Matthew Barney's 'Secondary' Is A Meditation On The Cruelty Of Sports

The "Cremaster Cycle" creator's newest project turns football into abstract art

By Eric Shorey

Matthew Barney debuted his latest project, titled “Secondary,” on June 12th, 2023. Exhibited at the artist’s studio space in Long Island City, about a ten minute walk from the MoMA PS1, the installation uses a surreal athletic dreamscape inspired by real life events to explore the inherent sadism of American athletic life.

The installation itself consists of a multi-channel video performance displayed on 8 screens, all hung from the ceiling. The three screens in the center of the space are attached to a sort of miniature Jumbotron, hanging above a multicolor astroturf field on which Matthew Barney’s signature symbol, The Field Emblem, is emblazoned. To the left of the rainbow fake grass is a 6 foot deep, mud-filled hole in the ground, through which a small trickle of water was being piped. (The heavily tattooed gallerist outside glibly warned us before entering, “Don’t fall in the pit, please,” followed by a stern “No, really.”)

Above the pit is a sort of inaccessible dugout in which sports memorabilia (pictures of who I assumed were famous football coaches and players, jerseys, an American flag) were being displayed. And on the right wall is a painting with the same design as the grass, but smeared with… mud?

The hour-long video itself depicted a sort of abstracted football practice, culminating in an actual re-imagination of a football game — performed, obscurely, as a kind of slowed-down breakdance. The dancers, dressed in Raiders jerseys, lifted weighted, tossed ropes, and ran laps around the space in which the audience sat — but also seemed, in between exercise, to be making sculptures of cast iron barbells and covering themselves in mysterious, viscous substances. Referees stood on the outskirts of the practice session, looking over the Manhattan skyline, speaking to each other in barely-audible gasps and exhales. Meanwhile, Raiders fans, dressed in heavy-metal regalia and brutalist corpse paint, screamed incoherently, like preverbal banshees.

As the video shifted from abstracted practice to abstracted game, a beautiful, large woman in a gold lamé dress sang a pseudo-operatic version of the national anthem. Only a minute into the bizarre “game,” one of the athletes is downed and unable to get up. He twitches rhythmically on the floor, while the other participants in this strange ritual looked onward in silence.

Barney has since stated that the installation is an artistic recreation of an infamous football game from 1978, during which professional athlete Darryl Stingley suffered an unexpected spinal cord injury and was permanently paralyzed. (at first I’d assumed the piece was a comment on the frighteningly similar Damar Hamlin incident that occurred earlier this year. I guess these things are destined to keep happening.)

My use of the word “ritual” was intentional here, and one gets the feeling that “Secondary” itself, as with all of Barney’s work (but most especially Drawing Restraint 9, River of Fundament, and The Cremaster Cycle) is a kind of ceremony with specific rules, actions, and meanings in which the characters participate in a semi-conscious daze, only dimly aware of the roles they are playing or the purpose which they serve. In this particular occult cosmology, “Secondary” requires a sacrifice to be completed, that of Darryl Stingley’s body.

By taking the ball out of football and replacing the ultra-violence of the game with slo-mo dances borrowing gestures from breaking, whacking, crunking, and breakdancing culture, Barney calls attention to the ways that athletic games are themselves a kind of psychotic, primitive ceremony that hides cruelty, violence, and sadism — in which the bodies of (mostly non-white!) players are fed into a kind of cosmically indifferent, devouring maw beyond rational comprehension.

I’ll be real here and admit that although I’m an ardent follower of Barney, I almost never understand what the fuck his art is “about.” I mostly take it in as pure surrealism: the stunningly beautiful imagery of dreams. But, truly, the man is practically suffocating in art jargon and is totally incoherent in interviews. One could say this piece begs the question: what’s the difference between art and sport? Is there one? But here, more specifically, I think Barney is narrowing his obtuse scope to focus on a specific moral conundrum that remains to be solved: are sports worth the sacrifice? Does the amount of joy produced by this violence outweigh the costs? Is it moral to demand human beings obliterate their own bodies for the sake of our barbaric entertainment?

These are questions with which the artist must have grappled, considering he, at one point, was a college football player for Yale University.

Barney is digging in a familiar trough of imagery to make this point: his recycling of the aforementioned Field Emblem from his previous projects and his obsession with mucilaginous and gelatinous substances (thankfully, unlike in River of Fundament, there’s no diarrhea!) take on a more legible meaning in this particular symbolic system, whereas who fucking knows what they “meant” in his other works — if they “meant” anything at all. “Secondary,” then, functions as a sort of advancement and continuation of the bizarre sacraments he created in his previous projects.

As with sports, I do wonder: where does all the money for this stuff come from? To rent this space, to create these videos, to hire the gallerists — who is funding all this shit? Barney’s pockets are obviously deep. The dude has multiple, big-budget, non-narrative art films over 5 hours long at this point. He must have some serious coin. How does fine art — or athletics for that matter! — amass so much money? Is the appetite for this stuff really that big? Who are the investors making this happen and what are they really after here? Thus, the feeling of being controlled from afar, involved in some clandestine process which even the viewer and creator don’t fully understand, is completed, I guess.

Anyway, upon leaving the installation I wondered: why not do this as a live performance? But upon further consideration, there was something ghostly about watching the dancers on screens, occupying the same space I was occupying but at a different time — or, whimsically, in another dimension. And of course, this is how we mostly experience sports, as a spectacle on a screen. To be watched over and over.

“Secondary” is on view at 4-40 44th Drive in Long Island City, New York through June 25th. Entry is free and the film starts on the hour, every hour. More info over here.

FINAL JUDGEMENT: A+