Last year Arthur Jafa was awarded the Golden Lion for the Best Participant at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice for his 2019 film "The White Album". The motivation stated, "Jafa uses appropriated and original footage to reflect upon the issue of race. Just as the film critiques a moment fraught with violence, in tenderly portraying the artist’s friends and family, it also speaks to our capacity for love."
In the complex last few months in which the news were dominated first by the Coronavirus pandemic and then by the horrific death of George Floyd, a black man killed in May by a Minneapolis policeman who knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, we may have not been able to see much love. Yet we have seen solidarity, sacrifice and a strong will for change, feelings on which we could ponder a bit more via Jafa's work.
The artist, filmmaker and cinematographer was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1960, but he is based in Los Angeles. He worked with Stanley Kubrick on "Eyes Wide Shut" and Spike Lee on "Crooklyn", but he is better known for winning the "Best Cinematography" Award at Sundance for the independent film "Daughters of the Dust" (1991), directed by Julie Dash. The film went on to inspire Beyoncé for the visuals in her film-album "Lemonade". Besides, Jafa also worked as director of photography on Solange's videos "Don't Touch My Hair" and "Cranes in the Sky", and on Beyoncé's "Formation", editing also Jay-Z's video "4:44".
One of Jafa's key artworks remains "Love is the Message, the Message is Death" (2016; part of the title, as you may guess, is inspired by 1973 MFSB's track "Love is the Message"), a multilayered visual collage in which joy, horror, beauty and alienation are all combined together.
The video shows a series of rapid sequences relating to sorrow and happiness, violence and triumph, so you will see in it a white police officer shooting unarmed black 50-year-old Walter Scott in 2015, but also civil rights demonstrations in the '60s, Beyoncé dancing on a balcony, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Notorious B.I.G., and former US President Barack Obama speaking, with Kanye West's "Ultralight Beam" as soundtrack.
Jafa developed a passion for collecting images from newspapers, magazines, books, and films; he has been doing it since the '80s, when he started saving them in notebooks in which he juxtaposed images showing the brutalities against blacks across American history with jazz musicians such as Miles Davis.
Jafa uses these images as references for his artwork and films (he is also a long-time collaborator of another artist who uses collages of images in his films, Kahlil Joseph) as he did in "Love is the Message, the Message is Death" and in last year's "The White Album", showcased at the Venice Biennale in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini.
This video is a mix of news clips, home and music videos, memes, historical photographs and other assorted materials collected from the Internet and other sources to examine the theme of race in media-based culture. "The White Album" investigates the tension between the violence and insanity of white supremancy (clips go from the beating of white trucker Reginald Denny in the 1992 LA riots to white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof) and Jafa's love for the people in his life who happen to be white.
Jafa also works with sculptures and in the Arsenale space at the Venice Biennale he displayed his "Big Wheel" series, beside a single photo of his son at two ("Little Buddha") and a sound installation playing Soul and Rhythm & Blues songs. "Big Wheel I, II and III" consists in three monumental black tires from Monster trucks wrapped up in chains and with a melded metal, meteorite-like hub from which bits and pieces of blue bandanas emerge.
Inspired by the monster truck culture in Mississippi, they look like giant medallions, but they actually represent something else: the chains point at subjugation and the fact that the tires were enchained on the floor or suspended above ground on an ominous structure reminiscent of the gallows, hinted restrained and imprisoned human beings .
Yet while the chains indicated restraint, the tires also referenced cars, mobility and the freedom of being on the road. They therefore hinted at the US automobile industry, its decline and the fact that it provided livelihood for black people, so the three monumental tires were a testament to the faded agrarian South where the artist was born and to the automobile industry and its black workers, considered as discarded, and therefore disposable, technology.
It will be interesting to see how Jafa's practice will develop in the next few months and if he will create a new film inspired by the recent events. You feel that his fractured and rich sampled films would be perfect to narrate the crucial historical moment we are living now, with its challenges, struggles and crises that will hopefully bring real change.
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