Music Video in the Spaces of High Art
Introduction | Black Art in Motion | Jenn Nkiru’s Institutional Critique | Arthur Jafa’s Theories of Black Filmmaking | Love is the Message, The Message is Death | The White Album
Double Conscience, m.A.A.d (2-screen installation), Kahlil Joseph, 2015
“Music videos” Curated and Exhibited in Art Galleries
Introduction:
In 2012, Kahlil Joseph’s short film “Until the Quiet Comes” for Flying Lotus received widespread critical acclaim: the film won the “Grand Jury Prize” for Short Films at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and “Video of the Year” at the UK Video Music Awards. It was also featured in the exhibition eMERGING: Visual Art & Music in a Post-Hip-Hop Era curated by James Bartlett for the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, NY, and, together with his 2011 video Black Up, in the 2014 Ruffneck Constructivists exhibit for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, curated by world renowned contemporary silhouette artist Kara Walker. This same show, whose title Jafa had suggested to Walker in conversation, featured also Deshotten 1.0 (2009, by Malik Sayeed and Arthur Jafa) and included also a screening of Jafa’s/TNEG’s APEX and excerpts from Dreams are colder than Death (2013).
Kahlil Joseph: Double Conscience was his first solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2015, curated by Ellen Molesworth, which included a 2-screen video installation titled m.A.A.d, featuring visual materials inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city gathered for the musician’s opening of Kanye West’s Yeezus tour. m.A.A.d has since been exhibited around the world, including at “The Infinite Mix” in London, 2015, and Documenta in 2016
m.a.a.d., Kahlil Joseph, 2015
Sources:
Miranda, Carolina A. “Kendrick Lamar’s Video Director Kahlil Joseph Takes His Hypnotic Art to MOCA.” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2015.
Duker, Eric. “Kahlil Joseph’s m.A.A.d. Gives New Visual Life to Kendrick Lamar’s Breakthrough Album,” The Verge, March 27, 2015
Lampe, Lilly. “Kahlil Joseph’s Double Act.” Art Papers Magazine 39, no. 3 (May 2015): 18–23.
Until the Quiet Comes, Kahlil Joseph, 2013. (winner Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival)
From: Lauren Cramer, “Icons of Catastrophe: Diagramming Blackness in Until the Quiet Comes,” liquid blackness 4, no. 7 (October 2017)
Kahlil Joseph’s Until the Quiet Comes is a short film about a series of miraculous and catastrophic events. As the camera moves gracefully through a dreamy Los Angeles sunset black children play and, as if it were predestined, die. Then, without warning, bodies begin to move gracefully in reverse while the world around them continues to move forward. Finally, in the dramatic conclusion of the film, a man bleeding from bullet wounds on the ground miraculously rises and begins to dance. He removes his bloodstained shirt and, evidently, the finality of death. The central conceit of Until the Quiet Comes is contradiction. The film subjects viewers to violence that is horrific yet beautifully surreal and to an unending cycle of death and vibrancy. Thus, we see blackness through the contradictory forces that shape it, boundless possibility and crushing confinement. Instead of coming apart at these formal and thematic fault lines, Joseph’s film finds balance between its oppositional spatiotemporal organizations. As a result, it visualizes the aesthetic possibilities of “holding blackness in suspension,” the provocative aesthetic possibilities of allowing blackness to float and unmooring it from the histories, policies, and technologies that cohere the notion of blackness in the realm of representation. The suspended aesthetics of Joseph’s film not only critique the specious task of representing blackness, they also visualize the disruption of the cultural logics that are sustained—literally grounded—by blackness.
Black Art In Motion
Fountain, Marcel Duchamp, 1917
Source:
Park Nights 2017: Arthur Jafa
In his essay “My Black Death,” and countless talks, Arthur Jafa articulates a counter-history of Modernism in the arts, whereby modern art is a subset of black aesthetics. He leans on Robert Farris Thompson’s reading of “African Art in Motion,” which argues that African artifacts in their natal context were just as mobile as the subjects that moved around them. Once brought to Europe, the movement of the African artifact provoked the revolution of Cubism, which attempts to represent an object from multiple points of view simultaneously. In AJ’s retelling of the story, it was ultimately Duchamp’s recontextualization of the readymade that was prompted by the actions, movements and behaviors of the alienated black object. Duchamp, in other words, did not approach the African artifact as a problem of/for representation but, rather of “radical alienation” and attempted to reproduce the same effect (for example, with the urinal). In the meanwhile, the transatlantic slave trade brought to the Americas not simply black objects but the makers of those very objects, who necessarily began producing culture in a freefall. Their challenge, which is the challenge Jafa still perceives, is “how to turn an immaterial concept – the black aesthetic – into a thing?”
Black music, in particular, became a site of articulation of formal freedom (of movement) which, in turn, became an inspiration for an artist such as Jackson Pollock, whose method, “consists largely of improvised dance as a means of getting paint down onto the canvas.” (248)
These two moments/examples offer a reframing of canonical art history around questions of movement and alienation. They can help us understand the institutional critique performed by later artists, such as Jenn Nkiru, as they create work that directly addresses the presence of the black body (and its surrogates) in white space.
Watch also this short promo film for “Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions.” Youtube, uploaded by Serpentine Galleries, July 5, 2017. Here too he summarizes his adoption of Robert Farris Thompson’s idea of “African Art in Motion,” and argues that Ming Smith’s work translates it as a “blur.”[1]
[1] Thompson, Robert Farris. African art in motion: Icon and act in the collection of Katherine Coryton White. University of California Press, 1974. See also, Fred Moten, Black and Blur. Duke University Press, 2018.
Sources:
Thompson, Robert Farris. African art in motion: Icon and act in the collection of Katherine Coryton White. Vol. 11. Univ of California Press, 1974.
Arthur Jafa, “My Black Death.” In Everything but the burden: What White people are taking from Black culture, edited by Greg Tate. Broadway Books, 2003.
“Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions.” Youtube, uploaded by Serpentine Galleries, July 5, 2017.
Watch also this short promo film for “Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions.” Youtube, uploaded by Serpentine Galleries, July 5, 2017. Here too he summarizes his adoption of Robert Farris Thompson’s idea of “African Art in Motion,” and argues that Ming Smith’s work translates it as a “blur.”[1]
Jenn Nkiru’s Institutional Critique
Women are Present, Jenn Nkiru, 2017
Artist: liquid blackness research page on Jenn Nkiru
Women are Present was commissioned in 2017 by the Tate, London, for International Women’s Day. The short film performs an “institutional critique” through the unregulated movements of dancer and multi-media artist, Zinzi Minott, whose work centers on processes of decolonization through the frames of “race, queer culture, gender and class.” Coming confrontationally close to the art objects themselves, she violates all protocols of propriety of distanced art consumption. By refusing to prop up the institution, Minott instead uses the white gallery walls as props. The camera lens both replicates and magnifies her transgressive gestures, making sure that her body escapes its predetermined position as “a black object in white space,” as the art object that – Arthur Jafa insists—since early Twentieth century Primitivism has set modern art in motion (“My Black Death”).
Additionally, approached from the point of view of the artists engaged, Women are Present can also be considered an essay film. The featured artists are: Guerrilla Girls, Louise Bourgeois, Barbara Kruger, Beatriz Gonzalez, Yayoi Kusama.
Apeshit, Jenn Nkiru, 2018
Sources:
Arthur Jafa, “My Black Death.” In Everything but the burden: What White people are taking from Black culture, edited by Greg Tate. Broadway Books, 2003.
Alter, Nora M., and Timothy Corrigan, eds. Essays on the Essay Film. Columbia University Press, 2017.
Gunn, Jenni. “The Outside Meets the Institution: The Carters' “Apeshit” Video.” Black Camera 11.1 (2019): 385-398.
Alter, Nora M. The essay film after fact and fiction. Columbia University Press, 2019.
James Tobias, "The Music Film as Essay: Montage as Argument in Khalil Joseph's Fly Paper and Process." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 157-162]
Similarly to Women are Present, The Carters’ music video for Apeshit set in the Louvre museum and on which Nkiru worked as second unit director of visuals, puts into dialectical conversation western canonical practices and the lived minority experiences that go unarchived, as Jenny Gunn argues in her essay, “The Outside Meets the Institution: The Carters' “Apeshit” Video.” Drawing from Lacan’s invocation of the anamorphosis in his analysis of the death’s head as memento mori in The Ambassadors (Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533), which Gunn sees as invoked in the video’s opening image of The Carters on either side of the Mona Lisa’s similarly enigmatic smile, “Apeshit” stages a stunning array of lessons in contrast, thinking through blackness in relation to ontology, capitalism, and aesthetics. With “Apeshit,” the genre of the contemporary music video emerges as a form of radical archival practice in moving image form that iterates blackness as an aesthetic and affective force of sociality incompatible with traditional archival methods.
The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533
Arthur Jafa’s Theories of Black Filmmaking
APEX_TNEG, Arthur Jafa, 2013
TNEG and Ensemblic Collaborations
During his talk at the MIT Symposium Cinematic Migrations convened by artist and scholar Renée Green dedicated to John Akomfrah’s work, Jafa presented APEX_TNEG (2013), which is visible in the YouTube video of his presentation at about 1:15:00. During the presentation, as well as during his December 2017 talk at the New Museum, on the occasion of Kahlil Joseph’s show Shadow Play, Jafa explains how APEX came to be: APEX was originally an internal document for TNEG, a proof-concept for film that follows a fictional black band, as the world is coming to an end. It comprises hundreds of images, placed in a software called “Bridge,” which functioned like a picture book and allowed one to “flip through” the images. Malik Sayeed and Kahlil Joseph decided to put it in a timeline, added a soundtrack (Robert Hood, “Internal Empire”), and projected it. In this way, they contributed to the making of a work that, in 2017, Jafa described as “the most calibrated thing I have ever done.”
Arthur Jafa, APEX_TNEG lecture, MIT, February 25, 2013
“Arthur Jafa – APEX (Interview).” Youtube, uploaded by Luma Arles, September 18, 2018.
During this same MIT address, Jafa locates his practice in the context of:
His production company TNEG and his collaborations with Malik Sayeed, his past practice in the industry, especially since Daughters of the Dust (1991), his relationship to filmmaking history and close reading of filmmakers that practiced a deliberate refusal of canonical norms (Oscar Micheaux and Ozu), the constraints and limitations of specific technological and industrial practices (sensitometry, sound recording, casting practices, among others), and the research TNEG has been conducting on the conditions of possibility for a black cinema that would be as relevant to the 21st century as black music has been to the 20th century. As he explains, this possibility hinges upon a sort of “reverse engineering” of canonical aesthetic practices and their value judgements, which are arbitrarily tied to industrial concerns (deconstructive moment/practice of refusal), and of the aesthetic sphere in which black people have been more fully actualized: music, and, more broadly, the organization of sound.
It becomes clear from his talk, however, that for Jafa the liquidity of the black arts is a given: he thinks of sound in relation to both color and movement, and, since his early study of architecture at Howard University, as a way of organizing space.
Reading excerpts from the TNEG’s mission statement and a paper he delivered at a conference on Oscar Micheaux, Jafa also mentions a series of key concepts he has elaborated on over the years, such as:
the idea of black potension (potentiality + tension)
his concept of quantum intentionality
his focus on vectors, pitch, timbre and the political ontology of movement in the cinema and visual arts (specifically when he references recording visual artist and dancer, Storyboard P)
an aesthetic sensibility and practice that aligns with what later has linked to Robert Farris Thompson’s idea of “African Art in Motion and the contribution of the African artifact to the art historical avant-gardes (See Black Art in Motion section) and many other concepts which we invite you to explore in the curated Jafa clips featured in this pathway.
Arthur Jafa, APEX_TNEG lecture, MIT, February 25, 2013
Arthur Jafa, APEX_TNEG lecture, MIT, February 25, 2013
Arthur Jafa, APEX_TNEG lecture, MIT, February 25, 2013
Arthur Jafa, APEX_TNEG lecture, MIT, February 25, 2013
Full MIT Talk: Arthur Jafa, APEX_TNEG, February 25, 2013
Deshotten, which has been part of Jafa’s catalog for several years, was also the result of a collaboration. During his 2014 talk at MIT, when Jafa screened Deshotten 1.0, he described it as “co-directed” with Sayeed. He also explained how both artists were asked to contribute to the 2008 “Exquisite Corpse” series for Little Minx. The film appears in Little Minx’s catalog with the title, She Walked Calmly and Disappeared into the Darkness. as directed by Malik Sayeed.
Love is the Message, The Message is Death
Love is the Message, the Message is Death, Arthur Jafa, 2016
Jafa’s current popularity in the art world coalesces around the success of his 2016 video, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, which had its official debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem just a few days after the 2016 presidential election. Since then, it has become perhaps one of the most quickly valued art objects of the last few years: one of the 25 works of art that define the contemporary age, according to The New York Times, a contemporary “Guernica,” for the curator of the Smithsonian. On June 27 and 28, 2020, Love is the Message, The Message is Death, streamed live for 48 hours, courtesy of the thirteen institutions that had purchased it.
Love is the Message is the expression of a very complex and vibrant black ensemble (TNEG, Kahlil, the “Specialists” featured in Dreams are colder than Death (2013), the anonymous social media posters whose clips comprise most of the video…). Yet, its beginnings are complicated, and its authorship “ensemblic.”
First, Love is the Message was not a reaction to the sudden reality of the Trump presidency. Indeed, the piece was practically finished by March 8, 2016, which is when Jafa shared it with liquid blackness founder, Alessandra Raengo, ahead of his visit to Atlanta, for a liquid blackness event in April 2016. Jafa then decided to screen the film before the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Special Event, Raengo and Matthew Bernstein – Chair of Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies — organized at the National Museum for Civil and Human Rights, in Atlanta, featuring a screening of Dreams are colder than Death (2013). The screening was followed by a roundtable discussion with the artist, Kara Keeling, George Yancy, and Alessandra Raengo.
Secondly, it was a work Jafa had made supposedly without clear purpose (perhaps an internal document, like APEX had been) and it was quite literally going to forego its later existence as art object had Jafa posted it on YouTube as he was planning to do. He was persuaded against it by Kahlil Joseph who had just sold his 2-channel installation m.a.a.d, inspired by Kendrick Lamar, good kid, maad city, to MOCA, LA.
Third, the story of how Love is the Message, the Message is Death came to be is one we know from Jafa himself, whose theories of black aesthetics preceded the current visibility of his art practice and the ubiquity of his interviews online, by roughly 30 years. Jafa himself discusses how his own ascendance in the art world might have never happened without Kahlil’s intervention. In the clip below, he speaks instead of Kahlil Joseph in February 2017, at the New Museum in New York in occasion of the installation of Kahlil Joseph’s single-channel work, Fly Paper.
Clip from Arthur Jafa on the works of Kahlil Joseph, with curator Natalie Bell.” New Museum, December 10, 2017
Sources:
Arthur Jafa on the works of Kahlil Joseph, with curator Natalie Bell.” New Museum, December 10, 2017.
Huey Copeland, “Love is the Message, The Message is Death.” Black One Shot 1.3 (June 2018)
Jafa, Arthur, and Tina Campt. "Love is the message, the plan is death." E-flux Journal 81 (2017): 1-10.
Keeling, Kara. Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: NYU Press, 2019)
Arthur Jafa Interview: Not all Good, Not all Bad, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2019
Talking about the role of Kahlil Joseph in the life and the reception of Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016) at the New Museum in 2017, Jafa joked about Kahlil’s generous arrogance. Thus he recognized that the conditions of possibility for the art world value of his work depend his already existing “ensemblic” practice. The clips below feature Jafa’s reading of his email reply to Christina Sharpe’s reaction to Love is the Message, ahead of its official debut and Jafa’s TNEG partner, Elissa Blount Moorhead contextualizing their interest for the life of (black) things, their shared refusal of traditional concepts of authorship, and their desire to be “emanations” of black culture. As Moorhead says: “I/we want to be meanings…. Not producers of masterpieces but producers of conversation pieces.”
Jafa on collaboration. Source: Creative Time, 2016
Elissa Blount Moorhead on art-making as “emanation.” Source: Creative Time, 2016
Jafa on Quantum Intentionality, Black Intentionality and Charlie Parker, Hirshhorn Museum, Nov. 17, 2017
Jafa on Black Potension. Source: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Rendition, American Academy in Berlin, December 17, 2018
The White Album
(Golden Lion winner, Venice Biennial, 2019)
The White Album, Arthur Jafa, 2019
Jafa has described The White Album as an attempt to address things about Whiteness that a non-white person cannot not know, and the love and respect he feels for some white people in his life. His goal, he has repeated multiple times, is to make work with “ontological integrity,” self-determination, which addresses existential questions about “black Being.”
The video oscillates between what AJ calls “demonic aspects of whiteness he cannot not know” (although he likes Iggy Pop, he says, because of his saturation with blackness), and the specificity of the white people he knows and loves and have given themselves over to being objectified and being in a piece in proximity with the more horrifying aspects of whiteness.
In The White Album the object of black aesthetics is whiteness itself. The work features much longer social media clips than Love is the Message and, indeed, duration and endurance are central to it. It includes entire monologues –a white Southerner vehemently denouncing white privilege and a young college girl expressing as racial injury her inability to make racially charged comments in public. There are moments of profound intoxication with whiteness, especially when it is saturated with blackness. It also reproduces in its entirety the video for Oneothrix Point Never and Iggy Pop’s song “The Pure and the Damned” (2017) intercut with extreme close ups – unyielding portraits – of some of Jafa’s white friends, and other YouTube clips, including images of the beating of Reginald Denny, during the 1992 Rodney King uprising, and surveillance camera footage of Dylann Roof as he enter and exits Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 15, 2015.
Compared to the way Love is the Message has been received, The White Album, perhaps, attempts to undo itself from within: like an Anatsui work, as discussed by Stephen Best in None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Duke University Press, 2019), it would like to begin and end in trash, but ultimately, whiteness has the ability to turn dispossession into sublimity, just like it frames AJ’s supposed counter-authorial practice as the signature style of what it perceives as a singular genius. AJ, however, does not think of the artifact as the end goal of his practice, but only as a way to engage with the force that white institutions exert upon him, the pressure, as he put it to pretend that that pressure is not there.[1]
It can be regarded as a test of ana-attachment: the exploration, for whiteness, of the same non-proprietary relationship that black people have/might want to develop with blackness.[2]
[1] BAPMFA talk with Stephen Best
[2] Moten, Stolen Life
Jafa’s reaction to winning the Golden Lion at Venice Biennale, 2019
In the two talks below (with Stephen Best at BAMPFA, December 14, 2018 and at The American Academy in Berlin, December 17, 2018) Jafa discusses The White Album as a work in progress.
In conversation: Arthur Jafa and Stephen Best
“Artist Talk with Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions.” The American Academy in Berlin, December 17, 2018.
AJ’s post-2016 career, recap: From Love is the Message to the White Album (Courtesy of Alessandra Raengo)