Arthur Jafa

I.

The general consensus within the art world is that ‘Love is the Message, The Message is Death’ (2016) was the breakout moment in Arthur Jafa’s artistic career. It’s a sequence of largely found videos that reach into both the soaring joys and the spectacular miseries in the broad spectrum of Black American life, rising and falling to the gospel sounds of Kanye West’s ‘Ultra- light Beam’. There are menacing scenes of policemen and Klansmen committing brutality and murder. Witness testimonies, both in Black churches and on the local news. Miles, Beyoncé, Serena and Malcolm, plus both Michaels: Jackson and Jordan. When played together, these visual notes strike something akin to a chord, sometimes in exquisite harmony, but often in haunting dissonance.

II.

I ring the bell of an ordinary storefront on West Adams Boulevard, in a historically Black neighbourhood of Los Angeles, and the artist answers the door with a warm “Hello” and “I like your shoes.” He’s wearing a pair of Tom Sachs Nike trainers – beige with gold soles – and a plain white T-shirt, black cargo shorts and glasses with black rounded frames. He has a lip piercing, an eyebrow piercing, a silver beard and silver hair parted into large sections that flare into fine braids around his temples.

Every surface of his studio brims with printouts, stacked on work tables and mounted on the walls or freestanding white boards. “I have this obsessive relationship to capturing images,” Jafa says, adding that it has only been intensified by the Internet: “If anybody was ever built to be doomscrolling, it was me.” His image collection reflects his interest in Black aesthetics “predominantly, but not exclusively,” alongside an omnivorous range of “elective affinities,” including Mickey Mouse, Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, The Hulk and Iggy Pop. We take a quick scroll of his Instagram feed, beginning with a reel by actor and friend Tessa Thompson, followed by college football highlights, a neuroscientific study on deep meditation, and more college football high- lights. Perpetually haunted by memories of images unsaved, he’s streamlined a system of immediately forwarding “anything that I find magical, sometimes informational, or that just fills me with wonder” to an assistant to download. That’s not withstanding the images he still downloads himself. “I easily have 200,000 files on my phone,” he estimates. “Only question is, can I find them?”

III.

The artist grew up in the Mississippi Delta, a fertile plain deep in the American South, where the spectre of racial violence was an inescapable feature of his youth. This environment galvanized his appetite for darkness, another key feature of his practice. “Early on,” he says, “I rewired myself to push into things that disturb me, as opposed to recoiling from them.” His works are barbed with images like the lacerations on an enslaved man’s back, a recurring motif that might appear alongside the similarly raised textures of ritually scarified skin or the mountainous terrain on a map. Jafa also readily gravitates toward archetypes of the vilified: the undertaker, the alien (like the one in the movie ‘Alien’), or the fugitive (like Roy Batty from ‘Blade Runner’). He says that attraction to an object or an image is rarely due to its sheer magnificence, but more likely to the way it activates a latent impulse or appetite. Rather than second-guess their attractions, he advises young artists to investigate them: “You have to swallow them whole and spit them back out.”

Despite its extremes of poverty and virulent racism, the supreme miracle of the Mississippi Delta was the invention of the blues, the precursor to rock ‘n’ roll and jazz, and therefore, as Jafa often says, “ground zero for American culture.” In his theory of music embodying Black American self-actualisation, the immateriality of music made it the ideal art form for the radically dispossessed, being easily stored within the nervous system as the body was forced inside the hull of a slave ship. The absence of resources meant an absence of conceptual limitations, where the melancholic intonations of the blues were developed by bending or worrying a note so that it fluctuates outside the lines of Western musical notation. With jazz, improvisation – the spontaneous and complex composition of music – introduced a new paradigm of self-determination, or in other words, freedom.

IV.

‘APEX’ (2013), best viewed on a big screen with top-quality sound, pares the cinematic experience down to an eight-minute sprint through 841 still and moving images. Jafa’s described it as the trailer to a film that, needing a $100 million budget at minimum, “in all likelihood will never be made.” It would be “a Black 21st-century ‘Lord of the Rings’” at the end of the world, flush with “spooky entanglements” and “the abject sublime.” In contrast to the soaring lyricism of ‘Ultralight Beam’, ‘APEX’ pulses along to ‘Minus’, a minimalist track by Detroit techno legend Robert Hood, in which different drumbeats continuously fade in and out, animating the still images with the urgency of a strobe light, an EKG monitor or a siren.

To me, ‘APEX’ captures the essential features of Jafa’s creative logic: the adaptation to economic constraint, the illumination of Black skin in cool blues, and an emphasis on “affective proximity” highlighting the peculiar and previously unseen similarities between one frame and the next – the spiritual likenesses between Mickey Mouse, African god Damballah and the orca whale or between bloody entrails and the volcanic surface of the sun. A decade later, Jafa followed ‘APEX’ with ‘SloPEX’ (2022): the same material stretched to 33 minutes and eight seconds, shifting it from the frenetic pace of an action movie to the slow burn of a prestige drama. I saw it last year at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, where two young people, confusing me and a friend for gallery employees, asked us what this work is about.

V.

“I like ideas,” Jafa says, “because ideas are pure.” Reality, by contrast, is riddled with compromise. “Generally, I’m pleased with what I’m doing,” but “not enthralled,” the artist adds. “I always have this very pronounced sense that I could do more.”

VI.

In 2020, with art dealer Gavin Brown, Swiss art collector Maja Hoffmann and producer Melinda Nugent as partners, Jafa co-founded the film studio SunHaus, its name inspired by the late Delta blues singer Son House. Jafa reads me a rejected logline of ‘Cudhial’, a feature-length love story the studio is in the very early stages of creating: “A recovering sex addict, with his mother and daughter in tow, returned to his Deep South origins to unexpectedly reconnect with his first love.” The “sex addict” descriptor isn’t quite landing in the studio, but Jafa says it approaches the brokenness of the main character, who, like himself, is both wounded by and proud of the place where he grew up. Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed film ‘Sinners’ actually takes place in Jafa’s hometown and is set in the same period as a cherished film project that the artist hopes to one day realise.

VII.

As we approach the late afternoon, the daylight in the studio begins to fade. This entire time, the search for the missing project file has been gnawing at the back of the artist’s mind. “I’m having a little crisis about this video,” he says about a work that to some extent evokes his previous life working as a person for hire. He spent roughly his twenties into his fifties working on other people’s films, where “90% of the shit I was doing I didn’t really want to do.” As someone with a pronounced ambivalence about finding success later in his career, he says, “Oftentimes I think, ‘Wow, I wish I had gotten here a little earlier,’” and wonders what he might have accomplished if he had arrived at 40. The years leading up to his breakthrough were mired by bouts of suicidal ideation and career uncertainty, and he would occasionally choose to sleep in his car rather than bothering his daughter for a place to stay. But if there are infinite universes with infinite AJs, he considers himself one of the more fortunate. “I’ve had a wonderful life. I have wonderful friends. I love my kids,” he says, and “I had really incredible experiences doing what I was doing.” Various projects brought him into the company of Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde and allowed him to travel the world. He’s seen visions that remain permanently ingrained in his memory, sometimes tinged with regret, like an encounter he had at a petrol station in the early 2000s while shooting a documentary in Benin.

He had heard that the people of the area had the ability to read minds, and as he began to raise his camera, she turned around and looked directly into his eyes, and he put his camera back down. “Not every image is meant to be turned into a picture. I just had to accept that in my life,” he says. However, “if there is an afterlife, the first thing I want to do is go back to that.”

VIII.

“I don’t have any real fear of death,” the artist says. In Arthur Jafa’s theory of reality, this thing we call life is like a game of chess, an essentialised, binary version of a much bigger existence, reduced to a limited series of moves across a board. “But when you’re done with it, you go back to a life that is infinitely more complex, infinitely more nuanced, infinitely more specific,” he says. “I think when our lives end, we’re going to go to that bigger existence,” a robust plane where souls are reunited with life’s unsaved images and the friends no longer in the game. According to Jafa, “the game is the only way you can understand limit and constraint and resistance, so I think that’s why we’re here.” He pulls out his phone to read aloud a note he wrote to a friend: