The artist's video installation SECONDARY examines the violence surrounding American football. The exhibition is part of a tour of unique SECONDARY shows at the artist’s representing galleries.
Fondation Cartier is exhibiting new work by Matthew Barney. The artist's latest video installation, SECONDARY, examines the culture of sports in the United States and particularly the violence surrounding American football. The exhibition is part of a tour of unique SECONDARY shows at the artist’s representing galleries. Fondation Cartier first established a collaboration with Barney in 1994 with the co-production of Cremaster 4, his first film in the celebrated CREMASTER cycle.
SECONDARY revolves around a sports accident which happened on August 12, 1978, when Oakland Raiders defensive back Jack Tatum delivered an open field hit on Darryl Stingley, leaving him paralyzed. Presented as a five-channel video installation, SECONDARY emulates the trappings of an American football field on which eleven performers, consisting of the artist and a number of dancers, perform a stylized reenactment of this tragic event.
Barney's aim is to demonstrate the complex superposition that exists between violence and how it is represented and celebrated in American sports and society. He examines these aspects through an idiosyncratic movement vocabulary that he devised with David Thomson. These choreographed movements imbue the installation and its adjoining performance with a great deal of physicality, as they hone in on the different elements that are associated with a football game. SECONDARY is being presented in conjunction with Barney's ongoing video series Drawing Restraint.
Matthew Barney is an artist and director who expresses his multifaceted vision through the media of film, sculpture, photography and drawing. His works have been exhibited at major institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, Astrup Fearnley Museet, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many others. More information about this exhibition and other events at Fondation Cartier can be found on their site. For more about Barney and his work check his artist site.