The Brooklyn Rail

Two reigning assumptions of the present are that individuals are self-determined beings with the capacity to choose how they are represented, and that the capacity for self-determination should be the measure through which we evaluate what is good or bad about appearing to the visual. Racism marks a continual threat to these assumptions for the intractable ways it harnesses the image as an instrument of force, summoning the racialized into view to appease imperatives of both knowledge and desire. The value imputed to forms of affirmative representation for racialized people derives at least in part from the wish that self-determination provide a defense against, or freedom from, racialization. Taking up such a defense, however, risks locking us into an endless loop of affirmation, putting race (and blackness, especially) to work towards yet more forms of knowing and desiring.¹

These are difficulties limned in one piece of Sondra Perry’s multifaceted IT’S IN THE GAME ’17, without any triumphant resolution in sight. Between 2003 and 2005, the gaming corporation EA Sports produced It’s in the Game, which allowed users to play as their favorite National College Athletics Association (NCAA) basketball athletes. The artist’s brother, Sandy Perry, was one of many college athletes whose likenesses were digitized into playable characters without permission. This precipitated an eventual class action lawsuit that removed the game from shelves and resulted in a settlement for each player involved. Beginning with childhood photos of the artist and her brother as a backdrop, the video presents rotating 3D renderings of African, Egyptian, Oceanic, and Aztec sculptural forms based on sarcophagi, statues, and ritual objects collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum. The spinning objects, all re-presented in Chromakey blue, are then substituted for the version of Sandy Perry created by EA by means of a cut which sets the video to circle his digitized body. As the video game’s vantage continues to examine Sandy, a two-channel video image imposes itself atop the game, showing both brother and sister walking through the Met and British Museum looking for the objects domesticated and abstracted in vitrine display. As they walk through the museum, the song “Point of No Return” by The Stylistics replays as its most iconic line repeats through the video: “You are everything/And everything is you.”

The doubled rotations of Perry and the 3D-rendered “art” objects, the similarity of the two siblings, and the numerous frames wherein Sandy Perry comes face to face with museum vitrines indicate resemblance to be a primary concern of IT’S IN THE GAME. The resemblance in question traverses a sentimental and intimate dimension, telegraphed by the close conversations between brother and sister, especially as the former shares his exhaustion with the process of making the video. But resemblance here is also about how the forms of objectification that framed both museum objects and the artist’s brother resonate with each other. The desired extraction of value from Sandy’s digitized body, shaped by the problem of slavery, emerges alongside processes of museological extraction and knowledge-production in British and American imperial centers. The video’s suggestive juxtaposition of Egyptian sarcophagi or tombs as museum objects against the NCAA’s digitization of players points to what they might share, as death masks. The video offers that Sandy’s transformation into a valuable form was a kind of death. Visualization and value colluded to yield mortification.

Resemblance stages a Fanonian drama, where images overwhelm the individual desire to determine one’s appearance. The athlete is the artist is the mask is the sculpture; you are everything, and everything is you. Such a chain of equivalence marks an anti-Black violence that legal redress can only belatedly remark upon but never preempt. Perry’s work does not attempt to disavow the dangers of this resemblance and its necessarily racial character, nor to affirm a form of truer “life” outside the brutalizing imperatives of representation. Rather, it takes up a mourning that calls attention to its own implication in the dynamics of death-dealing through its pain-staking reiteration of the processes and tools of computational visual knowledge-production. Its insistence concerns the structures that determine black visibility across media and in the world.

From within the bounds of this meditation, IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 closes by way of another ambivalent combination of images: a Wikipedia screenshot showing Napoleon’s looting of art from Italy in 1797 is superimposed on Sandy’s face as the screen begins to fade to Chromakey blue. As the pigment becomes more saturated and steadily fills the screen, the screenshot crumples up into a ball that begins to recede in the distance. Her closing gesture substitutes the narrative closure of the cinematic fade to black for the undefined abyssal materiality of blue. Both Sandy and the encyclopedia page as objects of knowledge fade away. Perry’s closing thus opens onto a potential beginning: What happens once hallowed desires for knowledge and self-determination are submitted to an abyss, submerged in a place beyond our access to them? Would it still be desirable to invest in a cultural fund of powerful images, or would the image and its supposed social affordances cease to cohere?

1. I draw on the way Rizvana Bradley has framed the problem of blackness and black art objects being put to work in service of interpretation in her recent scholarship. See: Interview with Rizvana Bradley by Jennifer Krasinski, Web, 2024, https://novembermag.com/content/rizvana-bradley and Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023).