![]() This choreography recalls exercises that are meant to strengthen one’s muscles. ![]() ![]() Tatum (energetically played by Raphael Xavier, a dancer who practices a style called Breaking) is shown tethered in a harness, rocketing back and forth. Much of Secondary is composed of Barney’s cast going through the motions of something between experimental dance and a warmup routine. The dreadful possibility of death haunts the whole affair, a fact underlined by the appearance of one performer dressed as Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most who, at one point in the 1988 Tim Burton film, animates deceased linebackers. ![]() This dialogue-free video tensely moves toward its climax, guiding its viewers through game-day festivities, pre-kickoff preparations, and that fateful quarter. Gradually, it becomes clear that Secondary will restage that play. Secondary also relates to something that haunted a teenage Barney: the paralysis of the New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley, who was injured on live TV in 1978 when he collided with Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Raiders. Football, it turned out, couldn’t satiate an artist whose senior thesis project involved entering a gym, donning little more than cleats and a harness, and moving about above a mass of Vaseline shaped into the symbol that would ultimately recur throughout The Cremaster Cycle. He’d planned to be a professional athlete, then abandoned his dream while he was an undergrad during the ’80s at Yale, where he started out as a premed student before becoming an art major. That work, like this one, drew on Barney’s training as a football player while he was in high school. Secondary is comparatively downcast, its jagged soundtrack, also by Bepler, filled mainly by clanking and ominous humming, along with a lot of heavy breathing and shouting when the music isn’t playing. Cremaster 1 is buoyant: it features smiling dancers who kick their legs up and down, and a Jonathan Bepler score that recalls the tunes heard in 1930s Hollywood musicals. It’s Cremaster 1, in which an elegant ballet routine is enacted on a football field and inside two Goodyear blimps, that hangs most heavily over Secondary. With Secondary, Barney is returning to his past in more ways than one. The carpet contains an ovular form bisected by a rectangle-a symbol that appears throughout Barney’s art, most notably in The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2003), his famed suite of five videos exploring sexual development. Because of it, this space becomes something like an arena, with big screens hanging overhead at its center like those that loom over the court at NBA games. Its mise-en-scène, a dazzling red AstroTurf-like carpet that acts as the video’s football field, is left intact in Barney’s studio for viewers to lounge on. This is a triumphant return to form for Barney, whose icy gaze has rarely felt so personal.Īcross the installation’s 60 minutes-you will want to stay for all of them-oozy fluids fly, rabid football players scream, athletic bodies twist and turn, and a trench built in Barney’s studio gradually fills with muddy water, the sole reminder of all the shit and vomit that pervaded his last big swing in New York, the five-hour slog River of Fundament (2014). With Secondary, Barney returns to what made him famous during the ’90s-sticky substances, surrealist rituals, erotically tinged body horror-while also meeting the moment by exploring death as a form of spectacle. Yet it is so hypnotic that even those repelled by Barney’s machismo will fall under its spell. Set across several screens, the installation would be easy to write off as another macho, pretentious moving-image work from an artist who dabbles in them. Secondary, which runs at Barney’s studio in Long Island City through June 25, is his epic answer to that inquiry. The sport thrives on violence and bodily collapse, and yet, Barney, like millions of other Americans, is drawn to watching it. CTE, as that malady is known for short, is becoming increasingly common among football players. Monument Wars in the U.K., Matthew Barney-Installed Clock Goes Dark, and More: Morning Links from January 19, 2021Įven that protective gear didn’t help the real-life person Barney is playing: Ken Stabler, a quarterback for the Raiders who, many years after his retirement, was diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by trauma to the head.
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