Filmed in Matthew Barney’s sculpture studio in Long Island City, New York, US, where it was shown for the first time in spring 2023, SECONDARY is a five- channel video installation set within the context of an American football field. For sixty minutes, eleven performers — mainly dancers and movement artists with older bodies, including the artist — abstract the action that takes place on the field.
The plot of SECONDARY revolves around the memory of an accident that occurred during 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. Rebroadcast over and over in sports media, this tragic event would remain seared in the minds of football fans and the young Barney, himself a youth league quarterback at the time.
This new work demonstrates the complex superposition of real violence and its representation — as well as celebration — through sports entertainment. It examines the game and affiliated culture through a unique movement vocabulary developed collaboratively with the cast of performers, including movement director David Thomson, and Barney. The result is a highly physical, bodily study that focuses on every element of the game: training drills, pre-game rituals, moments of impact, and slow-motion replays.
Image gallery
The SECONDARY exhibition takes place across the Fondation Cartier. In the gallery adjacent to SECONDARY is a new ceramic sculpture that takes the form of a power rack — equipment designed for weightlifting. The work takes on a figurative presence in the installation. It evokes the material- based choreography in SECONDARY, in which metal, ceramic, and plastic are 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.
In addition, the exhibition will include some of the earliest DRAWING RESTRAINT video works which Barney began in 1987 while he was still in art school. Inspired by the idea of resistance training, he applied restraints to his body while drawing, exhibiting the resulting drawings, videos, and the related apparatus often as site-specific installations. The DRAWING RESTRAINT series initiated Barney’s explorations of the relationship between resistance and creativity, as well as bodily limits. It is the earliest work made by the artist and laid the groundwork for SECONDARY.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Barney will create the newest video in the series, DRAWING RESTRAINT 27, which he will film in the galleries of the Fondation Cartier. The in-situ performance will be realized by Raphael Xavier, in the role of Oakland Raiders football player Jack Tatum. It will be filmed and broadcast throughout the exhibition spaces.
Initially created by Matthew Barney Studio, a special edition of the SECONDARY magazine will be offered to visitors at the Fondation Cartier. It features never-before- seen imagery, as well as special contributions from the performers that comprise the ensemble of SECONDARY.
With this exhibition, the Fondation Cartier celebrates a collaboration with Barney that began thirty years ago with the co-production of the artist’s first feature-length film, CREMASTER 4 (1994). This film was the first undertaking in the making of The Cremaster Cycle—an eight years cinematic journey that concluded after five films.
For this occasion, the Fondation Cartier is organizing a special screening of the full Cremaster Cycle, hosted at the Christine Cinéma Club on June 29th and 30th, 2024.
A special Nomadic Nights program in summer 2024 will present unique works by some of the performers in SECONDARY. This programming includes debut work, featuring musical compositions and a variety of choreographic works, spanning postmodern movement, Contact Improv, Krump, and Break Dance vocabularies. This Nomadic Nights brings composer Jonathan Bepler, and movement artists Wally Cardona, David Thomson, Shamar Watt, and Raphael Xavier, into the Fondation Cartier’s irreplicable space.
Matthew Barney
Born in San Francisco, California and raised in Boise, Idaho, Matthew Barney lives and works in New York. A multifaceted artist, his practice incorporates film, performance, sculpture and drawing. He is known for his feature works The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), River of Fundament (2014), and Redoubt (2019), as well as his video series DRAWING RESTRAINT (1987-ongoing).
As a sculptor, Barney works with materials ranging from petroleum jelly, bronze, contemporary polymers, and now with SECONDARY, ceramic, to create objects and installations intrinsically linked to his cinematic universe.
Matthew Barney has presented large-scale projects in solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (1995); Guggenheim, New York (2002); 21st Century Museum for Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2005); Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland (2010 and 2021); the Morgan Library and Museum, New York (2013); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2014) and Yale University Art Gallery (2019).
He received the Aperto Prize at the Venice Biennale (1993); the Hugo Boss Prize (1996); the Kaiser Ring Award in Goslar, Germany (2007); the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the 54th San Francisco Film Festival (2011) and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024).
Curator : Juliette Lecorne
Exhibition project coordinator : Alessia Pascarella