Essay · Art & Ideas
The Question He Has Been Asking for Thirty Years
Arthur Jafa has organised his entire artistic life around a single question: how do you make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music? The question sounds like a problem of aesthetics. It is, in fact, a problem of civilisation — of whether the most significant cultural production of the twentieth century can be translated from one medium into another without losing the thing that makes it matter, and of what it would mean for art, for film, for the culture at large, if the translation succeeded.
By Bergotte · Mississippi & Los Angeles · Art & Ideas
He grew up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is either the worst place or the best place to grow up if your life’s work is going to be about the depth and the cost and the extraordinary creative force of Black American experience. Clarksdale is the Delta — the flat, agricultural, deeply segregated heart of the American South, the place where the blues was born, where Robert Johnson allegedly made his bargain at the crossroads, where the distance between the beauty of the music and the conditions that produced the music is so extreme that it constitutes, in itself, a kind of argument about what art is for and what human beings can make from the worst of what is done to them. Arthur Jafa Fielder was born on November 30, 1960, in Tupelo — Elvis Presley’s birthplace, another Delta resonance — and raised in Clarksdale, and the landscape and the history and the music of that place are present in everything he has subsequently made, not as subject matter or as nostalgic reference but as the foundation of a way of seeing and hearing and thinking about images that is entirely his own.
His parents were educators. He grew up Catholic, which gave him a relationship to image and ritual and the formal staging of transcendence — Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is a work he has cited repeatedly as a touchstone, the moment in Western art where the spiritual and the physical and the ecstatic are most fully and most honestly combined — that sits alongside the Delta music and the science fiction television and the binders of found images he assembled as a child, collections he called “the books,” the first evidence of the curatorial intelligence that would eventually produce Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death. He studied architecture and film at Howard University, the historically Black university in Washington whose intellectual tradition — serious, politically engaged, committed to the idea that Black excellence was not a deviation from the norm but a demonstration of what the norm had always been capable of producing — shaped his understanding of what art could be and what it was obliged to attempt.
Daughters of the Dust and the Education of a Cinematographer
His first major work was not his own. In 1991, Jafa served as director of photography on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust — the first feature film directed by a Black woman to receive wide theatrical distribution in the United States — and the cinematography he produced for it is, by the consensus of everyone who has written seriously about the film, one of the most formally extraordinary achievements in American independent cinema. The images are saturated with light — the specific light of the Georgia Sea Islands, golden and diffuse and simultaneously documentary and dreamlike — and they are composed with an attentiveness to the Black female body, to its beauty and its dignity and its relationship to the landscape it inhabits, that was without precedent in American film. Jafa has spoken about the challenge of making images of Black people that were not shaped by the conventions of a visual tradition that had historically represented Blackness as deficiency, as deviance, as the negative space against which whiteness defined itself, and Daughters of the Dust was his first fully realised answer to the challenge: images that looked at Black women with the full attention of a camera that considered them beautiful and important and the proper centre of the world they inhabited.
The film won the Excellence in Cinematography Award at Sundance. Jafa went on to work as a cinematographer on Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) and, in one of the more unexpected collaborations in the history of cinema, on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) — the dying master’s final film, a work of such formal control and such deliberate strangeness that it required, and found in Jafa, a cinematographic intelligence capable of meeting its demands. The collaboration says something about Jafa’s range and about Kubrick’s eye: the director who had made 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the formative experiences of Jafa’s childhood, recognised in the cinematographer from Clarksdale someone who understood images at the level where craft becomes vision.
“How do you make Black people more than human on screen, the way Black music makes Black people more than human in sound?” — Arthur Jafa, in conversation, 2017
The Question and Its Implications
The question Jafa has been asking — how to make a Black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of Black music — is not, at first glance, obviously answerable, and the difficulty of the answer is part of what makes the question so generative. Black music in America — jazz, blues, gospel, soul, hip hop — has achieved something that no other art form in the culture has achieved: it has taken the experience of a people subjected to centuries of systematic dehumanisation and produced from that experience a body of work of such formal complexity and such emotional depth and such sheer aesthetic power that it has become, effectively, the defining cultural contribution of the twentieth century, the sound that the rest of the world heard when it listened for what America was. The music did this without sentimentalising the experience that produced it, without softening the alienation or pretending the beauty existed independent of the pain. Miles Davis — whom Jafa has cited as his primary aesthetic reference, whose quality of sound he describes as simultaneously voluptuous and austere — made music that held both things fully and simultaneously, and Jafa has spent his career trying to understand how to do the same thing with images.
The problem is structural as well as aesthetic. Music moves through time; images can be frozen. Music is abstract; images are always, in some sense, representational. Music operates in the body before the mind; images tend to operate in the mind before the body, which is why the most powerful images in Jafa’s work are those that reverse this tendency, that arrive in the body as a physical impact before the mind has assembled the narrative apparatus to mediate them. The editing style he developed — rapid, associative, rhythmic, organised by feeling rather than by argument, proceeding by juxtaposition rather than by logic — is his answer to the structural problem: if you cut fast enough, if the rhythm of the cutting is itself musical, if the relationship between images is felt rather than read, then the image can begin to do what music does, to operate at the level of the body before the level of the mind, to produce something closer to the experience of listening to Coltrane or to Kendrick Lamar than to the experience of watching a conventional film.
Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death
Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death — seven minutes, 2016, set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” — is the work that brought Jafa to the attention of the broadest international audience and that remains, four years after its release, the most discussed and most exhibited single piece of video art of the twenty-first century. It is worth describing in some detail, because descriptions of it tend either to reduce it to its most obviously political content — the footage of police violence, the images of historical atrocity — or to aestheticise it in ways that miss the specificity of what it is doing.
The work is a montage of found footage and archival images drawn from across the full span of Black American experience: civil rights marches and police beatings; James Brown performing with the total physical commitment of someone for whom performance is not representation but being; Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the Charleston memorial service; a Black child dancing with an abandon that is pure joy and pure freedom; footage of Alvin Ailey dancers and of athletes and of ordinary people doing ordinary things with the extraordinary grace that ordinary Black American life has always, in Jafa’s understanding, contained; and, threaded through all of this, images of violence and death and the historical record of what has been done to Black people in America by a state and a society that has not, across any of the centuries that the footage represents, fully decided whether they are people.
The montage is set to “Ultralight Beam,” which is itself a gospel song — a song about light and grace and the desire to be worthy of something larger than oneself — and the combination of West’s music and Jafa’s images produces an experience that operates, in the viewer’s body, as grief and as joy simultaneously, as the recognition that both of these things are inseparable in the tradition the work is drawing from. Jafa has connected the work to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa — to the moment in Western art where the spiritual experience is rendered as a physical one, where the body and the soul are not in opposition but are the same thing expressing itself — and the connection is exact: the work asks the viewer to receive its images the way the believer receives grace, which is in the body, before any question of interpretation or response.
“I want the work to be experienced the way music is experienced — not thought about, not analysed, but felt, in the body, before the mind has time to intervene.” — Arthur Jafa, in interview, 2018
The White Album and the Venice Golden Lion
The White Album — shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where it won the Golden Lion for best participant — extends the method of Love Is the Message into more uncomfortable territory: a montage of found footage that centres not Black experience but whiteness, the ideology and the imagery and the violence of a racial category whose construction Jafa examines with the same unflinching attentiveness he brought to Love Is the Message. The title references both the Beatles and the racial category, and the reference is deliberate: the work is interested in the way whiteness has been naturalised, made invisible, treated as the norm against which everything else is measured, and it uses the tools of montage — juxtaposition, rhythm, the violence of the cut — to make whiteness visible as a construction, as something made rather than given, as a system of power that has organised itself around the fiction of its own neutrality.
The work was controversial in ways that Love Is the Message was not, because it asked white viewers to occupy, briefly and uncomfortably, the position of the observed rather than the observer — to be the subject of the camera’s analytical attention in the way that Black people have been the subject of the camera’s attention, often without their consent and rarely with their advantage, since the medium was invented. The discomfort this produced in some viewers was, Jafa has suggested, precisely the point: the experience of being seen clearly, without the softening of sympathetic framing, is an experience that Black Americans have had continuously and that white Americans have rarely been asked to share.
Architecture, Music, and the Theory of Black Visual Intonation
The concept Jafa has developed over three decades to describe what he is attempting — Black Visual Intonation — is one of the more precise and more useful theoretical frameworks produced by any artist working today, and it deserves to be engaged with as theory rather than merely invoked as context. The concept derives from music: intonation, in musical terms, is the quality of being in tune, but it is also the inflection, the bending of the note, the way a jazz musician or a blues singer approaches a pitch from slightly below or above, departing from the written note to find the note that is true rather than merely correct. This bending — this departure from the given toward the felt — is, Jafa argues, what Black music has always done with the forms it inherited, and it is what Black Visual Intonation would do with the forms of cinema and visual art: not adopt the existing conventions but bend them, inflect them, depart from the given toward something that is true in the way that Miles Davis’s tone is true, which is not the truth of accuracy but the truth of feeling completely inhabited.
The architectural training at Howard is relevant here, and not merely as biographical background. Jafa has spoken about wanting, as a student, to build a Black architecture — a built environment that would represent and reflect Black experience the way Black music represented and reflected it — and finding, eventually, that cinema was the architecture he was looking for: the constructed space that the viewer moves through, the organisation of time and image and sound into something that has a spatial as well as a temporal dimension, that creates an environment rather than merely a sequence. His video installations are, in this sense, architectural as well as cinematic: they create spaces that the viewer inhabits rather than images that the viewer watches, and the inhabiting produces a physical experience that approximates, at its most fully realised, the physical experience of music.
The Big Wheels, the Cutouts, and the Expanded Practice
In recent years Jafa’s practice has expanded into sculpture and painting in ways that extend the preoccupations of the video work rather than departing from them. The “Big Wheel” series — massive tires covered in intricate chains — combines the industrial and the decorative, the weight and the restraint of physical materials, in objects whose formal qualities are inseparable from their historical resonances: chains on Black bodies, the machinery of labour, the beautiful and the brutal in the same object. The “Cutouts” — freestanding printed metallic figures — are props and portraits simultaneously, stand-ins for people who have shaped Jafa’s vision, monuments to influences and to presences rather than to events.
The paintings he has made more recently — assemblages drawn from his vast image archive, connected through thick passages of paint — continue the practice of the video work, the organisation of images by feeling rather than by argument, but slow it down, give it weight, make the viewer stand in front of it rather than be carried through it. The slowing is itself a statement: images that move too fast to be fully seen in the video work are here arrested, held, made available for the kind of sustained looking that the video’s rhythm deliberately withholds.
What He Has Given Us
The achievement of Arthur Jafa’s career — across the cinematography and the video work and the installations and the theoretical framework of Black Visual Intonation — is the achievement of someone who identified, early and with great precision, a gap in the culture and spent thirty years developing the tools to fill it. The gap was this: that the visual representation of Black American life had not found a form adequate to the depth and the complexity and the beauty of what it was representing, that the images had not caught up with the music, that cinema and visual art had not yet discovered how to do what jazz and gospel and blues and hip hop had always done, which is to take the full weight of Black American experience — the beauty and the alienation and the grief and the joy and the violence and the grace — and transmit it, intact and undiminished, to anyone willing to receive it.
Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death demonstrates, in seven minutes, that the gap can be filled, that images can do what music does, that the visual can carry the weight of the spiritual in the way that sound has always carried it. That demonstration is one of the most important things produced by any artist working in any medium in the twenty-first century, and the fact that it was produced by a man from Clarksdale, Mississippi, who grew up watching science fiction and assembling binders of found images and listening to the music that the Delta had made from everything the Delta had suffered, is not incidental. It is the whole story. The question he has been asking for thirty years has, in that seven-minute answer, been answered. The answer is still playing.
This essay draws on published interviews with Arthur Jafa, including conversations with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, and various arts publications; the critical writings of Fred Moten on Black aesthetics; and the works referenced in the text. Arthur Jafa was born Arthur Jafa Fielder on November 30, 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi. He received the Golden Lion for Best Participant at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016) is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the High Museum of Art, among others.
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