- Okay. - Okay, good.
And three, two,
one; and action with the harpoonist.
You're going to see a crust starting to form pretty quickly.
The interior of the casting is still soft,
so that the, um... it pushes the, um...
it pushes through the crust, and slides.
It starts to sheer and slide away.
It starts behaving a little bit like a glacier.
It drives the rest of the story.
The behavior of this... of this casting
drives the rest of the story.
I was interested in the context
to describe these petroleum jelly sculptures
that I had been making
and the history of that material.
If you think about where petroleum comes from,
I mean, it comes from prehistoric fossil,
and the way that, um, you know,
the way that the whale is probably
one of our closest connections to prehistoric life.
I'm learning a hell of a lot about this stuff.
I'll tell you that.
It's, like, more than I... more than I need to know.
I just want to pour this fucking Vaseline thing.
Hold on, there. Hold on.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait.
- Mike. Mike. - Everybody, wait.
Wait, Mike.
Okay, let's pull it.
That's great.
Excellent.
Big mold.
Yeah, out on the ship,
it's going to behave totally differently, right? Cold air.
Oh, so you're going to break it up right on the ship?
We are going to do this whole procedure again
out on... out on... at sea, yeah.
Come on, gather around.
This project is by Matthew Barney
the artist who is working in New York...
He is making a film and sculpture
for a new project that will open as a one-person show
next year at the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa
We are asking for your help.
Here is Matthew Barney.
Thank you very much.
Thank you much, Captain.
We're just starting to assemble the mold here
so these are the first couple of wall pieces going into place
that we're trying to capture in this shot.
I am an employee of the company.
I am a site foreman.
We've never had an experience like this,
so honestly we're having a hard time doing it.
...tie down to the front rail to further remove the vibration.
It's been shown in drawings, and we've talked about it,
but nobody really understood what it entailed
to have 45,000 pounds of jelly pumped into a big steel mold.
There's just a lot of things that are different
than what we did in Brooklyn, so we don't really know
if it's going to go as well as it did in Brooklyn.
And it's kind of a more of a sensitive situation
than it was in Brooklyn 'cause it's not our space.
It's their ship,
and the captain's already, like, pissed off,
and if we screw it up on this first day,
then they can just cancel the rest of the thing.
I mean, I'm trying to stay calm, although,
I know there is a lot of shit that can go wrong.
The jelly is not coming up right now, right?
Uh, no, they're raising the pressure.
They're raising the pressure in the tank.
Okay, everybody,
stand by, here we go.
Go ahead and let it go.
That's weird, man.
Okay, booming up, booming up.
- Booming up. - Okay, Pete.
Very nice.
- Very nice. - Oh, nice.
That's great.
Slow it down. Okay, good.
This is the 15th departure of the Whaling Research team...
We are aiming to catch 440 whales.
Without your effort, we could never be successful
with our research on whales.
Every year the ship departs from Shimonoseki
for researching and hunting whales.
Each voyage lasts six months.
We take a break for one to two months,
then we go on our next trip.
Well, the story really takes place on the mother ship,
and, um, the larger idea behind the piece
is to do with a guest and host relationship
between my endeavor of making a project here
and making an exhibition here.
So in that way, the Nisshin Maru symbolizes Japan
in a certain way.
You know, part of the-the concept of the...
of this coat and, um, some of the other costuming is that,
that the characters-- the guest characters--
start out as land mammals and slowly they become whales, so...
the stepping off of land
becomes kind of critical in the story.
The story started to develop into this, uh,
into kind of a love story, really.
I felt like it would make sense to bring Björk in
as a character, introduce her into the story that way.
We've known each other for, like, five years
and talked about a lot of stuff,
so such a big part of the project is so intuitive.
We've gone to Japan together, and...
probably found it was a place where...
it was like a neutral place that wasn't the States.
Because it's... can be tricky for foreigners like me to be
in the States sometimes, and it wasn't... Iceland.
It's tricky for foreigners to be
in Iceland, too, so it seemed like sort of a neutral ground.
And-And I think maybe... that's part of why, um...
when Kanazawa Museum asked Matthew to do the project, um...
I can imagine he maybe thinking,
"Maybe this is the one that we do together."
I received a phone call
about the project and Matthew Barney.
And she says that Matthew Barney would be
a very lucrative, prominent artist
like a Picasso.
I know Picasso, but I didn't know
anything about Matthew Barney.
She also named Mrs. Björk.
But I didn't know the name.
She is a very famous singer.
I do not understand his project,
but, of course, not many people can understand what is art.
If somebody gave a popularity exam,
ordinary people like me follows.
Matthew always worked
in several-- what he called-- states of the same piece
so that there would be,
um, a photographic state and a sculptural state
and a filmic state.
For this first shot, let's, uh...
let's just focus on the spine.
If you ask him he would say he's a sculptor,
and it just kind of grows and becomes this other thing...
The only reason why he's doing it is to serve his sculptures.
I can sort of relate to that.
I mean, I guess in a very different way, I...
at the end of the day, I am a musician and I end up, like,
doing photo shoots, and I'm just standing there
thinking, "This is ridiculous. Wh-What am I doing?"
And then it's-it's all back to the...
it's basically to serve the first...
you're doing it for the music, you know?
As a group, we'd like to see them all in the shot so...
looking down in the hole, the object comes down...
...make it off through here.
Goes through...
And then have the, uh, four other people...
...pulling the object back into the room, yeah?
Matthew uses materials which are not traditional materials
for a sculpture, if it's... if it's being seen as sculpture,
which it certainly is, because it's...
disgusting or liquid or greasy,
or all things which are so natural, so, I think
it's rather about expanding
these notions of materials than limiting them to standards.
Good, pick up your speed, very nice.
Here it comes. Okay, here it comes.
All right.
- Now slow down again. - Ten feet, B.
Slow down, slow down, slow down...
In 1991,
Matthew had just come to New York, he had graduated Yale.
As an undergraduate, he had come to New York.
He had a studio on 14th Street. I didn't know him.
Clarissa Dalrimple had been directing a gallery, and, uh...
and a gallery at which Matthew was about to have an exhibition,
maybe in two weeks, uh, and Clarissa went into work one day
and the-the gallery had been padlocked.
And I said, "Oh, you poor darling!
This is terrible."
And she said, "Well it's..."-- typical Clarissa--
"It's not terrible for me, but there was a young artist
"who was about to have a show in two weeks.
"He's put his life saving into fabricating his work,
"and he's being such a gentleman, that I feel rotten.
"Would you go and pay him a visit
and just kind of give him some attention?"
Absolutely!
Matthew had installed, in the basement
of this building, this incline bench,
and he had covered it in Vaseline.
And because the room was refrigerated, it held its form.
And it was this
ghostly, beautiful, amazing thing
that I had never seen or ever thought of.
I mean, who would use Vaseline as a material for a sculpture?
Then the editor of Art Forum,
she asked to see some images, and she was go...
"Oh, Madonna, Madonna..." and she was, like,
clearly beside herself with these images, which again were
completely... they had never been in the world before.
Matthew ended up on the cover of the magazine.
He was probably the first artist,
or one of the first artists, who was kind of adopted
straight out of graduate school, uh, and made a star.
Matthew had become
somewhat mythic by this moment, and there were
instant crowds, instant publicity, instant accolades.
Lot 327, Lot 327, the Matthew Barney.
And $60,000 starts it.
$80,000 in a new place...
$90,000 to the telephone.
It turned a lot of people off,
as well as turned a lot of people on, precisely because
Matthew was what was then a relatively new phenomenon--
a guy whose career seemed made before it even started.
And people wanted to find all sorts of reasons for this,
that Matthew was really just a fake
but good-looking, he was marketable.
The fact that he was a model
was being used against him there.
Well, if he was a model, how serious could it be?
The whole apparatus of the marketplace
masked what made Matthew, um... special.
And that was he had an imagination
that was pretty big;
uh, and that was unusual and a little hard to get a hold of.
Everything began with the Drawing Restraint.
That was the initial, uh...
that was the initial artistic impulse.
The early images from Yale, where he was
literally running up the ramp, tethered,
making as many marks as he could on the paper
before he was, like, literally slammed back down.
It is completely an artificial challenge
that he has set up for himself.
He exerts the maximal amount of personal energy
to achieve the result within this game
that he himself has structured.
Matthew's an athlete.
The sport of choice ended up being football
and really informed the early work.
Barney.
Again, they're trying to go.
He's got Corby Bernard, touchdown!
Matt Barney, what an excellent throw.
He is hot tonight and-and, boy,
are we going to see a fantastic finish to this game
and some fantastic, uh, plays through the air tonight.
I think Matthew does think like a trained athlete,
and I think that has enormous influence
on how... how the work is structured.
He was also channeling a certain kind of
1970s performance art with an emphasis
on endurance and physicality and process.
Because he was an athlete, and because he is an artist,
it was somehow a combination of the two activities.
And I think that he's very involved, even now,
in the sports concept of personal best,
where I think that he added something extra
to the making of a drawing
by hindering the process in-in some physical way.
So that the evidence you had of this activity was the marks
on the paper, but it's the activity that predominates.
This idea of placing hindrances,
of placing obstacles in the way of achieving something
to achieve something far greater
is the basis of Drawing Restraint.
Cut.
All right, cut.
Okay, let's move, uh, dolly over to here.
The scene comes from, um,
a traditional ceremony that's held in Taiji,
a small whaling village,
where, um, a plate is served with, um, shaved whale skin.
So that scene really comes from that
and that we decided to make it more like a piece of, uh, food.
So we made, in gelatin, we made a slab of blubber
with black skin over the top of it.
And we used squid ink to make the gelatin black,
and, um, a milk to make the gelatin white
and tried to keep the whole thing edible.
The bamboo represents the net
that was used in-in early coastal whaling.
I am nervous.
I feel like I'm on a cooking show.
And then we want these guys,
we'll cue them to all peel their arms.
All four at this table, okay?
Starto!
Our story is about the removal of the arm from the field
and the oval of the, the field is the body.
And the bar is an external resistance that's self-imposed.
So, the symbol represents, uh, restraint or resistance
that's imposed onto the body.
Drawing Restraint 9 is sort of about removing the resistance
from the body
and there being the potential for a sensuality,
or an eroticism, or, uh, something
that the project hasn't allowed itself to have before.
So there's some sort of suggestion
that removing the restraint could enable something
emotionally positive,
but, um, but puts the body into a state of atrophy somehow.
The harpooners are actually firing
at what they think is a whale.
And they hit this.
It's basically shells of shrimp that the whale can't digest.
At a certain point they vomited,
and these blocks of vomit float around for years
and they calcify.
Okay, thank you, we're going to move onto the next...
Thank everybody.
Stand by.
Yeah, we got your signal back down.
And...
action!
Starto!
Slower. Slower.
Keep dropping, keep dropping,
keep dropping, all the way to the floor.
You're amazingly calm.
Well, we got the shot, so...
- Like that. - Okay.
- You know. - So that what means this turn...
- Okay, I'll-I'll work it out. - Right.
- Okay, so that goes up. - Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's nice.
- Okay. - Okay.
- Here you go. - Nice.
- See you in a bit. - Okay.
Matthew's stories are the sort of type
that you don't sort of go,
"Once upon a time," and the whole story comes out.
It's just so many layers.
I think it's to do also with, um,
to drop the analytical mind, you know,
and not insist on, uh, an explanation.
And action.
Action.
Action!
- Starto! - Starto!
Nice.
I love the coat.
Curtsy.
Nice.
Why's he laughing?
Keep going.
Yeah, she's going through frame.
Okay... and cut.
Great. Thanks. Perfect.
That was great.
- Yeah? -Yeah, the timing was perfect, yeah.
- Is there more stuff? - No.
- Just that one.
- Sorry. - Okay, it's okay.
I saw a video of a Norwegian factory whale ship
from maybe the '50s or something like that.
They had a games of some sort where they were, you know,
sprinting and long jumping,
and, I mean, these guys were probably out on...
on the water for, you know, six, eight months
or something like that.
So, I suppose that gave me the idea to,
to try to develop some sort of a game
that-that our characters could play.
That guy's having a good time.
What happens in this game is
a crudely made garbage-bag whale
is dragged across the deck, and, um,
the guys are-are throwing these pieces of bamboo at it.
And cut.
Excellent.
Cut.
All right.
- Can you get a close-up on the whale? -Yes.
- Standing by. - I'm going to try to get a hit.
Can you guys, um, pull the thing?
Slowly, and I'll throw it at it.
Okay.
Cut.
Let me try it again and see if I can get one sticking up
that looks more like the other one.
Okay.
The things that got me most excited were these older
traditional rituals and the form of whaling
that's really outdated.
I was interested in trying to integrate some
of these traditional rituals and ceremonies.
The world was dependent on whale oil
as a main source of energy.
And when we figured out a way to use fossil fuel,
the need to capture whales sort of went away.
I wanted the mold to metaphorically be a whale,
but, at the same time, wanted it
to have all the language of a mold.
That's cool.
- And... rolling. - Stand by.
Rolling!
Telescope out into an overhead.
- All the way up? - Yeah.
We need, so we need to widen as much as we can, right?
- Yeah, this is all the way wide. - Okay.
Look at that.
There goes the crack.
Calving. Nice.
Ron, can we have the flensers go in
and try to work that seam again,
to try to get it... to try to get more to fall?
Okay, perfect, there we go.
Okay, stand by for winches, Ron.
Stand by for winches.
Okay.
We're... Oh, yes.
Good one.
Looks good, right?
Did you catch that moment?
Yeah.
- That was gorgeous. - Yeah, great.
That's looking great, Louis.
That's it?
Yeah.
That's it!
No fanfare?
No, like, "Whoo!"
These pieces are always about landscape for me.
Also to do with making, um,
a deliberately entropic piece,
especially at the end of the Cremaster Cycle, where I think
these chapters ended up being a little more understood as,
you know, stories that have a dramatic arc
with a resolve at the end.
And I think that for me,
when they're all put together,
it's, um...
it comes together as a system that can't,
it can't overcome its condition.
It's trying to, and there are moments in each chapter
where it seems like it succeeds, but I think, um,
overall, it can't... it can't overcome its condition.
And in that way, these pieces, I think,
are important in-in... admitting that.
I was interested in starting
what becomes a more radical transformation
later in the story,
a kind of a metamorphosis when the...
the two guests start to become whale,
that that could begin in the barber chair
with the removal of his facial hair.
Who's the star of the show?
Don't ever forget who the star of the show is.
I never will.
Have you called your parents since you've been here?
No. Have you?
No, not lately.
Even as an eight-year-old,
as a ten-year-old, as a 12-year-old,
he was totally committed to whatever he did.
He was a really active young guy.
He, uh, he liked sports.
I remember, uh, Marsha made him
a Superman costume with a cape and a big "S" on the chest,
and he just loved it.
He just wore it all the time.
And Matt gets up on one of these, uh, storage sheds,
up on one the roof,
and... and flies off.
And, uh, and we all look, and there he is in the air.
So I think he learned at that point that he couldn't fly.
Yeah, this piece Matt gave us,
he did while he was still at Yale.
And it's probably about 16 or 17 years old.
And this is the original Vaseline
in the center of this.
And this, uh, this piece here,
which is now a main part of his work,
originated from a wrestling mat.
That's where he, that's where it started--
from his high school experiences with wrestling.
He always wanted to wrestle with the guys
that were bigger than him.
Does your mom worry about you?
Um, probably.
Maybe the way that we tend
to throw caution to the wind
on some of these projects.
She's probably, um, she probably thinks that at some point,
it's going to come back and bite us in the tail.
At the very beginning of our conversations, um,
I had said to him at one point, and...
"What do you think you'll be doing in five years?"
I mean, "Do you have any big plans?"
And he said that he wanted
to do a work, and he said,
"Please don't think I'm pretentious by calling it
a visual opera," but he wanted it to have five acts.
Because he had Barbara Gladstone behind him,
he had access to money, um,
and was able to make productions that were
larger than a lot of other artists.
He makes films, but they're not standard movies.
They're not like most video art.
They relate to
sculptures and films that he makes,
but not in a way that's always clear.
A lot of people
reject it out of hand because they just don't get it at first,
and they feel that it's intentionally obscurantist,
and just unnecessarily convoluted.
I remember the first time I was there
and he was describing the storyboard that he had laid out.
And he went through this very elaborate process,
and this leads to this,
and then there were these mustangs.
And there's this thing in the middle of
the Bonneville Salt Flats
and then Norman Mailer.
And it sounded to me like complete,
utter bullshit, I mean absolute unbelievable nonsense.
And then, you know, what happens is once you become
indoctrinated by this,
you realize that it does make sense
in Matthew's world.
How do you feel, Matt?
This is the third day you've been pretty much
dipped into Vaseline, now you're into tubes today.
- Feeling pretty good. - Yeah?
My sternum's a little sore.
Mm-hmm.
My patellas are slightly abraded.
Matthew was working with a vocabulary
that I had not seen before.
He was introducing narrative and fantasy
in a very complex, sophisticated way.
Even though each Cremaster was different,
they had in common this story
of the descent of the testicle
and this system that wanted to be free.
It finally, in the end, had another metaphor to him
that very much related to Drawing Restraint
and the core idea in Matthew.
And that is
that the creative process itself
involves some strain and effort.
That idea of the Cremaster itself being about
this effort that one makes, you know,
this breakdown that happens
and then this newer form taking shape.
I think that's actually very interesting
as a way of looking at Drawing Restraint, Cremaster
and the whole creative process in general.
There's a certain cyclical aspect
that he continues to return to,
concerns that were there in the very, very beginning,
that are about this notion of growth through restraint
and I think that underlies all of his projects.
Red kimonos.
Okay, good.
This is a place that swallows up human scale
in the way that a lot of
the Cremaster stories are set in
really dominating architectural conditions.
I think that's useful to the stories,
which are trying to use landscape
as character or architecture as character as much as,
you know, human-driven characters as character.
Matthew wanted to plan together the story
and the Awadori festival, which is held
in South Japan every year.
That's good, right in the center.
Four, four. Walking. More.
And around, Louis.
All right, Louis, like you were doing something, okay?
- And then... 180, 180. - Slightly reverse it.
The story...
starts in an oil refinery,
and they're about to bring the oil to the ship
so the ship can sail off
and hunt whales.
Okay, here comes the kids.
- Sorry. - I told you to keep...
How do you combine the Awadori rhythms
and an oil refinery?
We ended up writing
rhythms that are very, very, very sub.
Um, they're almost, you almost cannot hear them,
you can, like, more feel them.
Being the music nerds we are,
we're trying to write sort of a sub-bass symphony.
I took some of the ideas from
one of the whaling ceremonies in Taiji
where people's faces are painted
in black and white and red.
Red, being the center, symbolizes the
inner body or the muscle tissue of the whale.
And the white is to do with the layer of blubber,
and the black being the skin.
Do you feel... is it pinching you anywhere?
No, not at all.
Okay.
Not the most practical garment in the world.
Looks great.
I guess he's a spirit of some sort.
Like somebody that would probably work
downstairs in the processing plant.
Some suggestion of belonging to this place but...
but in the most part, otherworldly character.
Check it out, Pete.
Scary.
Looks good, eh?
Yeah. That is really good, man.
It's going to be great.
Okay, rolling cameras.
Good one. Okay.
I've decided not to go too...
like concept something, whatever.
I-I... I've just been, like... in one... in one song is vocals
and, you know, another song is like-like, uh,
a rave track and-and the next track is kind of like...
you know, a Noh singer.
And, you know, I'm just trusting my gut.
My last album, which was only vocal,
I was very strict with myself
and said this, I have to do everything in vocals,
and no instruments allowed.
So it sort of had a discipline before I even started.
So, on this one, I decided not to have any of that
because I felt I'd earned the freedom...
by five years of silence, uh...
it-it was time to kind of just open the door.
It's so cute.
When I do my own music,
I obviously am very, very, very...
deeply concerned that the music I do,
that the root is from me,
the-the trunk is from me, the branches are from me.
That is not, like, borrowed from anywhere else.
Now that I am doing music that's set in Japan,
and Matthew wants the music to be based on...
original, ancient Japanese music,
I kind of got a license to
go a lot further in basing something
on something that musically already exists
than I would ever do for my own albums.
It's that... sort of fine line between using something
and making it yours.
I've been doing a lot of-of...
just layers of my own voice, um, kind of, sort of...
attempt to do, like, an oceanic landscape.
Sort of... with my voice since the whole movie happens
out on the ocean.
Instead of kind of having me as a narrator.
You see the amas,
who are traditional women Japanese divers,
coming in the story around the time that the story departs
from land and goes into the water.
So there'll be kind of a...
a passage that I'm imagining will be really, um,
carried by music.
Everybody, everybody should take several deep breaths
into their barrel before they dive.
Hyperventilation.
Towards us, towards us.
I was really interested in, um,
in trying to capture this sort of
hyperventilation that they do and this, um, depressurizing.
When they come back up to the surface, they dive deep enough
that they've developed some way of
depressurizing their lungs when they come to the surface.
It sounds like a whistle.
I'm hoping that by the time we start sound design,
that I figure out what that sounds like.
And then diving.
And action.
Cut.
We lost her at the bottom of frame.
Can we, uh, Björk can we have you, uh...
lean forward so we can focus?
Uh, uh, can I ask you one thing?
"The oranges were a pleasant surprise,"
it doesn't sound like a question to me.
- "Can you tell me..." - Yeah, first you're saying...
that the bath you were offered was very refreshing,
and then you say, "Can you tell me about the oranges?
They were a lovely surprise."
Yes, but it's not a question, right?
The second line is, right, "Can you tell me about the oranges?"
The way I've translated it,
it doesn't... it's not like a question.
It's that the oranges are a pleasant surprise.
No, so should I end on an up note, like a question?
- Tone up or-or down? - Yes.
Uh, that would be fine,
particularly if... in Icelandic, if that makes more sense.
I mean, I think it could work either way.
Okay, here we go. We're...
rolling.
- Speed. - Rolling sound.
And... action.
And cut. Excellent.
Okay, and you're going to sit down next to me.
We're going to sit...
kind of uncomfortable pause, then we're going to start
kind of looking towards each other,
- but never making eye contact. - Yeah.
And then I'm going to get up and go to here.
- And that's the end of the shot. - Okay.
The two guests who arrive on the Nisshin Maru
work their way through the hallways,
and eventually find their way into this room.
This is a tearoom, and is meant to be
in the bottom of the Nisshin Maru.
We're good.
There's a tea master who greets them,
and, um, a tea ceremony takes place.
He brings the tea ceremony idea to his project
and connects it to his own ideas.
I sympathized with this idea,
and that's why I decided to collaborate with him.
The ship is beautiful.
The path through the-the fox hole is complex.
It surprised me.
Can you tell me more about her name?
Okay, I'd like to try that again.
I guess what was surprising was the, uh...
how much like a... a game it is,
like a... like-like chess or something.
It's how you hold the objects,
and with what finger, and where you go,
and then you do this, and...
It's almost one of the tricks,
because, obviously, the reason why you go...
you go have a tea ceremony is to get
a-a vacation from the busy world,
just to free or clear your mind.
Af-After the-the tea ceremony scene is
that the-the host leaves and leaves the guests behind,
and they're... they're together alone
for the first time, and-and from that point, um,
they start to
break the formality
that-that the tea ceremony established.
And from that point on,
the-the scene starts to become more romantic.
The guests become romantic with one another,
and, um, and intimate.
So why do they become barnacles and squid heads?
What's interesting about Drawing Restraint 9
and its storytelling and its cycle of evolution--
Matthew asked us
to build this ultra-realistic body reproductions that,
when they're being filmed,
as the skin is cut, that will be parallel
to what's going on top of the boat's surface,
cutting up the symbol,
is that instead of seeing, um, graphic blood in human anatomy,
the skin parts, and it actually becomes quite beautiful inside.
It's clean, undriven snow, like whale blubber.
Nice and easy.
That alone is almost an-an arc in itself,
because you go from the expected,
and you blend into the unexpected.
Matthew's work tries to expand the notion
of a traditional artist,
to question the body, the function of the body, and
to use the body in many more ways
than we are limiting it traditionally.
What we're doing today is we're-we're using body doubles
for myself and the-the woman who plays opposite me,
and, um, in the story, we... first we cut off
- each other's feet... - Yeah.
And then we start, uh, cutting the back of each others' legs.
Oh. So you try to eat each other, yeah, yeah?
Eventually, yeah.
So you want it to sit like this?
Nope, like that on the bottom.
Want it to sit like this on the bottom?
Yeah, bottom of the foot up.
Oh, not the water heater...
When he decided that he wanted to go to Yale and-and, uh,
and was planning to go to Yale, it was for premed,
and he wanted to be a plastic surgeon,
and, uh, I had never thought, you know, a doctor...
what kind of doctor he was going to be.
It didn't...
But after I look back on it, I could see, you know,
he wants to create.
He wants to create faces and characters.
And I've always laughed
about him wanting to be a plastic surgeon since,
because, uh, God, what a job he would have done on people
if, uh, if they allowed him to do it.
There'd be some strange people walking around the street.
And action.
Sarah, come again.
Little higher, little higher.
There's your mark.
Holding. Now, pulling.
Over, and... good.
Deep cut, more behind the leg.
And there.
Little more.
Keep the cut deep.
Good. Keep going.
And back out, Sarah.
And up and out.
Great.
And cut.
The top horizontal.
And the tea guests start cutting one another
in a very similar way that the whales are cut.
The flesh is peeled away,
and the tissue is peeled away until there are these trenches
that go all the way down to the bone,
and eventually, the legs are cut off completely.
Hi. Um, I just wanted to welcome everybody
um, for the first screening of Drawing Restraint 9.
Um, for a lot of us that have worked on this film,
um, this is the first time we've seen it as well,
so I'm happy that you're all here to share our anxiety.
Honestly, I didn't understand
what the content of the film was.
I was honestly surprised our culture
could be portrayed in this way.
Pleasure.
Maybe that's shrimp?
I wonder what the white thing is? Wax?
When you look closely it looks gross.
He has put Japanese culture into himself
and then represented it through his own viewpoint.
Plus, he is adding his own imagination to it.
Usually, when an American artist uses Japanese culture
in their work, it makes Japanese people cringe.
But his project doesn't give us any of those feelings.
Hi.
I am very nervous today.
When you see the cutting up of a whale,
it seems like a dark thing, but in this case,
I was amazed at how beautiful it was.
Ah.
How are you?
When I was in school, and I just started
taking, uh, art classes, um...
I found that I was, um...
immediately trying to find things
in my own, um... experience,
my own life that I could
turn into subject matter and, um...
as I started to make things,
the process of making
started to become more interesting to me
than the things that I was eventually making.
This impulse to put myself into a...
a... a physical condition
and to, um... self-impose some sort
of restraint onto myself,
to challenge, um...
my ability to make a mark,
that eventually that idea, or that physical condition
became an idea, or became a story in a way.
Well, I grew up in a fairly, um,
isolated part of the country.
Boise, Idaho is a small city
in the northwest, but I think, I think
I always felt growing up
like... there was a long way to travel
to get to anywhere that I really wanted to be.
I tend to start with a place
and, um, I bring to that place
my own language,
and taking my language and...
passing it through another culture,
another place where, um,
mythologies that belong to that place
can inform my language, and, um...
my own language becomes a guest in this host body
and passes out the other side, transformed.