Matthew Barney’s ‘Secondary’ Called His Best Work in Years

'Even those repelled by Barney's machismo will fall under its spell,' wrote critic Alex Greenberger.

At an NFL preseason game in 1978, Darryl Stingley, receiver for the New England Patriots, was rendered quadriplegic by a hit from Jack 'The Assassin' Tatum.

Matthew Barney, now 56, saw the hit when he was just 11 years old; it was further cemented in his memory by repeated slow-motion replays.

That moment of physical and psychological trauma is the subject of Barney's latest work, Secondary (2023), a multi-channel video installation showing at his warehouse studio in Long Island City that opened 12 May and continues through 25 June.

A wet trench dug into the studio's floor evokes the muck and violence of World War 1. Its decaying pipes reveal the ebb and flow of the tide from the nearby East River.

The work's title refers to the line of defenders tasked with disrupting wide receivers. Six performers out of a principal cast of 11—mostly men in their 50s and 60s—reenact the action on the field.

Barney himself plays Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler, whose brain was posthumously found to have suffered advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.).

Other performers include referees, Raiders fans dressed up like heavy metal barbarians, and singer Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, who performs an experimental reworking of the national anthem.

The work lasts for 60 minutes, the duration of a football game, minus all the stoppages. Writing for ARTnews, Alex Greenberger said viewers 'will want to stay for all of them'.

Greenberger described Secondary as 'a triumphant return to form'.

'The installation would be easy to write off as another macho, pretentious moving-image work from an artist who dabbles in them,' he said. 'Yet it is so hypnotic that even those repelled by Barney's machismo will fall under its spell.'

'The work's structure, with its emphasis on the buildup to the bad thing everyone knows is coming, energises it with premonition,' wrote Siddhartha Mitter for The New York Times.

Barney, who is represented by Gladstone Gallery, found success right out of Yale University, a school he was recruited to for his talent as a quarterback.

He is best known for his ongoing Drawing Restraint (1987–present) project, which used the metaphor of tearing muscle to stimulate growth as a model for creative progress, and the Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), which is named after the muscle responsible for raising and lowering the testicles.

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones described the Cremaster Cycle as 'the first truly great piece of cinema to be made in a fine art context since Dali and Buñuel filmed Un Chien Andalou in 1929.' —[O]