Matthew Barney at SFMOMA

What's under the hood?

Matthew Barney's latest test of pateince, Drawing Restraint 9, is the first filmed piece in his Drawing Restraint series of artistic endeavors, and it's the ninth one. All of which probably goes without saying.

Now, I enjoy Mr. Barney's cinematic trials because they are usually quite lovely to the eye and they leave you windering about this and that, like good art should. Sure, sometimes you just wish he'd give up the pretense and the preoccupation with bodily functions and just take his shirt off without attaching horns to his nipples or painting himself purple or whatever, but it's all kind of interesting in an odd, uncomfortable, "am I supposed to understand this or laugh at it?" kind of way.

But I am not here to review his current SFMOMA retrospective because I haven't seen it yet, though I shall. No, I merely wish to provide to you the one memorable moment of Mr. Barney's talk at the museum prior to a book signing where he would scribe his name on your $75 paperback copy of one of his books.

Here is that moment: Mr. Barney is describing the elaborate costuming that he and his paramour Bjork wear as part of an equally elaborate tea ceremony that takes place on a whaling vessel off the coast of Japan as liquid Vaseline fills the room prior to the couple slicing each other's legs off so they can have blowholes.

Mr. Barney is showing pictures of the costumes as part of a PowerPoint presentation when we come to a close-up of Bjork's coiffure. He has described in detail each of the pieces of clothing and what they are composed of, the animals that have given their skins or other parts of their bodies to provide the cloth and the shoes made of elk shoulder bones and so on. What we see of the screen is the back of Bjork's head done up in a Geisha's 'do with porcupine quills pressed into the 'do with what appears to be doo.

Mr. Barney is not an eloquent speaker. Nor is he very electric or engaging, other than his biceps. So it was that his presentation was choc-a-bloc with extended silent pauses as he struggled to find the words to describe his vision.

So - Bjork, hair, porcupine quills, and... what is that in her hair?

"Cast... dog... bowel."

Dog bowel? Cast dog bowel? You mean shit, right? That's not a bowel. It certainly looks like a bowel movement, but not a bowel. Is it called 'bowel' in Idaho? "Wow, look at that big pile of bowel?" And if it is cast, does that mean you took the dogshi... bowel and pressed it into a cast of dogshi... bowel so that it would resemble the perfect dogshi... bowel? Or that you took a cast of dog... bowel and then placed thermaplastic into the cast to create a dogsh... bowel model so that it looks like dogshit but isn't? And does that then make the art suddenly less authentic? If the dog bowel isn't?

These are the questions that today's art world must answer.