Suggested Viewing: Hannah Black’s “Team Jolie”

Hannah Black is an artist and writer who intertwines multiple disciplines so that text and image, matter and sound are not in opposition, but tangled up in each other. Bodies are especially important to Black, as are all their messy and even queer associations and implications.

“Team Jolie,” released online three years ago, slams two images up against each other: Jennifer Aniston’s left eye overlaid with “Team Aniston” and Angelina Jolie’s lips overlaid with “Team Jolie.” The images alternate on the cue of a heavy single bass note as Black’s voice recites a text. For instance:

Her achievement was the mirror of an indescribable failure. Even when it became clear that although she was a machine for producing affection, she too had failed to be loved, I was not sure I could forgive her the ease she had previously been[…] Because pain was for everyone, she represented the fierce enjoyment of pain with whatever necessary emptiness in present social conditions.

What results is almost a song, with not just the bass beat but also the alternative images providing a simple yet hard rhythm.

Part of the brilliance of the video is that Black is able to take a code/phenomenon/pop cultural event, and re-wire it to greater effect. The words provide both a narrative for the images and the beginnings of a theoretical framework for them, so that the Team Aniston/Team Jolie cultural battle — which pitted two famous women against each other because of their relationships with America’s most ubiquitous embodiment of infallible white male charm, Brad Pitt — manifests as even more compelling than before. In the process, Black manages to tell us something about our obsessions and ourselves. “What if every person’s body was replete with something pregnant with its own future?” Black asks, suggesting that the Aniston/Jolie imaginary is not only current, but inescapable. “Team Jolie” rewords a facile, sexist media narrative into a rigorous alternate history of events.

I wish more people knew of Black’s video work, and also, that there was a way for more people to consume videos as art. Instagram’s increasing the video limit to one minute has been a big step towards that, though Black’s work benefits from a longer runtime during which the viewer cannot decide whether to fight against or submit to hypnosis. So few of the short-form (let’s say between one- and five-minute) videos we share online are imaginative or affecting in a lasting way. To an extent, music videos have and continue to achieve this, with artists like Missy Elliott, Björk, Rihanna, and Beyoncé (and their collaborators) pushing the form and the expectations surrounding them. But the primary motivation for a music video is the song, and, as a result, so many of them follow a simple form-follows-content structure. They’re meant to be easily consumed: watched in a flurry, obsessed over for a few hours or days, and then carefully filed away as references.

Music videos aside, YouTube is filled with endless short form fodder that asks the absolute least of us. And yet shareable short-form video has been such an important revelation, and a democratizer for artists and otherwise creative people without significant resources or connections. Perhaps then, my posting “Team Jolie” here is a way of asking that online video sharing and viewing become less about passive entertainment, distraction, or future mood-boarding, and more about desperate attentiveness and studied attraction — the feeling of perpetually approaching a thing, and becoming more challenged the closer you get. About getting bodied, so to speak.

Header image via Hannah Black. Transcript after the jump.

—

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Everything you could know about her was immediately visible. In appearance she was proximate, always close at hand.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

The face is cosmic, arranged around a principle of too much symmetry.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

What mystery she had was contained in her hair, a crowning glory much imitated.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

This excess of symmetry makes it eerily familiar like what Freud says about the mother’s body and the feeling of something being unheimlich.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

She could be approached directly and without shading the eyes. She can be taken to sports events hypothetically. And introduced to hypothetical family and friends.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

A place that should not be familiar, but is. The place of your origin that you wish not to recognize.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Given an initial value, x, she had successfully expanded it to a multiple of x.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

During a sex act he said “No, it’s so beautiful to look at where I have been. I am embarrassed telling you this, though Team Jolie are against shame.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

But as her fate unfolded, what hadn’t seemed entrepreneurial became a pattern of self destruction, as if she were not a fan of her own product. As if she could see the reverse of the fetish, as if she did not know when to stop.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

Love could make you rich. But if it does so you will become yourself the body; you will vanish into a pure relation.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

But still the reassuring smile, like an air hostess’s professional grin: both promises and withstands destruction. You might never be loved in a way you can bear.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

You will die of yourself and be reborn through others.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

I wanted to like her but I couldn’t. I could not stand her desire to be liked. I punished her minutely by withholding my affection as if this could do anything but affirm her power. Her achievement was the mirror of an indescribable failure. Even though when it became clear that although she was a machine for producing affection, she too had failed to be loved, I was not sure that I could forgive her the ease that she had previously been.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

Because pain is for everyone, she represented the fierce enjoyment of pain with whatever necessary emptiness in present social conditions. Someone who once really made me suffer or who was the premise for suffering I somehow may have wanted sent me some lines from Marx where Marx seems to suggest that in communism we might experience pain and pleasure differently. I was pleased to see a solution to the problem of who in communism would work in the sewers—perhaps even the smell of shit will be experienced differently then. Perhaps, like animals, we will no longer be alienated from what Benjamin calls “the most lost forgotten land of our own bodies.”

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Remember that American has outsourced its concentration camps. Dwelling too long in the heart of unforced cleanliness, she learned to laugh at the disgust of others. It was their own disgust for themselves, not her. She was triumphant eventually in what was not actually her loneliness.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

For want of anything else to do, she became the universal mother.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Like her hair she shone with strength and power.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

It was as if she had exhausted sex or brought to a close the history of sex or completed every gesture and now had to produce new humans so they could invent new forms.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

She was worth it.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

It’s like the mouth is underlined or highlighted. The mouth is like the word “mouth.” The face is like the word “face.”

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

She produced no airs and her empty body echoed like a cathedral saying “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

If we could see all of her teeth, they would be like the word “tooth” said many times.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

It looked like a rebellion against the image of her nature.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

They would definitely be teeth.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Inverted the relation between Team A, bourgeois normativity, and Team J, the savages at the gates. Pagan worshippers of beauty.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

The best kind of teeth.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Who was Pagan now, out of the Siren and the Girl Next Door? Now that “next door” has been historically dismantled, and the girl herself wanders the streets in search of a new purpose.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

What if every person’s body were replete with something pregnant with its own future? What if there was more than enough time, more than enough love, and more than enough desire?

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

But to say “what if” is to admit that there is not enough love.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

The image of plenty begins to make you feel sick.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

There is not enough time.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

But perhaps the humans of the future — the humans she intends to bear — would not be sick from having too much.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

We currently live in a social relation based on lack and scarcity. Scarcity also of beauty. Also of love.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

Ok, beauty is to an extent subjective. Perhaps she does not look approachable. Perhaps, after all, she doesn’t want to be approached. Despite everything, we felt that her beauty was not for them, but for us.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

These are only skirmishes in the war between yourself and others. The decisive battle is always deferred. Your rebel armies grow tired; your state loses international support; the metaphor collapses, and still you are left with the border. The green line of promised intimacy: impenetrable and, at the same time, impossible to defend.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

They were like two planets coming together or like two major dynasties marrying each other’s land. They were like two empires mingling their fates against a barbarian threat. His Aryan blondness, her hair the color of night. Even if they did not love each other they would’ve had to love each other. Their careers were a telos aimed at their love.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

When Humphrey Bogart had cancer and Lauren Bacall banned anyone from telling him that he was dying, nevertheless he must have known from sensations in his own body. Unless he trusted her enough to conclude that it must be his own body that was lying.

Single bass beat. [Image of Angelina Jolie’s lips and nose and text that reads “Team Jolie”]

Perhaps there was nothing to choose from between them.

Single bass beat. [Image of Jennifer Aniston’s left eye and text that reads “Team Aniston”]

Perhaps there was nothing between them.