Matthew Barney: ‘Secondary’

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over.

That act is at the centre of Matthew Barney’s latest film, ‘Secondary’; a quiet, unnerving, uncomfortable exploration of how bodies can be broken, destroyed and remade, and how violence is humanity’s ultimate spectacle.

The gallery is decked out like the film set. A stiff red astroturf carpet lies on the floor; a sculptural assemblage of jumbotron screens, like an inverted ziggurat, hangs from the ceiling, a glowing digital object of worship. Two sculptures – one a net made of barbells laid over a sewer pipe, the other two stacked power lifting racks – are totemic testaments to physical anxiety; part-metal, part-plastic, part-hard, part-soft. 

In the film, athletes in black and red uniforms wade through a filth-filled sewer, or stretch and warm up on the turf. Their bodies move, twist, prepare for action. We, the viewers, know what’s coming. When it arrives, it passes in a flash, bang, body against body. Stunned silence, a prone man on the floor. An opera singer ululates, a net made of barbells is lowered into the sewer, the act is played and replayed, slowed down and dissected until Stingley’s body shatters.

All the bravado of masculinity was nothing but a frail shell waiting to crack

In gladiatorial times, violence was momentary. The instant a mace cracked a skull was exactly that, an instant. The act occurred, was witnessed, and could only live on in the mind of the spectator. But in the modern violent spectacle – NFL, rugby, a horror tackle on the football pitch, a crash into the barriers in Formula One – the instant can be incessantly repeated. Violence is permanent now.

America was changed by that tackle, so was Barney. It made it clear that bodies are there to be moulded for action, but they can be broken by it too, and that destruction is just as valid a form of entertainment as anything else. 

Is Barney asking if this is acceptable? Is he asking why we allow violence to become a spectacle? Or is he an ageing man looking at how his once strong body is starting to weaken, and realising that all the bravado of masculinity was nothing but a frail shell waiting to crack?

The film is obviously fairly melodramatic, po-faced, humourless. But it’s also utterly mesmerising, powerful, beautiful and smart. This is art about power, control, athleticism, weakness. In Barney’s vision of the stadium as coliseum, we see the strength of society, capitalism and masculinity as a facade, and one that’s slowly, inevitably crumbling to dust.