ZURICH.- In the evening of the 3rd December to the 4th December 1966, director Shirley Clarke hosts Jason Holliday (born Aaron Payne) in her room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. From 9pm to 9am – twelve hours straight –, Jason has a camera pointed at him. He goes on to tell his life and muse about his childhood, the different jobs he had, as well as some important encounters, prompted by questions we can sometimes hear from the director herself in the 105 minutes film Portrait of Jason (1967).

A major work of cinéma vérité praised by Ingmar Bergman and a rare testimony of black queer experience in mid-century US, the power dynamics at play in the film have been debated. Tavia Nyong’o, in the chapter “Crushed Blacks: On Archival Opacity” of his Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Lifes (2018) notes:

“Critics have focused on the power the white, female director, Shirley Clarke, wielded over her black, gay male subject, Jason Holliday. The film has been characterized as a racist enactment of film as an apparatus of capture of black life”.

Moment 2, by Deborah-Joyce Holman, takes Portrait of Jason as a primary material, to free Jason from the white gaze and Shirley Clarke’s timeline. If Tavia Nyong’o considers the blurs and “crushed blacks” in the film as strategies of refusal and bursts of agency, then maybe Moment 2 is an expanded glitch. Indeed, Holman’s interest for Portrait of Jason grew out o frustration from the many ways the overexposure of images of black people feed the crave for black trauma and, ultimately, underexpose the multiplicity and complexity of black experiences. The question was: how to act in solidarity with Jason? What images to produce to break the cycle of oppression enacted in Portrait of Jason? Unleash its potential as tool for a liberatory practice?

Moment 2 is nine hours long. Its length fits the opening hours of Luma Westbau on Thursdays (11h00 – 20h00), making it difficult to apprehend as a whole, and thus consume the work, the image. The duration also enables Rebecca Bellantoni, the performer that appears on screen, the freedom to avoid the lens of the camera – which stands still on a tripod and doesn’t “follow” (in comparison to Shirley Clarke’s camera). The slick and neat hotel room – some would say cold – in which the film is shot is thus, sometimes, background, and some other time, main protagonist. Despite the difficulty to identify the location, the hotel room acts as a marker of a certain social class which gives the words channelled by Bellantoni the character of being outof-place.

“I’m the bitch” is one of the punchlines. Bellantoni voices, throughout the 9 hours of Moment 2, excerpts of Jason Holliday’s words in Portrait of Jason, carefully chosen by Holman for their self-affirming nature. They are sentences which come across as ways for Jason to remind the watcher – the first being Shirley Clarke – who is here, who is in charge: “Mother’s coming through”. In her deep and quasi-monotonous voice, Bellantoni gives another weight to these lines, emphasising their share of resistance. The key might well be: “I’m a truth teller now, and the truth lies in me”.

And it goes on and on and on. Bellantoni repeats the same lines over and over again. They equate to seven minutes of Portrait of Jason in total. Holman, whose practice strives to complexify representation and queering black image making, makes use of repetition and recital as strategies of resistance. Her choice of Rebecca Bellantoni as the “channel” of Jason’s words isn’t innocent. As an artist and performer invested in playing with the shadows, her acting is also an exercise in non-performance. If she comes across as the main character, she also refuses this title in many ways. It also feels, somehow, that she is in conversation with Jason himself, that he could be sitting at the other end of the grey couch. As such, she and Holman manage to turn the screen test into a testing of the screen itself.

Cédric Fauq
Chief Curator, CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Frankreich

Deborah-Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, UK, and Basel, Switzerland. Holman employs a variety of media in her practice, such as text, sculpture, installation, film- and image-making.