![]() ![]() Barney filmed the “game” action on this springy, rainbow-hued artificial turf, which now fills and demarcates the exhibition space. In Long Island City, the playing surface was similarly colorized to suggest vectors of movement and force, its design centered on Barney’s so-called Field Emblem, a type of heraldic symbol, in the form of a bisected ellipse, for a body simultaneously in action and subjected to physical constraint. A star quarterback in high school, he was originally recruited by Yale to play football, and one of the most indelible sequences from his Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) involves an unsettling Busby Berkeley–style routine filmed on and around the uniquely blue field of the Boise State University football stadium. Clocking in at exactly one hour, the five-channel piece takes as its central subject a single incident, one of the most replayed moments in the history of American football: the 1978 collision between Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum and New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley, a hit that severely injured Stingley’s spinal cord, leaving the twenty-six-year-old quadriplegic for the rest of his life.Īs with the Idaho setting of Redoubt, Secondary’s subject matter represents something of a return for Barney. With Secondary, this conceptual focus is extended even further. Though stuffed to bursting with themes and ideas, from wildlife management and survivalism to alchemy and astronomy, in comparison to what came before it-the implausibly demanding five-and-a-half-hour-long Rabelaisian shitshow that was 2014’s River of Fundament- Redoubt felt eminently digestible, and, at just 134 minutes, almost pithy in its narrative scope. © Matthew Barney.īarney’s last major project was Redoubt (2018), a loose reimagining of the story of Diana and Actaeon set in the Sawtooth Mountains, near the artist’s childhood home of Boise. Five-channel video installation with sound, 60 minutes. Matthew Barney, Secondary, 2023 (production still). But it quickly became clear that Secondary instead represents a further step in his oeuvre toward a notional realism-that is, an approach that depends less on the endless profusion of symbolically freighted grotesqueries than on strategically pressurizing the strangeness available IRL until it begins to leak beyond the precincts of strict facticity. I arrived half expecting something to match the weather: another claustrophobic biopsychological phantasmagoria, maybe, or one of his rococo exercises in mythic exegesis. Walking through the acrid haze toward the pier where the video installation is on view-in the artist’s former studio, the same cavernous warehouse on the Queens shore of the East River where it was staged and filmed-it started to feel like Barney himself might well have orchestrated the unheimlich atmospherics, the sort that have populated his work for some thirty years. I went to see Matthew Barney’s Secondary on the first Wednesday in June, the day New York was reduced to a blur by smoke fuming south from the Canadian wildfires. Matthew Barney: Secondary, Matthew Barney Studio, 4–40 Forty-Fourth Drive, Long Island City, through June 25, 2023 Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Regen Projects, and Sadie Coles HQ. Matthew Barney: Secondary, installation view. ![]()
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