Drawing Restraint 9
Jun. 14th, 2005 06:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusFans of the artist and musician Mr B in the 1970s were kept on the edge of their seats, primed for exciting announcements. Mr B had shaved his eyebrows to play a kabuki rockstar called Ziggy! Mr B would make a musical based on Orwell's 1984! Mr B, halfway through his tour, has become a singer of "plastic soul"! Mr B appears in a television documentary showing us his collection of "woodland creature" costumes! Mr B plays a space alien in Mr R's new film! Mr B has moved suddenly to Berlin and is experimenting near the wall with Professor E and Mr P!
Elderly fans of Mr B might tell you that no contemporary artist—including Mr B—is that exciting these days. No artist startles and stretches you with creative ambition, dazzles and dizzies you with sound and multimedia spectacle, to quite that degree any more. But wait, what if we count two artists as one? Might not the team of Mrs B, the singer, and Mr B, the visual artist, compare?
Bjork and Matthew Barney are married. They've just announced their first major collaboration, a film and accompanying soundtrack album called Drawing Restraint 9. Like a lot of other people, I find myself very excited at the announcement, especially when I listen to soundclips like Ambergris March, which features processed harpsichord, or look at stills from the film, set on a whaling ship in Nagasaki Bay.
Drawing Restraint 9 is a follow-up to Mr B's excitingly strange and beautiful Cremaster series of films, with Bjork's soundtrack replacing the Jonathan Bepler scores we're used to. The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Mr B's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto. At one point a below-deck tea ceremony is flooded with liquid vaseline, at another the Bs, breathing through blowholes in the back of their necks, take out flensing knives and cut away at each other's feet and thighs.
I'm excited that the Bs have chosen a Japanese backdrop (Mrs B looked so nice as a pomo geisha in Nick Knight's photograph for her Homogenic album), I'm excited by the "folktronic" sounds of the samples (Mrs B really has a great talent for radical arrangements, Antarctic wails and dark out-of-tune brass), and I like the "otherness" evidenced by the photographs. I expect the film, which I shall certainly see when it comes out (it's premiered in Japan on July 1st), to combine the mysticism of Tarkovsky's Nostalgia (will he reach the other side of that Russian bath with his candle still lit?) with the violent sensuality of Oshima's In The Realm of The Senses (will she really flense her lover's member?). I expect it to be the most boring and yet also the most exciting and resonant film of the year. I love to be piqued by incomprehension, baffled into tingles by strangeness, as I was, for instance, this weekend by a presentation of In Mikronesien, a performance based on Jules Verne texts featuring actress Jeanne Balabar and choreographer Boris Charmatz.
Just as Mr B's interviews in the 1970s were full of startlingly bold yet sympathetic statements, Mrs B's interviews, at a time musicians mostly avoid giving offense, are full of radical moral positions: "She would never wear jeans and a T-shirt, she says, because they are 'a symbol of white American imperialism, like drinking Coca-Cola'."
We have mostly killed the shamen, their rites and languages. That's why it's important that artists should be inventing new rituals, new forms, new strangenesses. Truly strange and inventive artists quicken our pulses. I have even been, myself, for a few, for a while, an artist marked by the white stone of high expectation, an artist who courted spooky strangeness and made ambitious announcements. Mr M is in Hokkaido broadcasting the sound of boats squelching against harbour wall tires! Mr M is in a New York gallery "generating continuous landscapes" for a month using only his voice! Mr M, according to Pitchfork once upon a time, "seems almost fictional, and is sure to quickly gain cult status among the Anglophilic, educated, and fashion sensible. I'm just surprised Bjork hasn't dated him yet."
In the end I got something much better than a date from Mrs B. I got to watch her marry my favourite visual artist and witness their exciting collaborations. Together, today, they make a lunar pantomime horse act quite as radical as the erstwhile Mr B and his imaginary friend Ziggy.
Elderly fans of Mr B might tell you that no contemporary artist—including Mr B—is that exciting these days. No artist startles and stretches you with creative ambition, dazzles and dizzies you with sound and multimedia spectacle, to quite that degree any more. But wait, what if we count two artists as one? Might not the team of Mrs B, the singer, and Mr B, the visual artist, compare?
Bjork and Matthew Barney are married. They've just announced their first major collaboration, a film and accompanying soundtrack album called Drawing Restraint 9. Like a lot of other people, I find myself very excited at the announcement, especially when I listen to soundclips like Ambergris March, which features processed harpsichord, or look at stills from the film, set on a whaling ship in Nagasaki Bay.
Drawing Restraint 9 is a follow-up to Mr B's excitingly strange and beautiful Cremaster series of films, with Bjork's soundtrack replacing the Jonathan Bepler scores we're used to. The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Mr B's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto. At one point a below-deck tea ceremony is flooded with liquid vaseline, at another the Bs, breathing through blowholes in the back of their necks, take out flensing knives and cut away at each other's feet and thighs.
I'm excited that the Bs have chosen a Japanese backdrop (Mrs B looked so nice as a pomo geisha in Nick Knight's photograph for her Homogenic album), I'm excited by the "folktronic" sounds of the samples (Mrs B really has a great talent for radical arrangements, Antarctic wails and dark out-of-tune brass), and I like the "otherness" evidenced by the photographs. I expect the film, which I shall certainly see when it comes out (it's premiered in Japan on July 1st), to combine the mysticism of Tarkovsky's Nostalgia (will he reach the other side of that Russian bath with his candle still lit?) with the violent sensuality of Oshima's In The Realm of The Senses (will she really flense her lover's member?). I expect it to be the most boring and yet also the most exciting and resonant film of the year. I love to be piqued by incomprehension, baffled into tingles by strangeness, as I was, for instance, this weekend by a presentation of In Mikronesien, a performance based on Jules Verne texts featuring actress Jeanne Balabar and choreographer Boris Charmatz.Just as Mr B's interviews in the 1970s were full of startlingly bold yet sympathetic statements, Mrs B's interviews, at a time musicians mostly avoid giving offense, are full of radical moral positions: "She would never wear jeans and a T-shirt, she says, because they are 'a symbol of white American imperialism, like drinking Coca-Cola'."
We have mostly killed the shamen, their rites and languages. That's why it's important that artists should be inventing new rituals, new forms, new strangenesses. Truly strange and inventive artists quicken our pulses. I have even been, myself, for a few, for a while, an artist marked by the white stone of high expectation, an artist who courted spooky strangeness and made ambitious announcements. Mr M is in Hokkaido broadcasting the sound of boats squelching against harbour wall tires! Mr M is in a New York gallery "generating continuous landscapes" for a month using only his voice! Mr M, according to Pitchfork once upon a time, "seems almost fictional, and is sure to quickly gain cult status among the Anglophilic, educated, and fashion sensible. I'm just surprised Bjork hasn't dated him yet."
In the end I got something much better than a date from Mrs B. I got to watch her marry my favourite visual artist and witness their exciting collaborations. Together, today, they make a lunar pantomime horse act quite as radical as the erstwhile Mr B and his imaginary friend Ziggy.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 04:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 04:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:08 am (UTC)The film was breathtaking, and not a little elusive. But that's the beauty of Barney's work —he's been called many things (pretentious, overblown) but never reductive.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing this new project.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:21 am (UTC)My favorite was Cremaster 5, with its faded sex symbols, opera houses, water nymphs, river gods, and doves tethered to alien genitalia. I prefer the production stills to the actual films, at times.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 07:44 am (UTC)his score for cremaster 2 and 3 were truly amazing (and they brought the films a great deal)
and i can't say i'm as eagerly impatient as you are to see the result. i expected a massive step forward, or backwards (the early drawing restraints, for instance) asthetic wise, and the stills just seemp to be cremaster rip offs with Japan and Bjork trendiness in the middle. i don't know. i preferred to see richard serra in those bloody pics.
(odot)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 07:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 08:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 08:30 am (UTC)The opulence and strangeness of Barney's work and the mention of Tarkovsky reminds me of the Conversion of Russia and the comment of Prince Vladimir's envoys when they returned from the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople:
"We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere upon earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among men, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty."
The candle scene in Nostalgia is one of the most profoundly moving I've ever experienced in a cinema. But I'm rather more engaged with the trials and suffering of Domenico (indeed, the whole world) emotionally, whereas I'm not at all sure where I fit in with Mr & Mrs B's. The shaman needs to act as a bridge between two worlds and we need to be one of them for the rite to be more than gorgeous narcissism. I do look forward to it though.
(Do old Bjork fans accuse Matthew Barney of being her Yoko Ono?)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 02:05 pm (UTC)About that essay: it's obvious that the first part of Cremaster 3 is modeled after a platform side-scroller and the author makes a decent case that it's modeled after Donkey Kong, and I think Barney has come closer than anyone in capturing the repetitive puzzle-solving dedication necessary in video games, but I still the art world and the mass culture has a long way to go before they capture the magic of video games. Also, Barney (as far as I know) was the first to utilize sports, video games and zombie movies and gave a lot of younger artists a type of permission to follow their dorky passions - I hope that continues.
Also, I disagree with you about visual art. There's tons of great stuff right now, but it's the same as music: it's not in the big blue chip galleries. Also, there's no movement like the YBA or the Superflat crew - it's all a bunch of gifted autonomous artists who form part of a plurality.
But thanks for that post; I'm excited about the collaboration and have been hoping they'd do something together!
One last thing (the cutest couple thing ever):
I was at a club in Manhattan watching a hip band. Bjork and Barney were in front of me and it looked like Bjork had her hand in Barney's back pocket. I smiled at a scene of cute love and then looked again and saw that Bjork hand wasn't in Barney's back pocket but was down the back of his pants and was cupping his balls. I thought that was the sweetest/cutest/weirdest quiet public display of affection and fell even more in love with Barney and Bjork.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 02:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 02:33 pm (UTC)Thank you for being the bearer of good news and wishes come true!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 03:24 pm (UTC)Good point.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 05:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-14 07:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 04:03 am (UTC)yet she wears Nikes.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 04:22 am (UTC)i must see this!
even if it means having to go to dreaded Boston..
i was hearing stuff about this and it sounded awesome
now i can also see that it looks awesome as well..
Post.
Date: 2005-06-15 06:23 am (UTC)"In the universe created by the Cremaster Cycle, someone like Michael Jackson could be seen as the perfect embodiment of what it means to be human. The perfectly realized human being."
The Drawing Restraint Series is actually outside of the Cremaster Series and deals, I think, with 'impossible gesture.' Setting up a series of obstacles to overcome to 'induce hypertrophy' (to quote Barney), to 'change the form of an organism,' which is, in essence 'a closed universe.' I wonder if by throwing his wife into the mix, and given the sensuality to Bjork's last two albums... could some really artful porn be far behind?
Re: Post.
Date: 2005-06-15 06:26 am (UTC)Re: Post.
Date: 2005-06-15 11:38 am (UTC)I think the fact that Jeff Koons did that with his "Made in Heaven" series has put other artists off for decades (especially when they looked at what happened in Koons' marriage)!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-15 03:27 pm (UTC)A. K.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-07 09:10 am (UTC)Momus u are amazing!
Date: 2005-07-15 05:04 am (UTC)I will buy as fast as i can the drawing restraint 9, it´s a bjork album anyway!
www.reneverduzco.blogspot.com
Re: Momus u are amazing!
Date: 2005-07-17 05:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-11 01:35 pm (UTC)I read a bit of your LJ just quickly and must say, your writing is amazing.
I'd love to read more.
Hope you don't mind, I friended you. :)
vsXZgyPWiJZeDkKr
Date: 2007-10-22 01:14 am (UTC)LINKS
Date: 2007-11-04 06:52 am (UTC)End ^) See you