Fashion Neurosis with Arthur Jafa

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0:47Hi, come in.

0:55Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Arthur Jailer. Thank you. Can you tell me what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes? Yeah, I'm wearing my pretty standard for me at this point, VisVim. It's a Japanese label I like a lot. A little bit like based on American workwear, I guess, but, you know, like on steroids or something. I think the designer has an ethos, making things that last and that you can wear into. So I generally, you know, it's one of the things I love to wear and just be honest, just jeans, you know, T-shirt. How about the earring? The earring is a Balenciaga. It's funny, I'm just like Dimna era.

1:54Yeah. Now that he's moved on, but Balenciaga earring. It's not the kind of thing you can wear every day. It's funny. I think it's a little too large maybe or something. But I don't know. I guess that's half the point. I used to have this thing. It was a chain earring, Bottega earring when Daniel Lee was there. and I lost it and I tried everything to get it replaced. I was never able to get it replaced and I just sort of was running around one day and I saw this and I was like, I don't know. And I bought it, so now I wear it on occasion. So it seems somehow apropos for this. Yeah, it does. It seems special, so I'm glad you're wearing it.

2:45You're an internationally acclaimed artist working with film, painting, and sculpture. I became obsessed with your work when I saw a show in the Museum of Modern Art in Portugal. Oh. And you've talked about transposing and you said, what does it mean to crossbreed a Turner painting with a Coltrane song? Or if kind of blue or electric ladyland was a house and what would that look like? And what is transposing? well you know in a certain level it just means to move one thing from one place to another but you know um it you know in some ways it's about how context shapes uh a person or people but it's something else as in the case with you know african people in the americas if that transposition was uh you know coercive or you know and um so i'm very interested in well at core i'm really interested in mixing honestly and transposition is just a mechanism that produces mixing because you know ultimately you know anytime you confront a new situation a new context or a new person that's mixing of some degree or another that's going on.

4:11You know, you're standing in a room with a person, you're breathing in air that may have passed a bit long, you know. So I feel like I'm very, very, very interested in the intricacies and the complexities of just mixing in general, you know. Like in my show, I have this, I don't know if it's properly a painting, It's a picture, a big picture of Larry LeVan, who was the DJ at Paradise Garage, you know, which in itself was a place for mixing. You know, lots of different people came there. And he is, I mean, oftentimes recognized as the greatest DJ of all time. And, you know, and mixing music is, I mean, I was just starting to think about this recently because somebody asked me a question.

5:00And I was saying, if you look at DJs, like to me, there's an aspect of what they do that is, not so much theoretically, but like there's a way what they are doing is the beginning of a sort of where I think everybody's going to kind of transhumanism, you know? Like to me, like with Michael Jackson, like the plastic surgery, that's transhumanism to me. okay um but but you see it in the dj the art of the djs you see this whole thing where the boundaries are between one thing like a discrete thing and another thing start to dissolve a little bit you know you end up with these things mixes you know and black americans are and black people in most places in the americas are mixes you know we're like uh ad hoc non-consensual cross-bred things you know like i think of early like sort of you know documentaries by elvis presley how they would always have a shot of these sort of uh community groups and they would have a sign that said you know no dogs niggas and elvis presley you know what i mean really yeah you know it's funny and they always show those shots as if to say these people were quote unquote ignorant you know like rednecks or something like that but they weren't ignorant they understood that rock and roll was an alien cultural form you know and that it was gonna had the potential and maybe more than their worst fears to radically transform how their actual, often their children understood the world, you know?

6:51Yeah. Which it in fact did do, you know? And I read that you had an astrological reading when you were young and that the person said that you wouldn't come into your full being until past the age of 50. And I wondered if that influenced you when things were difficult. What's your star sign? Well, my star sign is Sagittarius. And I'm not actually a big astrological person, but I have my ex and one of my closest friends. They are. And I've been given readings as gifts. You know, so the two things I do remember from the first reading, which I got when I turned 30, was what you said, the one thing that I wouldn't come into my own until I was 50, which at the time I was like, fuck that.

7:46You know, I was like, no fucking way. Like, I'll jump off a building before. but the other thing that I remember and I remember this actually a lot more intensely than I remember the first thing which I had to be reminded of about my ex actually but uh and the first the thing I mostly remember is uh the astrologer his name was Carlos I never met him in person he was in Baltimore or something but you know it was you know I sent him my information he did it you know and then we talked about it on the phone. But I remember him saying if he had to characterize this life based on my past lives, because he had this whole past life thing.

8:28Oh, gosh. He said that he saw me as a hell's angel on the road to Mecca. I'll never forget that. Yeah, I was like, wow, okay. That's kind of intense. I can't remember that. But so I was like, yeah, I like that part, but I don't like this part about 50. which seemed you know like a million miles away at the time you know so yeah and i look back on it and think wow it's way in my rear view mirror you know i know i i used to get loads of things and psychics and then i realized i followed their advice and their kind of spell they seem to put on you especially about romantic involvements and I just sort of abdicated my own sort of you know now my instinct for what seemed to be going wrong and thought well they said this was the one and and now I never do that apart from my I look on a head I I'm I'm the same as you I mean I don't really believe it but I quite like anything that sort of says anything about what you are um but now i now i i never i'm afraid of being influenced by stuff like that yeah i mean i guess i'm i'm not so much afraid of it as i mean maybe it's the same thing maybe i'm just wary of it which is the same thing i guess as afraid i mean i find it to be fascinating on a certain level like one thing i know do know to be true is like at one point i started to realize that like i had a lot of libras in my life like so whether you you know you believe like in astrology or not i was like wow i got a ton of libras i think i made a list of like 20 people i considered you know like close or you know had been on my life and I think it was something like 16 or 17 out of 20 were Libras which is kind of you know even if you don't believe in astrology that's like what's the odds of that yes I mean first girlfriend my wife first wife only wife actually I guess uh best friend my oldest best friend my best best friend favorite sibling just like down the line and even like i remember sitting in my studio and we i don't know this came up some kind of way and my design director connor who i get along with like this i just said i just stopped i turned to him what are you and he said libra so it's weird i don't know it's not it's not even just that i process libras they seem to be somehow to be able to process me yeah Yeah, yeah.

11:26This mutual socialibre thing. It's quite nice. Yeah. You began collecting pictures and collaging them from a young age, and you described it as basically a form of OCD. And you said, it's not whether you're neurotic or not, it's whether your neurosis is productive or not. And that was really great because plenty of people collect stuff. Right. But how did you make it be productive? You know, I mean, one of the things I would say, like in some ways, what's directly tied to my traction, let's call it, in the art world, it's just, you know, just in an increasingly, like, unmovable sense that if I'm interested in it, it's legitimate.

12:22You know, you know, anybody knows my work knows I'm very preoccupied with like black aesthetics, I would say. But it's not like an exclusive, you know what I mean? It's like you wouldn't. I mean, somebody asked me about the Peter Townsend thing in Sadie's show. And, you know, it's like I didn't make it because I was trying to be an exceptional Negro or anything like that. You know, I didn't make it to be like, oh, look at this. I can be interested in these other things. It's like I don't, you know, I don't just in the same way I don't do black art because I'm trying to be, you know, sociopolitically relevant or anything.

13:05It's what I'm genuinely interested in, you know. I suppose I was thinking of when you were a child because so many collecting is a full, you know, of people's whole lives who do nothing with it. But as a child, it seemed like you were collecting this stuff with a purpose rather than just for the sake of it. I don't think so. I mean, I think I was just collecting it for the same reasons that people collect anything. You know, it's almost been shown collecting is always somewhat neurotic, you know. But I was collecting it because I wanted to be able to access things that I found interesting. when I wanted to.

13:47And I can remember one time, like in my late teens,

13:57and just the fact that I remember this is almost as much evidence of how something seemingly not a big deal. But I was in Georgetown in D.C., and I just randomly walked into, like they used to have like international newsstands and stuff a lot. I spent a lot of time in like magazine stores and stands and stuff. And it's just pre-social media, but I always loved magazines. I mean, the same way I love the internet now. It's the same thing, like scrolling, you know? Like flipping through magazines was like doom scrolling, you know? So I happened to walk into this newsstand and I picked up a, I just sort of, for whatever reason, picked up an issue.

14:42I think it was the Stern, this German newspaper. And it had a long, or it had a feature on Fela Huti. Oh, yeah. But it was all images of his wives. You know, he married like 100 women or something like that. And it was just incredible. Like, I mean, these images were like really amazing. Full bleed, full page spreads for each face, you know. and uh and i was like wow this is incredible i had to get this but i think it was like 17 bucks or something like at the time the idea of spending 17 dollars on a magazine was so crazy i could i just was like i'm not gonna spend fucking i mean even like spending like 50 bucks you know on a magazine or something i was like i can't spend 17 dollars on a magazine and I went away and like for two or three days all I could think about were these images you know so eventually like I said I just need to go ahead and buy and I went back and of course it was no longer than I was there and I've never forgotten it and since that moment I was like if I have an immediate intense response to something like that I mean like in life like you could see something once and never see it again and so again like that's probably inherently neurotic on some level to never to you know to the whole idea of not wanting no longer have access to something you've seen but uh but since that point i've always just followed my you know my gut on stuff like that like even today like if i'm on instagram or something one of the things i hate about instagram and i love instagram like people come up and say you don't post you never post yeah but it's the first thing i do in the morning when I get up and forget Instagram.

16:33But the thing about it, it's such a tricky app, man, because, you know, you can't go back. Oftentimes, you can't go back to things. Like if your fingers misfumble, you know, and you hit something and it's gone and you can't, there's no, like, backspacing on Instagram, you know? So it's a little terrifying. So I've developed all these strategies. If I see something, the first thing I do is screenshot it. And then I'll try to record it or something like that afterwards. But, of course, you miss a lot of things. Like just yesterday, I stumbled on this post somebody had done. And it was an interview with Tatiana, who was the model in the Michael Jackson video, The Way You Make Me Feel.

17:21This is a classic. She's walking, strutting, and he's running around her. and she was talking about like basically what happened to her afterwards you know and it was it was really really interesting but I just sort of fumble figly hit something and couldn't so I've spent the last 48 hours like obsessing about it you know like will I ever be able to find this video clip of her talking you know uh about her in action with Michael Jackson because she basically got banned from the show when she sort of ad-libbed and kissed him on the cheek doing a routine and it wasn't planned. And, you know, it was like that was the end of her.

18:06Really funny. God. And you and your brother slept in bunk beds when you were living in a trailer and you'd tell each other stories and make drawings and hand them up and down to each other. And you also talked about being brought up with different members of your, by different members of your family. And I wondered how important your siblings were as allies in your childhood. Allies. More like band of brothers, you know, like people who've been to war together. But, yeah, you know, I mean, my relationship, my siblings is close, but like any kind of relationship, variable, you know, changes. As I've gotten older, I've gotten closer to one of my brothers, you know, a little bit closer than with the other two.

19:06But the other two are twins, so. Oh, really? They have their own kind of thing, you know what I mean? I mean, like they're a little bit of like a two-headed person in a certain respect. So, you know, but when I was growing up, to me, it was more like my sibling who's under me, who's three years younger than me. And them were a clot, like they were a thing. And then it was me. I was a little like isolated, you know. I mean, the eldest, but, you know, but a little bit of an outsider. I felt a little like a black sheep, a little bit, I guess, a little bit of an outsider. I'm sure that was somehow shaped by the fact also too that when I was five my parents had me stay with my grandparents for the year so I could start elementary school because my birthday came later in the year and typically at least in Alabama where we were living at the time you had to be six years old at the beginning of the school year and I didn't turn six until november 30th which was of course almost at the end of the year yeah but in mississippi you could start as long as you turn six before the end of the year so so rather than have me um spend another year in kindergarten when it was clear i was bored um they had me stay with my grandparents and uh i was close to my grandparents you know it wasn't like i'd always growing up around my grandparents but but it was you know strange you know being away from my family um that year was interesting i mean we would and this was a different time than now because i can't imagine like putting like with my kids from four or five i can't imagine putting them on a Greyhound bus by themselves you know what I mean yeah and sending them off to you know like a five hour three four five hour bus ride by themselves it's like I don't even know like now I don't even know if that's legal you know what I mean it might be considered like you know um child abuse or something but in any event at the time yeah my grandparents would put me on the bus like on a Friday after school and I'd take a bus ride from Tupelo, Mississippi to Russellville, Alabama which is at least three or four hours.

21:36And my parents would meet me on the other side. I don't know. It definitely contributed in some way. I mean, you could say it contributed to my sense of independence or you could say it contributed to my sense of alienation. Yeah, or both. I remember being very envious of my brothers and their relationship to not just my parents, but even there was a young lady named Rhonda who used to babysit me. She was maybe four or five years older. Maybe she was like a teenager when I was four or five. And when I came back, she had shifted her allegiances, her affections to my brother. And I was very, very, very envious.

22:25Yes. Because there's something about being the eldest, which I found. Anyway, I'm the eldest in my family. And feeling quite like the sibling is behind you. You're the one that's facing the world always. Yeah. But then my sister used to trade me stories, except for I never traded her back. But she would tell me these stories, and she became a writer. And she was an incredible ally. She was sort of like a great soldier. That's what she felt like, and I was the general.

23:10But it was kind of a strengthening thing. Even though, like when you describe them being a unit and you being the satellite and the kind of loneliness of that too. Yeah. I mean, the thing about also just growing up in Mississippi and particularly, and I've talked about this a little bit before, but like because I kind of grew up in two places. I was born in Tupelo, and that was like at the time, you know, the mid-60s. So that's, it was sort of the model, sort of liberal, new southern, you know, town in that respect. I mean, not that, you know, black people weren't oppressed there or, you know, white people controlled everything, you know, Klansmen, the whole thing.

24:09It's not like it was some utopia or anything like that. but relative to Clarksdale which was segregated even after the laws changed it was you know there was black high schools white high schools even then when they integrated Clarksdale high they had a problem for the black students and the problem for white students in the same school but I you know I definitely have realized you know as I got older how much not only was I shaped like everybody's shaped by where they grew up. But not only was I shaped by growing up in Mississippi, which is a very particular place to grow up. I mean, for no other reason but outside of maybe the Appalachia is the poorest region in America.

24:53So not only that, but it was this constant flux between these, you know, for the most part of the year on a weekly basis between Tupelo and Clarksdale, which was, you know it was like growing up you know if you move back and forth between mozambique and south africa during apartheid you know what i mean it's just really it was a head you know snapping kind of movement back and forth in terms of you know just how you sort of exist in the night but one of the consequences of it you know use that word again alienation it may it's sort of abnormalize both environments you know neither one seemed normal somehow or natural so I was like a little alienated in both environments you know when I was in Clark it seemed like unfortunately regressive or something but when I was in Tupelo I just didn't buy the whole kumbaya of it you know I was maybe very very cynical and skeptical about it you know so today's show is brought to you by anthropic the team behind claude you know how certain pieces of clothing can haunt you that vintage saint laurent blazer the perfect pair of jeans that represents an entire decade's rebellion or the 150 year old shoe style we're all suddenly obsessed with claude is right there with you it's a thinking partner that helps you explore the deeper psychology behind what we wear and why it matters.

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27:18Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash fashion neurosis and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. But your grandparents' home in Alabama was burned down by the KKK. My parents' home. Your parents' home. Yeah, the actual home that my parents lived in. As a matter of fact, they were away visiting me in Mississippi, and the house was burned down while they were away. neighbors saw guys because my the integrated high schools my father was a football coach at the time he was coaching the black high school and when they integrated the high schools they made him the head coach of the integrated high school and i think in some ways it was a response to that you know and so once the house was burned down basically my parents had been recruited to become professors at a small black college in Clarksdale and so they just never went back you know um yeah so we just relocated we were in Tupelo for a short time and then we relocated to Clarksdale and that's pretty much where you know like I said I grew up yeah and do you remember the first piece of clothing you longed for as a child and that you felt that it would somehow change things for you wow interesting the first piece of clothing um when i was really young maybe three or four years old i was uh my hero robert rogers i don't know if you know who robert rogers was he was a cowboy in movies and stuff he had a horse called trigger oh yes and he had uh wrinkles in his forehead Like that was one of his character traits.

29:12I used to sit and look in the mirror and burn my brow to get these wrinkles in my brow. That's so amazing. Which I still do today. Like of course now I was like, no, don't do that. But I wanted to look like Roy Rogers. But in any event, I wanted a pair of cowboy boots that I thought were Roy Rogers. So maybe that's about the earliest thing I can remember longing for, you know. Yeah, maybe a pair of cowboy boots. And you said of your work, I don't do the uplift thing. I'm definitely an undertaker. I'm like, let's go down. I'm interested in where the bodies are buried. And I've accepted this. And is this how you find out if something's trustworthy?

30:06Trustworthy? What do you mean by trustworthy? Well, like when I read that, I thought, yeah, I like to look under the bed. I want to find it. I want to know that everything's horrible so I can figure out how to handle things. And I wondered if it was that sort of sentiment. Yeah, I'm not so sure. I guess I'm just, I'm not sure about the term trustworth. I'm not sure if I trust, if anything is worth trusting. You know, it's like things are what they are. And when trust comes into it, it's more like that's a narrative about the thing, you know. And then you decide if the narrative is accurate or not.

30:54And I tend to not, you know, I'm skeptical of narratives. Even though on one hand it's a big part of what I do is make narratives, you know, about myself. You know, one of the things about that's sort of oftentimes felt about black artists is that, you know, we're doing the uplift thing. You know, we're like here to inspire and to, you know, sort of rally the troops and things like that. I mean, all of which I think are legitimate and necessary things, you know, to have. I mean, I don't think black people such as it is, particularly in the States, in the U.S., would have survived. Not just survived, but thrived without, you know, mutual aid and mutual uplift and things like that, you know.

31:53I mean, if you're born black in a way, you were born into a kind of original sin. You know what I mean? You're born into a state of lesser or deprivation, let's say. And then the idea is that one would be lifted up out of that state, let's say. Right. And that it was always a collective and ongoing endeavor. And that is completely legitimate, you know. but like everything and this is tied to some of the stuff i was saying about you know just increasingly accepting who i am you know not to say i don't try to be a better version of who i am but you know but at least accepting like fundamentally what is my impulse and one of the things i know is that that that function to uplift people to inspire people and things like that I mean, it's not to say I don't do it.

32:51I'm just saying it's not my primary intention. Yeah. You know, with something like Love is a Message, like a lot of people are inspired by it. But, you know, I mean, a big part of it is like, you know, a rendering of all the horrific things that not only have happened to black people but continue to happen to black people. So in a certain respect, I would say, why is that uplifting? You know, of course, like anything, you could say it's uplifting precisely because it's showing it as it is, as opposed to how we might want it to be or as opposed to how people might want to pretend it is or being in denial about.

33:33And maybe that in itself is uplifting. But, you know, it's not generally my impulse to do it. My impulse to do it is a little like my impulse to see anything that I find interesting slash troubling. You know, I'm not sure that troubling and interesting aren't like intricately, you know, intertwined. Well, there's something about acknowledging something that changes something, or at least it's not just an avoiding of knowing what's happening. That thing hiding in plain sight, I always find one of the most deranging things.

34:27and I suppose is there some sort of a freedom that comes with just that, just knowing, you know, not trying to see something. That's got to be. Well, I like to say one of the classic superpowers of black folks, again in the context of the states at least is our ability to see things as they are. I'm not even sure if it's still a superpower. Maybe it's just a waning superpower. But I do think classically black people wouldn't have survived our circumstances if we didn't have a very, very highly developed resistance to being in denial. about what a thing actually was. I think classically we never really confused how we wanted it to be versus how it was.

35:31So in churches, in sermons and stuff, so much of it was about rallying, and maybe this is the uplift thing, or emboldening people to confront what it was, not like encouraging denial you know and in in some ways that stance or that state of being put us almost inherently in rather like inherently radically at odds with you know society in general which certainly in context of america is all about denial how can you believe in the rule of law on a certain level when the law said you weren't human for several hundred years i mean it's absurd you know so i mean i think that's so shaped the fundamental sense of difference that black folks have you know and it it it also means that when we come into circumstances or into situations you know our point of uh departure from understanding it it's just different you know it's just different and it doesn't mean we're less human or alien or anything like that even though i do think we're pretty alien but uh you know like you know oftentimes i'm like it's something i lean into a lot you know like uh black black black black being black seeing black all of this but then i do also have to remind people and and black folks too like yeah but we're human too you know what i mean and so if you say like my friend carrie james marshall has this incredible show at the royal academy now known carrie's early 80s he might have mentioned the royal academy not he might have he did mention the royal academy you know in the 80s as an ambition of his I didn't even know what the Royal Academy was but you know and but one of the things that we talked about from the beginning was like a complete and total refusal of the idea that in order for your thing to be universal that it had to somehow be less black you know like it can both be as black as it was and still be universal.

38:03Yeah. That the refusal or the notion that those two things don't meet, that if your thing is black, like I used to say a lot, I don't say it so much now, but I used to say, you know, if you have a sculpture of a human being pointing at the stars, you know, everybody can say that's man's aspiration, humankind man's aspirations you know but if you paint that same sculpture black same exact sculpture all of a sudden it gets narrowed down somehow to black man's aspirations or if you put breasts on it women's aspirations you know what i mean yeah why can't a sculpture of a woman be a stand-in for humankind the way a sculpture of a white man can be a stand-in for all of humankind it's uh you know that's again like just another one of those things like corner what says it's great thing you always say there's certain things you cannot not know yeah as a black person in america you know and so it's a complicated like series of maneuvers you end up having to make to account for the discrepancy in a way between how are things is seen or responded to when it's black versus not black.

39:28You know what I mean? Like how kind of default position is always somehow bound up with some sort of diminishment of one's humanity or feeling or intellectual capacity or whatever, you know? It's like sometimes I would say you always get penalized as a black artist for subtlety. You know, if you try to have your work be subtle, then it's somehow understood as not doing anything. And so there's a certain kind of pressure to make your thing be overt. Right. That's interesting. And, you know, and loud. And, you know, I don't, it's like, I do a lot of things, but like I said, I'm not really oriented towards the uplift thing so much.

40:21I'm not already forced to protesting. I'm not protesting shit. And even like somebody said, oh, yeah, you want to make art about black people. And I would say making art about black people is important, but it's not really what I'm preoccupied with. I'm more preoccupied with making art like black people. It's a distinction I make. How do you mean? I mean, like, the impulse is not necessarily sociological or something, or it's not about addressing a lack of representation to a certain degree, even though that's a legitimate thing, it's important. but it's more like I think like blackness is a new thing and I don't even mean it like as a racial category I think blackness is a new kind of being that's been shaped as much by absences of understanding who you are, where you're from it's like it's a paradoxical truth that the violence of being non-consensually separated from your NATO context is also an opportunity to be a new thing.

41:48Right. Yeah. It's both. It's paradoxical. And that new thing, which, you know, we can try to think through under like the rubric of blackness, of which black people have a privilege, so-called black people, people of African descent in the West, have a privileged relationship to it. But it's, you know, as friends have said, but we don't own it, you know. We don't own it. It's a new way of being in relation to the world. And oftentimes myths are uncredited as a basis for so many new ways of being in relationship to the world. So it's like people, you know, it's like, you know, just from the music alone, they just make these new categories so that, you know, look, I love Led Zeppelin like everybody else.

42:40I'm obsessed with Led Zeppelin, but it's just black music, you know what I mean? By white folks. And, you know, I just said recently a kind of crazy thing, you know, I was at the ICA having a talk with Marty Leckie. we were talking and you know as often times i get going and i'm riffing you know what i'm saying shit i don't know half of what i'm saying sometimes it's like a kind of you know conceptual improvisation or something but i'm just talking you know and uh i was just saying stuff and people were like yeah yeah you know the crowd was with me yeah yeah yeah and then i said england is the black japan and everybody said yeah yeah yeah yeah what like what does that mean what does that mean even i yeah i'm saying you can see it on my face i was like processing it like my eyes were like rolling up in my head i was like yeah right england is the black japan what the fuck does that mean england is the black japan you know and i knew it meant something but i had to unpack it You know, I had to unpack it.