Drawing Restraint 9.

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden finds "an overt spiritual dimension that is a new element in Mr Barney's work. If that spirituality is an outgrowth of his relationship with Björk, it is a welcome addition in an oeuvre whose obsession with athleticism, competition and fertility rites has sometimes taken on fascistic overtones."

Updated through 4/5.

My hat flies off to the Cinematical editors, by the way, for their reaction to an official request that they remove an image of Björk. But of course, that's just a footnote to Ryan Stewart's review, in which he explains, "For anyone who has not taken the trouble to view Drawing Restraints 1 - 8, they are art projects centered on the search for an artistic corollary to the physical condition known as hypertrophy, whereby muscles gain in strength when they meet resistance."

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "God knows what any of this amounts to, really."

In the Voice, Ed Halter proposes it amounts to little more than "big-budget ejaculation of ritual self-involvement and superficial foofery."

More talk with Barney: Karen Rosenberg in New York, via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.

Reminders: Girish; Ed Gonzalez at Slant; and right here, David D'Arcy and Moira Sullivan.

Updates, 4/3: Michael Wilson files an entry in Artforum's diary on the US premiere in NYC: "Drawing Restraint 9 is unarguably Barney's most ambitious and spectacular film to date."

Harper's pulls up Roger D Hodge's "Onan the Magnificent" from the archives.

Update, 4/5: Daniel Kasman: "Outside of grand concepts, the film includes many other pleasures, and not just its visual esoteria, made surprisingly narrative, tense, and propulsive through Barney’s cross-cutting, which can swing from hackneyed and ignorant in one moment to evoking a kind of purity of simplistic of correlation in the next, reminiscent of its development ages ago in silent cinema."

Posted by dwhudson at March 30, 2006 1:32 PM