Drawing Restraint 13 by Matthew Barney takes place in Gladstone Gallery, with the front of the gallery open to the street and a graffiti'd "THEN" visible on a building outside.  In the foreground stands an army photographer, on duty to historicize this event.

In DR 13, artwork serves literally as document.  In Barney's version of Japan's surrender, there are fifteen (excluding the video itself).  We glimpse each drawing except the last one, only the title of which is shown: "The Instrument of Surrender."  The Japanese Instrument of Surrender was the written agreement that ended WWII.

Some of the drawings are reproduced in two catalogues available for viewing at Conduit Gallery during the exhibition of DR 13.  The drawings incorporate images relating to Drawing Restraint 9, whaling, or Japanese history or culture: the log of ambergris (a protective substance produced in whale intestines and re-purposed as a fixative in perfumes); prow-like shapes; references to hosts and guests; the Japanese arts of wrapping or tying packages or tea vessels, or of binding sexual partners; a Shinto shrine purported to be the home of a sacred mirror; breaching whales; intercourse; Barney and Bjork after they've sliced away one another's legs; Dejima, a fan-shaped island which, during a period of self-imposed Japanese isolation, was the only lawful place of contact between Japanese and Europeans, with a field emblem serving as sole bridge to Japan; and Barney/MacArthur as a skull smoking a pipe spouting like a whale, among other things.

"Instrument" evokes writing, drawing, or musical instruments – tools by which we make expressions of ourselves that may or may not survive us.

It seems the artist has compelled an aggressor to surrender.  Whatever you think of Barney's work, it can't be denied that he has, in some sense, won the art wars.  But unlike the signing of the original Japanese Instrument of Surrender, in Barney's ceremony, the artist brands his own "instruments," signs before the other side instead of after, and then remains in the gallery, within his own figment, while the asian man walks out.  Perhaps the asian man leaves because he's been defeated; but apparently he has in some sense also been freed.

Is there a sense in which the U.S. actually lost the war to the Japanese?  Has Barney as artist really conquered, or surrendered – perhaps to some (drawing or whatever) restraint?  He arrived in a relatively small container, from which he had to be released by his soldiers.  Is it a real restraint if it's one you chose?

Barney has also surrendered his work to his gallery, his patrons, to all of us.  If he wants others to see his work, he has no choice but to suffer whatever interpretations any of us may put not only upon the documents through which he expresses his vision but upon him personally.

But through this re-enactment, Barney transforms both the past and the present.

I remember the Queen's Magician in Cremaster 5, at the bottom of the Danube, his hands still shackled, on the verge of transformation, escape and freedom, or death.  (CS)