Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017) (Installation view). Image courtesy of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Photo: Brian Forrest
In the late ‘80s, my Hebrew school class was shown video clips from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. As much as a child could conceive of the systematic annihilation of European Jewry, it was clear that watching this footage was an obligatory rite. Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) at MOCA Geffen invoked a similar ethical imperative: to witness racial violence in America with the same initiative with which we consume popular culture. Or put more directly by Amandla Stenberg in Jafa’s video, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?”
Stenberg’s YouTube video Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows (2015) appears in Jafa’s mash-up alongside a rapid succession of familiar clips featuring black celebrities, historical footage, news, social media posts, and documentation of police brutality; all set to the tune of Kanye West’s gospel-infused Ultralight Beam (2016). The video begins with an interview clip of Charles Ramsey, the neighbor who rescued Amanda Berry from a kidnapper in Cleveland. He explains, “I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.” Ramsey’s quick-witted understatement about internalized racism aptly sets the tone for Jafa’s compressed history lesson.
Using a familiar trope of online culture, Jafa reframes popular narratives and dismantles hierarchical structures as he equalizes contrasting moments; Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen embrace, a cop tackles a bikini-clad teenager. But the same technology that distributes documented racial injustice also enables fleeting attention spans and narcissistic tendencies. Beyond the fast pace of Jafa’s video is the slow moving reality of change.
Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, the Message is Death is on view April 2 – June 12, 2017 at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (152 N Central Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012).
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017) (Installation view). Image courtesy of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Photo: Brian Forrest
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017) (Installation view). Image courtesy of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Photo: Brian Forrest
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017) (Installation view). Image courtesy of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Photo: Brian Forrest
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017) (Installation view). Image courtesy of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Photo: Brian Forrest
Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2017) (Installation view). Image courtesy of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Photo: Brian Forrest