Matthew Barney: an anatomy of sports violence

Paris is overcome with Olympic fever. The buildings are spruced, the banners flying. There’s anticipation in the air, that come July, the city will bear witness to moments of sporting history.

In a different century, on a different continent, another event in sporting history was recorded, one that would haunt a nation. On 12th August 1978, during a pre-season NFL game at the Oakland Coliseum, California, Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Oakland Raiders, collided with Darryl Stingley, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots. The impact of Tatum’s shoulder pad on Stingley’s head compressed his spinal cord. In an instant, he was paralysed from the neck down. Tatum received no penalty for the incident, and never publicly apologised to Stingley. It ended Stingley’s career and came to symbolise the violence of the sport, but also captured the media’s capacity to feed the insatiable appetite for trauma – the unrelenting stream of suffering to service humanity’s worst rubbernecking desires. The Stingley –Tatum incident was a sequence of seconds that changed American Football, broadcast and replayed in morbid, microscopic detail, frame-by-frame.

Matthew Barney – a youth league quarterback at the time – was haunted by the incident. In 2023, he based a video installation, titled SECONDARY, around the events, now on view at five galleries across Europe and the USA. At the centre of this sequence is Fondation Cartier, Paris, where Barney has transformed the building’s central atrium into a ghost of a stadium, complete with an astroturf field and a five-channel video installation.

SECONDARY was filmed and first screened in Matthew Barney’s colossal studio in Long Island City, New York. The hour-long performance is not a reenactment of the events of 1978, but a dissection of its memory – a post-mortem. For 60 minutes, eleven performers – dancers and artists – capture the sensation of that moment on the field and its global dissemination – neurotic, obsessive and pathologised. They engage in an eerie dance with rhythmic, breathy movements that play out training drills, pre-game rituals, blocks and tackles and slow-motion replays. The characters seem more vulnerable than their padded kits and steely stances suggest. They wade around in a wet trench filled with clay and gilded slosh, make objects out of metal, ceramic and plastic, and seemingly attempt to repair the long irreparable. Then an angel of death appears, evocative of a halftime show, wearing black feathers and singing a throaty, strangled chant.

I’m lost, but I think that’s the point. SECONDARY is a collision of latent ideas, and subtext, its five-screen broadcast designed to overwhelm, to stifle. I squint awkwardly at the gyrating figures on the distant screens, surrounded by spectators doing the same, I realise that none of this is supposed to be comfortable, easy. It all starts to feel quite Roman – gladiatorial brutality served as a leisurely distraction. And are we not entertained?

In the adjacent room, I find something to settle my strained eyes on: a power rack for weightlifting, the sort you find in the more intimidating corners of your local gym. The material looks like rusty iron, but it’s actually made from ceramic. I like how the fragility of the material is at odds with its function, how it makes me think of weightlifting as no more than a body in a self-imposed cage, and how a 10kg barbell in steel is certainly not 10kg in clay.

The building blocks for this show were laid long ago while Barney was still at art school. Before his short-lived modelling career, before he met Björk before he made his best-known work, The Cremaster Cycle, he began DRAWING RESTRAINT (1987), a series of films that pit desire against discipline, the artist against the athlete, while also drawing on that fateful moment in 1978. Inspired by the idea of resistance training, he applied restraints to his body while drawing, the results of which he exhibited alongside the film.

On the lower ground floor of Fondation Cartier is a new iteration of the piece. A few days before the opening, Raphael Xavier took the role of Tatum in a one-off performance for which he undertook a series of drills with still-wet cast clay barbells while tethered to a rope, running at the walls with the wet clay, smearing them with traces of his body. The barbels now lie warped, mashed, melting between the walls and floor. The scene is an aftermath of carnage – something primal happened here and its sticky scent lingers.

Perhaps it’s my own lack of literacy, and frankly interest, in the subject of American Football, but I think the point here is beyond sport. Barney uses sport because it’s a language he’s fluent in, but the themes are deeper, and more universal: voyeurism, obsession, ageing, brutality, and what it means to push the mind and body to extremes. Muscles grow through resistance. So too, does creativity.