Matthew Barney’s latest video installation, titled SECONDARY, is on display at the Fondation Cartier in Paris until September 8th. The legendary American visual artist returns to one of Paris’s most important exhibition venues exactly thirty years after his first film, Cremaster 4, was shown there in 1994.
SECONDARY, filmed in Matthew Barney’s Long Island sculpture studio, is a five-channel video installation set on an American football field, first presented last spring. For sixty minutes, eleven dancers, including the artist himself, abstractly reenact actual events that occurred on the field. The narrative of SECONDARY revolves around a 1978 football game incident where Jack Tatum (Oakland Raiders) collided with Darryl Stingley (New England Patriots), resulting in Stingley’s paralysis. The tragic event, repeatedly broadcasted by the media, became etched in the memory of American fans and the young Barney, who was a youth league quarterback at the time. The work is an intensely physical case study focusing on every aspect of the game, from training and pre-game rituals to the moment of impact and its famous slow-motion replays.
Born in San Francisco in 1967, Matthew Barney graduated from Yale University in 1989. Since then, his work has primarily combined sculptural installations, performance art, and video. His unique perspective highlights the physical rigor and erotic undertones of sports, exploring the boundaries of the body and sexuality. His works draw on his athletic background while also reflecting on the new politics of the body. Barney’s ritualistic actions unfold in hybrid spaces that evoke both a training camp and a medical research lab. His earliest works at Yale were staged in the university’s athletic complex. In this alternative universe, Barney’s protagonists—played by actors and the artist himself, often naked or cross-dressed—perform the dance of sexual differentiation. Through the exploration of his own body, the classical athletic model is transformed: muscles resist, swell, deteriorate, and eventually become stronger through recovery. The relationship between desire, discipline, and productivity forms the basis of Barney’s meditation on sexual difference.
Barney began working on the CREMASTER series in 1994. Eschewing chronological order, he first created CREMASTER 4 (1994), followed by CREMASTER 1 (1995), CREMASTER 5 (1997), CREMASTER 2 (1999), and CREMASTER 3 (2002). Alongside these films, which Barney wrote, directed, and often acted in, he produced sculptures, drawings, and photographs. The conceptual starting point of this cycle is the male cremaster muscle, which controls the contraction of the testes in response to external stimuli. The project is filled with anatomical references to the position of the genitalia: for instance, CREMASTER 1 represents the “ascended” state, while CREMASTER 5 depicts the most “descended” state.
Over the past thirty years, Matthew Barney has created one of the most unique bodies of work in contemporary art, becoming a pivotal artist of his generation—a visionary whose complex and radical forms have established an entirely new and unique artistic vocabulary.