Arthur Jafa Part 2 November 16 - January 16, 2025
« How can we interrogate the medium [film or images] to find a way Black movement in itself could carry the weight of sheer tonality in Black song? How can we make Black music or Black images vibrate in accordance with certain frequential values that exist in Black music? How can we analyze the tone — not just the sequence of notes that Coltrane hit, but the tone itself — and synchronize Black visual movement with that? » Arthur Jafa, 1992
Visual frequencies are at the root of Jafa’s simultaneously hyper-focused and expansive practice. Superseding the reduction to description, Jafa’s works ask as much as they answer. The works invite a profound experience of awe and horror, recognition and curiosity, beauty and despair.
An often cited anecdote is Jafa’s quest to develop a “Black cinema with the power, beauty and alienation of black music”, an effort to render the force of Black music in a visual register.
Each work in this exhibition holds both a potent musicality, but also a frequency, a destabilised and vibrating surface.
They possess a sonic and visual texture, akin with the experimentations seen in Man Ray’s earliest films, or in Sturtevant’s destabilised allusions to Plato. The surface of the image is rendered unstable, both dissolving certainty and calling you to focus on the rhythm, the waveform of an image.
"Tree", made in 1999, is one of the first film based works Jafa considered as an artwork; shown 25 years ago at Artists Space, in New York, is a seminal example of Jafa’s works; heavy with the unknown, what is not seen. It holds the keys to the language he continued to develop throughout his career. Alongside are a pair of new works - "Orange was Black: Miles, Alex" and "Frailsailgrailrail".
A central image within "Frailsailgrailrail", is that of a woman demonstrating against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, on hands and knees, repelled by a water hose. The image hums with its own oscillation. It is an image at its most laden, where violence is inferred, built into its potent structure. Running along the length of the wallpapered photographs, cresting the images, are several of Jafa’s rail sculptures. Assembled from industrial materials – aluminium,steel, plastic – these sculptures are Jafa’s ready-mades. Nods to Duchamp, and then further again, to the sub-Saharan African masks and statues that spawned Modernist aesthetics in the West, the materials of these sculptures are, “load bearers”, the sculptures relate to and almost literally underscore the images upon which they are affixed. Little Richard, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Lil Wayne, Foxy Brown, Kayne West, Stan Lee’s Silver Surfer, Miscellaneous, Sharon Tate, Chuck Berry, Corretta Scott King, and Jafa himself, all elements compressed into affective proximity - a musical score writ large.
The fourth work in the exhibition, shown in the lower gallery, "Crystal and Nick Siegfried", made in 2017, speaks to the same elemental core of Jafa’s practice as Tree. Close to motionless, a face captured in immobilising close-up, holds you to its surface. A curl of hair moves, an eye blinks. The unknown is abundant, violence is inferred.
Viewed together these works navigate the space between objectivity and subjectivity, witnessing and experiencing, and in so doing, create a space for audiences to do the same. The sonic tonality of the confrontational pushes you to consider the underside of what is seen.
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi)
At the forefront of thinking through how Blackness is rendered, imagined and lived in society, artist, filmmaker and theorist Arthur Jafa draws from a substantial film and still image database he has been assembling since the 1980s, to make bold, visceral films and room-size installations that lay bare anguish, outrage, power, history, cultural memory, rupture, pleasure, and repair. Placing one resonant cultural artifact – footage whether newly shot or found – next to another, through astute juxtaposition of images and ideas, coupled with lyrical, syncopated editing, he renders both the beauty of a ‘new harmonic’ and searing critique. Renowned for his cinematography – a body of work that includes Julie Dash’s seminal 1991 film Daughters of the Dust, films by Spike Lee, Isaac Julien, and John Akomfrah – Jafa creates work that approximates the radical power, beauty, and alienation of Black life in the West, while seeking to make visible (or emancipate) the power embedded in modes of African expression.
Solo exhibitions of Jafa’s work have been organised by London’s Serpentine Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale. In the summer of 2020, Jafa worked with a global consortium of art museums and institutions to live stream Love is the Message, The Message is Death in alignment with global uprisings for racial justice. Jafa's films screen at the Los Angeles, New York, and Black Star Film festivals, and his artwork is in celebrated collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the LUMA Foundation, in Zurich and Arles, amongst many others.
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