Matthew Barney’s film and related exhibit Drawing Restraint 9 at SFMOMA in the Summer of 2006 plays itself out as a poor follow-up to what can be seen as his magnificent opus and Gesamtkunstwerk: the Cremaster Cycle. Barney’s new film and supporting exhibition portray a far-fetched, overly personal and extremely drawn-out (pun intended…) marriage ceremony between Barney and his pop-star wife Björk. Was it necessary to make a feature length film and further design a traveling film-prop exhibition at SFMOMA to show the world that he and Björk are sea-crossed lovers, clandestine whales in human form, delighters of Eastern tradition…as well as extremely bad actors? I think not!

Drawing Restraint 9—the film—is roughly 2 hours and 25 minutes of slow moving imagery (and overall pace) that borrows style from Barney’s previous Cremaster Cycle films, but never quite manages to achieve the complexity or visual acuity that propelled the Cremaster Cycle (and Barney) to stardom. The major point of this film that completely halts my appreciation, as well as interest, is: in the previous Cremaster Cycle films, one never asked with disbelief “why are these people here/there, doing these things/actions, in the middle of the night/day, simultaneously?” In the Cremaster Cycle, everything was sufficiently weird to be convincing, where dispelling disbelief was exactly the key to fully appreciating the disparate combinations of imagery, action and set. But in Drawing Restraint 9, one immediately asks “just what the hell is Barney and Bjork doing in Japan, on a whaling boat, while whalers are cutting up a jelly-mold and, and, and…until the shit gets really weird and Barney and Bjork start slicing and dicing themselves into…whales?”

Sometimes I can be a little dense, but I am still trying to figure out where the “drawing” and the “restraint” come into the film (okay, I know it is supposed to fit into his other series of Drawing Restraint works, but…). Too many questions pervade the “reason” for making the film Drawing Restraint 9 in this reviewer’s opinion, and too many open-ended questions lead to a certain confusion, which I think was not Barney’s real intention to begin with. Which means he failed.

Drawing Restraint 9—the installation—is one floor of the SFMOMA…and one too many floors, if you ask me. I’ll be short about this: if Barney’s installation was of any merit, detailed literature would not be required to explain and educate the viewer to his ideas, symbolism, concepts, etc.—the viewer could be left alone to experience the work and find resonance based on personal opinion about “what it all means.” Yet, this is exactly what the curator of the SFMOMA exhibition has done by producing a type of “manual” on the backside of the exhibition’s information pamphlet. Is the work of Barney too complex? No!— read the pamphlet. Don’t know how to look at the exhibition? Okay— read the pamphlet. Feeling confused? Poor you—just read the pamphlet and the artwork’s value to Art, Society and your own cultural knowledge will be laid out for you in concise order that you can recite at a later date to actually sound like you know what it is all about. Because, gee…maybe no one will be able to figure it out on their own… or, could that mean there isn’t anything to figure out in the first place? If—in the opinion of SFMOMA and Barney himself—supposed great contemporary art and artists have become so complex that one needs an index/dictionary/manual in order to embrace the ideas behind the artwork, then obviously the title of Barney’s new work translates into “restrain yourself from drawing your own conclusions,” because otherwise, you might just have to agree with me that the film is lacking necessity to be produced, and furthermore, the exhibition stands as a blatant and weak attempt to further canonize Barney and his superstar-artist career.