This film is, mutatis mutandis, the Moby-Dick of our era.
Matthew Barney has an Ahab-like obsession with art; it is appropriately ironic that in his case there are some eco-religious overtones against whaling that never really threaten with propaganda the fierceness of the meditation, for a meditation it is, part of Matthew Barney's lifelong meditation on America; if this seems far-fetched, remember Cremaster's epic scale, remember in Cremaster the Chrysler building, remember how evocative and subtle is Mailer's use in Cremaster as, that other exemplary American, Houdini. At least for me, this reverberates suggestively as one of the most refined recent comments on American spirituality.
Is Matthew Barney's quest an unholy war towards art with art's conceptual industry? Is this what the ambivalent title/wordplay "Drawing Restraint" is about? Everyone will give his own answer, but for this viewer the object drawn is strikingly equivalent to what in lacanian psychoanalysis is called object a, that is an Utopian, fantasmatic object which in one instance can function as cause, and in another as object of desire. For me, this specific status of the object in his works, along with making the artistic object resist symbolization, that is, having the status of trauma as defined in psychoanalysis, is what makes funny Mr Barney's inquiry fascinating, standing apart, and him a kind of prophet of the unknown.
Thank you.
Matthew Barney has an Ahab-like obsession with art; it is appropriately ironic that in his case there are some eco-religious overtones against whaling that never really threaten with propaganda the fierceness of the meditation, for a meditation it is, part of Matthew Barney's lifelong meditation on America; if this seems far-fetched, remember Cremaster's epic scale, remember in Cremaster the Chrysler building, remember how evocative and subtle is Mailer's use in Cremaster as, that other exemplary American, Houdini. At least for me, this reverberates suggestively as one of the most refined recent comments on American spirituality.
Is Matthew Barney's quest an unholy war towards art with art's conceptual industry? Is this what the ambivalent title/wordplay "Drawing Restraint" is about? Everyone will give his own answer, but for this viewer the object drawn is strikingly equivalent to what in lacanian psychoanalysis is called object a, that is an Utopian, fantasmatic object which in one instance can function as cause, and in another as object of desire. For me, this specific status of the object in his works, along with making the artistic object resist symbolization, that is, having the status of trauma as defined in psychoanalysis, is what makes funny Mr Barney's inquiry fascinating, standing apart, and him a kind of prophet of the unknown.
Thank you.