Coda Human, Animal, and Matthew Barney

It is perhaps fitting to end this book on animals and art with a coda on becoming: a tale and a tale of tails. Mathew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 centers around a series of events on a Japanese whaling ship, the Nisshin Maru. The activities that unfold in this video work and the figural forms established in the piece serve as a coda to this book, which is to say that Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) reveals and extends the concepts developed in other chapters. As a closing, this coda recaps figures and concepts, but it also opens new directions for exploration beyond this book and on to other art. Rather than discuss the breadth of Barney’s elaborate works, I am interested in how Drawing Restraint 9 takes up and provides inflection to concepts that I have laid out. This artwork serves as a field and testing ground for these ideas.

Drawing Restraint is a series of works that explore a fundamental tension: the body as creative organ builds itself and produces only by imposition of resistance or restraints on it. Barney began the Drawing Restraint series in the 1990s with works in which the artist sets up elaborate contraptions that required him to climb, pull, and push with great exertion in order to make inscriptions upon a writing surface. The restraints and harnesses in these pieces recall Carolee Schneemann extending her body on a harness to make marks on the walls just beyond her reach in Up to and Including Her Limits. For both artists, the body is the fundamental artistic instrument. The body as instrument meets resistance as it abuts other worlds, other Umwelts, and the frictions become the site of production.

As explained by the artist and critics alike, Drawing Restraint 9 explores how restraint functions upon desire, how it bends and transforms desire, and what happens to bodies as the barriers of resistance are removed. The work unfolds as Barney’s character in the video is taken aboard the whaling ship and then joined by another guest, his female counterpoint played by Björk. Immediately a guest–host relationship is established between these visitors and the crew. The two worlds negotiate the space of the ship. Occident and Orient, land and sea, fur-bearing humans and smooth-skinned ones develop a language of give and take, a pidgin language of hospitality and exchange. The guests are bathed and dressed, shedding their land clothes for period Japanese costumes. When Barney first comes on board, he wears a large fur coat and sports a dramatic beard. His transformation begins as the ship’s barber shaves him. Later his head is shaved, and he wears hornlike protrusions from his skull. His garb is a mix of arctic fur and a Japanese ceremonial robe. Björk’s character also takes on a transitional form by wearing an obi but with fur trappings and elaborate fur headgear. After the guests work their way through a maze of hallways, they find a tearoom at the bottom of the ship. They are greeted by a tea master, and a tea ceremony unfolds with ritual dialogue of questions and response.

The story line of the guests is paralleled by the creation and transformation of a twenty-five-ton petroleum sculptured form on the ship’s deck. The Vaseline solidifies in a mold shaped like a whale, but also shaped like Barney’s field emblem used throughout the Drawing Restraint series. The emblem is an oval form with a vertical bar or restraint across the middle of it. As Barney explains:

Our story is the removal of the arm from the field and the oval of the field is the body. And the bar is an external resistance that is self imposed. So, the symbol represents restraint or resistance that is imposed onto the body. Drawing Restraint 9 is about removing the resistance from the body and there being a potentiality for a sensuality or eroticism or something that then the project hasn’t allowed itself to have before. So there is the sense that removing the restraint can allow for something emotionally positive but that puts the body in a state of atrophy somehow.1

In Drawing Restraint 9, the field emblem looks like an abstract whale form with the bar serving as flippers. In a ritual consuming as knowing (an activity I have previously detailed in chapters 1 and 2), the crew eats small emblem/whale forms in a ceremonial hunting meal. Later, once the large petroleum field emblem form on deck has congealed, the braces are removed, revealing the black whale “skin,” grooves, and ridges of its outer body. Workers wield long staves with sharp knives on the end to cut at the outer “skin” of the mold until it sheers away and reveals the inner white petroleum, which stands thick like whale blubber. The crew slices into the form, and layer by layer, the mold breaks apart and, glacierlike, slides across the surface of the deck.

As this transformation and cutting take place above deck, another set of changes has begun at the bottom of the ship. After the tea ceremony, the tea master leaves, and the two guests are alone for the first time. An ensuing storm draws them together. The tea ritual served as a constraint that allowed communication between guest and host; it provided rules of engagement and respect of difference. Yet such ritual defines and constrains expression through arbitrary limits. When the host leaves and the ritual rules fall away, the guests begin to explore expression in tentative and sometimes awkward new ways. The tea ceremony’s ritual formalism is broken, and an erotic and passionate embrace unfolds.

It is a strange and slightly alien intimacy with gestures of romance that are familiar but exaggerated and oddly contorted. The lovers gesture as if tentatively forming a new ritual and syntax for communication. Above on the deck, the crew carves up the form of the whale. Below deck, the tearoom begins to flood with a mix of seawater and petroleum from the emblem/whale. The human as a homogeneous subject over and against the animal becomes divided between the above-deck Japanese hosts who would consume the whale and the below-deck Western guests who seek a knowing (one another) without devouring. With the below-decks room half flooded, and amid a passionate embrace, the two guests draw carving knives. Placing the blades under the water, they begin to cut at one another’s flesh, slicing away the human legs. Rather than blood and gore, the cutting reveals another surface, one of inhuman form. The legs are sliced in a fashion similar to that of flensing whales, with strips of fat and flesh peeled away one after another all the way to the bone. An odd assemblage of gestures and affects ensue by which this cutting without consuming, this passion of flesh—layer upon layer—this transformation of ritualized slaughter of whales transforms the lovers themselves. Eventually the legs are cut off completely. Used up. Whale tails appear from the layers of flesh, and blowholes appear on their necks. Finally, the ship survives the storm and rolls into the Antarctic seas accompanied by two whales swimming like spirits behind the ship.

The cutting to reveal whale tails establishes a dialogue between Hirst’s use of cutting as in Mother and Child, Divided and Coates’s becoming-seal in Finfolk. In Hirst’s work, the animal becomes a consumed object appropriated for human knowledge. The animal as object, as meat, functions as layers of flesh, veils of nature, to be opened up and investigated. In Hirst’s work, the animal bodies preserved in formaldehyde recall his fascination with scientific inquiry. Rather than use the scientific scalpel—with its connotations of reason, intellect, and dispassionate engagement for knowledge—Barney makes use of ritual flensing knives and turns them not toward the whale alone but more particularly toward the human form, where he literally cuts away at a conception of privileged interiority of the human subject. The artist transforms the rituals of whale slaughter. Barney’s character as guest is set within Japanese rituals, but as foreigner is far enough removed to reutilize these rituals toward other ends. He makes use of whale slaughters’ syntax and form as a language of death and consumption but turns it toward transformation. Unlike Hirst’s cuts with a chainsaw, which establish subject–object relations, Barney’s erotic cutting undoes human subjectivity and the myth of human interiority. There is no interiority there, no Dasein or being-there below or within the human body. Instead, there are layers of flesh and organs that shift in shape and function according to different assemblages.

Whereas Hirst posits a safe distance between viewer and object, in Barney’s world, it is the collapse of distances that ignites the dynamics of the work. When the bar is lifted from the field emblem and the restraints are removed from the form, it spills across the ship. The viscous mess fills the space between viewer and viewed like a flesh of the world (to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase) that engulfs and implicates all beings as participants. There is no safe position, no outside or transcendent space from which to stand and judge or observe. Instead, tactile form, touch of surface upon surface, becomes the mode of comportment. The friction of contact between surfaces propels the work.

The transformation in the tearoom recalls Schneemann’s erotics and body surfaces meeting in a ritual that breaks open into Dionysian myth of flesh cut, dispersed, and transformed. In Schneemann and Barney, these are not an erotics of interiority manifesting itself but rather desire on the surface of things, one surface against another. Unlike the crew that comes to know the Other through the violence of consumption, for Barney, the blades are pointed toward the humans, and becoming-whale functions as a different sort of knowing. One comes to know the Other through fragility of the human subject, which is stretched beyond its limits not to incorporate the other but to transform the self beyond itself. To recall what I have said earlier about Schneemann’s Meat Joy, the messiness of the work derided by Schneemann’s formalist critic is this problem of organizing the organs—ours and the animals’—so as to hold together the human organism rather than allowing bodies and body parts to mix across individuals and species. When the field emblem’s bar is lifted and the erotic embrace begins, the “mess” of contamination between bodies is unleashed.

As art critic Luc Steels observes, Barney’s work is driven by the artist’s fascination with morphogensis.2 The petroleum form fluctuates between its initial liquid state and eventual cooling and solidity, only to be cut open and sheer onto the floor in a semiliquid, quasi-solid state. Meanwhile Barney and Björk undergo their own transformations as they become part of a larger event structure, a haecceity or nonpersonal individuation that coordinates with the surrounding environment. The bodies of the guests have undergone a series of changes that lead to this event, each time becoming more aware of the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected by other surfaces and materials.

I have traced the Dionysian and satyr qualities of Schneemann’s work earlier, but Barney also has an interest in satyrs, as is evident in Drawing Restraint 7 (1993). In this earlier video work, a dapperly dressed satyr drives a limousine by crawling through the seat to chase his tail. Two satyrs in the backseat wrestle one another. One has turned into a ram (where his horns are turned around, curving inward). The horns become drawing instruments as the satyr wrestles the ram and uses the ram’s horn to draw a ram horn on the car’s sunroof as the car consecutively crosses the six bridges into Manhattan. Barney is consciously using the myth of Marsyas, in which the satyr challenges the god Apollo to a musical competition and is punished for his hubris by being skinned alive. Drawing Restraint 7 highlights the relationship between creativity and bodies risking their limits. Desire, creativity, and flayed skin from the myth of Marsyas and from Drawing Restraint 7 get reworked into the tearoom scene in Drawing Restraint 9.

Above, on the deck of the Nisshin Maru, the crew tries to keep the whale flesh at a distance. The long cutting implements recall Heidegger’s shepherd’s staff—a staff to corral beings into the open, an opening or appearing that is foundationally humanist. This is a crew that prefers consumption of animals over a becoming—devouring and using the animal for human purposes rather than repurposing themselves. Of course, Barney’s field emblem/whale does not comply; rather, it spills out onto the deck, invoking and instigating the erotic transformations of skins and flesh from the Occidental guests. Recall that Coates plies good sense and common sense as foils in his becomings. With the bars of resistance lifted, civility morphs into other forms and codes. Organs and organization are repurposed. The guests are caught between worlds: between their former land lives and the crew’s life at sea, between Occidental and Oriental, as cultures, languages, and modes of comportment, and between the lives of humans and the life and death of whales. With the bar of resistance lifted, barriers of containment between worlds become porous. Bodily being spills out in new ways, in a pidgin language of surfaces, worlds, and desires. Like the closing of Finfolk, in Drawing Restraint 9, Barney leaves us out to sea, afloat and caught between forms of being. The works provide a tentative closure, ending the work but doing so on the waves of the high sea—the alien realms and possibilities of other worlds.