Always Boiling Over

In West Adams, an eclectic mix of Craftsman, Victorian, and Gothic Revival architecture line residential streets, and long-time mom-and-pop storefronts and warehouses flank the more commercial ones. Shiny, new high-rise buildings nearby hint at a San Francisco-tinged fate, but the neighborhood still bears the traces of its past: If you listen closely the wind still carries the sounds of Donna Summer, Rick James, and Whitney Houston playing live from the now-shuttered Catch One, one of the first gay Black discos in America. Off West Adams Boulevard, on a nondescript white, brick corner building is the studio of Arthur Jafa, where the multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker has worked since 2018.

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Inside, Jafa is sitting at his desk, scrolling through images rolled over from his current show at Sprüth Magers, where he recently signed. His first debut with the gallery and his first-ever solo exhibition in Los Angeles follows up his spring show at 52 Walker and Gladstone Gallery in New York. “It felt like a full circle for my art,” says the 63-year-old artist who has lived in LA since moving from New York in 2012. But rather than sit with the moment, he continues forward, working nonstop on an unflinching and tender visual soundtrack of Black America.

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For the last three decades, Jafa's practice has steadily evolved since his acclaimed cinematography debut with Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust in 1991. He followed this with work on Spike Lee's Crooklyn (1994) and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), as well as music videos for Solange, Jay-Z, and Kanye West (now known as Ye). A turning point came with his seminal 2016 video, Love is the Message, the Message is Death, and his Golden Lion-winning work, The White Album, showcased at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Since then, Jafa has continued to expand his practice, exploring new ways to move images through sculpture, painting, assemblage, and more narrative-driven films. This spring, he plans to shoot his first feature. “C-u-d-h-i-a-l,” he spells it out for me. It is a love story set mostly in Mississippi, where he was born and raised. “I sat with it, and then I didn’t think about it for 20-something years,” he says of the plot. Three-and-a-half years ago, he set up his film company to support Black cinema. Soon after, he began to plan his own.

Dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, thick eyebrows that rest above eyeglasses that frame inquisitive eyes, salt-and-pepper hair in two short braids, a short beard, Jafa leads me to his desk. Around him, a lexicon of images are lined up, grid-like on tables and pinned to walls and boards. Black bodies in ecstasy, under pressure, crystalized in pop culture moments, next to or superseding their white counterparts: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The tip of an iceberg of material, his collection makes up a room-sized, tactile assemblage, a nervous system of ideas yet to be realized. “Before flash drives, they would just be in my head,” he says with a laugh. “They recede, they bob below the surface, and sometimes they pop up.” For an artist with a morbid curiosity who works with intense subject matter, in person Jafa has a humble air and a warm smile, mouth closed, shoulders slightly raised. A true practitioner of dialogue, he steers our conversation between peaks and valleys with ease. Everything is material; no topic is off limits. 

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Jafa sees America for what it is, its heart of darkness, but the artist prefers to show, not tell. On his large computer monitor, he pulls up a rendering of his painting Eternal Order, 2024, now on view at Sprüth Magers. The black-and-white composition features a close-up photograph of Miles Davis’ eyes next to the lead singer for the death metal band 1349. He moves the two images around until both have been replaced: In their place, a close-up reworked illustration of Jafa’s LeRage, 2017—a greyscale Incredible Hulk that Jafa has likened to a self-portrait. And a pivotal scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) in which Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen), emerges from fog-laden water, his face covered in military camouflage paint that out of context appears like blackface. Suspended in space, the images hover side-by-side, apparition-like. As he speaks, he drags them into different positions, zooming in and out, playing with the scale and color until Le Rage floats above Captain Willard in darkness. It’s resolved,” he says after some time, at least for the moment. 

Is the artist searching for another meaning when he brings seemingly disparate scenes into orbit? “Not just another meaning, a meaning,” he clarifies. To release Schrödinger's cat from the box, so to speak. Yet at this point of the process, he is simply responding to what visually clicks. Then comes the question: Is that a painting? A video? A sculpture? “The critical comes in later—to bring a thing into a sharper focus or amplify what's going on.” His process, he explains, is a lot more intuitive than what is maybe expected from an artist known for his conceptual depth. Jafa picks up a metal car emblem that reads "Impala” in script and turns it around in his hand. He is looking for a physical artifact to potentially embed in the image. “It could be almost anything.”

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Jafa might be collecting source material, but he doesn’t think of what he consumes as an archive, at least not in the formal sense. “When something enters into an archive, it never comes out,” he notes. Instead, he repurposes and reframes his findings again and again. In “nativemanson,” on view until December 14, these findings unfold, collapse into each other, and emerge anew. Ominous sounds permeate from the entryway: sometimes gunshots, sometimes yelling, sometimes bits of muffled dialogue or music. A nearby dark, curtained room plays Jafa’s film BG, 2024 (short for Ben Gazzara). Upstairs his films SloPEX, 2022 and Dirty Tesla, 2021 play at the end of a pathway formed by a sequence of found images emblazoned on mirrored acrylic walls, titled Picture Unit (Structures) II, 2024. Jafa tells me he thinks of the exhibition as a group show of his own work, but I can’t help but think of it as a sprawling, total installation.

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On the first floor of Sprüth Magers, paintings, photographs, and assemblage makeup its main, open room. In the sculpture Untitled, 2024, extruded aluminum rails, pipes, foil, and bicycle frames are contorted horizontally across the wall to a haunting effect. A navy blue tarp is woven between the folds—purchased by the artist himself on skid row. “Tarps that people have lived in have a certain kind of energy,” says Jafa of his decision to opt for a weathered, distressed fabric. “I would say one of my primary interests is something I would term ‘the incidental aesthetics of things that people do when they are under pressure.’”

How does a person look cast overboard, escaping in a burning house, fleeing the cops or a mob, escaping or enduring violence? “I'm fascinated with how aesthetics seem, almost incidentally, in spite of circumstances, to constantly assert themselves,” Jafa says. For the artist, to recognize the beauty of, say, the brutal scene of Walter Scott running from the police and getting shot in the back that appeared in Love is the message, the message is Death is to recognize a possibility for, or even inevitability of, aesthetics.

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“Love is a naked shadow/ On a gnarled and naked tree,” wrote Langston Hughes in his 1927 poem Song for a Dark Girl, in words that capture the horror of a racist America through language that is also tender and visually striking. “For Black people in the Americas in particular, it's something that we know very well,” Jafa says. “If you think of how we came to be and what we found here, and what we have developed under and in opposition to, this question of how do you, if not configure and if not extract, at least, how do you recognize beauty in the face of the circumstances that we've had to survive under?” 

This question is embedded in the wrought history of Los Angeles and its cultural output, too. In 1965, after the Watts Rebellion erupted over systemic racism and violence by the Los Angeles Police Department and the city government writ large, local artists such as David Hammons, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John T. Riddle, and John Outterbridge picked up the pieces and turned to assemblage to reckon with the moment and advocate for change within the Black community and in the country at large. Then came the Rodney King riots of 1992 in response to the graphic video of L.A.P.D.’s brutal beating of King and the subsequent not guilty verdict. Prominent Los Angeles rappers including Dr. Dre and Ice Cube responded with poignant, high-octane albums that double as documentaries of the moment. 

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“Trayvon Martin… George Floyd…” says Jafa, “at this point there are more names than you can even name." Rather than address a singular moment of outrage, his art underscores that the moment is never ending. ”In BG, his Taxi Driver remake, on view at Sprüth Magers, this comes front and center. “It is grounded the everydayness of violence in American society, in particular the kind of violence that is directed against Black people in that way is very similar to Love is the Message. You want to call these mass shootings an epidemic but at this point, there's nothing that's novel about it. It's just so much part of contemporary society–it’s part of the fabric.” 

For such a work, the artist began with what appeared to be a straightforward idea: “To replace the characters that were intended in the original script to be Black.” Painstaking recreated in a studio, the recut sequence's run time is doubled, tripled, collapsed into itself in 13 slightly varied versions that always end with the shooting yet decenter Travis Bickle. “It's a compulsive return to a cathartic moment,” says Jafa of the inescapable climax, a harbinger of America’s fate carried over from a bloodstained, racist past embodied in Bickle who haunts a present that is disenfranchised, back-against-the wall, with nothing left to lose, inundated with violence. In some versions of this work, you might see the pimp talking on the corner or singing along to Stevie Wonder's "As," but he is still trapped in the cycle. “Even if you make space for a particular character to articulate or just literally voice their internal landscape in some kind of way, it still doesn't escape the endless loop of violence,” says Jafa. And it's repetitive. “On one hand it just resists the whole idea that this is an aberration,” says Jafa. “This is constantly ongoing. There's nothing novel about it.”

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As Jafa sees it, Taxi Driver was ahead of the curve in that sense. “What seemed like an aberration at the time was obviously a tidal wave.” Despite, or because of, this stream of violence in America, Jafa says his work is not as reactive as it may seem. “It's more like I'm taking the temperature of society, but it's not because the water is boiling over—the water is always boiling over.”

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Arthur Jafa: "nativemanson" is on view until December 14, 2024 at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles at 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036.