Matthew Barney, Again within the Recreation

The hit, 45 years in the past, shook up the world of soccer. Then, simply as shortly, folks moved on. However not Darryl Stingley, the receiver for the New England Patriots who bore the head-on cost by Jack Tatum of the Oakland Raiders. Stingley was rendered quadriplegic. Tatum, a defender referred to as “The Murderer,” notoriously by no means apologized.

The artist Matthew Barney was an 11-year-old in Idaho on the time and remembers the incident from fixed slow-motion replays on tv. He was simply moving into the game severely himself, and the Tatum-Stingley collision, although stunning, didn’t cease him. Violence was inculcated in soccer coaching, he recalled. It was additionally addictive.

“That was my gateway, feeling that blow to the pinnacle and what that seems like in your physique,” Barney mentioned in an interview in March whereas enhancing “Secondary,” his new five-channel video set up that takes that 1978 occasion as its level of departure. He relished observe drills the place he and different boys had been ordered to slam into one another at high pace, he mentioned. “You’d stroll away, and also you’re seeing stars.”

Barney grew to become an elite high-school quarterback, however he modified course throughout his years at Yale College, rising from there in 1989 into the New York artwork world, the place he discovered near-instant success. Bodily duress was instantly salient in his work, from the “Drawing Restraint” initiatives during which, as an illustration, he would harness himself and transfer alongside a gallery’s partitions and ceiling, trying to attract on the wall.

Soccer served as a immediate within the “Jim Otto Suite,” which Barney made in 1991-92, one of many early works that established his distinctive method to combining efficiency, video and sculpture. Its inspiration was Otto, a Raiders participant whose quite a few accidents led his physique to be loaded with prosthetic supplies. Otto’s story collapsed resilience and destruction, and artistically opened efficiency and sculpture horizons.

However the sport itself would recede in Barney’s work, engulfed by numerous different themes — sexual differentiation, reincarnation, automobiles, sewers and excrement, amongst many others — and the epic scale and baroque staging of his “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002) and “River of Fundament” (2014) movies. (Metrograph, a movie show in Manhattan, is exhibiting the “Cremaster” movies this month and subsequent.)

With “Secondary,” which is open by June 25, Barney is tugging at a unfastened finish that goes again to his childhood. From a spot of bodily and mental maturity, he’s scrutinizing a sport — and a rustic, as a result of soccer is quintessentially American — which will or could not have modified. Now 56, he’s taking inventory of himself and an uneasy nation.

“There’s a means that the violence in our tradition has develop into so uncovered all over the place you look,” he mentioned. “I believe my relationship to that legacy is by the use of my expertise on the soccer area. I wished to make a bit that appears at that, in additional methods than one.”

The brand new work is concise for Barney. It runs one hour, the clock time of a soccer sport. Six performers, out of a principal forged of 11, enact the roles of gamers within the 1978 sport, together with Barney as Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler. It was filmed at Barney’s warehouse studio in Lengthy Island Metropolis, close to the East River. And it’s exhibiting to the general public now in that very venue — his remaining use of the area earlier than he strikes to a close-by facility.

Final fall and winter, the studio served as a simulated soccer area, a motion lab and a movie set. After I visited, the principal performers — together with David Thomson, who performs Stingley and is the challenge’s motion director, and Raphael Xavier, as Tatum — had been working by among the episodes that inform the story abstractly, in an oblique sequence.

There have been bizarre issues occurring, too. Further performers across the sideline wore the all-black costumes of devoted Raiders followers, strolling round like camp horror figures; some had been actors, however others had been members of the Raiders’ New York Metropolis fan membership. Some had been being filmed inside a trench that was dug into the studio flooring, exposing pipes, dust and water.

An artist’s studio, Barney mentioned, has traits of the stadium. “It’s form of the organizing physique for this story,” he mentioned, including: “I wished my working area to be a personality.”

Digging the ditch, he mentioned, revealed decaying pipes and the way the tide floods and recedes below the buildings. “I wished that infrastructure to be uncovered, each as a manifestation of the damaged backbone of Stingley, but in addition as crumbling infrastructure inside my studio, inside the metropolis of New York,” he mentioned.

For all its allusions, “Secondary” — the title refers back to the again line of defenders on the soccer area, cornerbacks and safeties whose job is to shadow the vast receivers and break up any passing play — holds to the Tatum-Stingley incident as its narrative and ethical core.

It’s wealthy and likewise tragic materials. Stingley died in 2007 at 55; Tatum, 61, died three years later. All his life after the hit, Stingley wished an apology that by no means got here. Tatum argued that the hit was simply a part of the job, even when he additionally boasted that his fashion of play pushed the road. Since then a flood of analysis has confirmed the game’s toll. Stabler, whom Barney performs in “Secondary,” contributed to this information posthumously when his mind was discovered to point out superior persistent traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E.

I requested if Barney, the previous quarterback, had come to fret about his personal well being. “Truthfully, yeah,” he mentioned. He was glad, he added, that he stopped taking part in when he did.

“Secondary” has a staccato format, amplified by its staging: A jumbotron-like overhead gadget exhibits one video channel on three screens, whereas 4 different channels run on screens across the studio. The hit is evoked early, however a lot of the following motion returns to buildup — gamers warming up, followers getting hyped. The play sequences make up roughly the ultimate third.

The purpose was by no means a literal remedy, mentioned Thomson, the motion director and Barney’s shut collaborator on the challenge. “This isn’t a docudrama,” he mentioned. “I’m not attempting to be Stingley, an individual I don’t know. We’re not representing his life, we’re representing a second.”

Nonetheless, Thomson mentioned, from finding out the real-life athletes, he distilled traits that knowledgeable how he labored with the actors who painting them. Stingley, he mentioned, was earnest. Tatum, offended. Grogan, technical. Every trait, he mentioned, grew to become “a touchstone one goes again to with out too many prospers, and see what resonates from that place.”

Of their analysis, Barney and Thomson learn Tatum’s and Stingley’s autobiographies and watched hours of soccer highlights and observe reels. Video of the hit — which got here in a preseason sport, with no aggressive stakes — is grainy and sparse. The digicam follows the ball previous Stingley’s outstretched arms, in order that the hit takes place on the fringe of the body. There weren’t dozens of digicam angles obtainable like right this moment.

This opened area for improvisation, and for Barney to introduce sculptural props that the gamers negotiate. (Barney has all the time said he’s a sculptor first and plans for these works to be proven in future exhibitions.)

Xavier, the dancer who performs Tatum, needed to take care of a pile of moist clay dumbbells that distended and broke as he carried them. “I’ve labored with props earlier than, however they had been stable,” he mentioned. “However the clay was alive.” It compelled him, he mentioned, to find vulnerability, even tenderness, inside a personality that he remembered from his personal childhood as an aggressive, even imply, soccer participant.

Certainly, the core gamers in “Secondary” are middle-aged males negotiating the reminiscence of the tradition they grew up in — and of their very own our bodies. Even stylized, the soccer actions concerned within the piece aren’t instinctive or simple ones for males of their 50s and 60s.

Barney “significantly wished older our bodies, which I appreciated,” Thomson mentioned. “What are the restrictions that these our bodies maintain which will have a unique resonance, a unique visible narrative?”

However “Secondary” enfolds different views because it gestures towards a broader, modern American social panorama. The referees are a mixed-gender crew. Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a composer, experimental vocalist and member of the San Carlos Apache Nation, delivers an especially deconstructed model of the nationwide anthem.

“As an Indigenous individual, it was one thing that I used to be excited to tackle,” Deshchidn mentioned. They grew to become drawn, too, to the work’s environmental side, spending breaks on set staring into the damp trench. “It introduced up imagery of bones and burial, and repatriation work — the best way there are establishments really constructed on high of our bones.”

Barney is an art-world movie star (whose fame solely grew throughout his greater than decade-long relationship with the Icelandic pop artist Björk), however he prefers a low profile. On set, he reduce a workaday presence together with his close-shaven look below a cap. Performers in “Secondary” mentioned his work ethic was intense however his method open. Whereas some folks on the challenge are his longtime collaborators, just like the composer Jonathan Bepler, many are new to his world.

There’s a sense with “Secondary” that Barney is popping a web page — definitely with the studio transfer, after some 15 years at that web site, however in some non-public means, too. After I requested if he was feeling his age — our age, as we’re contemporaries — he mentioned sure.

“In a great way,” he added. “Letting go of being a youngster is a giant reduction.”

In contrast together with his earlier work, “Secondary” strikes a extra concise and collaborative notice. “It’s extra related to the world,” he mentioned. “It’s a bit that’s considering by the atmosphere inside which it was made. In my 20s, I used to be attempting to determine methods of assigning a cloth language for what was inside me. This piece is completely different that means.”

“Secondary” could take its cue from 1978 and invite its gamers right into a form of reminiscence work by their our bodies — however the work’s construction, with its emphasis on the buildup to the unhealthy factor everybody is aware of is coming, energizes it with premonition.

It ends in an elegiac vein, the ultimate pictures widening to the town. “It felt essential to pan away from the particular to the final,” Barney mentioned. “As a lot because the studio is a form of micro body, there’s a bigger one that’s the metropolis and nation that we reside in. I need there to be some form of legibility to learn these completely different scales — for all of them to be in there.”