Paris, France — It was a pre-season football game. American football. It was August 12th, 1978 when Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Oakland Raiders hit Darryl Stingley, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots as he stretched to catch a pass. Stingley was left paralysed and the incident would remain seared in the minds of football fans becoming a symbol of violence in football and contribute to the changes made by the National Football League (NFL) to its rules and conventions in order to curtail aggressive plays. And it would also be the plot of a five-channel video installation set within the context of an American football field by the contemporary American artist Matthew Barney, who at the time of the incident was himself a youth league quarterback and plays the role of a quarterback in the video. That video installation work along with works related to it are the object of an exhibition entitled Secondary being played out in Paris at the Fondation Cartier, a temple to contemporary art. 

Filmed in Matthew Barney’s sculpture studio on the East River in Long Island City in the New York City borough of Queens, it features 11 performers, mainly dancers and movement artists with older bodies, including the artist who is 57, abstracting the action that takes place on the football field. This new work demonstrates the complex superposition of real violence and its representation — as well as celebration—through sports entertainment. It examines the game and affiliated culture through a unique movement vocabulary developed in collaboration with the cast of performers, including movement director David Thomson, and Mr. Barney. The result is a highly physical, bodily study that focuses on every element of the game: training drills, pre-game rituals, moments of impact, and slow-motion replays. 

The video is being projected in the spectacular glass structure that houses the Fondation Cartier and in a gallery neighboring the projection room sits a new ceramic sculpture by Mr. Barney taking the form of a power rack — equipment designed for weightlifting. The exhibition also includes some of the earliest Drawing Restrain video works which Mr. Barney began in 1987 while he was still in art school. Inspired by the idea of resistance training, he applied restraints to his body while drawing, exhibiting the resulting drawings, videos, and the related apparatus often as site-specific installations. 

« Secondary maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture. My personal involvement in the sport served as a starting point for the development of this project. The extreme physical and psychological conditions of the game—which have been abstracted into my art practice since my earliest work— provide a context for this subject that is both retrospective and a new, direct engagement, » explains Matthew Barney in an essay, « The significant risk of the game became clear, and made a lasting impression on me as a young player, through an incident that took place in a professional football game on August 12, 1978, when Jack Tatum, a defensive back for the Oakland Raiders, delivered an open field hit on Darryl Stingley, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots. Stingley was left paralyzed. The impact, and Stingley’s resulting catastrophic injury, became mythic in scale through its relentless replay in sports media. It was also a watershed case for the reform of rules protecting the bodies of athletes, which remains a polemic in football today, now gathering critical mass in the media. » 

The second intertwined narrative involves sculptures by the artist in which he uses materials like lead, aluminium, terracotta and plastic all in various stages of liquidity that are generated, formed and manipulated by the performers in real time. These materials reflect the qualities of strength, elasticity, fragility and memory with each in its own way embodying a character, explains Mr. Barney.