MATTHEW BARNEY’S SECONDARY, 2023
IT WILL TAKE a particularly dedicated football enthusiast—and, perhaps more accurately, one of a particular age—to recall fully the significance of a fateful 1978 preseason game between the New England Patriots and the Oakland Raiders. In this matchup, a young star receiver, Darryl Stingley, was running a slant route to the middle when, reaching out to catch a leading pass from quarterback Steve Grogan, he was absolutely flattened (or blown up, to use players’ parlance) by Raiders safety Jack “the Assassin” Tatum. Stingley’s neck was broken on impact, leaving the player a quadriplegic for the rest of his life and prompting the league to consider rule changes to protect its athletes on the field. Some new regulations were ultimately introduced. But the question of how to police the game—and to what degree it ever should be—remains hotly contested, for reasons that Tatum himself would provide through both word and deed over the years following the tragedy. The safety, for his part, never apologized to Stingley for his vicious hit or even spoke with him. As a former teammate explained, simply, “That’s the way he played the game.”
According to Matthew Barney, who took this event as his subject in SECONDARY, 2023, the episode made an outsize impression on him during his youth playing junior league football, articulating the game’s intensity and awful risk—its fundamental requirement of fortitude matched by physical preparation—and it is not difficult to imagine how this perspective might have extended to his artmaking in turn. Time and again in the artist’s oeuvre, sport (whether auto racing, grappling, or football) has provided a scaffolding for his surreal abstractions—to say nothing of his deconstructions of masculinity—often while Barney underlines the common cadence it shares with artmaking in respect to repetition, process and endurance, and even ritual.
The physical installation assumes a representational, televisual quality by mirroring the scene depicted on-screen.
As a matter of technique, the artist’s SECONDARY then represents a kind of apotheosis of such an approach, magnified here in evocative superimpositions. The piece moves across contexts in its very conception and production, consisting of a performance in his Long Island City studio (converted into a stadium-like stage for a reenactment of Tatum’s hit on Stingley) that he filmed to create a five-channel video for gallery presentation. This physical installation assumes a representational, televisual quality by mirroring the scene depicted on-screen, complete with a jumbotron hovering from the ceiling and large monitors in each corner. (Nowhere was this effect so powerful as when the work was first displayed in Barney’s own studio, the very spot in which it was filmed.) As in the video, a carpet makes a branded playing field of the white cube’s floor, with the color scheme nodding implicitly to the Russian avant-garde’s affection for athleticism. And two paintings in the installation at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, drive the point home, one featuring a busy passage that summons both expressionism and whiteboard play diagrams, the other depicting a camera on a tripod, with a diagrammed focal point underscoring how the gallery is the lens through which object is made image.
Barney’s video dramatizes this redoubling of art and sport (as well as of object and image) with an episodic structure that solemnly distills the arc of ceremonies that preceded Tatum’s hit—and which, in truth, happens on any given Sunday. Referees convene before the game clock starts; the team proprietor stares down from his owner’s box; and animated graphics show rotating portraits of Tatum and Stingley. In Barney’s handling, all seem figures from Greek myth. Yet most resonant are moments when players’ movements intermingle with the making of art: when the act of taping one’s hands rhymes with the sculptural process, and athletes use their bodies to cast objects using Barney’s materials of terra-cotta and plastic; or when Raiders fans are shown lowering components of Barney’s sculpture into the muck of New York’s East River. Different choreographies, from ladder drills to krumping—the performers themselves hail from different disciplines—are overlaid and interwoven. Single motions from both sport and dance are isolated and repeated, creating the sense of having been clearly edited, or disassembled and dissected, like so much videotape. And this sense of atomization culminates when Tatum’s hit—the project’s epicenter—is reenacted, with Stingley’s desperate reach for the ball shown in one long shot; the collision itself is replayed numerous times, shot from multiple angles (and with an ectoplasm-like sculpture materializing in one depiction by virtue of the event’s sheer force).
Through all these interwoven moments, what becomes clearest is that one of Barney’s greatest artistic strengths is his tacit acknowledgment of how media recasts experience. He embraces the camera’s surgical approach to reality’s web, and its capacity to expand space with close-ups and extend movements in slow motion. The crowd noise here can be heard in a single, isolated breath. (This art also has a corollary in athletics: Stingley would claim, until his death, that he could still see Tatum’s eyes as they were just before the collision.) Yet a crucial turn resides in Barney’s past and present preoccupation with myths and rituals that may create meaning, whether in the form of a corporate logo or cultural legend; satyrs in The Cremaster Cycle, 1994–2002; the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris in River of Fundament, 2007–14; or, in SECONDARY, Fury-like Raiders fans and the East River, seen here alongside Barney’s studio, whose elemental flow speaks to the irrevocable passage of time, and mortality. In art as in sport, it seems, myth and ritual are at once by-products of our mediascape, and necessities for anyone wishing to navigate its terrain.
Tim Griffin is executive director of The Industry in Los Angeles, and a contributing editor of Artforum.
