Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint: Volume V: 1987-2007

by Matthew Barney, Neville Wakefield

Matthew Barney's "Drawing Restraint" series imagines mythic interactions and subtle energy currents that meld legend and technology in dark, non-allegorical fairytales. In the film "Drawing Restraint 9," the tension is strung between creative discipline (restraint, orderliness, pattern) and protean creativity (oceanic chaos)—a theme that is symbolically enacted in the construction and transformation of a vast sculpture of liquid Vaseline called "The Field." Over the course of the film, "The Field" is molded, poured, bisected and re-formed on the deck of a whaling ship. These shifts in the sculpture's state are then echoed in the tale of The Guests, two visitors to the ship (played by Barney and Bjork) who, locked in a lover's embrace and breathing through blowhole orifices in the back of their necks, cut away each other's feet and thighs with flensing knives to reveal nascent whale tails. In conjunction with the Serpentine Gallery's 2007 exhibition, this catalogue for "Drawing Restraint 9" and the "Drawing Restraint" series to date features autonomous sketches, drawings, sculptures and photographs. It offers an assessment of the project's fusion of sculpture, architecture, music, computer-generated effects and prosthetics that draws from mythology, history, sports and biology to explore the interplay between polymorphous desire and applied order.

Genres: Art

233 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Matthew Barney is an American artist who works in sculpture, photography, drawing and film. His early works were sculptural installations combined with performance and video. Between 1994 and 2002 he created the Cremaster Cycle, a series of five feature-length films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema."

Reviews

[Gianluca Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems Barney has at times been criticised for the perceived obscurantism of his art but the systems with which he charts oppositional forces are surprisingly intuitive in the way that they meld the abstract and the biological. Both arts criticism and the audience response are the process by which bodily intelligence and active interpretation are mediated. Barney is, in essence, a fantastic aestheticist with a unique theoretical backing. The focus given toward the texture of soft, broken-apart surfaces really makes the sculptures like little else. Huge fan of this guy.