The average age of retirement for football players is around 35. In his latest work, the artist Matthew Barney, who is now in his mid-50s, has exceeded that by about 20 years. Were he to toss around the pigskin professionally now, he might seriously injure himself. You’re reminded of this when, in his new video installation Secondary, a white-bearded Barney dons an Oakland Raiders uniform and writhes on the ground, seemingly in pain after barreling into an invisible force.
By this point, Barney has tugged the plastic padding from his helmet and affixed it to the outside. If he were really playing the game—he isn’t, in Secondary, which never once features a football onscreen—he’d be putting himself in extreme danger.
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Even that protective gear didn’t help the real-life person Barney is playing: Ken Stabler, a quarterback for the Raiders who, many years after his retirement, was diagnosed with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by trauma to the head. CTE, as that malady is known for short, is becoming increasingly common among football players. The sport thrives on violence and bodily collapse, and yet, Barney, like millions of other Americans, is drawn to watching it. He wants to know why.
Secondary, which runs at Barney’s studio in Long Island City through June 25, is his epic answer to that inquiry. Set across several screens, the installation would be easy to write off as another macho, pretentious moving-image work from an artist who dabbles in them. Yet it is so hypnotic that even those repelled by Barney’s machismo will fall under its spell.
With Secondary, Barney returns to what made him famous during the ’90s—sticky substances, surrealist rituals, erotically tinged body horror—while also meeting the moment by exploring death as a form of spectacle. This is a triumphant return to form for Barney, whose icy gaze has rarely felt so personal.
Across the installation’s 60 minutes—you will want to stay for all of them—oozy fluids fly, rabid football players scream, athletic bodies twist and turn, and a trench built in Barney’s studio gradually fills with muddy water, the sole reminder of all the shit and vomit that pervaded his last big swing in New York, the five-hour slog River of Fundament (2014).
Secondary, by contrast, is much cleaner. Its mise-en-scène, a dazzling red AstroTurf-like carpet that acts as the video’s football field, is left intact in Barney’s studio for viewers to lounge on. Because of it, this space becomes something like an arena, with big screens hanging overhead at its center like those that loom over the court at NBA games.
The carpet contains an ovular form bisected by a rectangle—a symbol that appears throughout Barney’s art, most notably in The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2003), his famed suite of five videos exploring sexual development. With Secondary, Barney is returning to his past in more ways than one.
It’s Cremaster 1, in which an elegant ballet routine is enacted on a football field and inside two Goodyear blimps, that hangs most heavily over Secondary. Cremaster 1 is buoyant: it features smiling dancers who kick their legs up and down, and a Jonathan Bepler score that recalls the tunes heard in 1930s Hollywood musicals. Secondary is comparatively downcast, its jagged soundtrack, also by Bepler, filled mainly by clanking and ominous humming, along with a lot of heavy breathing and shouting when the music isn’t playing.
That work, like this one, drew on Barney’s training as a football player while he was in high school. He’d planned to be a professional athlete, then abandoned his dream while he was an undergrad during the ’80s at Yale, where he started out as a premed student before becoming an art major. Football, it turned out, couldn’t satiate an artist whose senior thesis project involved entering a gym, donning little more than cleats and a harness, and moving about above a mass of Vaseline shaped into the symbol that would ultimately recur throughout The Cremaster Cycle.
Secondary also relates to something that haunted a teenage Barney: the paralysis of the New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley, who was injured on live TV in 1978 when he collided with Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Raiders. Gradually, it becomes clear that Secondary will restage that play.
This dialogue-free video tensely moves toward its climax, guiding its viewers through game-day festivities, pre-kickoff preparations, and that fateful quarter. The dreadful possibility of death haunts the whole affair, a fact underlined by the appearance of one performer dressed as Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most who, at one point in the 1988 Tim Burton film, animates deceased linebackers.
Much of Secondary is composed of Barney’s cast going through the motions of something between experimental dance and a warmup routine. Tatum (energetically played by Raphael Xavier, a dancer who practices a style called Breaking) is shown tethered in a harness, rocketing back and forth. This choreography recalls exercises that are meant to strengthen one’s muscles. If done too many times or performed the wrong way, those same movements can wear down one’s body beyond repair.
The video’s big ending sees Tatum and Stingley (David Thomson, who also served as the video’s movement director) slamming their chests together several times over, with ribcage-like sheets of soft plastic between them. The last time around, they move at each other with a sheet of clay between them. Barney’s camera fixates on this mass as it falls to the ground and shatters in slow motion. It’s a piercing metaphor for how Tatum’s body was brawny and toned until it wasn’t.
This heartbreaker of an installation is fraught with suspense, and not only because a ticking timer is frequently shown. Much of Barney’s cast is not white, and the brutal encounter between these two men feels like too much to bear. Secondary is so abstract that the crunch of snapping bones is only implied, but even still, it’s visceral in a climate where filmed depictions of Black death proliferate on social media.
It’s worth noting, too, that the only women in this video exist on the sidelines as referees, a gender imbalance that’s not likely to sway Barney’s critics, who have claimed he has lifted liberally from feminist art, only to glorify the patriarchy. It’s a fair point: a surfeit of penile imagery recurs throughout Barney’s most well-known works, particularly in The Cremaster Cycle, which is named after a muscle that controls a testicular reflex. Secondary seems to be guilty of propping up the same beefy masculinity until you realize something more subversive is taking place.
Note the video’s best sequence, an anthem is sung by Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a Two-Spirit Chiricahua Apache and Isleta Pueblo soprano. Deshchidn, wearing a feathered black coat, fills the spot in a football match where “The Star-Spangled Banner” is usually heard. Rather than balefully intoning words of patriotism, however, they voice a mix of yelps, sobs, and operatic crooning. At a certain point, Deshchidn says the video’s only audible word over and over: “Bombs!” Afterward, they stare at the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis (Thomas Kopache), who watches the performance from a viewing booth, and laugh at his stony face.
Herein lies the crux of Secondary, a suspenseful confrontation between people of vastly different stripes moving on a collision course. Barney offers the standoff as America in miniature. He seems to tell us we must not look away.
Correction, 5/15/23, 2:50 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated details about the collision between Jack Tatum and Darryl Stingley. It was Stingley who was left paralyzed, not Tatum.