When I visited, the principal performers - including David Thomson, who plays Stingley and is the project’s movement director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum - were running through some of the episodes that tell the story abstractly, in an indirect sequence. Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated football field, a movement lab and a film set. And it is showing to the public now in that very venue - his final use of the space before he moves to a nearby facility. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, near the East River. Six performers, out of a principal cast of 11, enact the roles of players in the 1978 game, including Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It runs one hour, the clock time of a football game. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.” “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field.
“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he said. Now 56, he is taking stock of himself and an uneasy nation. From a place of physical and intellectual maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport - and a country, because football is quintessentially American - that may or may not have changed. With “Secondary,” which is open through June 25, Barney is tugging at a loose end that goes back to his childhood.
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(Metrograph, a movie theater in Manhattan, is showing the “Cremaster” films this month and next.) Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened performance and sculpture horizons.īut the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by countless other themes - sexual differentiation, reincarnation, cars, sewers and excrement, among many others - and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “ River of Fundament” (2014) films. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders player whose numerous injuries led his body to be loaded with prosthetic materials. Physical duress was immediately salient in his work, from the “ Drawing Restraint” projects in which, for instance, he would harness himself and move along a gallery’s walls and ceiling, attempting to draw on the wall.įootball served as a prompt in the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of the early works that established his distinctive approach to combining performance, video and sculpture. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”īarney became an elite high-school quarterback, but he changed course during his years at Yale University, emerging from there in 1989 into the New York art world, where he found near-instant success. He relished practice drills where he and other boys were ordered to slam into each other at top speed, he said. “That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney said in an interview in March while editing “ Secondary,” his new five-channel video installation that takes that 1978 event as its point of departure. Violence was inculcated in football training, he recalled. He was just getting into the sport seriously himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, though shocking, didn’t stop him. The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho at the time and remembers the incident from constant slow-motion replays on television. Tatum, a defender known as “The Assassin,” notoriously never apologized. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on charge by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. The hit, 45 years ago, shook up the world of football.
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