Introduction 

It has now become commonplace to divide Arthur Jafa’s artistic career into a “before” and “after”Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), in order to mark the extraordinary new visibility this world-famous installation has brought to his current and previous work. Yet this outcome has been a career-long labor and practice.

liquid blackness’s first began studying Jafa’s work and his theories of black aesthetics that preceded, by roughly thirty years, the current visibility of his art practice. We became particularly attentive to his concept of “Black Visual Intonation” because of the role that Larry Clark’s Passing Through (1977), the subject of our 2015 research project “The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble,” had in originally inspiring it. We have continued to research the ways in which processes of music-making still act as models for black contemporary filmmaking’s pursuit of an increasing fluidity between experimental modes of film practice and the music video format, a straddling of the line between the art gallery and online spaces, and high art and popular culture.[1]

Second, in our continued study of creative ensembles, we’ve explored the work that has emerged from Jafa’s formal and informal partnerships. Jafa regularly collaborates with his TNEG partners Malik Sayeed and Elissa Blount Moorhead, his intellectual interlocutors include Greg Tate, Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and countless others; the visual artists he has worked with include Kahlil Joseph, Ming Smith, Frida Orupabo, and Missylanyus[2]; he has also works with jazz musicians and performers such as Jason Moran, Steve Coleman, and Okwui Okpokwasili. The influence of the jazz ensemble on these collaborations is perhaps clearest in the Listening Session that concluded Jafa’s show A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, an event in which he “orchestrated” a performative/musical event as a deliberately “dismembered jazz ensemble.” Since Jafa visited Atlanta in 2016 to have a dialogue with members of the liquid blacknessresearch group, the group has continued to host artists that have been in more or less direct contact with what we have called the “Howard pedagogy lab,” i.e. the legacy of the mentorship of Haile Gerima at Howard University, such as Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young, and Jenn Nkiru, and who have worked with/have been in conversation with Jafa in various capacities. Jafa co-creation is a philosophical practice rooted in black sociality.[3]

Third, Jafa is arguably one of the most vocal and insistent proponents of an ontological approach to black aesthetics, that is, of the inseparability between questions of black beauty and black being—a stance he announced back in his 2003 essay “My Black Death,” which we explored in the December 2016 issue of liquid blackness,“Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness.”[4]

Finally, we are attentive to the ways the theoretical and critical concepts Jafa originated over the years—concepts such as “Black Visual Intonation,” the idea of black culture created in a “freefall,” the idea of “black potention,” which have been mobilized within an art practice that is specifically directed at black people while everybody else “gets to listen in”—have now become part of a popular critical vocabulary. Not only do they offer new ways to think about black expressive culture, but also challenge processes of art world evaluation and appreciation pitting them against the possibility for black artists to “self-authorize”; they reimagine the tension between tradition vs. innovation, appropriation vs. homage, singular vs. ensemblic authorship, and introduce new ways of thinking about the relationship between archives/collections/collectives.

[1] Alessandra Raengo and Lauren McLeod. Cramer, eds., “In Focus: Music Video as Black Art,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59 no. 2 (Winter 2020)

[2] Jafa Ming Smith, Frida Orupabo, and Missylanyus were a part of Jafa’s 2017 show at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions.

[3] Jafa explains his approach to “handing over” his work to collaborators and audiences as an expression of black sociality in this video, in which he reads his response to an email from scholar Christina Sharpe who sent Jafa her reaction to an early screening of Love is the Message and the Message is Death. 

[4] Jafa, Arthur, “My Black Death,” in Everything but the burden: what white people are taking from Black culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 245-257.

liquid blackness in Conversation with Arthur Jafa

Research

This research project and its corresponding events began focused on theoretical and practical questions that emerge from the film Dreams are Colder than Death, a pivotal work in Arthur Jafa’s career. It is, to date, his most heavily “footnoted” film in the sense that it openly and directly references scholarly conversations. It performs a sustained theoretical intervention in the discourse on black ontology, on par with Jafa’s previous influential writings on film and art history. It also contributed to the image-archive that Jafa has so effectively activated in APEX redacted (2013), which was shown in an unfinished form at the Cinematic Migration Symposium organized by Renée Green in 2013 at MIT to honor the work of John Akomfrah and later as part of Flux Night 2015: Dream in Atlanta—curated by Nato Thompson, with Elissa Blount Moorhead and Rashida Bumbray. Additionally, Dreams cements his multi-pronged collaboration with Kahlil Joseph who co-produced and partly shot the film and who, years later, featured some of the same scholars and cultural critics in his BLKNWS (2018-ongoing). Dreams signals the transition to a different mode of working, less reliant on original footage and more on Jafa’s long-standing archival impulse (see his Notebooks at made in la 2016: a, the, though, only, Hammer Museum, curated by Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker). In 2016, that archival practice was expressed in the production of Love is the Message, the Message is Death—a film Jafa generously shared, in an unfinished and still untitled version, at the 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies special event organized by liquid blackness and during his public conversation with members of the liquid blackness research group. 

We’ve identified two important theoretical frameworks to help explore the most salient thematic and formal issues in these films: Afro-Pessimism and Sensitometry.

Theoretical Frame: Afro-Pessimism

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hartman, S. V. and F. B. Wilderson, III (2003). “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle 13(2): 183-201.

Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (September 21, 2013 2013): 737-80.

Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177-218.

Moten, Fred. “The Subprime and the Beautiful.” African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013): 237-45.

Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and social death: A comparative study, Harvard University Press.

Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. U of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Sexton, Jared. “People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery.” Social Text 28, no. 2 (2010): 31-56.

Sexton, Jared. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” InTensions 5 (2011): 1-47.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81.

R.L. (2013) Wanderings of the Slave: Black Life and Social Death. Mute

Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of Us Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.

Death

Castronovo, R. (2000). “Political Necrophilia.” boundary 2 27 (2): 114-148.

Holland, S. P. (2000). Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, Duke University Press.

Jan Mohamed, A. R. (2005). The death-bound-subject: Richard Wright’s archaeology of death. Duke University Press, Durham N.C.

Mbembe, A. (2003). “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11-40.

Russ Castronovo. Necro citizenship: Death, eroticism, and the public sphere in the nineteenth-century United States. Duke University Press, 2001.

Special Issues on Afro-Pessimism

African Identities 11, no. 2 (2013) – “Cedric J. Robinson: Radical Historiography, Black Ontology, and Freedom”

The Black Scholar 44 (Summer 2014)

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, no. 2-3 (2015)

Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003)

Representations 113, no. 1 (2011)

Rhizomes, 29 (2016) – “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, blackness and the discourses of Modernity”

Theoretical Frame: Sensitometry 

Akomfrah, John. “Digitopia and the Spectres of Diaspora.” Journal of Media Practice 11, no. 1 (March 2010): 21–29. doi:10.1386/jmpr.11.1.21/1.

Giard, François, and Matthieu J. Guitton. “Beauty or Realism: The Dimensions of Skin from Cognitive Sciences to Computer Graphics.” Computers in Human Behavior 26 (January 1, 2010): 1748–52.

Higgins, Scott. “A New Colour Consciousness Colour in the Digital Age.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 9, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 60–76.

Pozo, Diana. “Water Color: Radical Color Aesthetics in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust.” New Review of Film & Television Studies 11, no. 4 (December 2013): 424.

Roth, Lorna. “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity” Canadian Journal of Communication [Online], Volume 34 Number 1 (28 March 2009)

Williams, David E. “Street Knowledge.” American Cinematographer 96, no. 9 (September 2015): 38–55.

Winston, Brian. 1985. “A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image”. Daedalus 114 (4). The MIT Press: 105–23.

Read, Paul. “‘Unnatural Colours’: An Introduction to Colouring Techniques in Silent Era Movies.” Film History 21, no. 1 (March 2009): 9–46.

Publications

liquid blackness 3, no. 6 “Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness” Contents

The outcome of this research is the December 2016 issue of liquid blackness, “Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness,” that addresses the question “can blackness be loved?” by exploring issues of violence, care, and queer love. 

Alessandra Raengo – “Black Ontology and The Love of Blackness: Introduction”

Jericho Brown – “Bullet Points”

Calvin Warren – “Black Care”

T. Mars McDougall – “‘The Water is Waiting’: Water, Tidalectics, and Materiality”

Parisa Vaziri – “Windridden: Historical Oblivion and the Nonvalue of Nonidentification”

Tobias C. Van Veen – “Robot Love is Queer: Afrofuturism and Alien Love”