True stories (11/7/06)
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Drawing Restraint 9. [Matthew Barney, 2005.]
The celebrated artist Herr Barney and his even more celebrated paramour Björk are ferried separately to a Japanese whaler, subjected to elaborate ritual preparations for a wedding ceremony at the hands of a retinue of solemnfaced attendants, and then, partly as an expression of solidarity with our oppressed cetacean brothers but mainly in the spirit of good oldfashioned Surrealist fun, consummate their union by hacking one another to pieces with whaling knives.
Which left me, of course, whistling “I've got you under my skin”, and reflecting once again that surrealism is largely the visual expression of dumb puns [cf. the locus classicus, Bunuel/Dali on “cut”]; and noting that, first, Greenaway was much funnier on cannibalism, but, mainly, second, that the underwater camera angle on the resulting gobs of blood and giblets floating in the water is deliberately meant to suggest an equation of the slaughter with a lava lamp.
And, in fact, the whole thing reads like a series of such equations, some ironic, some not: cannibalism with intercourse; the organization of industrial workers with a form of dance; commercial whaling with the natural way of life of the hunter [thus the Japanese with Eskimos]; lemons with tits [and bathing with cooking]; minimalism with music; shaving with the pruning of encumbrance; the weirdest hairdos since the Leningrad Cowboys with shells; the conches strapped to the lovers’ backs with guitars; the ritual tea [served in shells] with seaweed; an enormous gnarly coprolitic lump of ambergris with a gigantic dork; whale with ship [a toy ship is harpooned, two ships pass the giant ambergris dork from one stern to the other in a sort of parody of rear entry]; ambergris with pearls [vomited up by the antitechnological girl pearldivers]; sea with sky; ice with assorted varieties of gelatinous fatty gloppy mess; said glop subjected to a kind of oversized cookiecutter with wedding cake; artistic talent with a talent for self-promotion; and [at 140 funfilled minutes] length with depth.
Which meant that I was myself attempting to derive the equation of artistic rapture with dozing off until I discovered the babe sitting in the row in front of me — who was sporting a pretty funny hairdo herself, come to think of it, some sort of topknot with pencils running through it like skewers — and forgot all about Björk. — Suffice it that the chambered nautilus continues its alltime record stay at number one on the charts as metaphor for the labyrinth; and that, since Barney’s cinematography and editing are relatively colorless and uninspired, we must expect his ideas to bear the artistic burden here. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them to drag this picture through two-and-a-half hours of Art Movie Slow Motion. — As a five minute music video, this might have been a work of genius. But as things stand, somebody needs to explain to this dude that brevity is the soul of wit.
____________Babes in the woods (10/5/06)
