Matthew Barney rarely leaves one ambivalent; in fact, it’s hard to think of a living artist quite so polarizing. On the one hand, you have people like New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman declaring Barney “the most important American artist of his generation,” and on the other hand there’s the Village Voice’s Ed Halter using words like “masturbatory,” “ritual self-involvement” and “superficial foofery.” How it is that he is the subject of such a tepid documentary is nearly as much of a mystery as the often convoluted allegory of his art.

The main problem with Alison Chernick’s film, Matthew Barney: No Restraint, which screened last night at the Hirshhorn in the first of three Barney-related events at the museum in the next few months, is that it can’t really settle on what it wants to be. Ostensibly, the movie is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Barney’s latest piece, Drawing Restraint 9, which played in theatres and galleries earlier this year.

The documentary opens on the Japanese whaling ship, the Nisshin Maru, where most of DR9 was filmed. We then flash back to half a year earlier, as Barney does a test run of the molding process he’ll later use on the ship to create a sculpture with 45,000 pounds of his medium of choice, petroleum jelly. Returning to the deck of the ship, Barney is introduced to a thoroughly confused-looking bunch of sailors who are to assist him in making his film while they are at sea. Through much of the first half, Chernick jumps from this setting to a brief history of Barney’s rise to prominence as an artist. But for a documentary about the making of this one film, too much time is spent discussing his biography, and as a result, neither subject is addressed satisfyingly in the brief 71 minute running time. The end result amounts to little more than a promotional device for Barney and his film, or a special feature for the DVD release.