Jordan Strafer
at the Hammer Museum

Jordan Strafer, LOOPHOLE (video still) (2023). Single-channel video with color and sound, 24 minutes and 36 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Introduced as the first two chapters of a planned trilogy of videos, Jordan Strafer’s Los Angeles debut at the Hammer Museum looped like rerun episodes in a 1990s TV soap opera. Based on the 1991 Florida trial of William Kennedy Smith (nephew of the former U.S. President), who was charged with and ultimately acquitted of raping a woman at his family’s Palm Beach estate, Strafer’s LOOPHOLE (2023) and DECADENCE (2024) feel inspired by the grayer edges of mass media: reading like an amalgam of an erotic thriller, daytime soap, true crime documentary, and court TV. Strafer wields the moving image as the place where we commonly broadcast and consume dynamics of power for their dramatic (or traumatic) effects.

Within a bare, Lynchian all-red room furnished with two plump leather sofas, viewers were invited to settle into an uncomfortable story. Against sparse courtroom scenery, LOOPHOLE fictionalizes the trial itself; DECADENCE follows with an imagined party celebrating the verdict at the Palm Beach Kennedy estate (the scene of the crime). Stylistically, think Days of our Lives perversion, constructed through conspicuous musical cues, dramatic stage lighting, prosthetically thick makeup, crunchy sound effects, and a script that is at once camp, benign, and disturbing. Together, these works form a brief but historical vignette of white American misogyny that is both exceptionally composed and hard to watch.

Entering LOOPHOLE, we follow closely behind a blond woman in a pink hourglass-silhouette skirt suit. As she walks into a courtroom to take up her post at the jury bench, the camera’s slight movement gives a reality TV sense of proximity to the proceedings. Next, we cut to a whirring handycam that follows from a distance as another blond takes up her uncomfortable perch at the witness stand. The low-grade footage feels historical, as if belonging to state archives, directly connected to the moment it records. The witness is about to be cross-examined by an older male attorney. As he appears, the cinematography crosses back into the glossier style with which the film begins. Xylophonic musical cues envelop an unexpected tension between the attorney and bombshell juror—they exchange surreptitious glances, a wink, slight smiles. In the 1991 case, a covert romance was indeed unfolding between defense attorney Roy Black and juror Lisa Lea Haller (by 1994, the two would be married).¹

The witness waits. In terse monosyllables, she will answer questions about the night of her friend’s rape. We see and hear the crinkle of a plastic evidence bag containing a single Manolo, examined by a gloved hand and canned camera flashes. Further transmogrifying reality into uncanny fiction, the witness testimony in LOOPHOLE was lifted word-for-word from the actual court transcripts. As it turns out, the cross-examination was in part ghostwritten by Strafer’s late mother, who served as an attorney on the defense team during the trial.² Here, through a Law and Order-style montage, she is introduced only as “The Pen.” This synecdoche points to her implicated status as a marginal tool, but also as the one who authors. She seems blank, untroubled. A palpable feeling of estrangement enveloped me while watching Strafer’s videos, as each female character presented in the film is estranged—either disturbed and pushed out, or formidably present but empty.

In another scene, Smith’s doppelganger addresses the press corps outside the courthouse. With a beaming smile and voice echoing, he performs his gratified innocence as cameras flash. A brunette woman dressed in black enters the periphery, alone. Her face is blurred, then briefly revealed as she moves—a formal reference to the 1991 trial, during which the plaintiff’s identity remained obscured by a black dot (though it was eventually revealed in the tabloids and, after the trial had concluded, by the victim herself).³ In LOOPHOLE, the woman’s (temporary) facelessness feels metonymic for the countless others who have witnessed and identified with her experience. Back in the emptied courtroom, now darkened, the defense attorney and bombshell juror dine and slow dance; Smith later croons Sinatra, spotlit on the stand. True to reality, the sensational elements of this story easily eclipse the trauma and erasure experienced by the faceless victim. Then, in the last few seconds of the video, as she’s embraced (trapped?) by the defense attorney, a single, useless tear runs down the bombshell juror’s cheek.

Next, DECADENCE stages a nauseating victory celebration at the Kennedy estate, furnished with colorful banquets of food, drink, and WASPs milling about. The same characters emerge. At one point, The Pen briefly exits the party for the restroom. In this private space, she starts fiddling with something just outside of the frame—perhaps changing a tampon or fishing something from a purse. It turns out to be a breast pump, which she begins to fill, staring blank-faced in the mirror. The year is 1991. Strafer, who was born on the last day of 1990, would have been an infant. The doubling of fiction with reality suddenly produces a direct liquid line to the artist herself. It’s a strange reveal: rape trial as the backdrop to her gestation; her mother’s quiet participation in the violence as substance for Strafer’s art; the extraction of her physical sustenance set against nauseating decadence.

A reflection starts to emerge around our expectation of an artist’s biography as source material, even subject, for their work—and our common desire for this connection to be at the same time extricated, clarified somehow. For Strafer, these biographical hallmarks are present, but their irreconcilability is kept intact. As a beautifully produced Aesopian window in time, this story does not clarify nor conclude. Rape is irresolvable, it only ricochets. And so, in this fable, perhaps the figure of the artist is something like The Pen, at once a creator (of life, art) and susceptible to being a participant in its violation.

DECADENCE ends in a flashback, as the victim flees in slow motion down a darkened hallway, Smith following behind in a towel. She finds a landline and dials a number, sinking down the wall. Presumably, she calls the friend who later testified to coming to her aid that night, linking us back to the beginning of LOOPHOLE. The narrative now returning in a circular loop, Strafer’s art-making becomes a means to process the thing that can never be resolved.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 38.

Jordan Strafer, DECADENCE (installation view) (2024). Single-channel video with color and sound, 20 minutes and 26 seconds. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and the Hammer Museum. Photo: Jeff McLane.

Laura Brown is a writer, editor, and curator in New York. She is a founding editor of BLUE, a journal born online, and has edited books on the work of Juan Pablo Echeverri, Kikuo Saito, Juanita McNeely, and Josephine Halvorson. She has curated exhibitions by ektor garcia, Aryana Minai, Sofia Moreno, Darja Bajagić, and Obi Agwam.

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