ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Artist, filmmaker, cinematographer, TNEG (motion picture studio) co-founder, Arthur Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and currently resides in Los Angeles. Renowned for his cinematography on Julie Dash’s pioneering film Daughters of the Dust (1991), Jafa, also the film’s co-producer, put into practice techniques he had long been theorizing. “Black Visual Intonation” is but one of his radical notions about re-conceptualizing film. He is the director of Slowly This (1995), Tree (1999), Deshotten 1.0 (2009), APEX (2013) and Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016). Jafa was the director of photography on Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994), Isaac Julien’s Darker Shade of Black (1994), A Litany for Survival (1995), Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson’s biographical film on the late Audre Lorde, John Akomfrah’s Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), a cinematographer for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Manthia Diawara’s Rouch in Reverse (2000), Nefertite Nguvu’s In the Morning (2014), shot second unit on Ava DuVernay’s Selma (2014) and was the director of photography for Solange’s music videos Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky (both 2016). In 2017, along with TNEG, Jafa conceived, shot and edited the music video for JAY-Z’s 4:44, the title track from his newest album. Dreams are Colder Than Death, a documentary directed and shot by Jafa to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, garnered acclaim at the LA Film Festival, NY Film Festival and Black Star Film Festival where it won Best Documentary. His writing on black cultural politics has appeared in various publications such as Black Popular Culture and Everything but the Burden, among others.
Arthur Jafa: Love is The Message, The Message is Death Publication ©2018 Jafa’s notable solo, group, gallery and museum exhibitions include Artists Space, New York, NY (1999); Okwui Enwezor’s traveling exhibition Mirror’s Edge, BildMuseet—University of Umea in Sweden / Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada / Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy / Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (1999); 2000 Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Black Box, CCAC Institute, Oakland, CA (2000); Media City Seoul, Korea (2000); Bitstreams, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2001); Social Formal, Westaelischer Kunstvein, Münster, Germany (2002); My Black Death, ARTPACE, San Antonio, TX (2002); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA (2015); The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, NY (2016); The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016). Jafa was recently featured in a solo exhibition entitled “A Series of Utterly Improbably, Yet Extraordinary Renditions” at The Serpentine Gallery in London in 2017 that will tour to the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin in 2018. His work is represented in celebrated private and public collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The High Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Museum of Fine Art in Boston, The Stedelijk Museum, The Perez Art Museum in Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.
This publication was produced in conjunction with Arthur Jafa: Love is The Message, The Message is Death, at the Van Every/ Smith Galleries, Davidson College, January 25–March 3, 2018. Van Every/Smith Galleries Davidson College 315 North Main Street, Davidson, North Carolina 28035 davidsoncollegeartgalleries.org All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-1-890573-24-9 Lia Newman, Director/Curator Allison Tolbert, Curatorial Assistant Images: Arthur Jafa, film stills, Love is The Message, The Message is Death, 2016, Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York/Rome Detail on cover; Installation images by Thomas Müller
Arthur Jafa: Love is The Message, The Message is Death
about a member of a group that has been needlessly, prejudicially, and usually violently estranged from society and opportunity. The term “Other” is often used as a cousin to “victim” and is meant to point out an embodied history of systemic and personal injustice and subjugation. The Other is only the Other because there is a dominant Somebody who has the resources, the floor, the mic, the benefit of the doubt. And many of us who think and write about art and identity have constructed our responses to black art around this idea of “the Other”. But while that picture is quite right — useful in understanding American society, its violence, and exclusionary tactics — it is only a partial view.
Introduction: Love is The Message, The Message is Death CASSIE DA COSTA Arthur Jafa’s visionary and deeply, complicatedly imaginative Love is The Message, The Message is Death is a story about impossibilities that are entirely real — specifically, the impossibility of the alien “Other” in our society. Jafa’s video presents a story about black people and black presence, but in refreshed and renewed terms. It poses a challenge to critics because when we talk about “the Other,” we’re typically talking
The word “Other” has the robust dialectical armor of le mot juste. In signifying difference and signaling the way it is punished, “Other” lays down the theoretical groundwork for studying forms of oppression. But the public discussion of otherness, in media, books, visual art, movies, and on television often misses the plurality and diversity within that very difference. Yes, there is a dominant view from which terrible and lasting abuses spring forth but, in the meantime, the Others do not simply languish in the margins; they make magic, turn those margins into a whole, other world. This idea that Otherness is an inherent state of diminishment is perhaps owed to the overcorrecting liberal response to anti- black oppression that has in turn given birth to the white savior. And black people have noticed. In Tyler Creator’s 2015 song “SMUCKERS,” the oft-prophetic Kanye West quips “richer than white people with black kids / scarier than black people with ideas.” Here, he speaks to the price of rich white benevolence — black people’s unending humility, gratefulness, assimilation — and rebukes it.
Jafa’s Love is The Message, which uses West’s 2016 hip hop gospel “Ultralight Beam” as a score, does the same and more. In a 7-minute, 25-second long ode to black expression and excellence, Jafa gives face and voice to this so-called Other, but never within the binary, causal terms to which language tends to relegate life. Instead, we are ushered into what Jafa has called the “entangledness,” conundrum, or dilemma of black being. To Jafa, blackness is a state of exuberance and terror, solace and horror, play and mourning, grace and power, genius and sorcery, absolution and defeat. None of these conditions are in conflict; instead, they’re in concert. And in portraying these conditions onscreen, Jafa never depends on the white, Eurocentric perspectives that have dominated visual art and filmmaking in the Western world. In Love is The Message, the margins cease to be margins.
But what’s more interesting, generative and tricky, what relentlessly bursts with life, is the struggle for freedom. In the 2010 song “Good Friday” Kanye rips the radio for refusing to play his album 808s & Heartbreak: “Such an easy morning, we on a ride / And I’m feeling smooth as the way the Benz drive / Turn the radio down if they playing that bullshit / They don’t want black people to think and drive.” Kanye has the Benz, the comforts, the easy morning, but the dominant view still chases him. This kind of complication is the stuff of black excellence — the consciousness that isn’t simply double but multiple, the imperative to live many lives not in succession, but at once. That’s the missing part of the picture of the Other: the howling, the hustling, the hoping and praying, the being at once inside and outside of ourselves. We wouldn’t have blackness without it. That’s our triumph and our trouble.
For Jafa, the experience of blackness is one of alienation, but also, blackness is alien — it’s extraordinary.
felt like a kind of mass. So naturally, the video itself is an archival gospel work of its own, including clips of spirited church singing, Obama’s brief rendition of “Amazing Grace,” and, of course, “Ultralight Beam.” But there’s so much more. That’s the idea. There’s always more — black excellence never ceases to expand, to find new avenues and connections, new forms of expression from sport to dance to humor, to death.
I saw the video for the first time in Harlem in 2017, fresh off the New Year. Having seen much of his film work and having written about his archival work — Jafa obsessively collects images on files on his computer and had recently exhibited binders full of magazine clippings at museums in LA and Chicago — I was excited to see his first video art piece. Arriving at Gavin Brown’s uptown space and seeing the swarm of black folk (and friends) gathered in and outside of the screening room
For Jafa, the experience of blackness is one of alienation, but also, blackness is alien — it’s extraordinary. This is the premise upon which Love is The Message rests. Indeed, true liberation would be the freedom to be ordinary, the assurance and comfort of equal standing and safety in society that results from the image of ordinariness, the opportunity for complacency and simplicity (and obliviousness) that rich white men have always been afforded.
CASSIE DA COSTA is a cultural critic who has written about movies, visual art, television, and new media for newyorker.com, Hyperallergic, 4Columns.org, Film Comment, Feministing.com, and elsewhere. A 2015 Yale University graduate with a degree in Comparative Literature and Film, she is currently a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff and the producer of the magazine’s video podcast series The Front Row, which features the New Yorker film critic Richard Brody. Born in Cardiff, Wales to a Gambian-Ghanian-British father and a Zambian mother, da Costa grew up in the United States, in Nevada, North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Beyond her work as a writer and editor, da Costa is also committed to the causes of mental health and women’s health, particularly in underserved communities in the U.S., and, this coming fall, will pursue a career in medicine and psychiatry.