“The Kennedys. Palm Beach. A charge of rape. It all made for a real-life soap opera in May 1991 that resulted in an arrest, a trial, and non-stop cable TV coverage.” So reads a recent Miami Herald summary of William Kennedy Smith’s trial, when John F. Kennedy’s nephew was acquitted of raping a twenty-nine-year-old woman. New York-based artist Jordan Strafer fictionalizes that case in “DECADENCE,” an exhibition at the Renaissance Society showing two films back-to-back on a large standing screen, starting with LOOPHOLE (2023). Clocking in at twenty-four minutes (the standard runtime of a TV episode), and filmed in the style of a 1980s soap crossed with a true crime reconstruction, LOOPHOLE draws on sociolinguist Gregory Matoesian’s observations on the “matrix of language, law, and society” that he saw mobilized in Smith’s court proceedings “to create and recreate cultural hegemony”—which Matoesian found to be inextricable with patriarchy. Echoing Matoesian’s findings, Strafer zooms in on what Matoesian described as the poetic, aesthetic, and “persuasive rhythms of trial talk” designed to “organize and intensify the inconsistencies in the victim’s account and shape them into a cumulative web of reasonable doubt.” LOOPHOLE plays with that doubt by embellishing proceedings with a Lynchian surreality …

One Sergei Eisenstein quote I’ve always remembered: “montage is conflict.” It’s the ultimate expression of how art can be politically relevant—not by representing or calling for struggle, but by manifesting it formally. Eisenstein argued that while conventional film merely directs emotions, montage directs the entire thought process. A century later, Beirut-based artist Haig Aivazian’s examinations of conflict in the Middle East insist that montage is every bit as expedient today as it was upon its invention. Aivazian’s solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society features two densely edited videos: All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes (2021) and Prometheus (2019). Roughly twenty minutes apiece, these play alternately on opposing large screens within a third work: the moody, site-specific installation 1440 Couchers de Soleil par 24 Heures [1440 Sunsets every 24 Hours] (2017/2021), which covers the gallery’s raking walls in a chalk grid reminiscent of surveillance technologies such as radar and heat maps. In both of the videos, Aivazian layers and splices found footage to brutal effect, mobilizing elemental motifs—fire and light—to trace themes of surveillance, protest, cultural hegemony, and military invasion that have characterized the relationship between the West and the Middle East over the past several decades, …