36 The New York ReviewForce of Gravity
Ben LernerSteffani Jemison: Broken Fall
an exhibition at Greene Naftali,
New York City,
November 4–December 4, 2021In Steffani Jemison’s split- screen video
In Succession (2019)—the most recent,
longest, and largest work in the mul-
timedia artist’s first show at Greene
Naftali in Chelsea—four Black men
(it took me a long time to decide there
were four), all dressed more or less
identically in starched white button-
down shirts, khaki pants, and black
sneakers, are engaged in a mysterious
choreographed activity on the lawn of a
large white house (we often see shots of
cornices and gables; we often see shots
of the grass from above). The motion of
the video is gently slowed. The tightness
of the framing and the juxtaposition of
different perspectives on the divided
screen mean we never see the whole
bodies of individual men, let alone the
structure they are collectively forming
as they move through the frame. It’s
impossible to tell whose limbs or torso
belongs to whom, an effect heightened
by the sameness of the clothing.
That they are involved in some kind
of collaborative, careful gymnastic ac-
tivity is clear: you can see hands sup-
porting ankles, feet resting on backs or
shoulders, legs extended into the air. At
moments you can also just hear—over
what sounds like wind and traffic, noises
that may or may not be diegetic and
often serve to amplify a general sense of
silence—the men indicating how to sup-
port or position one another’s bodies:
“That’s it,” “Shoulders,” “Over here.”
The video’s drama of lightness and
weight is subtly echoed in the presenta-
tion of the video in the gallery; instead
of projecting it onto the wall, Jemison
constructed a large screen, sixteen by
nineteen feet, that rests on the floor.
Watch i ng In Succession (2019), I find
it hard to identify when a body is hor-
izontal or vertical, when a body is sup-
porting or supported, where the force
of gravity is being resisted and how. It
becomes fascinatingly difficult to sort
relaxation from strain, a difficulty com-pounded by the shots of the men’s faces
when they appear: they often have their
eyes shut; they could be at rest or in-
tensely focused on holding their posi-
tion. Images of the grass or house or a
tree in the yard or the sky that might be
from the perspective of the men them-
selves—someone facing up or down
while holding a pose—also prevent any
clear orientation to the horizon, to di-
rection or downward force.
I’m using words like “confusing” and
“difficult,” but the video isn’t headache-
inducing; it’s beautiful, balletic, hyp-
notic, moving. (This quality is what first
attracted me to Jemison’s work. After I
saw her video Personal at the Brooklyn
Museum in 2014, I wrote to her about
the piece; we’ve often been in conversa-
tion since.) The grace of the editing of
In Succession (2019), the strange mix
of gentleness and strength in the men’s
quiet collective effort, the gradations of
light and dark in the shifting folds of the
clothing, the wind in the grass and the
leaves, the slowed motion—the piece is,
among other things, a study of the effort
involved in the appearance of effortless-
ness, which is one definition of disci-
pline, for an artist or athlete or acrobat.And yet there is also an unmistakable
sense of peril. What is the relation of
these four young Black men—who are
dressed more or less uniformly, more
or less in uniforms—to the large white
house? Do they live here? Do they work
here? Is what they’re doing work? The
plainness of the clothing, the black- and-
white tonality, the details of the house’s
architectural ornamentation—all of this
renders the historical moment indefi-
nite. The men’s shoes and hairstyles and
tattoos seem contemporary, but long
stretches of the video could depict any
number of pasts, with their different re-
lations of servitude and bondage.
The “succession,” the sequence, of
shots is ambiguous (sometimes the
frames show the same moment from
different angles), but so is our place
in the succession of historical periods.
How long could these men do whateverthey are doing together before the cops
arrive? I find it impossible to watch
these Black men suspended in the air—
with expressions suspended between
concentration and unconsciousness—
without thinking of lynching, or of their
activity as a kind of dance or memorial
or ritual reenactment of that horren-
dous spectacle of suspension. Jemison’s
exploration of lightness and heaviness,
of bodies giving and receiving support,
of the individual as both an agent and
an object, makes me feel the interplay
of historical and physical gravities.
While nothing on the wall of the gal-
lery says so, In Succession (2019) is a
subtle reimagining of a historical event.
In 1931 The New York Times reported
that a group of African American men
in Hightstown, New Jersey, saved a
white woman from the second floor of
a burning building by forming a human
pyramid before they “left the scene
without giving their names to the po-
lice.” Just before seeing Jemison’s show,
I finished reading Burning Boy, Paul
Auster’s biography of Stephen Crane.
Once I learned of Jemison’s source for
In Succession (2019), I immediately
thought of Crane’s novella The Monster
(1898), which tells the story of Henry
Johnson, who works as a coachman for
the family of Dr. Trescott. Johnson is
Black; the Trescotts are white. In the
act of heroically rescuing Dr. Trescott’s
young son from a fire, Johnson is hor-
ribly disfigured—“His face had simply
been burned away.” The townsfolk were
ready to celebrate Johnson when they
were sure he’d succumb to his injuries,
but when he survives as a “monster” (a
mirror for their monstrosity) they want
him expelled from the community.
Since Dr. Trescott will not send John-
son away to an institution or otherwise
abandon him (no Black family is will-
ing to house him, either), the Trescotts
themselves are made pariahs, rejected
by polite, white society. Jemison’s video
also has its source in a fire and in Black
men rescuing white people from their
burning property, and while one could
read the men’s declining to give their
names to the police as selflessness (theyrequire no celebration), to me it sounds
like rational self- preservation; it sug-
gests escape. (On the adjacent wall at
Greene Naftali is projected Jemison’s
video Escaped Lunatic.) Henry John-
son’s failure to disappear turned the
town’s gratitude into fury.
Both The Monster and In Succession
(2019) are concerned with, among other
things, white people literally depend-
ing on Black bodies for their survival,
which of course recalls the foundational
American fact of white dependence on
slave labor, and the dependence of the
very idea of whiteness on the demotion
of other races. It’s remarkable to me
and refreshingly counter to the didacti-
cism of so much contemporary art that
In Succession (2019) evokes all of this
even if you don’t know the story behind
the men’s human pyramid. Jemison has
activated these historical forces with
such subtlety and precision that the
video no longer requires the support of
the source material.In fact, each of the four videos in the
Greene Naftali show has a source text,
is in some sense a reenactment or re-
vision or variation. In the same room
as In Succession (2019) is Broken Fall
(Organic) (2008), a brief (just over a
minute long) looped video on a mon-
itor that shows a man from the shoul-
ders up as he hangs by his arms from
something outside of the shot—maybe
a tree branch, maybe a pull- up bar or
other structure at a playground, maybe
a window ledge. The man looks down
at the ground, up at whatever he’s
gripping, looks around as if he’s being
watched, at times seeming to strain, at
times appearing thoughtful or maybe
a little bored. As in all three videos
in the main room, there is a quiet that
lets in the ambient sound: traffic, wind,
birdsong, toward the end music from a
passing car. The young man’s breath is
visible in the cold. You can’t tell how
high off the ground he is, although
the houses in the background and the
amount of time it takes for him to hit
the ground when he releases or loses
his grip at the end of the sequence
imply that the fall won’t be mortal.
Regardless of the actual distances,
the man is also hanging onto the edge
of the image, and when he falls he falls
out of the frame of the shot, so in a
sense he’s hanging onto visibility. The
gravity of the gravity is unclear: Is he
killing time or flirting with self- harm?
That the man is in ambiguous relation
to the house in the background—that
he might be in a neighborhood in which
he doesn’t “belong”—forms an import-
ant link with In Succession (2019). Has
he been forced onto a ledge? Is he try-
ing to escape? I find myself reading his
face for signs of worry or pain that will
indicate the severity of his predicament
as he hangs, and—wincing each time I
write “hangs”—I again note the inevi-
table specter of lynching.
Broken fall (organic) is also the name
of a film by Bas Jan Ader, a ground-
breaking Dutch artist who disappeared
in 1975, at the age of thirty- three, when
he left Cape Cod in a small boat bound
for England. In Ader’s short 16 mm
film, the artist is shown in a much wider
shot than Jemison’s, holding onto a treeA still from Steffani Jemison’s In Succession (2019), 2019Steffani Jemison/Greene Naftali, New YorkLerner 36 39 .indd 36 11 / 16 / 21 5 : 34 PM