He’s a master at composing Vaseline sculptures, and you’d be hard-pressed to find another human being who can make a mind-bending fivepart movie featuring tap-dancing Masonic Girl Scouts, a double-amputee Olympian, cowboys, and the Goodyear blimps half as well as Matthew Barney did. We suspect it’s the symbolism in those movies that captured Björk’s heart. Now she and Barney are life partners and artistic collaborators. She wrote the soundtrack to Drawing Restraint 9, a movie based on a concept that Barney’s been involved with since his days at Yale: creating a drawing while physically restraining himself in some way. The movie centers around a trip Barney and Björk took to a whaling ship in Japan. The eight signed prints in “Matthew Barney: Photogravure Prints from Drawing Restraint 9” at the Dean’s Gallery at MIT (50 Memorial Drive, Building E52, Room 466, Cambridge, 617.253.9458) were taken from stills from the movie. Admission to the exhibit is free. Barney’s thinking? Even freer.
