viewers don’t need to 

be acquainted with Barney’s private symbols to 

understand the film. “It’s lush. It’s like a fresco and 

it’s a love story, but it is as layered as any of his 

other work,” says Benjamin Weil, curator of visual 

arts at SFMoMA. “The idea of transformation is 

spelled out in a much more literal fashion, but it 

doesn’t lose any of its qualities.” 

Both more straightforward and poetic than the 

other films, DR 9 raises the stakes in the ‘Drawing 

Restraint’ series. Barney’s early pieces were a 

response to his unwillingness to sit and draw, 

which didn’t pose enough of a challenge. For 

DR 1, he strapped an elastic line to his thighs and 

anchored it to the floor. Increasing the resistance 

of the line by walking up an incline, he tried to 

draw on one of the walls. DR 6 was the only piece 

performed for an audience, although most of the 

others were videotaped. In it, Barney bounced on

a mini-trampoline while drawing his portrait on 

the ceiling, making one mark for each bounce. “I 

would do ‘Drawing Restraint’ pieces when I 

didn’t know what to do,” says Barney. “The idea 

was to set up a condition for making a drawing.” 

DR 7 featured his first narrative, in which 

wrestling satyrs “draw” on the condensation that 

has gathered on the sunroof of a limousine with 

the movement of their horns, finally flaying one 

another as well as the upholstery. “Matthew 

brings the body back into the idea of making art,” 

says Weil. “Lots of artists have explored this, but 

they haven’t taken it to the degree of literality that 

he has. He says drawing is an easy thing to do, so 

he applies the whole strength of his body to put a 

trace on a piece of paper, to make it difficult to 

achieve this, bringing physicality into the notion 

of making art. This brings together a number of 

ideas that artists have been exploring in the two 

decades before he started working.” 

HAPPY MEDIUM .................................................. 

Born in San Francisco in 1967, Barney was raised 

in Idaho, where he was quarterback on his high 

school football team. This is where his relationship 

with petroleum jelly began: all the athletic 

equipment, from padding to balls and flags, was 

made from plastic. Vaseline, chaotic and formless, 

would become his sculptural medium of choice. 

Weil recalls seeing Barney’s first New York 

show in 1991. “The least I can say is that it was 

incredibly puzzling. The work was disconcerting 

and confusing to most people and there was an 

incredible amount of media coverage that was 

even more confusing,” he says. “Nobody I can 

remember who saw the exhibition was left 

without a strong feeling. People were either angry 

or excited or very, very adamantly rejecting. 

Nobody was looking at it like, yeah, so what” 

At first look, the flensing scenes in DR 9 could 

make a viewer adamantly rejecting. On second 

look, however, it’s clear that the characters are not 

actually in pain. “Matthew has been careful to not 

let it be gore,” says Weil. “It’s not sadomasochistic. 

They’re embracing each other and each other’s 

wish to transform into another state. It’s a way to 

spell out the symbiotic relationship that happens 

when a couple forms, people become one and 

transform themselves through a ritual. Where is 

the drawing in this film They’re drawing each 

other’s bodies with the knives.” Barney suggests 

that he is also visualising a metaphorical system 

that has valves where pressure can be released and 

that the seeming violence is never representational 

BELOW LEFT A still from Drawing Restraint 3, part of Barney’s series of attempting 

to draw while being physically restrained. In the third instalment, he lifted a barbell 

cast in petroleum wax and jelly. The chalk powder covering the barbell’s grips 

gradually fell onto the floor as he lifted the weight, documenting the act as 

drawings. BELOW RIGHT A still from Drawing Restraint 4. (Can’t find any info on 

this) FACING PAGE A still from Drawing Restraint 11, created specially for an 

exhibition at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, a 

precursor to the SFMoMA exhibition. The piece, which was filmed in real time, 

documents Barney’s attempt to complete a drawing while climbing up three 12- 

metre-high gallery walls.

ABOVE Barney’s partner, singer Björk, dressed in the Japanese Shinto wedding costume made from animal 

skins in a still from Drawing Restraint 9. According to SFMoMA, Barney “became interested in Japan’s 

historical position as a host country to foreign guests, how the local rituals are a type of productive restraint”. 

38 POL OXYGEN 

for him. “Muscle fibre is torn in order to be built 

up,” he says. “I’m compelled by violence that has 

the potential to become sublime.” 

“Every one of Matthew’s films or sculptures is 

an exploration of the creative process, whether it’s 

making an artwork or making a universe,” says 

Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, who worked 

with Barney during his solo show at the gallery in 

2002. “It’s about the idea of potentiality, an 

individual or a system realising itself.” In 

Cremaster 2, in one of only a few scenes involving 

the human voice, Norman Mailer plays 

Harry Houdini describing one of the magician’s 

famous illusions, Metamorphosis: “Within 

Metamorphosis, Houdini becomes part of the cage 

that contains him, he enters the lock and seals the 

bonds, he digests the lock, it becomes a part of him, 

the walls that imprison his body come open.” 

Barney has not been credited with one of the 

elements that is most interesting and least 

accessible in his work: his voluminous research 

into a plethora of apparently unrelated topics. For 

instance, the title for Cremaster comes from the 

word for one of the male reproductive muscles, 

and the cycle is filled with anatomical references. 

The first film represents the most ascended or 

undifferentiated position of the reproductive 

organs in the process of embryonic sexual 

differentiation, while Cremaster 5 represents the 

most descended or differentiated position. In DR 9, 

the ship is analogous to the artificial island, Dejima, 

built by 19th-century European merchants in order 

to be able to trade with the Japanese without 

stepping foot on the nation’s sacred soil. 

Until September 17, SFMoMA is offering an 

unprecedentedly comprehensive selection of 

Barney’s work. Don’t eat for two hours before 

going into the museum; it’s not easy to digest. 

Viewers may feel some resistance to the work it 

demands of us. “You don’t get a five-minute 

Barney experience,” Weil warns. “A Barneycentric 

museum experience will take at least 3.5 

hours, but it is one of the more important 

functions of art to make people slow down.” 

Keep an eye out for the special issue of POL Oxygen, 

which will feature articles about other crossdisciplinary 

artists and performers.

POL Oxygen / Multimedia Artist / Matthew Barney - shonquismoreno

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