Drawing Restraint 9

Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle of films (AFF05) bridged the gap between theatrical cinema and art gallery filmmaking, opening the way for this lush collaboration between the artist and his partner Björk, who co-wrote and appears in the film, as well as providing its soundtrack. The plot (but if you saw Cremaster, you know not to set too much store by story) involves Barney and Björk boarding a Japanese whaling vessel and preparing for a stylised Shinto wedding ceremony. Meanwhile, the ship’s crew moulds a huge sculpture out of vaseline. As the sticky liquid melts and floods the cabins, the wedding participants begin to hack at each other with knives in a tender, gruesome and transformative ritual. There has been intense debate over the meaning and value of the film, with Barney describing it as dealing with "the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity." Prepare for a flood of gorgeous imagery, a mythic artistic canvas, and an interpretive puzzle that will confound and mesmerise in equal measure.

The final phase may be the only half-hour of filmmaking which will appeal equally to subscribers to Artforum and Fangoria.

The Onion