December 16, 2021 39rigor and grace. Her videos do not tell
me what to think or feel but invite me
to locate myself in an American gravita-
tional field. Meanwhile: birdsong, traf-
fic, wind in the grass and trees.The final video at Greene Naftali—in
its own room at the back of the gallery—
is The Meaning of Various Photographs
to Tyrand Needham (2009–2010),
which echoes John Baldessari’s 1973
video, The Meaning of Various Photo-
graphs to Ed Henderson. In the latter,
the artist shows his friend Ed Hender-
son eight decontextualized photos from
various news media and asks him to
elaborate their “meanings”; Hender-
son obliges with shifting descriptions
and associative responses and narra-
tive projections. It’s like a parlor- game
version of the thematic apperception
test (TAT), a psychological test devel-
oped in the 1930s in which subjects are
shown a photograph and asked to make
up a story about what they see, narra-
tives that are thought to reveal import-
ant information about personality and
possible behavioral disorders.
As in Broken Fall (Organic), Jemi-
son’s version changes the race of the par-
ticipants and tests what difference that
difference makes. Instead of the artist
interacting with Needham, another man
the credits identify as Lloyd “Flow”
Johnson conducts the conversation.
Unlike in Baldessari’s video, neither
Needham nor Johnson ever appears on
camera; we just see the images Needham
is being asked to describe. They have a
friendly, jokey rapport that echoes the
casual dynamic of the 1973 video.
It’s hard to know how to take the“meanings” Needham elaborates when
viewing the twelve images Jemison se-
lected—to know when he’s being ironic
or sly or funny (he’s often very funny),
when he knows more or less than he
says about what’s being shown. The im-
ages (all identified in the credits) range
from photos of musicians (Kanye West;
Earth, Wind & Fire; the rapper Slim
Thug) to photos of protests (striking
sanitation workers in the 1960s, Tom-
mie Smith and John Carlos with their
fists raised on the Olympic podium in
Mexico City in 1968) to stock photos
(image 6 is identified as “African boy
climbing tree,” a “Royalty-Free Digi-
tal Stock Photograph”) and film stills
(photograph 9, for instance, is from
Charles Burnett’s 1978 movie Killer of
Sheep).
Presumably, Needham is aware that
this video will appear in art- world set-
tings, in galleries and museums, which
of course means predominantly white
settings, and I experience his humor
and evasiveness as both an acknowl-
edgment and a refusal of the pressures
this places on him—a refusal of the
implicit demand to perform for a white
audience, to elucidate the “meaning”
of Blackness for a viewer like me.
His response to the first image takes
up about a minute of the twelve- minute
video. Needham and we are shown a
photograph of a young Black man in
an unmarked police car. Two white
men who look like plainclothes cops
are in a similar car behind him. (I
didn’t recognize the photo and assume
Needham doesn’t either, but the credits
identify the Black man as Rudy Flem-
ing, who was convicted of murdering a
white woman on the Lower East Sideof Manhattan in 2005—a frightening
inversion of the rescue of In Succes-
sion (2019).) The young man’s face is
crumpled in pain, his body contracted,
an image of loneliness and suffering
more vivid in my memory than any of
the other photographs in the video. A
transcription of the audio:Needham: Um, what I see is.... It
looks like a Park Avenue, a blue
Park Avenue...look like Shawty
Lo [a rapper who died in a car crash
in 2016] in the back seat with his
head hanged down, with a Chevy
Caprice, a bubble Chevy Caprice
in the back of him. It look like two
people in the back, they might be
playing some Dan Elroy—you
know the country singer—and he
got his headlights on the blue car
which is in front of that car, they
don’t have no rims on the car, it’s
just blue. It appears to be night-
time and...that’s it.
Johnson: Does he look alive to
you?
Needham: He look like he happy....
Like there’s something wrong with
his neck. He might be, uh, crank-
ing that Soulja Boy.Needham quickly mentions the
young man in the picture, but only as
part of the effort not to see him—say-
ing he looks like a rapper, speculating
on the music that might be playing
in the other car, deflecting his atten-
tion onto the details of the cars them-
selves without mentioning that they are
clearly state vehicles. “That’s it,” Need-
ham says, as if eager to get out of the
exchange without having to describeFleming further, but his interlocutor
dramatically refocuses the attention on
Fleming: “Does he look alive to you?”
Needham’s statement that the man
looks happy makes plain the deliber-
ateness of his refusal to acknowledge
the suffering in the image, his refusal to
identify or identify with the Black man
in custody and obvious distress. He
won’t say what he thinks Fleming has
done or feels or what any of it means.
Especially in relation to the three
videos in the other room, I interpret
Needham’s refusal as a gesture of pro-
test, a tactical evasion, not a disavowal
of the reality of the pain being depicted
but a refusal to participate in its spec-
tacularization or to authenticate it for
the viewer of the artwork, who is prob-
ably or at least possibly a white viewer.
Needham is another Black man in
Jemison’s work engaged in a drama of
gravity and its defiance. In one sense
he refuses to become an informant for
the art audience. I think of the men in
Hightstown who declined to give their
names to the police.
Part of the history Jemison shoulders
and shifts is art history, and the way
she advances—through a mixture of
homage and critique—the possibilities
of experimental video is inspiring to
me. She evades spectacle, but she also
refuses to let art degrade into polemic,
into paraphrasable statements about the
politics of representation. Instead, her
videos interrupt, quietly but decisively,
my habitual forms of looking. That in-
terruption is a challenge but also a gift.
It suggests that ou r ways of seeing m ight
change, that our senses might be recon-
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From Cambridge University Press
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