barney discovers japan!

With his combined love of formal gesture and gelatinous/semi-gelatinous textures, it's no wonder that Matthew Barney was drawn to Japan, home of cuisine like kaiseki in which the physical texture and visual aesthetic is equally if not more important than the flavor, which is of course perfection as well.

I have to say though, after seeing Drawing Restraint 9 last night, I find actually visiting Japan to be a far more rich, enlightening, and utterly disorienting visual feast than any of Barney's forced constructions. And Björk just rehashed her attempts at "labor-becomes-music" music as she did in Dancer In The Dark, with the clangs and crashes of people working becoming the rhythm for yet another song. Clever! Jonathan Bepler's haunting scores fit Barney's vision much more naturally, as in Cremaster 3.

I was disappointed, I wanted another mental massage a la Cremaster, but all I got was a lot of lukewarm Björk and tons of whale imagery with a huge cast of Japanese extras just being themselves, sort of hanging out on the set of a Barney film. As for me, I'd much rather just go hang out with Japanese people themselves, in Japan, watching summer festival dancers in strange hats wind their way through huge industrial cities, while enjoying some slimy slithery raw eel.