Old friends reunite for Matthew Barney’s new video installation at his New York studio

Any exhibition of Matthew Barney attracts the curious. This has been the case since 1991, when long queues formed outside Barbara Gladstone’s gallery for the opening of her first exhibition in New York.

And so it was again last month, when a gurgling horde of invited connoisseurs descended on Barney’s sculpture studio in Long Island City for the premiere of his latest work, Secondary. The multi-channel video installation highlights the spectacle of violence that now grips America as it plays out in team sports, professional soccer in particular; it is also a dance.

“I love how much new work it is,” the artist said as cocktails were served outside in the setting sun. The studio, should I add, is across from the United Nations headquarters on a pier on the East River and has a great view of Manhattan. That’s where Barney did Secondaryas well as scenes from the epic River of Foundations (2007-14) and the recent Redoubt (2018). Because he’s moving to a nearby inland studio, the current exhibit will be the studio’s last hurrah, open to the public until June 25.

Upon opening, an air of nostalgia ran through the warehouse-sized space along with a reinvigorating sense of community. More than one of the artists, museum directors and curators present compared it to a class reunion. “So much has happened here,” said photographer Ari Marcopoulos, who helped Barney bail out the studio after it was inundated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. memories,” added Aimee Mullins, the para-athlete and actress whose roles on Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002) and River of Foundations each packed a lasting punch. “That’s where I was almost raped by a live bull,” she recalls, talking about her first collaboration with the artist and detailing the torture she suffered during a public rehearsal for the contribution of Barney at the exhibition-performance. Post time at the 2007 Manchester International Festival. Obviously, that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the job.

While the sculptures that came from time Secondary are new, the show is full of references to Barney’s earlier works. Here they are elegiac, understated, less surreal than in the past, and endowed with an exquisite new clarity of motion. On the five screens around the columned space arena, audience members turned their heads to watch the actors shape iconic materials like molten lead, aluminum and resin to craft objects in real time. , just like the performers in Basis did. And they push their physical limits.

Viewers watched the action on a three-sided jumbotron suspended in the center of the space, near the ceiling, while lounging or standing on a vast carpet printed with the “field emblem” that Barney introduced in Cremaster I, which takes place on a football pitch. Secondary looks back on the same tragic incident that inspired it: a 1978 game between the Oakland Raiders and New England Patriots that left one player, Darryl Stingley, paralyzed for life. His attacker, Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum, walked away without apologizing. Barney watched this incident several times on TV while training to be a quarterback and the memory never left him. While the ensuing uproar led to better body protections for athletes, they didn’t go far enough: The same thing happened to a college football player just last year.

Unlike his previous videos, Secondary adds a pointed comment to the horror of the subject. Barney appears in a cast of performers who developed the piece with him in improvisational workshops led by choreographer David Thomson, who plays Stingley, and composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney’s longtime collaborator. “There’s no music,” Bepler told me, “but lots of sound.” It includes our national anthem, a patriotic ritual that never made sense to me as a prelude to sporting events. Here he is rendered unrecognizable by the piercing vocalizations of Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a Native American soprano who is, as she wrote in the oversized souvenir program, “one of the few surviving Chiricahua Apaches who were called to nothing from less than total extermination by the US government”. officials in 1886″.

The character of Jack Tatum (played by break-dancer Raphaël Xavier) meets his destiny in motion in slow motion, so we can see every expression of pain in his body in extremis as if it were an inanimate sculpture – a thing of beauty floating through time. A disconcerting image.

Sport is more dangerous than art. It is a fact. Even though today’s art might threaten market consensus – it rarely does – it won’t put anyone on life support. What it can do is give a bruise to the status quo. In this vein, the Secondary is almost a public service operating at the highest level on all fronts.

“It’s not exactly The Hunger Games,” observed the Museum of Modern Art’s chief performance curator, Stuart Comer, “but you have a sense of the apocalypse.”

This was not the only spontaneous criticism. Actor Rupert Friend, who is married to Mullins, took my notebook in his hand to write his own after just five minutes of the hour-long video – a brief nod to this towering performer. “Barney’s show, writes Friend, resembles a picnic. There’s the lemonade, the mat, and the ball game, but you wouldn’t leave your murder unattended. I’ll be back.

I will too.