TRIBUTE: Matthew Barney-SECONDARY (object impact)

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: Galerie Max Hetzler 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 Galerie Max Hetzler, “SECONDARY: object impact”, Barney presents a series of objects that address the concept of impact as both a physical interaction and a theoretical system of exchange. Central to the exhibition is “impact BOLUS”, a sculpture that strips back the prosthetic skin of the artist’s iconic 1991 work, “DRILL TEAM: screw BOLUS”, and exposes its unguarded interior. The piece is largely comprised of casts made from the negative space between Tatum and Stingley (performed in the film by Raphael Xavier and David Thomson) at the moment of contact. Memorialising the exact distance between the two colliding players, the sculpture suggests an interaction that ricochets between extreme violence and physical intimacy. With its series of vertebrae-like elements draped in a shroud of netted dumbbells, “impact BOLUS” edges incrementally towards figuration, its components exploring both the body and a culture that demands its sacrifice in exchange for entertainment. Also included in the installation is “Patriot”, a white polyethylene structure draped with Stingley’s jersey that hovers between effigy and ghost. Here, Barney’s historical investigations are both conjured and negated; in lieu of probing the relationship between resistance and material potential, the artist instead presents a pair of objects in a state of exhaustion.

Photo: Matthew Barney, Field Panel: C.T.E. Parallax, 2023, oil and acrylic on aluminium, 106.7 x 213.4 x 22.2 cm.; 42 x 84 x 8 3/4 in., Photo: David Regen, © Matthew Barney, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler

Info: Galerie Max Hetzler, 46 rue du Temple & 57 rue du Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 7/6-25/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.maxhetzler.com/