Matthew Barney, Back within the Game

The hit, 45 years in the past, shook up the world of soccer. Then, simply as shortly, individuals moved on. But not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on cost by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender often called “The Assassin,” notoriously by no means apologized.

The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho on the time and remembers the incident from fixed slow-motion replays on tv. He was simply moving into the game significantly himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, although surprising, didn’t cease him. Violence was inculcated in soccer coaching, he recalled. It was additionally addictive.

“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the head and what that feels like in your body,” Barney mentioned in an interview in March whereas modifying “Secondary,” his new five-channel video set up that takes that 1978 occasion as its level of departure. He relished follow drills the place he and different boys have been ordered to slam into one another at prime velocity, he mentioned. “You’d walk away, and you’re seeing stars.”

Barney grew to become an elite high-school quarterback, however he modified course throughout his years at Yale University, rising from there in 1989 into the New York artwork world, the place he discovered near-instant success. Physical duress was instantly salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” tasks through which, for example, he would harness himself and transfer alongside a gallery’s partitions and ceiling, trying to attract on the wall.

Football served as a immediate within the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of many early works that established his distinctive strategy to combining efficiency, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders participant whose quite a few accidents led his physique to be loaded with prosthetic supplies. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened efficiency and sculpture horizons.

But the game itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by numerous different themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, vehicles, sewers and excrement, amongst many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) movies. (Metrograph, a movie show in Manhattan, is exhibiting the “Cremaster” movies this month and subsequent.)

With “Secondary,” which is open by way of June 25, Barney is tugging at a free finish that goes again to his childhood. From a spot of bodily and mental maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a rustic, as a result of soccer is quintessentially American — that will or might not have modified. Now 56, he’s taking inventory of himself and an uneasy nation.

“There’s a way that the violence in our culture has become so exposed everywhere you look,” he mentioned. “I think my relationship to that legacy is by way of my experience on the football field. I wanted to make a piece that looks at that, in more ways than one.”

The new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a soccer sport. Six performers, out of a principal solid of 11, enact the roles of gamers within the 1978 sport, together with Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Long Island City, close to the East River. And it’s exhibiting to the general public now in that very venue — his ultimate use of the area earlier than he strikes to a close-by facility.

Last fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated soccer area, a motion lab and a movie set. When I visited, the principal performers — together with David Thomson, who performs Stingley and is the venture’s motion director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — have been working by way of a few of the episodes that inform the story abstractly, in an oblique sequence.

There have been bizarre issues happening, too. Additional performers across the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders followers, strolling round like camp horror figures; some have been actors, however others have been members of the Raiders’ New York City fan membership. Some have been being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio flooring, exposing pipes, filth and water.

An artist’s studio, Barney mentioned, has traits of the stadium. “It’s kind of the organizing body for this story,” he mentioned, including: “I wanted my working space to be a character.”

Digging the ditch, he mentioned, revealed decaying pipes and the way the tide floods and recedes underneath the buildings. “I wanted that infrastructure to be exposed, both as a manifestation of the broken spine of Stingley, but also as crumbling infrastructure within my studio, within the city of New York,” he mentioned.

For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers back to the again line of defenders on the soccer area, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the vast receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and ethical core.

It is wealthy and in addition tragic materials. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wished an apology that by no means got here. Tatum argued that the hit was simply a part of the job, even when he additionally boasted that his fashion of play pushed the road. Since then a flood of analysis has confirmed the game’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney performs in “Secondary,” contributed to this data posthumously when his mind was discovered to point out superior continual traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.

I requested if Barney, the previous quarterback, had come to fret about his personal well being. “Honestly, yeah,” he mentioned. He was glad, he added, that he stopped enjoying when he did.

“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead system reveals one video channel on three screens, whereas 4 different channels run on displays across the studio. The hit is evoked early, however a lot of the following motion returns to buildup — gamers warming up, followers getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the ultimate third.

The level was by no means a literal therapy, mentioned Thomson, the motion director and Barney’s shut collaborator on the venture. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he mentioned. “I’m not trying to be Stingley, a person I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a moment.”

Still, Thomson mentioned, from finding out the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that knowledgeable how he labored with the actors who painting them. Stingley, he mentioned, was earnest. Tatum, offended. Grogan, technical. Each trait, he mentioned, grew to become “a touchstone one goes back to without too many flourishes, and see what resonates from that place.”

In their analysis, Barney and Thomson learn Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of soccer highlights and follow reels. Video of the hit — which got here in a preseason sport, with no aggressive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The digicam follows the ball previous Stingley’s outstretched arms, in order that the hit takes place on the fringe of the body. There weren’t dozens of digicam angles accessible like immediately.

This opened area for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the gamers negotiate. (Barney has all the time acknowledged he’s a sculptor first and plans for these works to be proven in future exhibitions.)

Xavier, the dancer who performs Tatum, needed to deal with a pile of moist clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve worked with props before, but they were solid,” he mentioned. “But the clay was alive.” It compelled him, he mentioned, to find vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a personality that he remembered from his personal childhood as an aggressive, even imply, soccer participant.

Indeed, the core gamers in “Secondary” are middle-aged males negotiating the reminiscence of the tradition they grew up in — and of their very own our bodies. Even stylized, the soccer actions concerned within the piece are usually not instinctive or straightforward ones for males of their 50s and 60s.

Barney “particularly wanted older bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson mentioned. “What are the limitations that those bodies hold that may have a different resonance, a different visual narrative?”

But “Secondary” enfolds different views because it gestures towards a broader, up to date American social panorama. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an especially deconstructed model of the nationwide anthem.

“As an Indigenous person, it was something that I was excited to take on,” Deshchidn mentioned. They grew to become drawn, too, to the work’s environmental side, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It brought up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the way there are institutions truly built on top of our bones.”

Barney is an art-world superstar (whose fame solely grew throughout his greater than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), however he prefers a low profile. On set, he minimize a workaday presence along with his close-shaven look underneath a cap. Performers in “Secondary” mentioned his work ethic was intense however his method open. While some individuals on the venture are his longtime collaborators, just like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.

There is a way with “Secondary” that Barney is popping a web page — definitely with the studio transfer, after some 15 years at that web site, however in some non-public means, too. When I requested if he was feeling his age — our age, as we’re contemporaries — he mentioned sure.

“In a good way,” he added. “Letting go of being a young person is a big relief.”

Compared along with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a extra concise and collaborative be aware. “It’s more connected to the world,” he mentioned. “It’s a piece that’s thinking through the environment within which it was made. In my 20s, I was trying to figure out ways of assigning a material language for what was inside me. This piece is different that way.”

“Secondary” might take its cue from 1978 and invite its gamers right into a sort of reminiscence work by way of their our bodies — however the work’s construction, with its emphasis on the buildup to the unhealthy factor everybody is aware of is coming, energizes it with premonition.

It ends in an elegiac vein, the ultimate pictures widening to the town. “It felt crucial to pan away from the specific to the general,” Barney mentioned. “As much as the studio is a kind of micro frame, there’s a larger one that is the city and country that we live in. I want there to be some kind of legibility to read those different scales — for them all to be in there.”