Drawing Restraint 9

Drawing Restraintis a 2005 film project by visual artist Matthew Barney consisting of a featurelength film, largescale sculptures, photographs, drawings, and books. The Drawing Restraint series consists ofnumbered components and related materials. Some episodes are videos, others sculptural installations or drawings. Barney created Drawing Restraintwhile still an undergraduate at Yale University and completed Drawing Restraintin 2007 at Londons Serpentine Gallery. With a soundtrack composed by Bjrk, Drawing Restraintis an unconventional love story set in Japan. The narrative structure is built upon themes such as the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.

The film opens with the careful, ceremonial wrapping of two unidentifiable organic objects in several layers of carefully folded decorative paper, an activity known in Japanese as tsutsumi or orikata, sealed with twine and gold field emblems and finished with a sliver of white shell. The centre strips of the field emblems, a recurring symbol in Barneys works, are then pulled off, a frequently repeated motif throughout the film. The scene moves to Nagasaki bay where a celebratory procession of dancers, animals and floats approaches the docks as the crew of the whaling ship finish construction on the shore.After the opening credits, a field emblem mould is assembled on the deck of the Nisshin Maru and filled with molten petroleum jelly from one of the vehicles in the celebratory procession. One of the Occidental Guests, played by Bjrk, waits on another shore with her gaze directed out to sea. The other Occidental Guest, Matthew Barney, waits on a docking rig in a large fur coat. In a third location a group of young women at the waters edge, pearl divers, apply grease to each others skin in preparation for the dive. Separately, the Occidental Guests are picked up by small motorised vessels and carried towards the Nisshin Maru. The pearl divers enter the water with their collection barrels, hyperventilate to improve their lung capacity and make the first dive. Mayumi Miyata is shown playing the sh over the scene with a string of pearls entwined in her hair and hanging down her exposed back. ........

Source: Wikipedia