Motion Practice (with <i>Portrait of Jason</i> )

Abstract Repurposing the forms of legal writing (its motion practice), this essay deploys black studies and Marxism — specifically Theodor Adorno's and Fred Moten's respective writings on art's law of motion — to consider both the statutory fair use test under United States federal law and Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1967), a film about a screen test. Both tests, the author argues, enact systems of judgment, or interpretation, that ask those who judge thereby — whether as spectators or officers of the court — to make evaluative judgments regarding art, economics, subjectivity, and race. The author then demonstrates that this judging — or reading — is a form of labor, often to the profit of whiteness and capital, but also toward what may end them, provided we work this work as a kind of discovery procedure. Finally, the author shows that this judging labor transforms with the arrival of Post-Fordism and that Portrait of Jason, unlike the fair use test, helps us move with this desired change, its practice.