In short
Arthur Jafa discusses “readymade”/appropriation art—how taking existing images or objects and recontextualizing them (like Duchamp’s urinal) creates new meaning through contextual transposition and dissonance. He also argues that “archive” is the wrong frame for his practice, since YouTube/Internet material is a repository, not a gatekept archive.
Guest backgrounds
Arthur Jafa (born 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) grew up around television and genre cinema, then became a cinematographer (e.g., Daughters of the Dust; worked with Spike Lee on Crooklyn). He later became a visual artist known for difficult video and found-image works.
Key claims
appropriation isn’t art unless you structure what you appropriate; African aesthetics function as “conductors of energy” and behave differently in Western display; social media enables “producer culture” and aggregate movements.
Notable examples
Love is the Message, the Message is Death (found social-media collage including police violence and viral joy); The White Album (Venice Biennale Golden Lion); his “La Rage”/Black Hulk character; MoMA show Less is Morbid; Prada Foundation two-person show Helter Skelter with Richard Prince.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOArthur Jafa's Background and Rise
0:45 to 2:29
Discussion of Jafa's early life, career in cinema, and rise in the art world.
“I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.”
Influences of Cinema and Comic Books
2:29 to 7:09
Jafa shares his early influences from cinema and comic books and their impact on his imagination.
“In the middle of all this intense activity, Jafa agreed to talk to me about his art, his view of art history, and what comes next.”
Transition from Cinema to Art
7:09 to 10:10
Jafa explains his transition from a career in cinema to the art world and the challenges faced.
“Marquez and Cortezar and things like that.”
Reflections on Film Production
10:10 to 14:00
Jafa discusses starting his own film production company and the challenges of development.
“Young Black woman, she said, you know, you seem to have chosen the art world over the film world, you know, as a place for you to do your thing.”
Arthur Jafa on Film and Art
14:00 to 22:32
Arthur Jafa discusses his artistic process, influences, and the intersection of film and visual art.
“needed a good idea, but I've been disabused of that.”
Theories of Appropriation in Art
22:32 to 28:00
Jafa explores the concept of appropriation in art, particularly in relation to Duchamp and African aesthetics.
“You know, it's funny, like a good friend of mine is a brilliant scholar, Robin Kelly.”
The Art of Blending Cultures
28:00 to 29:40
Explore how DJs mix music to transcend boundaries between songs and cultures.
“DJs, what they do first and foremost is not only to sequence finite, discrete bits of music, but they, in one way or another, start to blur the boundaries between one song and another song.”
Understanding African Art Contexts
29:40 to 31:20
Discuss the significance of African artifacts and their cultural contexts.
“But having it on your nervous system in a way.”
The Nature of Blackness and Absence
31:20 to 33:00
Delve into the ontological aspects of Black identity and historical absence.
“So if you put an African artifact in a white cube, in a white space, it just produces a certain kind of energy.”
Gaps in Understanding of Black Identity
33:00 to 34:40
Examine how gaps in ancestral knowledge shape Black identity in the Americas.
“I've been saying for quite a while now, I don't think I've ever intended as a provocation, but I've been saying like I've been all over Africa.”
Show all 16 chapters
Art as a Reflection of Reality
34:40 to 36:20
Arthur Jafa speaks on creating art that captures and reflects Black experiences.
“And you realize that these things that we imagine oftentimes have very little to do with how those gaps would have been filled in the native circumstances.”
Visibility and Obligation in Art
36:20 to 38:00
Discuss the complexities of visibility and the responsibility of artists.
“this violent exclusion, racism, discrimination.”
Narrative and Film Aspirations
38:00 to 39:40
Learn about Jafa's ambitions in filmmaking and challenges in narrative storytelling.
“And that's one of my sort of operative points of reference.”
The Search for Authentic Expression
39:40 to 41:20
Explore the desire for authentic representation in film and the tension with commercial success.
“When he read my script, one of the things he said was that things like, how do you think an audience is going to deal with a film where the story doesn't start till 45, 50 minutes into the film?”
Transformative Power of Cinema
41:20 to 42:01
Investigate how cinema can alter societal perceptions and contribute to cultural transformation.
“But what they could control is how we think about average spring.”
The Role of Cinema in Shaping Perspectives
42:01 to 45:56
Explore how cinema influences societal transformation and perspectives.
“She actually spells out a mission statement for progressive and certainly for Black cinema, as I want to understand cinema.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:03Arthur Jafa:Ben here. This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the new museum in New York, I think it's very much worth another listen.
0:29It's about what you appropriate and what you do with it, how you structure it, how you like the urinal can take a thing that's fixed and turn it into something else just by way of a kind of contextual transposition or dissonance, let's say.
0:49Arthur Jafa:I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.
1:00Arthur Jafa:Arthur Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went vertical in 2016 with the video, Love is the Message, the Message is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that included police violence against Black people and also moments of viral celebration and joy. It was both experimental and accessible and drew huge crowds when it was first shown at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York.
1:39Arthur Jafa:A follow-up film called The White album, won the Golden Lion for Best Artist as part of the main show of the Venice Biennale back in 2019. And this month, Jafa is back in Venice, this time in a two-person show called Helter Skelter, curated by Nancy Spector and pairing him with the famous artist Richard Prince, also known for using found and appropriated imagery to disorienting effect. That show opened alongside the Venice Biennale at the Prada Foundation and during the opening weekend was one of the few things everyone could agree was a must-see event. That's not all. Jafa has also curated a show currently at the Museum of Modern Art called Less is Morbid, a deliberately packed display of his favorite art, and he is one of the winners of this year's Art Basel Award to be honored at that fair in June.
2:30Arthur Jafa:In the middle of all this intense activity, Jafa agreed to talk to me about his art, his view of art history, and what comes next. Arthur Jafa, thank you for talking to me. Cool. Glad to be here. You're a very busy man. You are probably one of the most, if not the most, well-regarded artists at this moment. However, for the very small number of people who don't know your career, I did want to start with cinema because you came out of the world of cinema before you became an artist. So what drew you to the moving image or to film in the first place? I don't know if I was drawn into so much as it was just a ubiquitous part of growing up looking at television for sure.
3:13There's so much television in my mind. It's just like really pollution and garbage, you know, everything from Saturday morning cartoons to Gilligan's Island to Hazel. I Dream of Jeannie. Like, I remember very early the Dick Van Dyke show and Bewitched. Probably my first, like, attraction to media figure was Elizabeth Montgomery on Bewitched. But it was just everywhere. And then, you know, my dad took me to movies. I think the first one he ever took me to see was, like, maybe Planet of the Apes when I was, like, four years old. And then maybe after that, it would be like Dr. No. Grew up going to James Bond movies.
3:53And, you know, it was a big, big part of my life, like, going to movies and stuff. And then also, too, I guess, like very early on, I was always a late bird. I would be up at night and everybody else in my family, I got three siblings, my mom and my dad, they'd all be asleep and I'd be up, particularly on the weekends. Like there was this show called Fantastic Features, which is a little like Creature Features. You know, I had this host, Savard, the master of, you know, of the macabre. And they would, you know, you'd always show a double feature. Oftentimes, maybe American movies and stuff like Invasion and the Body Snatchers, things like that.
4:35It came from outer space. But also, like, I think my first exposure to, like, foreign films and stuff are mostly, you know, genre films, either like the Hammer films, you know, Dracula and those kinds of things. but also to, you know, Italian horror films like Black Sabbath. I didn't know who Mario Bava was at the time, but I certainly remember just the trailer for the damn thing when they had the woman with the Iron Maiden, you know, and they closed those spikes on her face. Also, a lot of Japanese horror films like Godzilla and, you know, things like that. But even, you know, even stranger things like Island of the Mushroom, people.
5:12I mean, it's just so... The Fantastic, then. The Fantastic. So it's interesting.
5:16Arthur Jafa:The formative stuff is like the fantastic. Is that the kind of films you wanted to make? You know, I started off early on, like reading comic books, and that was the fantastic. Like I say, there's no other single figure who's had as much impact on my life. Not even just as an artist, as a person with imagination, Jack Kirby, the king. People want to debate Stan Lee versus Jack Kirby. It's all Jack Kirby as far as I'm concerned, you know. So Marvel, like some of my earliest memories, are standing in this store in the Black community in Tupelo, Mississippi, called Ashby's. It was just, you know, like a convenience store.
5:54And they had a comic book rack, as they used to do. And I can remember looking at, you know, Jack Kirby's The Fantastic Four and things like that. You know, so my earliest, earliest is engagement. In some ways, even pre-television in a way. because, you know, television, of course, was a moving image, but there was nothing nearly as fantastical as what was in Marvel Comics in the early mid-60s, you know. So, yeah, I grew up reading comic books very intensely, being a fan of particular comic book artists. I was very aware of who Jack Kirby was and then Jim Steranko and people like that, you know, in the early 70s.
6:36That's the psychedelic stuff, yeah. Yeah, that sort of transitioned into the fantastical in general, particularly science fiction novels. You know, that's why I would just say it was a straight evolution from comic books to science fiction novels. And then from science fiction novels to just literature in general, but always had a predisposition to us, a fantastical. Even if it wasn't like, strictly speaking, science fiction, you know, some horror fiction. but also I became very interested. I was turning to be a teenager in Latin American literature, Marquez and Cortezar and things like that. To me, that was just a continuous, very easy transition from the early things to that kind of literature.
7:20Arthur Jafa:Well, it makes me think about some of your recent work. You have the figure, the Black Hulk that you've been using. I hate when he's called the Black Hulk. Oh, really? I thought that that was a... I get it. No, you know, like, obviously, let's say it's derived to a certain degree. But I don't think, like, my character, La Rage, is any more than the Hulk is like Mr. Hyatt, you know, which it was obviously derived from. Nor do I think Captain Marvel is Superman, even though Captain Marvel obviously was derived from Superman. You know, it's his own specific entity that bears a striking resemblance to the Hulk for sure.
8:00But, you know, the Hulk doesn't have dreads. The Hulk doesn't have gold diamonds in his teeth. The Hulk is not a black man. You know what I mean? So all of that, you know. But, yeah. They were generally metaphors for kind of like outcasts and estrangers.
8:15Arthur Jafa:You know, Kirby grew up working class Jewish scrapper on the Lower East Side. Captures that in those characters. You think that was part of what engaged your imagination? Oh, I think so. I mean, it certainly was something that I think from pretty early on, I was very cognizant of like the X-Men or outsiders. Even to this day, you know, I often say I meet a certain Black person in general who is, let's say, a mutant or a geek or a freak or something like that. Not just everyday, whatever that means. I don't know what an everyday Black person is. That's like saying an everyday mutant. You know, it's not an everyday kind of thing.
8:55But inside of that, of course, there are always, you know, as we say, heads. People are into the fantastical. They're into horror movies and stuff like that. They're into Star Trek. You know, all those kinds of things. And we would say, oh, that's an X-Men. You know, and it's evoking both Kirby's X-Men and, of course, Malcolm X. So the outsider thing is something that I've been particularly aware of, attracted to, engaged with since, you know, I was young. I can't remember, like, as a three or four-year-old, asking my dad if Yogi Bear was black or white.
9:31Arthur Jafa:What's the answer to that? I can't remember how he answered. I think he just laughed when I said it. I was four or five years old. It's interesting, Inversion, because that kind of culture, the comic book, the popular fantastic stuff, is kind of outsider culture compared to fine art, which is, you know, fancy pants culture. You had a whole career in cinema, pretty distinguished career. Although I know, you know, it has its frustrations. Where did you move into the kind of art world? What did it allow you to do that film didn't? Well, you know, I don't really see so much as a moving away from cinema and into the art world.
10:08And, you know, I had a young lady ask me, it must be like seven to eight years ago, I was doing a talk in Berkeley. Young Black woman, she said, you know, you seem to have chosen the art world over the film world, you know, as a place for you to do your thing. And I just started laughing and saying, well, I didn't choose the art world. The art world sort of chose me. You know what I mean? Whatever interest in the art world, in the Korean art world I'd had, I'd sort of exhausted like in my late, late 30s. I mean, I was always interested in the art world. And when I got very, very disenchanted with the film thing, I said, oh, I'm going to do the art thing.
10:52You know what I mean? And I got a lot of very quick traction. I think I was in the Whitney Biennial like six months after I said, oh, I'm going to do the art thing. But within a year and a half, I just sort of distanced myself from it because, you know, frankly, it was very segregated. It was a very segregated context. You know how it sounded like Bosco? So this was, when was it?
11:13Arthur Jafa:When were you in the Winnie by No first time? This would be like, maybe it was 99 or 2000. So I was in my late 30s, but I sort of, let's say, lost my wind a little bit around the cinema thing in my mid to late 30s. And this is after, as you sort of alluded to earlier, a certain kind of success for sure. You know, I shot Daughters of the Dust in my 20s, cinematography awarded a Sundance for that, went on to work with Spike Lee quite a bit, you know, shot Crooklyn, you know, and a few other things. But I just, at a certain point, it was just the most lucrative thing I knew how to do. But I've sort of come to the conclusion, or maybe I understood it at the time, maybe I thought it at the time and I know it now, that many of the things that make me suited for the art world as it's, you know, typically constituted are things that made me a bit of a dark horse in the sort of thing, you know, a kind of, you know, I don't know, for lack, you know, intellectualism, I guess, a kind of interest in things that weren't necessarily commercial or overtly commercial, even though I myself never had any the aversions to something being commercial.
12:30I mean, you know, Jack Kirby was commercial. Horror movies, science fiction films are commercial. You know, Jimi Hendrix is commercial, even though it's sort of avant-garde or something like that. In the context of pop music at the time, for sure. So I never like completely accepted that as a split. But I would say those aspects of my creative interests, which were, let's say, left field, you know, of any left field of any kind of normative idea of what a movie might want to be. I feel like always sort of, they stigmatized. I mean, I felt like I was slightly stigmatized or people could sense it.
13:09They could sense it some sort of way that, you know, like people ask, who's your favorite filmmaker, Tarkovsky? You know, it's like, that's not the name you want to mention if you're having a meeting with producers and you're trying to get. It's so far, you know, nobody would think there was anything odd about saying Tarkovsky is an amazing filmmaker, but if you're trying to get a film produced like in Hollywood or something, to mention Tarkovsky is akin to saying you don't care whether the thing does it.
13:35Arthur Jafa:In the last 10 years, you started a film production company, didn't you? Yep, I did. I'm very excited about it. It's called Sun House. Very, very excited about what we're doing. We're doing a number of different things. We have some technology we've developed, which is patented. We got scripts that we developed. The development thing has been a long haul. It's been a steep curve, honestly, a learning curve. You know, I thought you just needed a good idea, but I've been disabused of that. You know, development is slow, but we are right on the verge of fulfilling all the sort of ambitions and promise I think that we had.
14:11So I'm very excited about where the film thing is now. One of the reasons I've been working like crazy is to just clear space in my schedule in this upcoming year to make my movie. First of hopefully at least several.
14:25Arthur Jafa:There's a whole number of actual film directors who have kind of moved into visual art to make more personal work. It's actually kind of one of the more interesting things happening in visual culture. What you say? Well, I mean, David Lynch did that for a while. I interviewed David Lynch. He said, you can't make personal stuff at that level. Of course, then he went back and made Twin Peaks season three. They let him do exactly the way he wanted to. Yeah, Inland Empire. So many things he made are just so far outside of any kind of normal commercial. Like movies, for sure. But, you know, he's also a really great example of a filmmaker whose work was always not normative at all.
15:08I mean, certainly not Eraserhead, you know. And even things like Blue Velvet. So many of those things. Even the one with the guy on the lawnmower. You know what I mean? Mulholland Drive is hardly, you know, as successful as it was, hardly mainstream cinema. So it's such a great example of a rare example in many ways of, you know, what's possible. So I want to talk about your art career, if that's what we want to call it.
15:35Arthur Jafa:And it's funny, just already talking to you, you know, you have a very dense memory of references. And I understand that's your creative process, too. It was like collecting a lot of images in books and then on your desktop, right? Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah, you know, I've said this multiple times. I'm super resistant to it being called archival. Like, I hate the idea of being characterized as an archival artist. I mean, I don't think Toni Morrison read a lot of books, but that doesn't mean her process is archival. Even though she did use archives like Beloved, for example. That central image in Beloved of the Woman with the Tree on the Back was taken from Ex-Late Gordon, a figure that I've been quite obsessed with since I was a teenager.
16:18Yeah, yeah.
16:19Arthur Jafa:One of the most famous images of the 19th century, yeah, that you've come back to. Yeah, for sure. And sometimes I just joke and I say, like, you know, musicians use notes that have been used before, but nobody considers, you know, being a composer archival. Well, but maybe I misunderstand the process then, because some of your cinema or some of your video projects, They are like collage films where you find a certain number of resonant images and you're kind of like conducting them together, right? Yeah, for sure. But I see that, you know, that's got more to do with what I would term like DJ culture or the tendency in jazz to sort of repurpose things, you know.
16:55You could talk about a lot of different ways. Like we take, you know, for example, love is the message, which is where this whole notion that I'm a collage artist or something like that, which I guess I don't even mind that so much, but this whole archival thing. First of all, YouTube, which is where most of the footage came from, is not an archive. Why? What do you mean? Well, it's a repository of things, you know, but so is a junkyard. You know what I mean? It's like a repository. The archive typically has a gatekeeper who determines what's going to go in and what's going to be borrowed or seen or loaned or whatever, you know.
17:31And also typically when things go into an archive, they never come out. You know what I mean? It's very overdetermined how one accesses or how archive behaves. And that's not what YouTube is any more than the Internet is archive. The Internet has archival aspects in general because it's a repository of all kinds of things. But it's not classically speaking archive. I just think, you know, everybody has archive feet where people tend to use archive in such a ubiquitous fashion. that's kind of basically meaningless. I have good friends who are incredible artists. Mining the archive is a big part of what they do.
18:13I don't understand myself as mining the archive in the way they do. I just understand myself as using whatever material is available. If I had to trace it to things that I saw that impacted, it would be more like Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, which has archival footage in it, but nobody would term Kenneth Anger archival filmmaker.
18:35Arthur Jafa:Well, I wonder, something you've talked about many, many times, is you wanted to make cinema that had a kind of vernacular rhythm to it, the rhythm of Black music. Certainly the vernacular is important, but I wouldn't reduce it to just the rhythm. You know, in the same way, I just wouldn't reduce Black music to just the rhythm, even though rhythm is a very central part. It's a generalization. It's a very prominent thing in the mix of Black music in general. but I don't think you could reduce it to that, you know, just from hip hop alone. Like so much of hip hop is just about tropes and thematic material and handling just the thematics in a certain kind of way.
19:13It's not just about the rhythm of the thematics, even though rhythm is a big part of it. You know, and then like, you know, Motown and Jimi Hendrix and just so many things you could mention. I wouldn't necessarily say it's only about the rhythm. So, you know, if you start using cinema as a point of departure, as a conceptual pivot point to think about what's possible in cinema, then you're talking about a lot of different things. Yeah, rhythm is one of the things you could talk about. You could talk about spatial continuity. You could talk about narrative ideas like, you know, having conversations from the South and the conversations with my grandparents and my aunts and uncles.
19:54And the way they just told the story seems to me to have really incredible implications for how a movie could trap narrative.
20:03Arthur Jafa:I guess the reason I was bringing it up is because, you know, sort of interestingly, yeah, you had a whole career as a cinematographer. You came into the art world, left the art world because it was, you know, too white, alienating, all this stuff. Came back and then had this big breakthrough a decade ago with Love is the Message, the Message is Death. And it did, interestingly enough, really, I think, uniquely respond to social media in a way. The new media of that moment in the way it used stuff that was circulating online, some very traumatic stuff, the stuff that was mobilizing people into the streets at that time period.
20:42Arthur Jafa:But it's just interesting that you, whose project was rethinking the image, how it could speak to this vernacular mode, you know, were the person, one of the people, but a very significant one who kind of was able to look at that social media material and turn its vernacular energy into kind of like art form that people, or something that people could process as art. I mean, the vernacular part of it is a part I'm interested in. I'm a little skeptical of when I hit terms like social media or digital. You remember everything in the internet was digital. Like nobody says that anymore because I think what we realize is that what's transfixing or mesmerizing about media is that it is media.
21:29You know what I mean? The difference is the Internet in various ways and forms allows, you know, a kind of crowdsourcing. It allows individuals to be not just consumers of the media, but producers of the media like TikTok and stuff like that. This is the producer culture. I mean, the culture we're in now and it's transformed big media because all of a sudden big media has to compete with a person who just posts. things in their lives. You know what I mean? They are narratives, podcasting. You don't need a studio to do a podcast. It's all narrative. It's all telling narrative to the point that it's so niche.
22:13Everything from like Club Shea Shea, you know, with Shannon Sharp, say for example, or Joe Rogan, that's not big media. I mean, it's huge in terms of its following, But it's not like ABC or NBC, CBS like we grew up, or the BBC, I guess, would be in London or something like that. You know, it's funny, like a good friend of mine is a brilliant scholar, Robin Kelly. In one of his books, he was talking about the civil rights movement. And he said this really important thing that I think a lot of people don't quite against. He said it is erroneous for us to characterize the civil rights movement as a mass movement.
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22:51He said it's more appropriate to call it an aggregate movement. Because when you call it a mass movement, what that kind of does is it implies that if you can't get the majority of people involved, you can't make change. As opposed to, you can be a small cadre of people that can make massive change for everybody. I mean, you see it quite frequently, even though people don't necessarily acknowledge or they don't quite seem to realize what they're seeing. Even in something like the documentary footage that everybody's seen of black people being hosed by firemen in Birmingham. Okay, you're seeing the people be hosed, but right standing looking at it is more black people who are just standing there looking at the people being hosed.
23:36You know what I mean? It wasn't everybody involved. It was a cadre or, as Robin says, an aggregate movement, not a mass movement. And I think it's the same thing. The democratization of moving images is what the Internet is allowed. I mean, all of a sudden you're getting people who aren't going through the classic hurdles you have to jump through. We have a producer work for 60 minutes, whatever. It's like anybody, for better or for worse, can have their say and can, let's say, broadcast it, so to speak. And that's, despite all the sort of increasingly obvious, egregious, fucked up things about social media, it is incredibly broad in terms of access and stuff.
24:21You know, they're trying to lock this shit down, as we know. They are, yeah. They are trying to lock it down. In reaction to some of the protests that it enabled. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, like, in a way, I would say I'm as much a product of that as anything. You know, I'm a bit of an autodidact. I've always been. I studied architecture in school, not art or anything. You know, I never went to take art class or art school or anything like that. I just because I became interested in art, you know.
25:05Arthur Jafa:that film other films you've done it is and you are also and i should say you were also in this two-person show at the prada foundation with richard prince who is best known for appropriation art for appropriating images from the media and giving his own meaning to them. So I guess I wanted to ask you about your theory of appropriation. I was reading your essay, My Black Death, and I think you have a very original and I thought really thought-provoking theory about Marcel Duchamp's appropriation and what he may have taken from the spectacle of the way African art effects were presented that I thought, yeah, it really changed the way I thought about him.
25:44Arthur Jafa:Can you rehearse that for a second for me? Basically, you know, what I was doing in my Black Death is just tracking the impact what I would call African and African aesthetics had on contemporary art practices. And I started off talking about Cubism and how Cubism, De Moselle by Picasso is typically considered the first modern artwork, but how it's not really possible without the impact or the influence that African artifacts had on European artists, painters at that time. And there was a quick jump from that to Deshaun, you know, and just to say, like, he made his Cubist paintings as well, New Descending the Stairs and those kinds of things, which are really about spatial temporal renderings, you know what I mean?
26:30A body at the top of the stairs and at the bottom of the stairs and all in between at the same time. In a way, it's very much like cinema, but with Picasso now, with Cubism, you're talking about one of the formal implications of African artifacts, which is that it is an artifact that is a rendering of an object seen from multiple advantages in space at the same time. And that, in a sense, is a profound break with Western European vanishing point logic of how you structure space and objects in space. one of the things I propose is that one, Duchamp was smarter than anybody else around him and that he in fact, because I think he was clearly was I don't know if Duchamp was the best artist of the 20th century but he certainly is the most interesting and or thought provoking artist of the 20th century.
27:20I think everybody's still trying to figure out what's on the other side of the urinal. You know what I mean? And Richard Prince is a person who has done as much or explored as much of what that might be as any other single artist. You know, like, look, anybody can appropriate, steal, sample, whatever you want to call it. Don't make it art. You know what I mean? Like, stealing, maybe you're a cat burglar, but it doesn't make you an artist. So it's not just about appropriating. It's about what you appropriate and what you do with it, how you structure it, how you, like the urinal, can take a thing that's fixed and turn it into something else just way of a kind of contextual transposition or dissonance, let's say.
28:02DJs, what they do first and foremost is not only to sequence finite, discrete bits of music, but they, in one way or another, start to blur the boundaries between one song and another song. That's what you would say a good mix is, that it flows from one thing to another thing.
28:19Arthur Jafa:I thought this point you made that, I mean, we always think of this gesture of him taking a urinal, taking it out of the contest, making it functionally as putting on a pedestal as this kind of radical gesture. But that the place where you would have seen that before was these African artifacts that were taken out of their ritual context. I believe in the show you curated at MoMA, that's up. People should go see it. It's up now. You have the photo of all the African artifacts crowded together in MoMA that it's almost like the master key to the show, right? Yeah, yeah. Slaveship style, I like to say.
28:54Because the kind of the term that's being used, you know, amongst sort of Black studies folks now, a lot of people use it, beside it. What happens in beside it? It means like when you put one thing next to another thing, what happens? Or as I've said in the most hyperbolic fashion, the solution to disorder in the world is not genocide. You know what I mean? It's like how to be beside another entity, another thing, another person in a way that is civil and cordial, maybe even in one fashion or another emancipatory, you know? And so I think DJs are great purveyors of that. I think whether it's like, you know, the Jamaican version of the selector, selecting things, I think is like really important.
29:48But the whole idea of taking a thing that never intended to be next to another thing, but being in some ways sensitive to the particular types of energy that are produced when artifact A is put next to artifact B is something that not only are Black people acutely sensitive to because our physical being has been so policed and so prescribed and dictated to us. But having it on your nervous system in a way. Another citation I often like to mention is Nam June Paik, the godfather of video art, who said the culture that's going to survive in the future is the culture you can carry around in your head.
30:27I think when you look at Black American culture or African culture of the Americas, you see that in a very, very profound way that more often than not, and this is particularly true of Black America for various specific reasons, But more often than not, the most powerful collective cultural expression is what I would say immaterial expression. It's not material. So singing, song, dance, oratorical stuff, things like that. Not so much in the context of America, material expressivity, even though if you go to Africa, if we want to use Africa, let's say, as a presumed source of these things, about the only thing that is as diverse and as complex as the various musics of Africa is the plastic arts.
31:15There's more carved material artifacts than just about anything. Masquerades, so much. Robert Farris Thompson's book, African Art and Emotion, had a profound impact on me because he does start to map out and spill some of the difference between how an artifact functions classically classically in the West versus how it functions in many parts of Africa, where an artifact is understood as to be not inanimate, but inherently animate in some kinds of ways, you know? So if you put an African artifact in a white cube, in a white space, it just produces a certain kind of energy. And I think Duchamp was not the only person who was sensitive to it, Because even you can see some of Picasso's writings about African artifacts are quite insightful.
32:06You know, and he says things like, this is not art. These things are intercessors and things like that. You know, they are conductors of energy. But Duchamp, I think, is the only person who we primarily know of who was able to think, like in a way, almost phenomenologically about how African artifacts were functioning. You know, as I like to say, not just how they look, but how they behave, you know?
32:34Arthur Jafa:Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very, it's very thought provoking to me because I, as I understand it, part of the theory is about how blackness is produced as an abstraction. You know, a lot of people from multiple cultures are juxtaposed together in the slave ship. Like you're suggesting with that image and that becomes a different thing than a culture formed of a kind of abstraction and how that feeds into a kind of a certain relationship to abstraction. I've been saying for quite a while now, I don't think I've ever intended as a provocation, but I've been saying like I've been all over Africa.
33:11And in a certain respect, I'm not sure I've met anybody black who's in Africa. You know what I mean? And I mean by that, of course, there's a sociopolitical designation, Black. But from an ontological perspective, Blackness, as I understand it, in the Americas, where so much of what determines how being functions in relationship, collective being functions, is about absences. You know, absences of things like a landmass, absences of understanding of, like, who your ancestors were. I mean, not in the abstract, we're all from Africa since, but you go to Africa, man, most people know where the fuck they're from.
33:54They can trace their families back. But so much of the experience of African people in the Americas is gaps in our understanding. And these gaps were structured by slavery and things like that. And so these gaps, these absences are defining aspects of what it means to be black, at least ontologically speaking. And I find most of those defining aspects are absent in the context of Africa where people have a pretty damn good sense of who they are and where they're from. And it's not just having gaps, but our collective transgenerational impulse to fill those gaps in. You know what I mean? So you have a chasm.
34:36You build a bridge over it, assuming that what you filled in was what it was like in this native context, until you, in a sense, have some experience of, quote, unquote, your native context. And you realize that these things that we imagine oftentimes have very little to do with how those gaps would have been filled in the native circumstances. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, we're mutants. We're mutants. We're African, for sure. But I think we're mutant Africans.
35:04Arthur Jafa:So maybe this is a weird question, but you're talking about living culture, immaterial culture, but you're an object maker. The films exist in physical space, in the white cube. I guess I feel like people want a lot from you, you know, and what do you want your work to do? You know, I increased my side to say I don't want to make work about black people. I want to make work like black people. It's a distinction I'm still trying to think through. meaning it's not a primary to somebody's representing things. I'm more interested in presenting things than representing things. You know, actually, like the urinal or like an African artifact, how do you make a thing that has some ability to produce energy and questions and queries and prompts and things like that?
35:57So, like, what do I want my work to do? I wanted first and foremost to be interesting. I wanted to hold people's attention, to provoke people. I'm not interested in telling people what to think or determining what kind of conclusions. It's not riddles of one answer to the joke, you know what I mean? To the riddles. It's not that at all.
36:19Arthur Jafa:So much of the work or a lot of the work is about, yeah, this violent exclusion, racism, discrimination. And then you've become very visible, you know? You are on stage all the time. There's a lot of attention on you. Do you find that attention? How do you assess the hunger for your work? Black people are always visible. That's part of the problem. If you're on an auction block, you're very visible. It's not about visibility. That's a given. I'm very resistant to notions of what one should do, obligation. I'm very much, in many ways, an anarchist. I believe in collective action and endeavor, mutual aid, things like that.
37:03I believe in people doing what they choose to do. It doesn't mean that I don't believe in ethics and morality and things like that. I just feel like my calling is about, and it's a classic calling. It's a calling that's very familiar to Black people, which is just keeping shit real, trying to keep it real, trying to, being a truth teller. like Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison. I mean, these are all people who, as much as anything they did, they just called shit for what it was. They weren't making shit up. A lot of what you're doing is not making shit up. It's just refusing to go along with the emperor's new clothes, to go along with this impulse of denial, like refusing to be in denial.
37:51I always loved this thing that Cornel West said years and years ago. You said there's certain things you cannot not know as a Black person in America. And that's one of my sort of operative points of reference. I really just try to do the things that come to me imaginatively. I try to implement them. A lot of times, the most interesting things that I create or affect, let's say, are things that started off as a joke. You know what I mean? of like, what if, like Ben Gazzara, like my taxi driver thing. It was just like, oh man, those supposed to be Black characters? Wow, I wish I could see that.
38:33You know what I mean? And now, you know, I've gotten to a point in my career where, you know, I have a certain amount of support. Also very frustrated about things that I want to do. I can't seem to get anybody to subsidize them, but I'm having fun. I'm having a lot of fun. I don't experience my career as a burden in any sense at all.
38:54Arthur Jafa:So, I guess last question. You've talked for a long time about wanting to do a narrative feature film. How's that project coming? I think it's coming great. I got a script that I think is amazing. You know, I miss the indeterminacy. I miss the, I don't know, I don't know. You know, but I'm very proud of my script. We've got a little bit of resistance from people who are, in fact, supporters of what I want to do. But the resistance, I think, is a fine line or maybe not a fine line, but there is a related but complicated relationship between a thing being complex and the thing being good or bad.
39:34Say, for example, a person who I think of as a really incredible supporter of my, he has been a really incredible supporter of my ambitions to make a film. When he read my script, one of the things he said was that things like, how do you think an audience is going to deal with a film where the story doesn't start till 45, 50 minutes into the film? Now, I don't agree with that characterization. I think the story started at the beginning of the script. But for whatever reason... So you want to make a feature narrative feature film,
40:06Arthur Jafa:but you don't want to make Black Panther. Yeah, I don't want to make Black Panther. I mean, I used to have a test question to filmmakers. I always say, if you could only make one film, Black Panther, Raging Bull, which one would you make? And Raging Bull was a flop. It was a flop. And it's probably a little bit even racist as a movie, but it's an incredible film. Black Panther is a film that has certain qualities, obviously that are good, but it's like no comparison to me. You know, it made a billion dollars. So everybody wants to make a film that makes a billion dollars. I used to have this term I would use, I would call the abject sublime, or sometimes I would call the alien familiar.
40:45You make a thing that's both alien because you've never seen it before, but it's familiar because it's so tethered to aspects of your culture. You just haven't seen your culture manifest itself in a particular medium. That could be architecture, that could be cinema, it could be fashion, that could be almost anything. But we know certain mediums, because they're capital intensive, and not just because they're capital intensive, but because they really do get at what we're going to think. You know what I mean? Nobody can control what's happening. Average spring. Nobody can control average spring.
41:23But what they could control is how we think about average spring. You know, they can control spin. like media is about dictating how we understand what happens not what happens and so you get into these arenas like cinema and stuff and a big part of it is they say it's just business but it's not just business you really are talking about wielding one of the most powerful instruments Sylvia Winters the great incredible black female philosopher scholar did an incredible lot of work around what it means to be human and things like this, but she wrote this one essay. She was talking about the heart of the day Kong.
42:03She actually spells out a mission statement for progressive and certainly for Black cinema, as I want to understand cinema. And she basically said, in a nutshell, she says, look, in our societies, transformation only happens when you alter the episteme. If you don't alter the epicene or the sort of central underlying logic of an epoch, say medieval, medieval times and the medieval worldview. She says Cervantes, you know, Cervantes' book is what made the medieval worldview unsustainable. sustainable and she said the way the novel function in western civilization is both an emblem of civilization literateness and these kinds of things but also simultaneously the primary mechanism of reinforcing and defining the episteme of a particular epoch but she says one of the things that happened is like as we move into different epochs like mercantile man or things like that that even though the novel is still the emblem of the current episteme in fact But the heavy lifting is being done by all the original.
43:13So as soon as you enter into these things, it's like you really are playing with the tools that dictate not what happens, but how we understand what happens. And then we know how we understand what happens is what dictates how we go forward.
43:26Arthur Jafa:And you still think that's in feature film? Because in a way you engaged with it. I think negatively, I think it is. I think it's reasserting and reifying. in fact, these misbeguided ideas that we have about how the world functions or how the world should function. And so it's important for people who have even just minimally an alternate view, even if I don't necessarily agree with their view, alternate views of what the fuck is going on, I think is really, really important. So I'm very committed to making cinema that is more popular than anything that's out here, but at the same time is very much preoccupied with a radical reorientation of what we think about what's going on.
44:14Look, reggae, Barb Marley and the Weathers. And as far as pop music goes, you couldn't be more progressive than a lot of that, right? Bad Brains, there's so many versions of it. Or there's jazz, which doesn't even have work, It's abstract mostly. But I do think in each of those cases, those are Black musical forms that really have transformed, you know, rock and roll transformed society. Look, I'm an anarchist. I'm a socialist. I've read Marx. I believe in Marxist thought. But rock and roll, I think, has transformed way more than any of those things. It doesn't mean it's the most sophisticated analysis.
44:58But if you talk about a form that transformed how people existed in their own skin, how they related to other people, we know the 60s was a result of Black culture starting to disseminate. And most of that happened in the music. It taught people how to be in space in a different way than they were trained to be. And we know also, too, that the powers that be realize that we need to co-opt that music. One, we need to do things to sort of disempower or disenchant the implications of that music. And, you know, and by and large. So it's like it's always about, for me at least, I'm not, again, dictating for nobody else.
45:44But like Ken Vanga did, I'm trying to figure out spells to do things that will, if not force people, at least allow people the space to think differently. Well, Arthur J.
45:57Arthur Jafa:Farr, I really hope you get to make that movie. And thank you so much for talking to me and being so generous with your time. Yeah, no problems. It was great. That's it for this week's episode. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Ben Davis and Caroline Goldstein. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
From the publisher
This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the New Museum in New York. It's very much worth another listen.
Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went vertical in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that included police violence against Black people and also moments of viral celebration and joy. It was both experimental and accessible, and drew huge crowds when it was first shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York.
A follow-up film, called The White Album, won the Golden Lion for Best Artist as part of the main show of the Venice Biennale back in 2019. And this month, Jafa is back in Venice, this time in a two-person show called “Helter Skelter,” curated by Nancy Spector, pairing him with the famous artist Richard Prince, also known for using found and appropriated imagery to disorienting effect. That show opened alongside the Venice Biennale at the Prada Foundation, and was one of the few things during the opening weekend that everyone could agree was a must-see event.
Jafa has also curated a show currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, called “Less Is Morbid,” a deliberately packed display of his favorite art. He is also one of the winners of this year’s Art Basel Award, to be honored at that fair. In the middle of all this intense activity, Jafa sat down with Ben Davis to discuss his art, his view of art history, and what comes next.
