Institutions such as New York’s Guggenheim devote shows to the work of Matthew Barney, but it's surprising that his Drawing Restraint 9 -- visual art and live performances, numbers 1 through 8 were not films -- should have secured festival screening and theatrical release. Still, amidst critical jargon, artist Andy Warhol, performance artist Yoko Ono, and environmental artist Christo have their enthusiasts, so why not?

Drawing Restraint 9 will probably appeal only to viewers who fancy New Age-ish Viking howling or to admirers of this multi-media experimentalist with a predilection for soft Vaseline. But, then again, there are the whale-watchers and –defenders, or latter-day Luddites armed against impersonal technology and maybe minimalists who, for example, decry the vanity of jewelry and pity the poor pearl divers. Just plain concerned folks, too, aghast at the despoliation and fouling of the oceans may find something of interest here.

The writer-director-coproducer and his longtime partner in New York, Icelandic singer Björk, gradually emerge as the central figures in this fantasy so nearly without dialogue that, when the first of only a half-dozen lines is spoken (in subtitled Japanese), the audience misses it. The nameless Occidental Guests, she in red and he bearded in bearskin, wait, respectively, on a rocky headland and a kind of industrial sea-platform, finally to arrive separately on the Nisshin Maru, the world’s only whaling factory ship, processing Leviathan’s flesh and by-products from smaller harpoon vessels.

There is time aplenty to meander, however, in the two-and-a-quarter hours, so before these two are distinguished from the pack, long shots zoom in, zoom out, on immaculate hard Charles Sheeler factories, on scores of workmen in unsoiled bright colored uniforms and helmets, adjusting spanking new machines and hoses and a large matrix contraption filled with hardening scum in the odd cross pattern first seen on gift wrap seals placed by a faceless woman (Rumi Tsuda) with not-young hands. Colorful neat schoolchildren celebrate the ship’s christening, though later we learn that she has sailed for years and suffered a mysterious wound in the manner of T.S. Eliot’s Fisher King.

Based from an elongated floating fake rock later towed to the ship as if a whale, female divers bring up oysters, strands of the pearls from which soon adorn the black coiffure and low-cut bare back of a woman in severe black evening wear. Brightly clad in happy coats in what promises to be a protest but disappears, teams of marchers pull a cistern truck with giant blue pipe cleaners.

There are machine rumbles, the effective ubiquitous sloshing of liquid, and a widely ranging music score, composed and often performed by Björk, partly accompanied by culturally unfamiliar traditional instruments and always pseudo-folkloric, invigorating or maddening depending on your ear.

Once basketed aboard, she is ushered into what looks a ritual bath with floating scored oranges, whereas he finds a barber to cut his beard and one eyebrow before a sailor surreptitiously shaves part of his head and half an eyebrow and leaves an empty beer can. The two are dressed in what are said to be Shinto wedding outfits, attend a stark tea ceremony, go through some sort of stiff marriage, and wind up developing dorsal blowholes and flaying each other’s lower flesh in a cabin flooding with rusty sea water and viscous petroleum jelly.

But the vessel does not sink in a terrific electrical storm. On deck, the mold removed, the sludgy contents collapse and ooze, the towed fake rock disintegrates into blackened glops of frozen shrimp, and two playful whales follow the floating factory into a shiny world of icebergs.

Michelangelo wrote of "freeing" his slave-forms from their stone, a fair assessment. “Visual artist” Barney includes sculpting among his multi-media experiments -- and supposedly the semi-liquid on deck, “The Field,” reflects his film’s core idea of  "the relationship between self-imposed resistance and creativity.” Come again?

(Released by IFC Films; not rated by MPAA.)