TRIBUTE: Matthew Barney-SECONDARY (Object Replay)

Since graduating from Yale in 1989, Matthew Barney has made a rapid impact on the art world. In 1994 Barney embarked on the “CREMASTER” cycle, possibly Barney’s most complex work, which consists of five feature length films that he wrote, directed and performed in. The cycle explores the creation of form gender and sexuality constructing a personal mythology. Alongside each film, Barney createS sculptures, photographs and drawings relating to the themes and imagery within the cycle.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gladstone Gallery Archive

Galerie Max Hetzler, Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, and Regen Projects are pleased to announce “SECONDARY” an exhibition in four parts by Matthew Barney. Unfolding sequentially across the galleries, each presentation traces the artist’s career-long interest in the relationship between the body, transmogrification, physical possibility, and the deep-rooted history of violence that serves as a cornerstone to the American psyche. In addition to a new series of sculptures and drawings, Barney premiers his film, “SECONDARY”, in London, Paris and Los Angeles. Across the installations, Barney re-maps subject matter that has repeatedly circulated within his oeuvre, conflating notions of material potential and myth-making with the spectre of entropic collapse. Each arm of the exhibition traces back to the artist’s 2023 film, “SECONDARY”, a five-channel work that draws its inspiration from the infamous 1978 Raiders vs. Patriots game in which defensive back Jack Tatum delivered an open field hit that left wide receiver Darryl Stingley permanently paralysed. Recalling his own memories of the play, the impact and the culture of spectacle that continues to inform the incident today, Barney addresses the consequences of a sport that has become synonymous with physical brutality. Moving from pregame to game, from play to impact, and finally arriving at the media’s relentless repetition of the collision itself, the exhibitions examine the connective tissue that joins our scopophilic desire to witness lethal force with the anxieties stirred by the vulnerabilities of our own bodies. Consistent with Barney’s practice, the sculptural works in the exhibition trespass from the screen to the gallery, blurring the distance between the artist’s constructed cinematic narratives and the corporeal. Comprised of a range of materials that exhibit individual intrinsic behaviours, the objects in “SECONDARY” probe issues of time and aging. Conjuring the limits of the body by using mediums that respectively indicate elasticity (synthetic polymers), strength (cast metals), and fragility (ceramic), Barney both memorialises and pathologises the Tatum/Stingley event. Also included in each exhibition are a new series of large-scale drawings on aluminium panel, each of which expands upon the motif of the field emblem. Simultaneously diagrammatic and abstract, these drawings examine issues of repetition, memory, and the flux between the symbolic and the real. For his installation at Gladstone Gallery, “SECONDARY: object replay”, the artist offers a series of contemporary meditations on his most familiar forms. Here, his relentless interrogation of interiority is turned outward, and his traditional concerns are complicated by a series of iterative structures that each indicate a personal confrontation with violence. A cast ceramic sculpture titled “Power Rack with Fractured Barbel”l evokes both the absent figure and a leitmotif of vulnerability, its broken crossbar and wilting towel suggesting injuries that are both visible and concealed. Created to echo both the internal mechanisms of the body and the subterranean infrastructure of the studio is “Supine Axis”, a segmented ceramic pipe that plastic, surgical scaffolding attempts to hold together. A collapsed net of dumbbells reveals the structure’s misgivings. In “Power Rack / Iron Inversion”, Barney continues his tradition of ideating on the relationship between the constructed physique and the readymade, redoubling his examination of the points of contact that join abstraction and figuration. Additionally, the artist presents “DRAWING RESTRAINT 26”. Executed, filmed and presented in Gladstone’s 21st Street gallery, the work is performed as a duet between dancer Raphael Xavier (SECONDARY’s Jack Tatum) and Barney (as quarterback Ken Stabler). Half performance and half presentation of trace, the work charts the repeated physical and psychological damage sustained by both players in endless replay. While Tatum’s mark-making on the gallery walls is the result of a series of running drills conducted while he impacts a cast clay weight, other gestures belie something more ominous. One of the first NFL players to be diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, Stabler leaves his imprint with a metal barbell and clay weight attached to his skull.

Photo: Installation View, Matthew Barney, SECONDARY: object replay, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2024, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Info: Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/5-26/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com/