Arthur Jafa – Unrest: “Seminal works that speak to the heart of 21st century experience” showing at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery

By Sarah Hall

Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), Arthur Jafa’s video work was described in The New Yorker as “the most spellbinding artwork of the past decade”.

The work cuts original footage with found imagery from social media, Youtube, watermarked Getty Images stock and historical footage, to the soundtrack of Kanye West’s ‘Ultralight Beam’. It speaks to the “beauty and alienation at the heart of Black American experience”.

Among the many images spliced together in Love is the Message, The Message is Death, we see Barak Obama singing Amazing Grace at the funeral of shooting victim Clementa Pinckney. We see Martin Luther King and Beyoncé. We see arial views of race riots, nightclub scenes and pivotal moments from the civil rights movement. We see police brutality, White violence and get a sense of, as Jafa has described it, the “tsunami of microaggressions that Black people have to contend with” in everyday life. Jafa speaks of the “barometric pressure” he experiences as a Black American in White dominated spaces, and “the pressure that’s placed on you to pretend there’s no barometric pressure.” In this light, this video collage can be understood as a build-up and release of that pressure.

Love is the Message, The Message is Death, streamed for 48 hours on the Smithsonian Institute’s website in June 2020, in the midst of lockdowns, a month after George Floyd was killed by policeman Derek Chauvin. Ahmari Benton, a member of Black Artists of DC described Jafa’s work on the Smithsonian American Art Museum website as dissolving “the myth that there is only one way to be black, while also highlighting the police brutality and respectability politics that have influenced black America’s cultural identity.”

The work has been shown at a stream of prestigious institutions around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Tate UK, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Pérez Art Museum Miami and Palazzo Grassi in Venice. And now, this work is being shown at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery alongside another of Jafa's major works, The White Album (2018).

“I don't take it lightly that we are showing such powerful seminal works that speak to the heart of 21st century experience,” said Dr David Sequeira Director, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery.

The White Album, similar to Love is the Message, The Message is Death, remixes a combination of found and original imagery. It is a longer, slower crescendoing opus, examining the violence of whiteness, the White gaze and the appropriation of Black cultures. The White Album won the Golden Lion Award at the 58^th Biennale di Venezia.

Jafa carefully selects and contrasts video and audio to make a poignant commentary about the historical and cultural realities of White supremacy. The work includes music by Aretha Franklin, Iggy Pop and Oneohtrix Point Never and features iPhone footage of a gunman preparing for a mass shooting, violent scenes from Grand Theft Auto, and archival footage of 1970s band The Mahavishnu Orchestra. The result is work that, as writer and artist Max Levin wrote in Screen Slate, Jafa “appropriates the tactic of appropriation itself.”

Inherently concerned with confronting and breaking free from the White gaze of our visual culture, Jafa rehandles images depicting violence and racism, that are replete in the media, alongside those of Black joy, strength, power and beauty.

“When you try to render the world in some kind of way, what kinds of protocols or methodologies are in place in the apparatus that frame what it is that you’re seeing?” asked Jafa, during a conversation with bell hooks at The New School. “I wanted to privilege the idea of Black people being able to speak freely. As freely as possible,” he said.

Arthur Jafa has worked prolifically as a cinematographer and director of photography. He worked with Stanley Kubrick on his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, with Spike Lee on Crooklyn, and with his ex-wife Julie Dash on her 1992 film Daughters of the Dust. He has been director of photography on music videos for Beyoncé’s Formation, Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky, and for Jay Z’s 44:4. 

For Sequeira, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, and The White Album are clearly cultural touchstones.

“These are pivotal works that both contribute to and echo global resonance around violence, authority, cultural representation, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. But they are bigger.

“Bigger because Jafa locates contemporary experience within a history of arguably the most influential art form of our time – film. Jafa is unmatched in his capacity to disrupt and derail standard two-dimensional narratives and the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery is honoured to present his work to our community.”

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