Matthew Barney: C/D?

Oh God, did you ever make as lovable a creature? A three-legged kitten in a teapot maybe.

When in Minneapolis, which has significant and early Barney 'purchases' at the Walker, it was funny to look at who the wealthy buyer/donors were: a local real-estate magnate nobody outside Minnesota would be troubled by.

As to the art, it's relentlessly packaged but that's part of the practice. I wondered also if the practice was trying to express the ultimate self-ref/reverence and directing all that narcissism into strange and loopy places. It is very meaty as in fleshy. However intellectual they might make it sound, I can't help but think B&B sit there all day counting one another's toes and doing fuck-all.

"The Simple Life" for a pair of self-important art-world celebrities. With a combination of lavish pageantry and industrial exertion, the Nisshin Maru, Japan's last whaling ship, sails off from Nagasaki Bay. Along with its crew, it carries two guests, Matthew Barney and Bjork, who submit to elaborate rituals of tonsure, pomade, and dress at the hands of solemn bearers whose job it is to keep from laughing at their employers' airs. They partake of a classical tea ceremony in an unabashed display of Oriental kitsch that makes "Memoirs of a Geisha" look like an ethnographic documentary. As their berth fills with what might be water or whale oil, the couple lovingly carve each other up into human sushi. Barney, the director of this unbearingly empty spectacle, has in effect filmed at great expense the couple's designer-sightseeing cruise, with little more skill and vastly more pretense than the average tourist.

also, they don't usually show in movie theaters. the cycle did two years ago as part of a retrospective, but i believe barney's preferred venue for these things is in art galleries. cremaster 2 was meant to be experienced sitting on saddle sculptures.

Don't Barbara Walters interviews have all of these things? With the exception of the soundtrack role, I could argue the same for music videos or sports documentary-style films. A friend has an indy car film that's basically an imax-style film put on dvd that has long driving sequences with no plot whatsoever. Should I complain about them using "Hollywood" technology? I don't even think this classifies as a repurposing of tools for artistic intent since the methodologies are versatile enough that I don't see them bound to one filmmaking style.

I've actually just realized that if the entire thing were soundtracked by Sad#233; I would totally love it. There's a similar kind of obsessive sadness going on with both of them.

It goes without saying this stuff isn't for most people, and I can certainly see why it's annoying to some people this work even exists; the films are flagrant displays of production value and wealth, employed towards something extremely subjective and vague -- so I can understand the derision towards not only the work but the fact that there's an audience for it -- all I can say is I got something out of it, so I'm part of the audience.

this new one, from the look of it (and, god help us, its eight sequels)

Drawing Restraint 1 through 8 already exist. Try Google.

i. avant-garde art is somewhat about refusing conventions (rarely as totally as it says it is: but def somewhat)
ii. conventions provide (among other things) useful constraints and obstacle courses for problem solving which allows for leaps of energy and imagination as HOOKS
iii. avant-garde art is generally also pinched for funding in ways mainstream and traditional art aren't
iv. lack of funding provides (among other things) useful constraints and obstacle courses for problem solving which allows for leaps of energy and imagination as HOOKS
v. MB never has to worry whether something he's doing WORKS -- there isn't a convention metric, there isn't a technique metric, there isn't a budget metric -- so a. he plans it all out, complete w.hidden conceptual whatever in his BRANE, and then b. he executes it, except where anyone else would come to FORMAL or STRUCTURAL or EXECUTIONAL obstacles*, he can always just spend his way round them
vi. so there's a actually a kind of evasive deadness haning over the whole thing -- you can't tell when he's ON IT and when he's NOT bcz HE can't te;ll, bcz there's no gradient for him between skin-of-yer-teeth brilliant cobble-together-after-the-fact solution and the re-envisioning (= thinking about it afterwards) that problem-solving would bring to it... problems don't arise

*like as an example: the glaciermelt footage -- he never has to worry in respect of "i could only afford one day's shooting", i have to make what i've got WORK as it is, and restucturte everything round my limitation; which wd give its presence a kind of torque in the body of the film: he can always just film as much as he first thought he wanted -- he never has to rethink or replan, and everything stays shallow, bcz the maker's mind is neverv thrown into relief, or even into second gear really...

??

(bear in mind i have only seen 2, and quite liked it) (certainly i remember sensual images from it very clearly)

Except that the avant garde has been around for so long that refusing convention has become, itself, a convention, and therefore is now exactly the sort of constraint and obstacle course that can provide the structure you're talking about. In other words, there's the kind of repetition and redundancy required already there, and it's been there since Duchamp, at least.

There's even more when an artist establishes a sub-genre as recognizable as Barney's. Watching Pierre Hughye's film A Journey That Wasn't, I couldn't help wondering if it was a parody of Barney's apparently not-so-sui-generis genre. The music by Joshua Cody sounds exactly like Jonathan Beppler's scores for the Cremaster series. Even if it isn't a parody, it shows that this genre of art film now has as much usable convention and redundancy as Hollywood film-making.

Well, the films are very much about weird labours of Hercules. Barney always has to shin up an elevator shaft, walk along the surface of the sea, climb through a tunnel connecting two cars, climb around the proscenium arch of a theatre, etc. These scenes resemble the crossing-the-pool-with-a-candle scene in Tarkovsky's "Nostalgia" or the hauling-a-boat-over-a-mountain in Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo", and act as a sort of metaphysical "Jeux Sans Frontieres" as well as providing an epic narrative structure.

There's also the constraint that each film has to incorporate Barney's sculptures and installations. For instance, the vat of liquid vaseline on the deck of the whaler in "Drawing Restraint 9" or the sex-organs-based installation in the blimp. This is the films' raison d'etre, to turn the space-based medium that is sculpture into the the time-based medium that is film. It's in itself a "trial of Hercules", and the way Barney accomplishes it is with music, a kind of intermediate artform between space and time. Beppler's scores not only brilliant, they're hugely important to the success of the whole enterprise.

Tokion is the proud sponsor of the premiere of Drawing Restraint 9, the new film by Matthew Barney.

DRAWING RESTRAINT 9
Director Matthew Barney in person today at 6:40 & 9:30 shows!

EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT STARTS TODAY! TWO WEEKS ONLY
IFC Center
http://www.ifccenter.com

Saw DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 a couple of weeks ago. Seriously gruesome finale, but if you liked the the Cremaster series, you'll like this. Otherwise . .

. . and, yeah, I'm up for DR10 and or Cremaster 6. Anyone who can connect me for a Cremaster 5 soundtrack, get in touch. And, Matthew, how about those action figures?

After straining hard to appreciate that Guggenheim show a few years ago and a few of the films, I never again felt the slightest desire to see anything this guy did.

Besides Bjork, I'm guessing.

heh