38 The New York Reviewbranch high above a small river until
he loses his grip and crashes into the
water. Ader filmed a series of falls—off
a roof, into a ditch, riding a bicycle into
a canal. The “organic” in his film im-
plies he’s like a leaf, part of the tree that
falls, but a young Black man’s body in-
variably conjures the more historically
situated metaphor of “strange fruit.” I
feel the differences in the specific gravi-
ties acting on Ader and the young Black
man, or the way these forces determine
my looking. Jemison’s decision to make
“Broken Fall” the title of her show
draws attention to how she’s asking us,
throughout these works, to consider the
significance of race or its erasure in the
history of avant- garde film and video.
Watch i ng Broken Fall (Organic) and
In Succession (2019), I thought of Witt-genstein’s writing about pain—about
the unreliability of “pain behavior,” how
the difficulty of verifying the authentic-
ity of another’s expression of pain, or
having confidence in the commonality
of the experience of pain, is a founda-
tional instance for many philosophers of
the problem of other minds.^1 But here
philosophical questions of pain and pri-
vacy cross with the long racist history
(an ongoing history) of disbelieving
Black pain in particular, of the sup-
posed insensibility of the Black body as
a defense of the ravages of slavery.^2 The
question of the legibility of strain or dis-
tress in Broken Fall (Organic) takes on
the weight of American racial history.
Am I projecting suffering where there
is none, or failing to see it when it’s
there? Ader’s three- minute silent film,
I’m Too Sad to Tell You (1971), in which
the artist is shown crying, is also rele-
vant here. We can only speculate on the
source of his pain behavior—he’s too sad
to tell us—and we’re confronted with
questions about what kind of interior
experience can be inferred from such anexpression. Jemison activates questions
of visibility and knowability, of the rela-
tion between exterior and interior, with
an astonishing economy of means.The final piece in the main room is
Escaped Lunatic (2011), an almost
eight- minute color video. Here the
implicit source being reenacted is the
“chase film” of early American cin-
ema, in which actors run away from
some authority—police, the staff of a
mental hospital. One also thinks of the
persistence of shows like Cops, recently
revived by Fox, that entertain viewers
with pursuits of actual suspects. Jemi-
son recreated these chase scenes in
Houston, where she lived at the time,
her performers recruited from a localparkour team. They run from nothing
we ever see, through scenes of exurban
desolation—overpasses, a playground
behind a chain- link fence that looks like
it could be part of a prison yard. They
leap fences, tumble, and otherwise exe-
cute a kind of gymnastics of flight.
The men—all but one are, I think, men
of color—are in vernacular uniform:
jeans, T- shirt, sneakers, clothes that look
like both everyday wear and prison issue.
There is bleakness and comedy here, a
kind of carceral Waiting for Godot; they
are endlessly escaping from a prison into
a prisonlike world, dramatically leaping
over a fence when there’s a large gap they
could just walk through, doing flips off a
child’s playground structure, apparently
crisscrossing the same landscape, maybe
ending up where they started (and, since
the video is looped in the gallery, always
ending up where they started). But there
is also a sense of possibility in the men’s
strength and grace and purposeless dis-
plays of agility and—this aspect of the
video was heightened for me by its prox-
imity to In Succession (2019)—the free-
style dance they make of fleeing.
In Jemison’s work, the dystopian and
utopian moments are impossible to sep-
arate—one contains the other. What
could be heavier, more overdetermined
in an American setting, than a human
pyramid formed of Black bodies (all
the more so since the world’s most fa-
mous pyramids were built by slaves) for
the rescue of a white woman? And yet
the men in In Succession (2019) defy
gravity with their discipline and model
a small social body stronger than any
of its individual elements. There is no
white person to be rescued this time,
and the white viewer is not “rescued”
with any narrative of racial progress,
but these videos do subtly suggest pos-
sibilities beyond repression and mere
repetition. Jemison’s work weighs and
defies the weight of her materials withA still from Steffani Jemison’s Escaped Lunatic, 2011Steffani Jemison/Greene Naftali, New York(^1) As he writes in Philosophical Investi-
gations, “If one has to imagine some-
one else’s pain on the model of one’s
own, this is none too easy a thing to do:
for I have to imagine pain which I do
not feel on the model of pain which I
do feel.”
(^2) For an exploration of the simultane-
ous spectacularization and disavowal
of Black pain, see Saidiya Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slav-
ery, and Self- Making in Nineteenth-
Century America (Oxford University
Press, 1997). A brilliant exploration of
this logic in both contemporary visual
culture and everyday experience—for
example, in racial disparities in palli-
ative care—can be found in Christina
Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and
Being (Duke University Press, 2016).
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