Five-channel video installation with sound, 60 minutes. Matthew Barney, Secondary, 2023 (production still). Viewers can sit or stand on it to take in the video work, unfolding across several screens: four channels run on four different monitors installed around the carpet’s perimeter, while one channel plays on the three sides of a jumbotron-like unit hanging from the ceiling in the center of the space. Barney filmed the “game” action on this springy, rainbow-hued artificial turf, which now fills and demarcates the exhibition space. In Long Island City, the playing surface was similarly colorized to suggest vectors of movement and force, its design centered on Barney’s so-called Field Emblem, a type of heraldic symbol, in the form of a bisected ellipse, for a body simultaneously in action and subjected to physical constraint. A star quarterback in high school, he was originally recruited by Yale to play football, and one of the most indelible sequences from his Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) involves an unsettling Busby Berkeley–style routine filmed on and around the uniquely blue field of the Boise State University football stadium. Clocking in at exactly one hour, the five-channel piece takes as its central subject a single incident, one of the most replayed moments in the history of American football: the 1978 collision between Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum and New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley, a hit that severely injured Stingley’s spinal cord, leaving the twenty-six-year-old quadriplegic for the rest of his life.Īs with the Idaho setting of Redoubt, Secondary’s subject matter represents something of a return for Barney. With Secondary, this conceptual focus is extended even further. Though stuffed to bursting with themes and ideas, from wildlife management and survivalism to alchemy and astronomy, in comparison to what came before it-the implausibly demanding five-and-a-half-hour-long Rabelaisian shitshow that was 2014’s River of Fundament- Redoubt felt eminently digestible, and, at just 134 minutes, almost pithy in its narrative scope. © Matthew Barney.īarney’s last major project was Redoubt (2018), a loose reimagining of the story of Diana and Actaeon set in the Sawtooth Mountains, near the artist’s childhood home of Boise. But it quickly became clear that Secondary instead represents a further step in his oeuvre toward a notional realism-that is, an approach that depends less on the endless profusion of symbolically freighted grotesqueries than on strategically pressurizing the strangeness available IRL until it begins to leak beyond the precincts of strict facticity. I arrived half expecting something to match the weather: another claustrophobic biopsychological phantasmagoria, maybe, or one of his rococo exercises in mythic exegesis. Walking through the acrid haze toward the pier where the video installation is on view-in the artist’s former studio, the same cavernous warehouse on the Queens shore of the East River where it was staged and filmed-it started to feel like Barney himself might well have orchestrated the unheimlich atmospherics, the sort that have populated his work for some thirty years. I went to see Matthew Barney’s Secondary on the first Wednesday in June, the day New York was reduced to a blur by smoke fuming south from the Canadian wildfires. Matthew Barney: Secondary, Matthew Barney Studio, 4–40 Forty-Fourth Drive, Long Island City, through June 25, 2023 Courtesy the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, Regen Projects, and Sadie Coles HQ. But it’s been a lot of fun working with these friends of mine, who are also just starting out and doing really, really cool things.Matthew Barney: Secondary, installation view. “I don’t know how far I’m going to go with this. “ have a kind of album … sort of … maybe formulating,” she told the outlet.

The Pitzer College student’s also following in Björk’s footsteps by making music, although she said she “ really found footing” in that arena yet. It was important to her that she would help me realize this.” “Since I was 13 or 14, I knew I wanted to take acting seriously,” she told The Face in February. Barney poses at the premiere of “The Northman” in April 2022. It’s been a big year for Isadora: The teen recently made her film debut alongside her mother in “The Northman,” which also stars Alexander Skarsgård, Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor-Joy. The “Hyperballad” hitmaker’s daughter models Miu Miu’s fall 2022 jewelry designed by artists Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, including colorful beaded pieces inspired by flowers and pills.

Matthew barney