Abstract
Matthew Barney’s 2006 solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art showcased large-scale sculptures, drawings, and photographs relating to his film Drawing Restraint 9 featuring the artist and his partner Björk on a whaling ship in Japan. This essay examines Barney’s neo-Orientalist project in light of cultural appropriation and discusses the author’s participation in Drawing Complaint: Memoirs of Björk-Geisha, a guerrilla art scheme to interrupt the exhibition opening. The successes and failures of this intervention are considered alongside other artistic practices that deploy disidentification and hyperracial drag to interrogate the consumption of exotic and erotic spectacles only to encounter further exotification or cooptation. This essay also reflects on the instability of disidentificatory interventionist tactics as well as the psychic and personal toll of embodying toxic representations especially for queer artists of color who deliberately perform their own racial and sexual abjection as a mode of critique.
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