Arthur Jafa’s Odyssey of Appropriation
Is Arthur Jafa a rearguard artist or an avant-garde one in disguise? It’s hard to say. “I Am Tony,” a major retrospective at the New Museum, doesn’t frame him one way or the other, but it does make you wonder about the moat of praise around his work, and whether it has discouraged reflection on some of his more conservative tendencies. Jafa’s most famous piece, “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death” (2016), selected by ARTnews as the best work of the twenty-first century, arranges clips of found footage into a non-narrative montage—a common technique in documentary film and commercial media, and a mainstay of the art world since at least Bruce Conner’s “A Movie” (1958)—and the exhibition has lots of pieces that read as reheated Pop-type gestures, such as a big cutout of the Hulk (or, rather, an off-brand version that Jafa calls LeRage) and retooled press photos of Jimi Hendrix and Justin Bieber. But Jafa has never seemed interested in making new art, per se. His work is more about shocking the past back to life—not with irony or quotation marks but like a medic in a disaster zone.
In “Love Is the Message,” seven and a half minutes of clips rush by: the March on Washington; Serena Williams at Wimbledon; Mahalia Jackson singing; Odell Beckham, Jr., making a one-handed catch; Walter Scott being gunned down by the police; a fragment of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”; a child screaming at his mother; people dancing; people collapsing; people wading through a flood. The distilled vision of Black struggle and joy struck a nerve in 2016, when the video was first exhibited, at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and again in 2020, when art institutions made a show of displaying it in solidarity after the murder of George Floyd. Jafa was bothered by reports of people crying, using the video as a prop for catharsis or absolution, but it’s hard to deny that it’s edited for emotional intensity. Even the soundtrack, the gospel-fuelled “Ultralight Beam,” by Kanye West, suggests that tears are in order. Each clip lasts just long enough for a feeling to ripen, at which point it’s smothered by another clip, until you’re left standing in the wreckage of dozens of unpurged, conflicting emotions.
Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1960, and raised mainly in Clarksdale, in the Delta. When he was a child, his parents’ house was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan. His school formally integrated when he was in first grade, but Clarksdale clung fiercely to de-facto segregation. At ten, Jafa saw Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in a theatre on the white side of town, and, even though he didn’t understand what the movie was about, it changed his life. Jafa says he’s still chasing an art experience comparable to that one, something that can “simultaneously alienate and ravish.”
I was reminded of “2001” in the show’s opening rooms. In Kubrick’s prologue, an ape realizes that a bone can be used as a weapon, then flings it into the sky, where it pinwheels and suddenly becomes a spaceship, the narrative leaping forward millions of years. It’s the old Freudian lesson of civilization as sublimated aggression, and Jafa seems keen to rehearse it. “Ex-Slave Gordon” (2017) is a plastic sculpture based on a famous photo of a man who escaped a Louisiana plantation, his back covered in scars from being whipped. The man isn’t humanized or made whole by the incarnation; the plastic makes his wounds look chintzy, like a wall ornament you could buy on Temu. The implied critique, that Black suffering is just another commodity in our online superstore, is produced by transforming an image of nineteenth-century violence into contemporary kitsch. That’s Jafa’s go-to method when creating objects in two or three dimensions. Like the time warp of the rotating bone-ship, his work entangles opposites across a historical divide, generating friction between an old medium and a new image, or vice versa.
Jafa launched his career as a cinematographer, and if you go back to his early work there are traces of the future video artist. At the start of Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” (1994), for which Jafa served as the director of photography, the camera flits around Bed-Stuy, showing un-narrated snippets of life: children racing down the street, jumping rope, and playing hopscotch; adults looking out windows or chatting in the sunshine. The critic bell hooks, in a review of the film, noted how Jafa’s sequence subverted the typical suffering of Black characters in American cinema, depicting instead the pleasures of Black life. Jafa has said that he doesn’t do remedial art, that he sees himself as more of an “undertaker” than an uplifter, but at the New Museum there’s plenty of exuberance and uplift—such as “akingdoncomethas” (2018), an hour-and-forty-five-minute video of gospel choirs and church sermons spliced together. Admittedly, the gospel footage turns into something oversweet, and is punctuated by three minutes of California wildfires. (“Crooklyn,” too, is ultimately a film about death.) If part of the message is about love, it’s always, for Jafa, a love that leans toward the grave.
Massimiliano Gioni, who was recently named director of the New Museum, has described the installation as a “freestyle” hang. One room has a charmingly drunken salon-style layout, with pictures suspended at random heights; another has a dozen or so large cutouts of artists and intellectuals (Sid Vicious, Miles Davis, Foucault) stuffed along one wall; on the fourth floor, there’s even a full-sized Pontiac Firebird. The show feels like a cross between a teen-ager’s paradise and a regional-history museum in the process of deinstallation. There’s also an enormous maze that winds through one room, with an exterior clad in black acrylic—so that it looks like a Minimalist sculpture—and an interior lined with images. The maze is dimly lit, so you’re restricted to blurry glimpses of the art: a large ear, a massacre, a reproduction of Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” a self-portrait. For decades, Jafa has cut out and collected anything in magazines that’s caught his interest, and here he recodes the cool indifference of Minimalism with a personalized collage. It’s a bit like cracking open a Donald Judd only to find a scrapbook inside.
A cat burglar can sample or steal, as Jafa has said, but it doesn’t make him a good artist. If Jafa’s signature move is appropriation, then his preferred model is the d.j.: someone who channels different songs into a mix with just enough harmony and dissonance to be interesting. In addition to the influence of Pictures Generation artists, such as Cady Noland and Richard Prince, he links his method to what he has called the “slave-ship style” of Black aesthetics—a nod to the Middle Passage, which saw people with different languages and cultures violently wrenched from their homes and crammed into the holds of ships. It’s that process of removal and recontextualization which Jafa identifies as the tortured root of great Black art and music.
But appropriation isn’t an easy strategy to rely on in 2026. Our screens are so frequently filled with images that have been peeled away from their referents—lifted, edited, scrambled, recombined, degraded—that you can no longer blow up a found image into wallpaper, pair it with a strange bedfellow, and expect it to acquire artistic depth. The weakness of Jafa’s approach is that he often relies on visual correspondences. In his diptychs, for instance—whether of Mickey Mouse and a witch doctor, Robert Johnson and Miles Davis, or Marcus Garvey and Jimi Hendrix—it’s the echo of a color pattern, an angled cigarette, or a compositional parallel that serves as some vague predicate for meaning. The historical collisions in these works might titillate with possible significance, but they aren’t deepened or elucidated by the images themselves or by their remediation. Jafa’s video work, by contrast, is much stronger. Pieces such as “Love Is the Message” and “BEN GAZARRA” (2024) make bold interventions into our image culture instead of merely revelling in how depleted it’s become.
“BEN GAZARRA” adapts a scene from Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) in which Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) shoots a pimp named Sport, who was originally a Black character in Paul Schrader’s script. In the movie, Sport is played by the white actor Harvey Keitel. When Jafa first saw the film, as a teen-ager, he loved the cinematography but felt that something was off, that Sport should have been Black. Years later, when he learned about Schrader’s script, he decided to perform a bit of surgery on the scene. In Jafa’s version, multiple characters are Black, and the scene loops twelve times, with little variations in the action. (One features a cameo by Stevie Wonder.) The work links the fantasy of an adolescent in Mississippi with a New York film of the nineteen-seventies and contemporary editing techniques, in order to pull the buried Black subject out of the subtext and onto the screen. Ultimately, it’s less a set piece of social critique than a way of appropriating the history of appropriation—of making the tactic feel new again, by reviving our relationship with the old materials. As a work of art, it alienates and ravishes just enough to live up to Jafa’s criteria. ♦