After I saw her video Personal at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014, I wrote to her about the piece we’ve often been in conversation 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 effortlessness, which is one definition of discipline, for an artist or athlete or acrobat.Īnd yet there is also an unmistakable sense of peril. (This quality is what first attracted me to Jemison’s work. I’m using words like “confusing” and “difficult,” but the video isn’t headache-inducing it’s beautiful, balletic, hypnotic, moving. Images of the grass or house or a tree in the yard or the sky that might be from the perspective of the men themselves-someone facing up or down while holding a pose-also prevent any clear orientation to the horizon, to direction or downward force. It becomes fascinatingly difficult to sort relaxation from strain, a difficulty compounded by the shots of the men’s faces when they appear: they often have their eyes shut they could be at rest or intensely focused on holding their position.
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Watching In Succession (2019), I find it hard to identify when a body is horizontal or vertical, when a body is supporting or supported, where the force of gravity is being resisted and how.
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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 support 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 presentation 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.
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That they are involved in some kind of collaborative, careful gymnastic activity is clear: you can see hands supporting ankles, feet resting on backs or shoulders, legs extended into the air. It’s impossible to tell whose limbs or torso belongs to whom, an effect heightened by the sameness of the clothing. 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. The motion of the video is gently slowed.
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In Steffani Jemison’s split-screen video In Succession (2019)-the most recent, longest, and largest work in the multimedia 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).