What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture? – Amandla Stenberg
The Messenger:
How a Video by Arthur Jafa Became a Worldwide Sensation—and Described America to Itself
By Nate Freeman
One evening last November, a year after the election of Donald Trump, guards at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden steps away from the White House were beckoning visitors to leave. It was closing time. As the guards turned a corner, sounds streamed from a gallery and light flickered from a projector; they swung open the doors to reveal a space packed with transfixed museumgoers.
“We on a ultralight beam, we on a ultralight beam, this is a god dream, this is a god dream, this is everything,” the lyrics swelled from inside the room.
Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, screened on a loop, was starting over, and once again, Kanye West delivered the opening lines of a slowed-down version of his song “Ultralight Beam” as a dizzying array of found footage spliced together by Jafa flashed before the audience. No one budged, even after they’d already sat through the video in its entirety.
Just a year after its gallery debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, Love Is the Message has already been seen in museums across the world. Its opening sequence is bold: clips from within a Google rabbit hole sewn together into an unforgettable suite, the moving images enthralling and amusing and terrifying the viewer: A black man named Charles Ramsey talking about calling 911 when he found Amanda Berry, who had been kidnapped a decade earlier by bus driver Ariel Castro and kept in a basement while Castro and his brothers raped and tortured her; the crowd at a Howard University basketball game dancing to “Swag Surfin” by Fast Life Yungstaz; police officer Michael Slager shooting and killing the unarmed Walter Scott; Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston; the rapper Earl Sweatshirt spitting “the description doesn’t fit, if not a synonym of menace, then forget it”; Michael Jackson in a trucker cap dancing in the back seat of a town car; the sun with explosions like spores licking off its surface; an unarmed black woman in Texas getting pulled over after she left a Walmart and being handcuffed in front of her two kids when the police got word of a black person with a gun in the area; Cam Newton running toward the end zone; a Steph Curry behind-the-back pass; Miles Davis in giant sunglasses; a small black child being told, “That’s what the police do to you. Put your hands up against the wall.”
There in D.C., people stared wide-eyed, some quietly sobbing, as “Ultralight Beam” hit its stirring coda, to the sound of gospel singer Kirk Franklin offering a prayer and a thousand multitracked voices crying out “Faaaaaaaaaith!” LeBron James dunking dissolves into the blazing surface of the sun that in turn dissolves into James Brown grabbing a microphone stand and collapsing onto a stage.
Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death is the first breakthrough by an artist who has been perfecting his contribution to black visual culture for decades, but has only recently come into the spotlight. Before his solo show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in November 2016, the opening coming just days after the election, Jafa had not exhibited in a fine art context in nearly a decade; he had instead been working as a cinematographer, on other people’s projects.
Now, Arthur Jafa shows are traveling to institutions around the world, and his marquee work, created in edition, has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the High Museum in Atlanta. Last fall, he was a new entry on the prestigious annual ArtReview magazine Power 100 list.
Although Love Is the Message came about quickly once the work started, it sprang forth from years of considering how to create a film in a lexicon that can intimate the African-American experience as well as popular music can—what Jafa has dubbed “black visual intonation.”
I interviewed Jafa in Gavin Brown’s personal office in his Harlem gallery on a sunny, bitterly cold December day. When asked about the film, Jafa said, “I suspected black people were gonna be moved by it, but I have to say, the most unexpected thing has been how strongly white folks, or nonblack people, have been moved by it.
“I mean, I don’t get to sit back and be the arbiter of whose response to it is legitimate or not, not at all, but it has been surprising.”
Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1960, as Arthur Jafa Fielder—nearly everyone still calls him AJ. From childhood he had a desire to pair images together, and before age 10, he started a set of three-ring binders, what he calls “the books,” compiling images cut from magazines, pictures he liked, anything he thought needed to be next to something else.
“I used to cut things out, cut pictures out, you know, but I wasn’t doing, like, a proper book, I used to just put them in between the pages of books, like sketch pads, something like that,” he said.
We were still in Brown’s office, a neat little nook in his Harlem castle. Brown was not around, but he had given us free rein to check out the pad, and he had up some small Alex Katz watercolors near a window that looked out on the adjacent red-brick buildings.
“I would cut them out of the newspaper, thousands of them, probably,” Jafa went on. “It was all at that point pretty unconscious, but then at some point [it] started to be a way to consolidate ideas.” He went to Howard University, in Washington, D.C., and began to study architecture, understanding what he learned through his identity as a black man.
“I was very much interested in how to make a black painting, how to make black architecture. I definitely would have said something like, if x record was a house, if Kind of Blue was a house, what would it look like,” he said.
He moved to Atlanta after graduating, and got odd jobs in the city. He began to move away from architecture, and resolved to be an artist working in film, and to work with a vocabulary that would wear its black identity on the sleeve of its aesthetic form, not just in the content of its message.
“It was an epiphany,” he said. “I was sitting behind the apartment that we had in Atlanta, and I was looking at this tree that was sitting [in] this apartment complex, and it was a very peculiar sort of weather [condition] where it was sunny but there were clouds in the sky, and the clouds were moving, and I sat and watched this tree change color—the sky was exactly the same but the colors changed, it went from a bright greenish yellow to a dark brown, and it was just an epiphany: dynamic visual phenomenon, black visual intonation. . . . This [was] a full-blown epiphany, and to a certain degree, I’ve spent the last 30 years exploring the implications of that,” he added.
Jafa wanted to give black film the same agency that black music had developed through its cultural cachet: black visual intonation would be film’s way of communicating blackness in the same way that music did.
“With black visual intonation, it was really possible to create moving image phenomena parallel to [what you hear] in black music—and the music, that’s the one thing the people can agree on,” he said. “There was something about the unique status that the music had. In the context in which black people are, by and large, without favor, without sanctuary. But with music, it was the blackest thing out, but it seemed so much freer, and so much freer than any black person, as it could exist in contexts that otherwise black people wouldn’t be allowed into.”
In 1989 Jafa started working on independent filmmaker Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. (Jafa would eventually marry Dash, who could not be reached for comment for this story, and they had a daughter during the film’s production.) The film’s story took place in the Gullah community, an African-American culture on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina–Georgia coast; Dash’s core team was Jafa and the African-American painter Kerry James Marshall, who served as art director. In this context, Jafa thought it was safe to have black visual intonation seep into the cinematography.
“You have these ideas, you’ve thought about them, you’ve talked about them, and you find yourself in an unprecedented position to implement, to pull the trigger on it,” Jafa said. “It was Julie’s film for sure, but me, Julie, and Kerry, we had a very complex, um, coauthorship of it on a certain level. Julie clearly directed it, I clearly shot it, Kerry did art direction on it, but there are these aspects of the mobilization of our personal energies.”
Daughters of the Dust bowed at Sundance in 1991 and lit up the festival, winning best cinematography for Jafa and ending up a finalist for the Grand Jury prize. Most important, it scored national distribution, making it the first feature film by a black female director to do so. First screenings at the New York theater Film Forum, at the start of 1992, sold out immediately.
“It was pre–social media, and so if it had [had] that effect with social media, it would have been explosive,” Jafa recalled. “We’re talking legit word of mouth—it was a thing, man. When it opened in New York you could not get tickets. Shit was sold out for weeks.”
It was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, and Filmmaker magazine named it one of the 50 most important films of the 20th century, but the crush of fame affected the relationship between its two creators: Jafa separated from Dash during the film’s publicity period.
“Working with Julie was like being in Miles Davis’s band or something,” Jafa said, by way of a compliment.
He then added, “But like, you know, being married to Miles Davis . . . ?”
With the newfound recognition, he got hired to do B-camera work for Stanley Kubrick and Spike Lee, but craved the opportunity to work his theory on black cinema into his own film. “I was working for them, not with them,” he explained.
“I got really frustrated with that, and in the late ’90s, I was like, I think I’m gonna do the art thing,” he said. “It’s something I’ve always been obsessed with, and around ’98, I said, fuck this film thing, I’m gonna do this art thing, and I was pretty successful, pretty fast.”
The first artwork he made was placed in a show at the New York nonprofit gallery Artists Space in 1999 as part of a series called “Artists Select.” Jafa was selected by the renowned sculptor and painter Kiki Smith.
“Kiki had seen some of my video stuff,” Jafa shrugged. The only advice she gave me was, take up as much space as you can, and don’t start so narrow; just start as broadly as your interests are [broad].” The advice paid off. Shortly after that show, he was asked to participate in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.
“I was always very taken by the nuanced ways in which he wanted to explore questions around blackness,” said Valerie Cassel Oliver, one of the organizers of that year’s biennial. She went on to work with him on a number of shows, including “Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a show at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas.
“When we presented his work for the 2000 Whitney Biennial, we featured video shorts that almost appeared as still lifes, but they were very subtle, very poetic,” said Cassel Oliver, who is now curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
Other shows followed, both here and abroad, as his standing among curators grew at a quick clip. Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, told me he first met Jafa through a recommendation from curator Okwui Enwezor.
“I met him around the beginning of the millennium—Okwui said I should see his films, and I was incredibly excited about what I saw,” Obrist said. “Around 2000, he was doing things in the art world, and I invited him to a biennial in Seoul. He made an amazing film with the running movement of a dog going through the city.”
And then . . . radio silence.
“We somehow lost contact for 15 years,” Obrist said.
Indeed, after a few shows in 2005, Jafa decided to hang up his gloves and go back to working behind the camera. He’d given up the idea of being an artist, or at least he’d sidelined it.
It’s not unusual for fine artists to work on commercial projects. “Most artists, they have a commercial side that sustains them, but they’re constantly creating,” Cassel Oliver said. But Jafa had his own reasons for stepping back.
“I realized I wasn’t equipped to navigate the whole social and emotional terrain,” he told me.
“And it was much more segregated at the time. I just didn’t like it—I didn’t like interacting with collectors and stuff like that,” he went on. “Not only because I had some inherent, like, kinda natural aversion to collectors, but because there was just a racial divide. It was just a lot to navigate. I always felt like Jean-Michel could do the work, it was the social stuff that killed him.”
In addition to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jafa went on to name a few other black artists who couldn’t handle the pressure, and ended up dying young, and then let out a sigh.
“It’s difficult for a person who’s not black to fully understand how demanding it all is—fuck the work, and the genius paintings, but how demanding and draining it is to operate as a black person in a fundamentally segregated context,” he said. “It’s not that people don’t love you and all this kinda stuff, it’s just fucking stressful, man.”
By the middle of the 2010s, Jafa had settled comfortably into his career making documentaries and taking gigs as a cinematographer on other projects, and in 2014, he teamed with curator Elissa Blount-Moorhead and filmmaker Malik Sayeed to form the Los Angeles–based TNEG, a production company that supports black independent film. That same year, he made a short “docu-poem” with filmmaker Kahlil Joseph, Dreams Are Colder Than Death, that got some love from the festival circuit but little else.
But it turned out the art world was paying attention. When the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles released the list of artists in its 2016 Made in L.A. biennial, among them was “cinematographer Arthur Jafa.”
Made in L.A. curators Hamza Walker and Aram Moshayedi had to plead with Jafa to participate. “It was very difficult for them to convince him to come back to the world of exhibitions,” Obrist explained. When at last he relented, Jafa decided to restart his career as an artist where it had begun: with “the books,” his binders of juxtaposed found images. At the Hammer, rows of them stretched across the center of a gallery, and visitors could flip through them at their leisure.
“It was very inspiring—I could not leave these vitrines, connecting all these images, and looking at his incredible way of editing,” Obrist said of the presentation.
Compiling the binders inspired Jafa to think about how a montage of disparate clips of moving images could be a black art form. And there was powerful raw material: on YouTube, camera phone footage of violence against black people was being publicly disseminated.
“Modern technology is giving us a front-seat view of the unprovoked violence upon black bodies; when you see that, there is no justification for it,” said Cassel Oliver. “There’s a whole generation that’s grown up with this outrage.”
Jafa began to throw such videos into a folder on his computer desktop, along with clips of prominent black activists and athletes, rappers in videos, and people dancing. And he started to find a rhythm in them, a balletic structure where one discrete clip of movement could blend into the next.
He just wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“It was just one of several files that I was always compiling,” he said, starting to talk about the origin of Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death. “Everyone’s struck by this stream of videos of black people being murdered, so I started throwing them in the file, and I strung them together, and put it together very quickly, two or three hours.”
This was February 2016, when Kanye West was letting songs from his new album, The Life of Pablo, dribble out. Just after midnight on Valentine’s Day, West performed “Ultralight Beam” on Saturday Night Live.
“I was futzing with [the clips] for a few days and I saw Kanye on SNL,” Jafa said. “I said, wow, that’s an interesting song, so a couple of days later I got the music, and I laid it down. I didn’t have a deadline or anything, so I was tweaking it and showing it to people.”
One of those people was Kahlil Joseph, who was so taken with it that he started playing it before screenings at the Underground Museum, an institution founded by Joseph’s late brother, the artist Noah Davis, in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Central Los Angeles. Before each film, there would be one showing of Love Is the Message sans any kind of introduction. In the small community around the Underground Museum, it started to achieve a sort of legendary status.
“I didn’t know he was doing that, because I didn’t attend those screenings, but when I would show up at the Underground Museum, everyone was saying like, ‘Much respect!’ and I was like, what are you talking about?” Jafa said.
Joseph started showing it to whomever he could persuade to watch. In June 2016, the Athens gallery Bernier/Eliades brought Joseph’s film m.A.A.d. to the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland, complete with its own screening room in the fair’s Unlimited sector. While there, Joseph set up an invite-only screening of the original, never-before-seen cut of his film Lemonade, commissioned for the Beyoncé album of the same name. The pop star had originally asked Joseph to helm the whole project, but when it came out too dark, she went in another direction (including drawing heavily from Daughters of the Dust for inspiration).
One of the people who came to see Lemonade in Basel was Gavin Brown, who left an Artforum dinner early to make the screening. When the lights went down, however, instead of a Kahlil Joseph film, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death lit up the screen, Joseph showing it as a preview just as he had at the Underground Museum.
“There had been no introduction, no explanation . . . completely without warning Love Is the Message just came on,” Brown told me over the phone. “It was a physical experience—when you have no idea what you’re looking at, it becomes an experience to which you cannot apply any preconceptions. It was one of [the] most pure art experiences I’ve ever had, because I had no idea what I was looking at.”
After the screening, Brown asked Joseph about the first film, “and he said, ‘By my friend,’ and he said this name, and I had never heard this name before,” Brown explained. The following morning Brown called one of the artists in his stable whom he thought had to know about the video he’d seen.
“I called Mark Leckey at 7:00 am and woke him up, and I said, ‘I’ve just seen . . . something,’ ” Brown said. “I guess I was trying to tell him [I’d seen] something that we’ve both been waiting for for a long time.”
Brown started digging around for information on Jafa. “All I could find out was that he was a cinematographer—but whoever made this object, it seemed to function in my world as art,” he said.
Brown got a contact for Jafa through Walker and Moshayedi, the Made in L.A. curators, and called him, cold.
“When Gavin called me, I was driving my son to school,” Jafa said. “He said, ‘I saw Love Is the Message, and I want to talk to you.’ ”
“He was still a mystery to me, but I was not a mystery to him, which was an unusual situation for me,” Brown said. “He said, ‘Hold up, stop talking, I know who you are, I’m coming to New York, let’s get together.’ ”
Lunch in Harlem led to a four-hour conversation, during which Brown offered Jafa a show at his gallery.
“It was one of the more incredible encounters in my life, really,” Brown said.
“He called me the next morning and said, let’s do it,” Jafa said. “And I said, do what? He said, ‘First off, let’s show Love Is the Message.’ I said, ‘You wanna show it next year or something?’ And he said, ‘No, two weeks. Let’s show it for the election.’ ”
“I was hoping that we could do something rapidly, spontaneously and with verve,” Brown said. “And no, we had never done anything like that before. I didn’t really talk to other people at the gallery about it.”
They made plans to open the show November 12, a Saturday, and in the early morning of November 9, Donald Trump was elected president.
“In my mind, most people after the election were waking up and going to work, and the Saturday morning was the first people had a moment to reflect on what had happened,” Brown said.
It was a true phenomenon, not unlike the release of Daughters of the Dust, but this time with social media. The nature of the short clips made it easily snapped for Instagram, but those stories stressed that Love Is the Message had to be seen in full and in person. Lines began to form as hundreds, and then thousands, trekked up to Harlem to see the work that seemed to provide some catharsis for a city broken by the election, unable to figure out how we got there.
“They encountered a film that seemed to describe this country back to itself, and describe the underlying conditions of racism that produced that election, that produce the conditions that prejudiced people who could vote for that man,” Brown told me. “It was just extraordinary timing.”
A headline in the New Yorker called it “required viewing.” New York Times critic Roberta Smith, in her column listing the best art she had seen in 2016, called it “a seven-minute-long life-changer.”
“Friends of mine, they’d told me, ‘You have to see this,’ ” said curator Mark Beasley, who acquired it for the Hirshhorn and placed it in “The Message,” an exhibition of new film works that took its name from Jafa’s piece. “It was the last time that I was moved in a gallery in a way that I had to ask myself, what is happening to me? Sometimes the timing’s right, and right now, the time requires this kind of work, this kind of message, because it speaks to now.”
Obrist, who happened to be in New York the week of the election, was one of the few who knew Jafa’s work going into the show, and thus had some sense of what he was about to see. Still, he said, it shocked and surprised him.
“The opening at Gavin Brown was very, very important; it gained a bigger urgency—his work has always had an urgency, going back to the 2000s,” Obrist said. “And that urgency of course was much, much stronger after the election.”
Obrist gave Jafa a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, in June 2017; it traveled to the Julia Stoschek Collection, a private museum in Berlin. Love Is the Message also traveled to MOCA Los Angeles. It was recently on view at the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College in North Carolina, and in the summer, will be shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the High Museum in Atlanta both acquired it. In the meantime, JAY-Z tapped Jafa to direct the video for the title track off his new album, 4:44.
“Quite simply, the world caught up with AJ—he’s always been where he’s been,” Cassel Oliver said.
In May, Jafa will show new work at Brown’s gallery. Both artist and dealer stayed mum on what will be included, but told me there will be a new video.
Back in Brown’s office, Jafa toyed with a braid in his hair, and leaned back on the couch as he tried to envision what was to come. “Next is a tsunami of stuff,” he said, sounding hesitant but excited. “It’s the product of having been in suspended animation for 20-something years. It was all on hold for so long, and now I got a lot in the works.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 56 under the title “The Messenger.”
Arthur Jafa in Bloom
Sought after by Spike Lee, Stanley Kubrick, and Solange Knowles alike, the visual artist is changing representations of blackness in museums and beyond.
Arthur Jafa photographed at his studio in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles on May 21, 2019. Success has come late for the artist, 58, who has had a long career in commercial film — but it has also come all at once. Last spring, Jafa was awarded the Golden Lion for best participant at the Venice Art Biennale.Credit…Wayne Lawrence
By Megan O’Grady for The New York Times. August 14, 2019.
“VIBES,” SAYS ARTHUR JAFA, clicking through images on a screen in his Los Angeles studio, all part of an extended mood board for a future project — photographs from the Harlem Renaissance, glamorous black-and-whites of vintage cars and fashion, work by Roy DeCarava — “more vibes.” It’s the morning after Jafa’s 58th birthday, and the polymathic artist, cinematographer and theorist of black culture threw himself a party the night before in this space in the West Adams neighborhood, not far from his home in Ladera Heights. The spotless studio is now empty save for a suite of computers and a large-scale photographic printer the size of a refrigerator. On one wall, there’s a sculpture: a seated man, his horrifically fissured back turned to the viewer. The work was inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a former slave identified as Gordon — it is at once abject and regal and, in Jafa’s 2017 rendition, creepily mesmerizing. The space is new, a place to test out ideas before placing them in a gallery, and late in the day, he shows me a prototype that didn’t work out, tucked in the back: an adult-size oblong of industrial-grade plastic. It takes a few moments of mounting dread to understand that I’m looking at the bundled shape of a lynched woman, meant to be part of a series called “Hang Time.” “Now I have a $60,000 hat stand,” he says dryly.
Success has come late and all at once for Jafa — he still mostly goes by A.J. — but his influence was everywhere long before we knew his name, before he won the Golden Lion for best artist at the Venice Art Biennale last spring. He shot Spike Lee’s 1994 “Crooklyn” and did second-unit cinematography for Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 “Eyes Wide Shut.” He co-directed the haunting video for Jay-Z’s 2017 “4:44,” which collages together images of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy and a pair of dancers, Okwui Okpokwasili and Storyboard P, locked in a pas de deux of sorrow and repentance. He shot Solange’s 2016 videos “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “Cranes in the Sky,” and his influence is evident in Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” the film co-directed by his friend Kahlil Joseph and based on the 2016 album of the same name. Its aesthetics were inspired by Julie Dash’s landmark 1991 film, “Daughters of the Dust,” about an early 20th-century Gullah family’s migration from the Georgia Sea Islands to the mainland. The lushly gorgeous “Daughters,” a touchstone in black filmmaking from the moment it was released, was shot by Jafa — who also produced the film with Dash, then his wife — after their cinematographer took another job. Its distinctive look merges Dash’s concept with Jafa’s intuitive visual instincts. (The celebrated painter Kerry James Marshall served as production designer.) Jafa had never worked with a 35-millimeter camera before, but the film earned him the cinematography award at Sundance.
The work I chose is a video clip of Thomas Whitfield’s choir performing the song “Nothing But the Blood.” ”(SINGING) of Jesus. My Jesus.” It’s a video, you know, that you can find on YouTube. I just stumbled on it. It’s complicated, like, who the artist is. I guess you could say the subject of the video is the Thomas Whitfield choir. Thomas Whitfield was a very successful gospel composer. The soloist is Lateria Wooten, who’s really an incredible vocalist. ”(SINGING) And oh, it’s redeeming.” But I’m not sure, per se, that that’s the artwork. The artwork, in a sense, is this sort of largely unauthored document of a performance.
It’s on one hand a document of the black community at a very particular time in history. There’s one guy who has this incredible hairstyle. Then they do these cutaways of people just doing the move, you know, a strange kind of gesture or something. So it’s, like, fascinating to me, this whole tension between whether something is authored or, in fact, not authored. It definitely tips over into, like, bad photography, bad video, and despite that, it’s still expressively powerful. (SINGING) I’m very, very interested in this question, let’s say, just of legitimacy, because I think for black folks, the question of legitimacy is like a fundamental, almost existential question.
Oscar Micheaux, who was sort of the Louis Armstrong of black cinema, made, depending on who you ask, 30 feature films between 1918 and the mid-50s. Films oftentimes characterized as being poorly done. I would say, well, if you do something one time, it’s an accident. If you do it twice, it’s a coincidence. But if you do it three times, it’s culture, right? And the Thomas Whitfield piece certainly exists as a high bar of how I’d like to think about my own work. I mean, I’m declaring it to be art, but I don’t actually think it cares whether it’s art or not. Increasingly, that’s how I want to make work. I want to make work that’s sort of, you know, it’s not even trying to operate inside of like, what anybody else thinks about it, positively or negatively. And that video, in fact, definitely does that.
In addition to his commercial work, Jafa has also been a documentary cinematographer (on films about Malcolm X, Audre Lorde and W.E.B. Dubois); in the early aughts, he started and abandoned a fine-arts career. A low point followed his 50th birthday, in 2010; he had moved to California to be closer to his then 6-year-old son but didn’t feel he was making work that was meaningful to him. A major shift began in 2013, when he made a magnificent but under-seen 52-minute film essay called “Dreams Are Colder Than Death.” Framed as a meditation on the legacy of the civil rights movement, 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it includes interviews with African-American intellectuals and artists like Fred Moten, Kara Walker, Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, their faces and voices interspersed with slow-motion images of water and stills of deep space as they meditate on American blackness and its complicated inheritance, what Spillers calls the “flesh memory” of pain. What gives the film its lyricism and grandeur is its unusual range of scale, linking the intimately human to the geologic and cosmological.
In 2016, he restarted his career as an artist when the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles included him in its “Made in L.A. 2016” biennial, inviting him to show the hundreds of binders of images he’d compiled over decades, culled from magazines and books — a kind of visual lexicon of diasporic blackness, including fashion photography, pictures of athletes and celebrities, art from superhero magazines and ethnographic imagery. The binders stretched across the gallery.
The tipping point for Jafa was a seven-and-a-half-minute film he made the same year, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” Composed to a large extent of found footage spliced together, it’s a kind of D.J. mix of pure chills, spun with urgency: The white South Carolina police officer Michael Slager shooting and killing the unarmed black forklift operator Walter Scott in 2015; a black Texas teenage girl in a bikini being hurled to the ground by a white policeman two months later; a clip of the British sprinter Derek Redmond pulling a hamstring in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, followed by his father rushing to help his injured son hobble to the finish line. We see swaying crowds and iconic faces — Coretta Scott King, Nina Simone, Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” — as well as newer ones, like the young actress Amandla Stenberg, who asks, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?” In the finale, LeBron James gloriously dunks a basketball, the surface of the sun blazes and James Brown grabs a microphone stand and collapses onto a stage. A phantasmagoria of brutality and magnificence, the short unsparing film is an expansive, unshakable fever dream of blackness as both a creative force and an object of white violence, a kind of digital-age “Guernica.”
Jafa’s distaste for what he calls “microwave epiphanies” has led him to work that expands upon themes embedded in “Love Is the Message” and to play with new forms, including, in his 2018 show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, “Air Above Mountains, Unknown Pleasures,” an arresting set of seven-foot-high tires wrapped in chains. But his strongest work draws upon visual culture and its relationship with blackness, from ironic self-portraits — including one from 1988 titled “Monster” — to the visual representation of historical events, some of which may not be known to younger generations of Americans. In a 2017 show at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions,” visitors were greeted with a wall-size reproduction of a press photograph of the 1970 Marin County courthouse siege, in which the teenage activist Jonathan Jackson — gun-toting, visibly nervous and very young — and three other Black Panthers took hostage a judge, three jurors and a deputy district attorney with the goal of freeing Jackson’s older brother and two others from prison.
Jafa’s latest film, “The White Album,” which was shown at the Venice Art Biennale, turns a black lens on the fragility of white self-conception. A 30-minute film with longer clips than “Love Is the Message,” it contains material ranging from the intentionally banal (a dim teen explaining why she’s “the farthest thing from racist”; goths dancing to hip-hop) to the searing (like CCTV footage of Dylann Roof entering and exiting Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where he would shoot and kill nine worshipers in 2015). A series of bad dreams about race and power, it contains an almost unwatchably painful sequence, one that recalls the scene in “Love Is the Message” in which a black father stands his young son against a wall to show him “what the police do to you.” In the new film, we see a small, tender boy repeatedly reduced to tears by his adult brother’s teasing. In both cases, and in much of his career to this point, Jafa’s intention is clear: to show a kind of misguided, preparatory tough love, the overture to the coming nightmare.
THE ART DEALER Gavin Brown saw “Love Is the Message” during Art Basel in 2016 when Kahlil Joseph showed it as a prelude to a private screening of his cut of “Lemonade.” Brown tracked down Jafa’s number and called him directly. “I was driving my son to school at the time, so I was like, ‘Yes, I know who you are. What do you want?’” recalls Jafa. His film opened at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem in November 2016, just days after the presidential election. The timing was brilliant — it seemed to be a perfect riposte to the atavistic white fears evident in the electoral breakdown; the reception electric. Lines began to form inside Gavin Brown’s Enterprise as people flocked uptown to see it.
As Jafa tells it, “Love Is the Message” came together over the course of a few hours in editing, but it sprang from many years of thinking about how to make films in a vernacular that might intimate the African-American experience as well as popular music could — what Jafa has called “black visual intonation.” After Jafa was released from a commercial project for YouTube in honor of Black History Month (the direction he was taking the film was deemed too dark), he began stringing together archival images — a digital version of what he’d been doing for decades in notebook form, refining his ideas about ways to centralize black life in art apart from Eurocentric ideals. He refers to his juxtaposition of footage he shot himself with found imagery culled from archives and dash cams and unseen corners of the internet — “If my dope register goes off, I use it” — as “affective proximity,” borrowing a term from his friend, the British filmmaker John Akomfrah, and the result challenges viewers to know and feel on a deeper level things we might have thought we had already known and felt. The montage form brings to mind the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s hypnotic collages of word and image, or of the various ways in which Andy Warhol harnessed pop culture to reflect us back to ourselves, but neither comparison goes very far in describing the improvisational virtuosity of Jafa’s editing, with its changes in pace, jump cuts, drags and dissolves. It’s more useful to consider the film’s place within a lineage of black art, of making something new and transcendent from leftovers (giblets, not tenderloin; found footage, not a solid chunk of marble) — and of the potential for visceral truth-telling art to emerge from a state of emergency.
Jafa, an attractive man in a blue button-down and jeans, with braids, excellent glasses and a graying beard, is appealingly neurotic, an intellectual prone to conversational riffs that expand and loop back, inviting you into his thoughts. Two impulses seem to govern him: the need to, as he puts it, “keep it real,” despite the sudden attention, and a determination to advance the larger project of black representation in visual art and beyond. Initially, when Joseph, unbeknownst to Jafa, first began showing “Love Is the Message” in 2016 at the Underground Museum, the art space Joseph co-founded in Los Angeles, Jafa was confused, and then flattered, when people would approach him to say, “Much respect.” But he’s since become more ambivalent to the unequivocally positive response to “Love Is the Message,” which was quickly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others across the country — perhaps especially the reaction of white viewers.
“A thousand people have told me that they cried when they saw it,” he tells me, looking pained. So I ask him: “What do you do when you have a nice white lady coming at you weeping after seeing ‘Love Is the Message’? Surely there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘This isn’t really your experience or reaction to have.’”
Jafa laughs, cringing, “Fortunately, I haven’t had to see the full-blown white lady weeping. I’ve just had people coming up to me saying, ‘I was super moved,’ ‘I cried’ — a pretty moderate articulation of their experience. I’m very happy that people are moved, but I do think it’s complicated when you say, ‘I cried.’ O.K., is that what art is supposed to do? Does that make you any less whatever the hell it is you are? Is that transformative crying or is it just crying? I don’t know.”
As we talk, I think of what’s behind those earnestly felt but un-thought-through white tears: empathy, no doubt, but perhaps also — one hopes — a fresh recognition of unearned privilege and its ethical responsibilities, a sense of just how profoundly we’ve failed to rectify structures and vote out ways of thinking that deny or perpetuate racism. While things have begun to change in the art world, with increasing numbers of curators and gallerists and other gatekeepers of color, black artists still face all kinds of complicated questions. Who are they making art for? Who gets to decide what work is worthy and what isn’t? Are the people they actually want to see their work able to do so, or do they lack the institutional access or sense of cultural entitlement?
To these questions, Jafa adds the strangeness of having presented — and sold — in a gallery something that he could have theoretically uploaded to YouTube. After some thin years, the money is nice — in addition to his daughter with Dash, who is now 35, with a child of her own, he has a son with the artist Suné Woods — and family and legacy are on his mind. Perhaps he’ll build that house he always imagined designing, back when he was studying architecture at Howard University. But it also feels a bit like “Monopoly money,” he says — not quite real.
JAFA WAS BORN in Tupelo, Miss., in 1960, into a middle-class family and an immediate awareness of “certain categorical constraints.” His parents were both educators. His mother taught business administration; his father taught math and science and coached football and basketball. His first-grade class was among the first to be integrated. He remembers being one of three African-American children in the class; 20 years later, his teacher attended his wedding.
The following year, his parents took jobs in the largely segregated Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t feel aware of other people’s projections, of being invaded by the perceptions of others.
As a young teen on family shopping trips, he avoided walking with his family, preferring to walk by himself across the mall or store. He mimes interlocking arms, a gesture of solidarity familiar from civil rights marches, one that also troubles Jafa in the way it perpetuates a perception of sameness, a kind of monolithic blackness — the very erasure of identity at the heart of the slave experience, of being separated from one’s family and specific ethnicity via the Middle Passage to become “a culture in free fall,” as he puts it.
“And that’s part and parcel of what it means to be black, and that’s part and parcel of what it means to be subjected to white supremacy. It’s what I think I was responding to when I didn’t want to walk with my family. I don’t want to be leveled.”
With his brothers, he watched a lot of television growing up — “The Green Hornet,” “I Spy” — that ignited a sense of possibility and fantasy; science fiction, comics and fanzines, including Warren Publishing’s Famous Monsters of Filmland, were his obsession, though only later could he unpack his complex identification with the yetis and aliens in them. (In a 2017 piece that Jafa considers a self-portrait, a stand-up cutout image of a grayscale Incredible Hulk-like figure pounds his fist furiously into his little bit of earth. Jafa calls it “LeRage.”)
When he was about 12, he started cutting kung fu film advertisements from the newspapers and pasting them in notebooks, and he became fixated on a nearby college library, staying there till 4 in the morning, falling asleep in the stacks (the librarian gave him a key), reading everything from Sports Illustrated and Life to Popular Mechanics, where he learned about technologies used in film special effects.
It was in the library at Howard University several years later that he first encountered the concept of African retention, in LeRoi Jones’s book of essays, “Home.” “The idea that there was some sort of continuity between black people in America and black people in Africa around cultural practices was about as radical a concept as I’ve ever been confronted with, and my head just exploded right there,” he says.
At Howard, Jafa learned of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s and began thinking more about where he might fit into a lineage of black aesthetics. One of the professors in the film department at Howard was Haile Gerima, who was part of the L.A. Rebellion, a loosely affiliated group of young African-American filmmakers who came out of U.C.L.A. film school that flourished roughly from the late ’60s to the late ’80s. Gerima introduced Jafa to Dash and Charles Burnett, the legendary director of “Killer of Sheep” (1978) and “To Sleep With Anger” (1990), for whom he briefly worked as a camera assistant in Los Angeles.
But as Jafa told it in a 2003 essay titled “My Black Death,” the bar had already been set for him at the age of 10, when he first saw Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), a film that remains a model for him of how powerful art can be. After the film ended, he emerged into the cinema’s lobby dazed and, though he was unaccustomed to “unchaperoned interactions with white people,” asked the theater’s manager, standing in the ticket booth, what the film was about. “Son,” he replied, “I’ve been looking at it all week and haven’t got a clue.”
The film also provided a template for what Jafa would later understand as a common thread in science-fiction films of the time: a latent preoccupation with, and unprocessed anxiety about, blackness, which in America is never simply figurative.
Decades later, when he was working on Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” his unit would often receive calls from the director, and an intermediary would relay Kubrick’s instructions and encouragement. Jafa waved the phone away whenever Kubrick asked to talk to him, ostensibly because he was too busy shooting. Shortly before the film was set for release, Kubrick died, and Jafa fell into a brief depression. “I wondered why, in over a year of working on the film, I’d never been available to speak to him. I realized that there’d been too much that I’d wanted to say. I’d unconsciously been waiting for the film’s completion in the hope that I’d be able to have a real conversation with him,” he recalled in the essay.
The other key to Jafa’s ambitions and inspiration lies in the Mississippi Delta itself, which he calls “the black Jurassic Park. It’s like this primordial, out-of-time kind of space, but it’s also like ground zero in terms of black musical culture, and if it’s ground zero in terms of black musical culture, then it’s ground zero in terms of American musical culture, which in the 20th century kind of means it’s ground zero in terms of American culture, period.”
Delta blues is an origin point for rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop and other genres of music, but Jafa sees it also as an attitude and a mode of survival, a counterpoint to that offered by the black church, with its message of perseverance through suffering to reach the kingdom of God.
Jafa’s 2018 film, “Akingdoncomethas,” illuminates this communal search for higher ground in a 105-minute collage of preaching African-American evangelists and gospel singers and their enthralled congregations — a spellbindingly bizarre extended catharsis. In contrast, black music, from blues to hip-hop, has become the place to talk about things like sex, drugs, violence, adultery and disenfranchisement: a place, in short, to keep it real. His current project, a feature film, is his life’s ambition: to create a visual experience that matches the impact of black music on American culture.
“I just want to make things that look like they came out of some alternate universe, a universe in which black people have had way more leeway to make cinema,” says Jafa. “You know, something like unspoken dreams.”
JAFA DOESN’T DO UPLIFT. He rejects redemption stories, the myths of the American dream and fairness and opportunity for all — and as a parent, this can pose some quandaries. Recently, his son was learning about the civil rights movement in school. “He was like, ‘Dad, they had to sit in the back of the bus and it wasn’t fair.’ I just started laughing, because it’s the #MeToo generation, the whole #BlackLivesMatter generation. Millennials, they be like, ‘We have to change the system because it’s hurting our feelings.’ It’s just mind-boggling to me.
On one level, I’m happy for it because I think black people should feel entitled, too, but that’s just not realistic. It’s not keeping it real. It’s not really seeing this for what it is, and I think that’s super critical. This whole idea of seeing is believing.”
Jafa thinks a lot about how black identity has shifted over the years. “One of the basic conundrums of black being,” he tells me, “is that the very things that have oppressed us are the very things that define who we are, and if we erase all the suppression and stuff, we sort of erase ourselves.”
Jafa’s work can be seen as a kind of missing link in our understanding of just how crucial it has been to civil rights to turn the camera back upon the white gaze in order to make the world see and believe. In 1955, Jet magazine published images of the mutilated face of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was lynched by two white men in Mississippi a few days after he whistled at the wife of one of the men, helping to catalyze the civil rights movement. In 1965, when voting-rights marchers in Selma, Ala., were run down by policemen, tens of millions of Americans watched on the evening news. “We no longer will let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners,” Martin Luther King Jr. said soon after. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”
#BlackLivesMatter became a hashtag in the summer of 2013, when the community organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi responded to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who killed the black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Since then, it has become the banner under which disparate organizations and millions of individuals press for change, but even Jafa didn’t anticipate the ways in which citizen documentation by smartphone would become an instinct, a reaction to a social pressure that has been building against centuries of white denial.
“I remember distinctly telling somebody, ‘That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. A camera in a phone?’ But here we are. Once someone documented [this brutality], it became a modus operandi. At a certain point, it wasn’t just that they knew they could do it — they felt compelled to do it.”
If Jafa’s late-career success also feels like a triumph for other artists striving to make films that exist outside Hollywood structures and conventions — more experimental filmmakers like Joseph, Ja’Tovia Gary and Terence Nance — it nearly didn’t happen. He recalls a conversation with Bradford Young, the cinematographer of 2014’s “Selma” and one of several friends who tried to intervene when the bottom fell out for Jafa in 2011. “I’m sitting in his car, and I’m really depressed, real suicidal,” Jafa says, “and Brad turned to me and he said, ‘Why do you think you’re not enough?’ And I was like, ‘Because I’m a big failure.’ He said, ‘Well for us, you are enough, because we all feel like you kinda …’ And then he didn’t say anything for a long time.”
Young broke the silence by saying that for young black filmmakers, “You’re like our Frodo,” the central character of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” who goes on an arduous journey to destroy the One Ring, an object of mysterious power.
Jafa’s love of science fiction didn’t extend to fantasy (“I don’t like unicorns or fairies or stuff like that”), so Young explained the story for him: “And he said, ‘You have Aragorn, he’s a classic king with a sword and born into it. And you’ve got the elves, and they have the archery and telepathy skills. And you’ve got the dwarfs who can forge iron weapons. And then you have Frodo. Frodo was little. He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t the smartest. He wasn’t the bravest.’ ”
“But,” Young told Jafa, “he could bear the weight of the Ring.”