Jordan Strafer | Self-Sentencing

Jordan Strafer. “PUNCHLINE” (2022). Installation view at Participant Inc, New York. Photo: Daniel Kukla.

What is that feeling? Someone has shuffled in front of a class and shakily gives a speech with beet red cheeks and a wet upper lip. Second-hand embarrassment. That doesn’t quite cut it. It’s too outward, having too much to do with someone else. It’s deeper, so we turn it inward: “God, I hope I don’t look like that.” That embarrassment, that shame, that pain. Nietzsche said pain is to be desired. Jesus’ pain was restorative—healing. All of this sounds a bit too sincere.

Jordan Strafer. “JUICE” (2020).

This isn’t to say that Brooklyn-based artist Jordan Strafer’s work isn’t sincere—as a matter of fact, it’s deeply personal and autobiographical. Strafer received her MFA from Bard in 2019, going on to exhibit around the world at the New Museum (where she premiered her film SOS), Participant Inc (where she held her debut New York City solo exhibition and recent film Peak Heaven Love Forever), and many more. Peak Heaven tells the story of betrayal on an air ambulance from London to Miami, based on a flight Strafer took with her ailing father. “Transatlantic air ambulances are just former private jets outfitted with a mobile ICU setup,” Strafer told Bomb Magazine. “It was oddly luxurious, even though it was the only option.” And in the film, a father lies down, hooked to medical equipment, the flight attendant sports a visage warped by excessive cosmetic procedures, a girl bears a rash on her face. There’s something perverted about all of it—a feeling that persists throughout Strafer’s work.

Jordan Strafer. “SOOEY” (2022).

Strafer’s latest solo show, SOOEY, is on view at Red Tracy in Copenhagen, making it the final solo show to exhibit in the space before shutting its doors. The sound work—a departure for Strafer who primarily works in video—is a seven-minute and two-second recording of Strafer singing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” interrupted by her exclaiming “Sooey!” (a word meant to call pigs), and timed so that it concludes with the clamor of New York City residents cheering and banging their pots and pans for essential workers. “I was playing this game with myself—if I could time my performance of the song exactly so that I finished when they all applauded,” remarks Strafer, explaining this newfound routine to catch the 7 PM applause. Cash performed this song for prisoners at Folsom Prison for the live album At Folsom Prison in 1968. Connections from “prison” to the “lockdown” and Strafer performing this song to the “prisoners” who would eventually bang cookware together in applause are obvious. Strafer finds them inappropriate, even. The conceit of the work? “There’s kind of a pointlessness,” she considers, “or a futility, and then deep ambivalence in the work, and a simplicity and humor and a self...” Strafer pauses.

Jordan Strafer. “SOOEY” (2022) installation view.

And of the self, what is it? Strafer’s self is quite apparently present, her voice projecting into the Red Tracy space—aptly, a former recording studio. Aside from the sound, the space features speakers muffled by transparent plastic curtains and a siren displayed in the window that would offer a view of the space’s engineers in its past life. But put yourself there. Myself. “... Self hatred,” Strafer finishes. “There’s something extremely embarrassing about that work. It’s me singing, and I’m a really bad singer, and being in that room with other people listening to it is excruciating.” The embarrassment, the shame, that pain. Not only might Strafer feel that pain, but the gallery visitor, too. “But, I think... there’s something kind of productive or really vulnerable about that, that I guess I feel hopeful about.”

Jordan Strafer. Peak Heaven Love Forever production still (2022).

What is at the heart of SOOEY? Is it as simple as boredom, ambivalence, routine? Has this routine become some sort of self-flagellation, performing for the masses in their homes and in Red Tracy? “I think maybe it’s the fact that the work is making me feel very embarrassed makes it closer to truth.” All of this sounds too sincere. Wait, scratch that—I think sincerity is the modus operandi here.

Jordan Strafer. Peak Heaven Love Forever video still (2022).