“Jordan Wept“

Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere
Video with sound, 8:48 minutes
2024
Commissioned by the Walker Art Center
https://bit.ly/jordanwept

Description
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Exhibitions & Screenings
Related #Sports works

Jordan Wept is a video spotlighting the range and utility of the long-running Crying Jordan meme, which re-immortalizes one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes into an avatar of failure; an everyman for disappointment, angst, and sorrow; a tool for rapid responses to live events; and a demonstration of the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture.

Excerpt from the essay, “No Time for Winners” by Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak:

“What does it mean that one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes—a six-time NBA champion, five-time MVP, undisputed GOAT, and global icon with career earnings of nearly $4 billion—has been re-immortalized as an avatar of failure and abjection in 21st-century visual culture? The Crying Jordan meme is a sign of the times; it demonstrates the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture and a gradual erosion of the jocks vs. nerds hierarchy. But to what end? Nearly 15 years since its inception, the viral image continues to poke holes at the idolization of sporting stars while also reinforcing the toxically masculine aversion to vulnerability and moist-eyed emotionality. Additionally, the meme’s boundless, generative capacity exemplifies a turn in sports fanship as a creative practice. In the age of social media, fandom has splintered into a field of micro-practices that permeate the larger media ecology. From homemade highlight compilations to sports GIFs, Vines, Tik-Toks, and memes, much of these artifacts are ephemeral. They flow through individual media feeds in rapid response to live events as they unfold, are consumed by online communities broad and niche, but are difficult to retrieve and perhaps even remember after the fact. In this new paradigm, alternative realities flourish. No one is safe from ridicule, not even—or especially—an incontrovertible winner and embodiment of masculinist values and dominance. Rather than humanizing the notoriously apolitical and image-conscious Jordan, this weepy likeness instructs us that sports excellence, particularly for Black athletes, is never enough.”

This video is part of the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.

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WATCH

View Jordan Wept on the Walker Art Center’s website:
https://walkerart.org/magazine/no-time-for-winners

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SCREENINGS & EXHIBITIONS

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Beginning Fall 2024, Jordan Wept will be available to view on the big screen within the Walker Art Center’s Bentson Mediatheque, a free, self-select cinema.

This video is part of the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection and accessible on demand via the Mediatheque’s touchscreen controls.

Established in 1973 to further the appreciation and scholarly study of the art of film, the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection serves as a basis for explorations into the history of cinema and the aesthetic and theoretical properties of the medium. The Collection’s strengths include early silent films by artists including Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov; European avant-garde films including artists Marcel Broodthaers, Derek Jarman, William Klein, and Fernand Léger; and American experimental films, including artists Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, Jonas Mekas, Gunvor Nelson, and Paul Sharits. As video and media artworks were acquired the holding diversified to include a wider range of artworks by artists such as Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Tony Oursler, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, and many others. The Collection has served as a site of preservation, scholarship, research, exhibition, and community engagement. Artworks from the Collection are regularly featured throughout the Walker Art Center in spaces such as the Bentson Mediatheque, Walker Cinema, galleries and gardens.

Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee, WI, USA

@ The Jazz Gallery, 926 East Center St.
April 19, 2025, 1pm

MUFF “celebrates the potential of cinema to imbue a community with excitement, critical discussion, and open-mindedness through the presentation of new artistic forms.” Program 5 includes work by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere, Saif Alsaegh, Miranda Pennell, Sabine Gruffat, and others.

“Remote Views,” Antimatter Media Art, Victoria, Canada

Wednesday, Oct. 22, 8pm @ Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, Canada
Thursday, Oct. 23, online

Analog ghosts and memories collaged and reconstituted for the digital age. The parable is the process, the anomaly is the archive. Films from Seoungho Cho, Magdalena Bermudez, Big Top Collective, Emily Pelstring, Thanut Rujitanont, Simon Payne, Astria Suparak, Brett Kashmere and Alexis McCrimmon.

Canada’s premier presenter of moving image art… focus[es] on innovative media and individual vision.