SECONDARY is a five-channel video installation which was filmed in my sculpture studio in Long Island City, New York where it was also staged as an exhibition in May 2023. The studio is both the site and a central character in SECONDARY’s narrative structure. In May and June 2024, the project will be expanded in a sequence of unique exhibitions including new sculpture and drawings at Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Regen Projects, and Galerie Max Hetzler, and solo shows will be presented at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, June 2024.

SECONDARY maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture. My personal involvement in the sport served as a starting point for the development of this project. The extreme physical and psychological conditions of the game—which have been abstracted into my art practice since my earliest work—provide a context for this subject that is both retrospective and a new, direct engagement.

The significant risk of the game became clear, and made a lasting impression on me as a young player, through an incident that took place in a professional football game on August 12, 1978 where Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Oakland Raiders, delivered an open field hit on Darryl Stingley, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots. Stingley was left paralyzed. The impact, and Stingley’s resulting catastrophic injury, became mythic in scale through its relentless replay in sports media. It was also a watershed case for the reform of rules protecting the bodies of athletes, a topic which remains controversial in the world of athletics today. SECONDARY’s underlying plotline examines these charged aspects of football, and specifically, my memory of that play in 1978—through a movement vocabulary that focuses on each element of the game, from drills to pre-game rituals to the moments of impact. It seeks to explore the complicated overlay of actual violence and its currency as image within the sport and the culture at large.

The parallel narrative in SECONDARY is a material-based choreography where the substances I use to make sculpture—metal, ceramic, and plastic, all in various states of liquidity—are generated, formed, and manipulated by the performers in real time. These materials speak to qualities of strength, elasticity, fragility, and memory, and each, in its own way, embodies a character.

I cast the negative space between Tatum and Stingley at the moment of impact as a starting point for a body of sculptural work. This abstract form was cast in ceramic, aluminum, and synthetic polymer. As each material cured, gravity and time allowed stress to affect its form, sagging and cracking. The evidence of sustained tension and impact in these materials is central to this group of sculptures.

These material dynamics are explored through the use of athletic equipment as figurative motifs. Power racks, Olympic weights, and barbells cast in terracotta were made to collide with objects in more resilient plastic and metal. In some works the materials were fused together, complicating the difference between their properties and behaviors. Instruments that originate from subterranean infrastructure and internal medicine—drain pipes and medical bracing, surgical drapes, and sandbags—recall the vertebral column and supine figure, described by their vulnerability.

SECONDARY is an ensemble piece, developed with the performers in the collaborative environment of improvisational workshops together with movement director David Thomson and composer Jonathan Bepler. The athletes cast in SECONDARY are played by professional dancers and myself, and range broadly in age, but with an emphasis on older bodies. The cast includes dancers, actors, and musicians from diverse movement backgrounds—football technique, postmodern movement, Krump and Break Dance vocabularies, dramatic acting, and extended vocal methods. The principal performers are Matthew Barney, Wally Cardona, Isabel Crespo Pardo, Jacquelyn Deshchidn, Jeffrey Gavett, Ted Johnson, Kyoko Kitamura, Thomas Kopache, David Thomson, Shamar Watt, and Raphael Xavier.

My studio sits on a pier on the bank of the East River. Inside the studio is a six-foot-deep trench excavated from the concrete floor. This hole reveals a shattered ceramic pipe that drains into the river. This spatial condition takes on another character in SECONDARY and shapes the plot. As the tide rises, the trench floods with river water, keeping time for the narrative alongside the scoreboard’s countdown. Fifteen minutes: the play begins. Thirteen minutes fifty-one seconds: the traumatic hit takes place. Zero seconds: time is out. The evolution of the characters undulates with the slow exposition of broken infrastructure.

Matthew Barney