For the first time, Matthew Barney and Bjork have collaborated on a film and soundtrack called Drawing Restraint 9, after some of Barney’s earliest, pre-Cremaster works. In DR9, the two visit a Japanese whaling ship in Nagasaki, undergo various Shinto wedding-inspired rituals, form and reform a large Vaseline sculpture, and then themselves transform into whales by cutting each others feet and legs off with flensing knives.
Bjork’s soundtrack incorporates Japanese instruments, vocalizations, and both folk and court music traditions.
[No, I didn’t know, either. Flensing is the process of cutting strips of blubber off of a whale carcass, as in Moby Dick, or this 1970 National Geographic photograph of a flensing Icelandic whaler.]
No word yet on when/where this will be released. The film premieres July 1 along with an exhibit of Barney’s work at the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan, and the cd comes out later that month. I love that a museum with this name still follows the antique Japanese corporate tradition of requiring postcard requests for seats. [kanazawa21.jp, via pitchfork]
Drawing Restraint 9 [bjork.com, via kottke, archinect]
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the making of, by greg allen