Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions
[The title of this article is also the title of an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries and the title of the brochure that accompanied the exhibition]
In the early days of University, I kept seeing articles about a video called "Love is the message the message is death" which I couldn't find anywhere as it only showed in exhibitions and I was out of luck. I was particularly keen on watching it because the video used Ultralight Beam as its soundtrack and I was always interested in the adjacent use of music in visual communication.
Fast forward to 2018 someone who went to an exhibition that displayed the video had recorded it and released it on Youtube. Granted, the overall quality was off but at least I got to see it and what I saw was powerful. (I don't support leaking artist's work on the internet but this is one of the few times where I'll attribute it to educational purposes).
The video is a collage of different moments of African American history, from a Civil Rights March to different instances of police brutality, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Drake and James Brown on stage, Earl Sweatshirt rapping "the description doesn't fit, if not a synonym of menace, then forget it", Barack Obama singing Amazing Grace, Minister Farrakhan talking about Christopher Wallace then a clip of BIG freestyling in Bed Stuy when he was 17, Derek Redmond's injury, Michael Jordan's flu game, Michael Jackson in a trucker hat dancing in the back seat of a car, old scenes from minstrel shows, Michelle Dobyne's viral "The house is on fire" interview, a black child crying being told: "This is what the police does to you, put your hands on the wall" and the list goes on… What struck me the most is that all of these things on their own hold their own significance but the narrative they create when weaved together is more powerful than the sum of its parts, it is as terrifying as it is mesmerizing. When the video finishes it leaves you perplexed as to what is it is exactly that you're feeling, and how you've come to feel it. It's a weird mixture of sadness nostalgia, contentment and anger.
The compounded injustice and abuse that are present throughout the video don't leave much room for emotions other than Anger but there was enough highs and moments of joy sprinkled within it to skew those. These moments are not particularly linear, the cycle - if i can even call it that- of joy turns into sadness, which itself may turn into joy or not, it is not organized, it follows no pattern or logic; what it does however is build this extreme tension up, especially if you recognize what some of those moments are and their historical significance. That tension is never released, it lingers within you for sometime after the video finishes. The video encapsulates (for lack of a better word) the black experience, it neither attempts to explain it nor rationalize it. What it does, more importantly, is pushing whoever sees it to think.
Jafa was involved in work that I admired and was inspired by, this includes but is not limited to Crooklyn and Malcolm X by spike Lee, Eyes Wide Shut by Stanley Kubrick, 4:44 by Jay Z, Formation by Beyonce, Cranes in The Sky and Don't Touch My Hair by Solange. Everyone of these works I recommend you to take moment and look at. He did camera work for the directors I mentioned and decided that "he was gonna try this art thing" at some point when he was frustrated.
Out of all the credits attributed to Jafa, he has one acting credit, an HBO TV series called Random Acts of Flyness which has just won a Peabody Award. This is one of my favorite discoveries of the year. It is a show I have urged anyone that would listen to me to watch. A few episodes in, I thought "Is it just me or does this feel like Jafa's work?" Well I got a pretty direct answer in episode 5 when Jafa's face got plastered on the screen as a snippet from Show Studio's In Your Face Interview pops up (he appears multiple times but this one was pretty hard to miss). This is another thing I appreciate, Random Acts throws quite a lot at you, so you see something new every time you revisit the series.
In similar fashion to what Jafa tries to accomplish with Love is the message, the message is death, Terence Nance tries to encapsulate the black experience, to the best of his ability, in these 6 episodes. Questions of race, identity, gender, family, sexuality are raised, in a brilliant exercise of genre bending nuance, surrealism and humor. I wanted this to be my excuse to mention it and urge everyone who reads this to watch it as more Black Visual Storytelling comes to light and we're exposed to more work of this nature.
Arthur's new Film The white album is reportedly 40 minutes long and is displayed in The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on a loop.
Still From The White album