When Matthew Barney’s work first came to prominence in the early 1990s, it brought to mind the Warren Zevon song, Excitable Boy.

Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best
Excitable boy, they all said
And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy

He took in the four a.m. show at the Clark
Excitable boy, they all said
And he bit the usherette's leg in the dark
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy

I didn’t attend the recent press or invitational screenings for Barney’s new film, Drawing Restraint 9. But both word of mouth and published reports made me feel as if I had seen it – all 135 minutes of it -- even if most reviewers seemed to wish that they hadn’t. Having endured the entire 15 hours of his Cremaster cycle, I could certainly feel their pain. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, the flayed blubber of DR9 not far from the descending testicle of Cremaster. Barney’s aesthetic legacy from the earlier film seems to have survived remarkably intact. There is his narcissism, his addlepated attempts at creating a personal mythology, his fetishistic transgressions, his pretentious (and expensive) tropes of fashion, his overreaching symbolism, his staging of inane rituals, his plodding sense of narrative, his artless editing (like boxcars crashing together on rusty tracks) and insipid cinematography. Taken together, they constitute a singular cinematic achievement.

In her contract with negative space - making it the sine qua non of her oeuvre - Rachel Whiteread generally creates sculptures that beg the interaction of humanity while remaining forbidding, unpopulated, aloof. A ceremony, and therefore a narrative, is implied by her austere castings of the volumes beneath a ceiling, around a stairwell, against a bookshelf, inside a water tank. But this narrative is conspicuously denied. We are set adrift, frustrated in our attempt to give significance to her plinths, altars, sarcophagi. We are thrown back upon an academic contemplation of their formal qualities, all the while yearning to assign them some specific context of human activity, some aspect of the anecdotal, vernacular, religious. But her sculptures remain obdurately obscure to our interpretation. They are, in a word, sphinxlike.

Although Whiteread's work is self consciously monumental, her embrace of the void renders moot any discussion of progress or history, issues which often accompany the civic monument, and which, in fact, are the impetus behind the public commissioning of most monuments.