Hyperdesign!
A camera crew asked me to say that yesterday. I tried to say it jauntily. I suppose the clip, if it’s used at all, will be used to promote the Biennale. Hyperdesign is this year’s theme.
Oh, I did see the Matthew Barney film yesterday. The theater in the museum was jam-packed, which surprised me until I noticed at least some of the people there were sleeping right from the beginning. They must have been napping before the movie started, and then people who wanted to watch just filled in around them. As for the movie, I can’t say I understood it. I enjoyed it, as much as for the documentary aspects (work on the whaling ship) as anything else. I didn’t understand the significance of the ambergris, or if it had any special significance, or even if that’s what was in that mold (which to me looked like it was shaped like a maxi-pad with wings). It didn’t help that I missed a little bit of the beginning. That happened because the museum was swamped again, there was a line snaking way out outside, and plus, several people working there insisted to me that the film wasn’t showing that day. But still, I persevered, bought my ticket, and tracked down the theater inside the building. Really, I don’t know what to say about the film. The visual imagery and music weren’t as lush as in Cremaster 5. The film had to do with restraint, and while watching it I realized the Japanese tea ceremony has something to do with displacement of pleasure (while I don’t think the film was supposed to help me realize this — it just happened). After being slow and very matter-of-fact for the first hour and a half or so, it got much stranger, and had much more of the sort of imagery I had expected to see. Still, I can’t say that I understood it at all. I didn’t understand the guy/thing with the hose, and what it was, if not a strange version of one of the ship workers. One of the Chinese people near me asked “Is it a clown?” (in the Peking opera clown sense, not the Western sense). I’m not sure I can say anything more about it, really, than what I’ve written here.