Arthur Jafa
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- Also known as
- Arthur Jaffa
- Arthur Jafa Fielder
- Born
- Tupelo, Mississippi, United States
- Digital Catalogue
- Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies
- Biography
Arthur Jafa is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts, and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa's practice is a recurring question: How can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent "power, beauty, and alienation" embedded within forms of Black music in US culture?
Growing up between Tupelo and the Mississippi Delta, Jafa describes being “very much shaped by bouncing [back] and forth between those communities,” where desegregation and continued segregation were in tension. He studied architecture and film at Howard University in DC, before moving to Los Angeles to focus on filmmaking. His first feature as a cinematographer, the art-house icon Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991), won him Best Cinematographer at the Sundance Film Festival, and he went on to shoot films for directors Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, and Ava DuVernay. Beginning around 2000, he also began showing short videos, sculptures, and photo collages in art contexts, where he has received increasing acclaim.
Solo exhibitions of Jafa’s work have been organized by London’s Serpentine Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale. In the summer of 2020, Jafa worked with a global consortium of art museums and institutions to live stream Love is the Message, The Message is Death in alignment with global uprisings for racial justice. Jafa's films screen at the Los Angeles, New York, and Black Star Film festivals, and his artwork is in celebrated collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the LUMA Foundation, in Zurich and Arles.
- Artist Biography
Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa's practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent "power, beauty, and alienation" embedded within forms of Black music in U.S. culture?
Jafa's films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Luma Foundation, the Perez Art Museum Miami, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others.
Jafa has recent and forthcoming exhibitions of his work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Fundacao de Serralves, Porto; the 22nd Biennale of Sydney; and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale "May You Live in Interesting Times."
Works by this artist (1 item)
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Music is a great source of inspiration for artists Ja’Tovia Gary and Arthur Jafa and a major element in their gallery-based work. Musicians are frequent collaborators and occasional subjects, as in Jafa’s music video for Cassandra Wilson and Gary’s documentary on queer rapper Cakes Da Killa. Through conversation and clip sharing, Gary and Jafa explore the interplay of music and moving image across their creative careers.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Hi.
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Thank you all for coming today. It’s really nice to see all you all’s faces and thank Arthur Jafa for making time in his extremely busy schedule to come and sit with a very green, young buck trying to make her way in the world. And shout-out to my mama, who is in the audience. She came from Texas.
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You did not just wave. [laughs]
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) So we’re gonna be really informal. In fact, I don’t even know what we’re doing quite frankly. I pulled a few videos that I think are really cool, and my dear brother Arthur is going to do whatever the Lord leads him to do [laughs] or whoever leads him to do it. And we’ll have questions in the end, and we’ll talk, and we’ll be good to each other, and I’ll stop talking now.
— (Arthur Jafa) Why you stop talking?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) [inaudible]
— (Arthur Jafa) It’s so funny to hear it said like we’ve never had a public conversation because we certainly have had private conversations. [laughs] The first time – I’m gonna tell a crazy story. I can’t even really tell the story, right, because some of the language is probably not appropriate. But in any event, a version of it is the first time I actually remember a distinct impression of Ja’Tovia was when a friend just sort of casually asked me one night hey, you want to go out to this film screening in Brooklyn or something, it’s this film society. I was like what is it. She was like you got some negro filmmakers or something. I’m like –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Negress.
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m just telling you what she said.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) We’ve reclaimed the colonial term.
— (Arthur Jafa) She was just like I wasn’t sure so I was like yeah, sure, of course. And it was at a bar in Brooklyn. And, I don’t know, this was what?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Twenty fifteen.
— (Arthur Jafa) Okay, you remember the date. Okay, 2015, a bar in Brooklyn in the middle of the night. I go in and Ja’Tovia and a good friend of her, Stephanie –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Shout-out to Steph.
— (Arthur Jafa) I cannot use the language they used, but basically they were like – I don’t even know how to use it without your bad language.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Want me to do it?
— (Arthur Jafa) You can do it.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Me and Steph went up to Arthur. We were a few drinks in.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And we said why don’t you mentor any of the women. You mentor all the men. How come you don’t mentor us? And there was some –
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Oh!
— (Arthur Jafa) Now she gave a very clean version.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I did. I cleaned it up ’cause my mama is in the audience, and she’s saved.
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) But I did use some colorful language.
— (Arthur Jafa) She did. She did.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) So why don’t you mentor the girls?
— (Arthur Jafa) I was like –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah. We accosted him. We rolled up to Arthur Jafa, and we were like yo, we’re young filmmakers.
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, the first thing you said, and this is the clean version of it, was Arthur Jafa in the house coming to support, and I’m like okay. But it was super aggressive, like if you could imagine like three times more aggressive.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) So I was like definitely on my heels like what have I gotten into. And then she went into the whole thing about how come I don’t mentor any female filmmakers, to which I responded like who are you talking about I’m mentoring, and she said oh, this person, that person, and I said well, I don’t really mentor people per se; I have relationships with associates, you know, and it’s really about people approaching me. And I said have you ever called me Ja’Tovia.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And I hadn’t.
— (Arthur Jafa) She had not.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Who calls Arthur Jafa. You all be calling Arthur?
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Do you all call Arthur Jafa?
[phone rings] [laughter] [applause]
— (Arthur Jafa) That was Tyrone. [laughter] We playing at. Yeah. But so and then we kinda, we started having a more I would say –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You have to tell them the rest of it ’cause I, okay, because I’m trained well, despite cursing him out in that night, I emailed him the next day, and was like yo, I’m really sorry, like I can’t believe I did that.
— (Arthur Jafa) And what did I say?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You said you’re apologizing. Would Lady Day apologize? Would Charles Mingus apologize? Like he was disgusted that I was now taking it back, you know.
— (Arthur Jafa) Because it was this like old timid version. I know that shit wasn’t real, excuse my language.
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) It definitely wasn’t real.
— (Arthur Jafa) It was like some timid version of her, and I was like what is this. I liked it better when you guys were running me out of there.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Well, I’m glad that you came.
— (Arthur Jafa) Oh, yeah. And so we continued to have a conversation. We also sort of pseudo argue, right?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I’m not arguing with you, Arthur. I’m stating my case. You’re coming out of left field with crazy shit all the time.
— (Arthur Jafa) She always says – what – she says something about I’m getting in her tea or something. I don’t know what she was saying.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I’m a millennial so I be using lingo that he may not be clued in on. Anyway.
— (Arthur Jafa) Anyway, so we sorta continued to have a dialogue. And, of course, I’ve watched, you know, Ja’Tovia’s stuff develop. And, you know, we were just talking to [unintelligible] here who just came up. She’s somewhere in the audience. And I told Ja’Tovia, I was like oh, [unintelligible] was the first black experimental filmmaker that I ever sort of knew of even and had even heard of. And it’s really interesting because I have always felt like this whole question of like what is an experimental black film in the first place, I mean – because I think it’s interesting because I do think if you really are engaged with the whole question of black cinema ’cause I think it is a question, then it almost de facto has to be experimental if it’s engaged with the question. Now, of course, there’s a lot of people who make films who are black or who make films about black people where it’s not experimental, and I don’t necessarily even consider those things black cinema. I get into trouble sometimes.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You ain’t gonna get in no trouble with me so don’t censor now.
— (Arthur Jafa) No. I’m just sayin’, you know, I have to be really careful though ’cause there are certain entities in the world, I’m not trying to run afoul of them.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right. There’s power out there.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah, definitely, you know. But, you know, like I remember somebody was just saying to me recently, and this is like a real pet peeve of mine. They came up to me and they started up talking about, okay, “Black Panther.” And being, you know, under control the way I am, I just sort of didn’t say anything, and the person was all raving, right, and I’m just like. And they’re like what. They’re like you have a problem with the “Black Panther,” and I just shrugged my shoulders ’cause I wasn’t really trying to go there. I just said – and they started, you know, running off all this stuff about the “Black Panther,” and I just was still shrugging, and then finally my man just said but it made a billion dollars, to which my response was so did slavery.
— (Audience) Ooh!
— (Arthur Jafa) So and this is not to say that the “Black Panther” doesn’t have some winning aspects or qualities. I think oftentimes we try to operate in a – I mean I like to say we try to operate in a remedial universe as if the bad guys always have the black hats and the good guys always have the white hats, but in the real world things comix. They always mix. So it’s not like if you see something, it’s gonna be like all bad. If it’s all bad, it probably has no ability to actually engage people. So the “Black Panther” certainly has, it has some qualities that are interesting or admirable I would say. And I say this, I also have the highest respect for Ryan Coogler like as an individual, as a young man, as a black filmmaker who actually navigated the whole Marvel thing and made a film that has some personality left over, right. Of all the Marvel films, it’s the only one that actually you could say you have a sense of a specific director actually made it as opposed to Marvel just kicked it out, right, good or bad. But having said that, despite some of these qualities that it might have, you know, it’s just got some things in it that I just find reprehensible, and I just don’t, I don’t know if you could make a film good enough where it would actually counteract those aspects, not the least of which, one of the things why I designate it as an abomination at the end of the day is because, you know, it has, it’s a film that’s constructed, and I can say a lot of things about it, but it’s a film that’s constructed so that audience is supposed to be cheering for a white CIA agent in Africa, right, who’s in Africa who’s actually shooting out of the sky African operatives who are doing what their dutifully elected king told them to do, which happens to be let’s go arm, oppress people in the world. And we’re supposed to cheer for that? That I can’t, I can’t stomach that.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) When you say it plainly like that, then people are like oh, you know.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) When you say there’s a white CIA agent who comes –
— (Arthur Jafa) Given the history of the CIA in Africa.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah. And people forget that part.
— (Arthur Jafa) And we’re cheering them to shoot down black folks. Like I’m saying, what’s his name, Killmonger, he wasn’t no – it wasn’t no coup d'état.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) None.
— (Arthur Jafa) He came in, he was of royal blood first of all. He followed the rules as they had constructed the rules. He defeated T'Challa mono mono as they say, and he was a new king. He did it the way they say you’re supposed to doing. So and when he says like enough of this, let’s arm black people in the world or oppress people he said so they can defend themselves, I’m like oh, that sounds kinda cool, you know.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Me too. I think so too.
— (Arthur Jafa) You know, so I’m just like I know Malcolm and, you know, all the people we care about, I know they’re just turning in their graves when black people are cheering that shit on, you know. So I think –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I mean I’m not gonna say too much about ”Black Panther,” but I’m in the same –
— (Arthur Jafa) Well kinda never, that’s me.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Well kinda never, that is true. I’m in the same, I feel like we’re in the same boat, right. I’m looking at these things real skeptically because I make films, and I make experimental films and because I’m a black radical, you know. But I feel like as I get older, a part of me does feel like I’m pulling back about my public critique, and I don’t know if I’m happy about that as much, but I’m being honest here with you all because I do see a bunch of shit out there, and I see power and I see money moving and a lot of deals being made and, you know, you’re just like let me not run afoul of, you know, the black billionaire.
— (Arthur Jafa) There’s nothing wrong with making money. I’m not against making money.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah. You make money.
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m trying to make some money.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m doing all right.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) I’ll never be against somebody, black folks in particular making money.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Me neither.
— (Arthur Jafa) But the thing about it is I just feel like we have to be really careful that we don’t mix metaphors in a sense.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) Because, you know, and I’ve said this in public before, but I think a lot of times, you know, there are some people out here who are winning at winning. They aren’t really winning at art.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Absolutely.
— (Arthur Jafa) Or even at cinema or anything like that; they’re just being successful.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) And there’s nothing wrong with that, and I think that should be celebrated. I think there’s something to be said for just celebrating a black person winning period, right.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) But I do think it’s also important to have some sort of critical specificity about what it is that we’re celebrating though. Like I don’t want to celebrate somebody, you know, who got an award, but the film is shit.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Same.
— (Arthur Jafa) Or vice versa. You know what I mean?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Or someone who’s making amazing – who’s making films and making deals and making money, but they’re enacting the same structure –
— (Arthur Jafa) Right.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) – that a white executive with all the money in the world and no connection to the community, enacting the same systemic power structure.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Like if you’re keeping somebody else out of the situation, then to me how are you any different?
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. So I just think it’s like really important. And so that goes back to the central question of the whole black cinema thing ’cause I do feel like, and these are like, you know, if you’ve ever seen me give a talk, very old examples or analogies that I like to use, but I think people can understand them. Like one of the things I like to say like if you take like Leontyne Price or Jessye Norman or something like that, you know, they do opera, and they do it very well. And if you know opera well enough, you probably could even make a case that they’re bringing a black sensibility to opera, but it is opera, meaning it grew, it developed in response to the expressive needs and desires of a particular group or period over a long period of time. In other words, that form evolved to express the world as they understood the world, right. So yeah, black people can enter into that and maybe excel at it, but that’s very different from Aretha Franklin –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) – who not only is bringing her individual genius to what she’s doing, but she’s also operating in a form that evolved in direct response to black people’s desire and the pressure we put on musical forms to express how we understand the world. So that’s the difference to me between the black cinema and black people making cinema.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) ’Cause just ’cause you’re black and you blow a horn doesn’t make it jazz.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) And the same thing, just ’cause you’re pointing a camera and you’re black don’t make it black cinema; it just means, you know, and that could be all right, you know, for a black person. We could celebrate that. Hey, so-and-so got to point a camera or they won some award. But I do think it’s important to have a critical distinction because like and that’s why I always go to the music so often, right. We said we were going to talk about music a little bit. I go to the music so often ’cause I think like black people when it comes to music, we’re aristocrats.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) We really, really do, we feel our music, and we don’t really care. Yeah, we want to win a Grammy, you know, some artists might want to win a Grammy, but nobody’s going to say this artist is better than that artist because they won 10 Grammys.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) No.
— (Arthur Jafa) You know what I mean? Like has George Clinton ever won a Grammy?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I don’t think so.
— (Arthur Jafa) I don’t know. I mean and it doesn’t really even matter, you know. I know Trouble Funk ain’t never won no Grammy or, you know, Rare Essence or I mean for D.C. go-go heads Rare Essence.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, I’m pretty sure they’ve never been nominated. You know what I mean? But I think it’s important to just make that distinction. And so my whole thing has always been not to say X, Y, and Z filmmaker’s better than this other filmmaker because of whether they are black cinema or not because, you know, the world is not built like that. My favorite filmmaker’s actually Andrei Tarkovsky who’s a Russian filmmaker. So it’s not like, like I say, remedial. It’s not remedial to the world. It’s complex, you know. So but I do think, you know, at the end of the day because I do feel like the real thrust for me is like how do we actually take this particular medium and transform it so it’s better suited, like opera would be for, you know, maybe Italians or something like that, it’s better suited to sort of describe the world as we understand it, you know. So a lot of times I’m not even so much interested. Sometimes people will be trying to tell me their stories or narratives or something like that, and I kinda, you know, I glaze a little bit because I just think we have a zillion narratives to tell, but the question is like how do we tell them ’cause as you said, you can put a black person in that thing and they can end up just replicating the same old stuff, you know. So yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You wanna show a clip?
— (Arthur Jafa) Oh, yeah. You want me to show something first?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) He didn’t want to tell me which clips he was gonna show so I’m just –
— (Arthur Jafa) No. I didn’t, I literally didn’t know.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I’m freewheeling up here.
— (Arthur Jafa) Let me see. But I know what I’m gonna show now that you say that. Clips. Let’s see. ’Cause I showed some things before, which are really good, but I kinda saw them. I don’t even know if I want to show them again.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You gotta show that lady singing.
— (Arthur Jafa) Okay. I’ll show that. Maybe that’s the last thing I’ll show. So this is actually kinda cool because it’s got a few things in it at the same time. And are we gonna kill those lights, right?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And I’m gonna stand up here.
[video clip - music]
[applause]
— (Arthur Jafa) Aretha so she totally took that song. I like Adele, but she sort of made that her own. So oh, okay, I’m gonna stop this. Yeah. And it’s funny, you know, as I was looking at it and I was cringing ’cause it was sticking on the Aretha thing, but so many of the things that I’m personally like interested in are things that actually build on what a lot of people will call accidents. Like at the same time I was cringing for the audience in a way, I also was like wow, that was an incredible edit. Ooh, did you see that one? You know, I can still remember being at Howard years ago and standing in the HB I think – WHBC I think it was called. They had a television station. And I was in the control room, and they used to get a satellite feed from I don’t know if it was BET or something. They got a satellite feed. And if you’re in a station, you can see the signal. They have two monitors on this thing called a time-base corrector. And there’s one monitor where you can see what the signal looks like, but sometimes because the images are being downloaded from out of the air, they stick. And what that time-base corrector does, it’s a buffer so like if you have like say a sequence of four frames and two frames don’t come down, what it’ll just do is automatically repeat the frame that is in the next gap in the sequence until it finds the right frame and it’ll delay it. So but the effect of when you look at it is super like staccato stuff. And I still remember just like one of the most amazing things I ever seen in my life, and what it does, at the end it flattens it all out. And then so what you get at home is something that’s been like woven back together, it’s been smoothed out, but if you’re actually standing there and see it – and I think like, you know, too my whole thing so much around black cinema is like I mean basically like accidents and like how do you will those things to a certain kind of expressive like sort of possibilities because, you know, cinema is only a hundred years old, and people, it’s like funny to me, they think like everything’s been done. Even inside of what we would call narrative cinema, which is not, you know, not experimental cinema, but they think everything’s been done, but it’s kinda not because, you know, all people, like Americans, Russians, Japanese people, like if you go to any different place, you can see how people have very different ideas about how you’re just supposed to organize the universe. I was just reading an article the other day about how clean Japan is and the whole thing, and it was just talking about it. But I know that from I was in with my son in Kyoto like about two or three months ago, and it was like ooh, walking around and there are no trash cans anywhere, you know, and people don’t put, you know, they don’t put trash on the ground. So we were literally, I was like oh, this could be a short film like where you had this trash, but you just gotta carry it around, and it would be a certain point at which I would – I made my son carry the trash. You know what I mean?
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. You know, until we found somewhere. And they literally don’t have trash cans around. And so that to me was a really, you know, that conversation, I had this other conversation with him when we were in Tokyo at I think it’s Shibuya Square. It’s that famous like the Times Square of Tokyo that everybody’s seen with the monitors and stuff. And we were walking through there, and “Godzilla” was in the theaters. So that was interesting to me. I was like oh, “Godzilla” is in the theater in Japan, you know, I’m in Japan. And my son was asking me something about “Godzilla,” and I said – he said something, and I said oh, yeah, “Godzilla” is how – I said Japanese people are the only people to ever have an atomic bomb dropped on them, and “Godzilla” was how their attempt on some social level, not that they consciously did it, but obviously it was an attempt to process the trauma of that experience. You know what I mean? Like this thing, this monster that was made out of radioactive fallout, and he comes and he just destroys, devastates everything, you now, and I said black people need their own “Godzilla.” And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because I do think it goes back to the question of the music and why I keep going back to the music of somebody – I was talking to my friend, Greg Tate recently. We were, you know, like everybody had Toni Morrison on our mind a little bit, and she had this very interesting quote where she said something to the effect of like yeah, the music is really great, but I don’t know if the music is gonna be enough taking us into the next century.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) And we’ve had like kind of an ongoing debate about exactly what she meant by that ’cause the music clearly has done the heavy lifting I would say. Most people would kinda agree with that.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah.
— (Arthur Jafa) But the question is like well, if she think the music is not enough, is it because there are some shortcomings in the music or is it because the music has changed in some kind of way? Have we changed in some kind of way? Does she think literature was supposed to pick up the slack? You know, these are very interesting questions to me. And I said to Greg, and I said well, you know, I think the thing about cinema to me that’s so – the potential of it for black people is so powerful – well, there’s a couple of things. One of them is just strictly a power or political philosophy thing, and that’s it. It’s like the world is too complex for anybody to control it anymore. You can’t control things anymore, but what people can control is spin. Like in other words, spring happens, nobody can stop spring from happening, but they can control how we control how we understand what happened.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) The narrative.
— (Arthur Jafa) The narrative, exactly. And that’s what the news and cinema and all these things is about. So cinema’s really important, almost like on some, like Sylvia Wynters talks about level, it’s important because it allows us to define like the [unintelligible], meaning the underlying philosophical notion of a moment. And As Sylvia Wynters has pointed out, I thought incredibly if you don’t control that, it doesn’t matter what you do; you just end up repeating the same thing, you know. So cinema is super important on that level just to control spin in the world that’s too complex for anybody to actually control what’s actually happening. So beyond that though is the whole question of like you know, going back to this whole question of the music again, it’s like how do we make this thing behave or do the way, you know, we want to do it because the unfulfilled potential of cinema I think like David Hickey, this art writer critic I like a lot, he wrote this essay and he made this statement that I think is true, but I’ve never seen anybody just write it as boldfaced as he did. He said the dominant culture form of the 20th century was pop music and, i.e., was black music because pop music is black music in its various manifestations. He said that was the dominant cultural form of the 20th century. Now I think that’s true, but anybody who would want to debate that or disagree with that, about the only other thing you could put up against popular music would be cinema obviously in the 20th century. It’s clearly cinema or popular music. I think it’s popular music. But I think what that means is that if we understood that the dominant culture form of the 20th century was a essentially a black cultural form, right, and cinema is the only other thing that you could even say took up as much social and psychic space, and we could talk about cinema specifically, why I think cinema was great or is great or was great, but so it's almost like there’s this space where these two things never really got to come together, like meaning black aesthetics, which was driving black music, but we never really got to see black aesthetics play itself out in cinema because, one, it’s very expensive, outside of architecture may be the most expensive art form and also because there was so much power at stake in terms of just being able to control the narrative about the world.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Who gets to shape perception.
— (Arthur Jafa) Exactly. Exactly. So the potential of cinema and the music coming together is something that I think is longed for on a certain level but also feared, you know –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Definitely.
— (Arthur Jafa) – because of all the implications of it. So anyway, that’s my little bit of ramble about it.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I appreciate that. I think for me, when you talked about black cinema just now, you mentioned accidents. I think also if you’re thinking about black cinema, you’re also thinking of absence and lack. You know, like for example, when I made “An Ecstatic Experience,” I was fresh out of grad school. I didn’t have no money, you know, and so I’m weaving things together, you know, in my kitchen like, you know, like a black woman, right, taking the curtains and making an outfit.
— (Arthur Jafa) Vibration cooking.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right, exactly. I’m taking whatever is available to me and now trying to craft a mood, you know, or trying to craft some sort of emotional register with scraps, you know. So I also feel like that’s a part of our maneuvering or our techniques around black cinema.
— (Arthur Jafa) Absolutely.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) But music for me has been this kind of structuring, and I’ve said this multiple times, a structuring element. Like if I don’t know where to begin in the edit, I know that I’ve been listening to a couple of songs or a playlist on repeat, and I can pluck one of those songs out and lay it in that Avid or that Premier, and I have an instant mood and I have an instant structure, regardless of whether I’m going to use that song or not.
— (Arthur Jafa) Right.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You know, I might completely scrap it.
— (Arthur Jafa) Right.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) It may be a dialogue scene or I might cut to it and it’s not a kind of montage.
— (Arthur Jafa) Mhm. Mhm.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) But it’s literally giving me the format.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) It’s giving me the framework and structure.
— (Arthur Jafa) But that happens a lot like, you know, one of the things that I’ve sort of, you know, I think it was a hypothesis, but I think it’s kind of you can’t debate it on a certain level. I think like if you look at contemporary art practice or art in the West, clearly, African aesthetics by virtue of African artifacts initially completely transformed Western art practice in the 20th century. It’s just there’s no way to get around it. Like those artifacts come, you know, they come from the colonies and eventually migrate to Europe, and European artists get ahold of those things and it completely changes the way they understand the world. I mean, you know, the beginning of modernism, what’s called modernism in Western art is like Picasso’s “Demoiselles” and Cubism. And it’s clearly, if you see “Demoiselles,” it just literally has African women in it.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) And in fact, even, you know, it’s really funny, I didn’t figure this out ’til about – well, I say about, but it’s maybe like almost 20 years ago, but, you know, way, way back I would have said yeah, you can’t deny it, but when I first saw “Demoiselles,” people introduced it to me as Picasso saw African artifacts and he, you know, in his genius, which I do think Picasso was a bad boy, he came to a complex understanding of those things and then he made Cubism out of it.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) But in fact, like the Picasso Museum came out with this book probably about 10 years ago called “Picasso and the Dark Mirror,” and what it is – and I can only think they came out with this book because they’re scraping the barrel a little bit in terms of like things to come out with by Picasso.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) I mean I’m just saying ’cause [unintelligible] has everything he’s ever done, you know, but they’re like going through his private stuff now to try to figure out.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) And this was like photos from Picasso’s private collection. And in that, you see these photographs taken by this guy named Ferrier, who was a French photographer who took pictures in Africa, right, in the French colonies, and it is “Demoiselles.”
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) Like literally you see it. You know how those women’s arms are like this? You see the picture of the sisters with their arms like this.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah.
— (Arthur Jafa) A lot of times they were holding, you know.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Baskets.
— (Arthur Jafa) Baskets and things on their heads. So it’s not just that he saw and got it like formally; he literally structured that painting based on these actual pictures of black people, black women in particular bodies, right. So the whole question of like black people in contemporary Western practice is like super, super complicated because you get this first instance where you get those African artifacts, and they completely change the game. And I’ve said this part a zillion times, but, you know, you got Picasso and you’ve got Matisse and these guys, and they’re seeing these beautiful artifacts, and it starts to inform how they structure space and all this kind of stuff. I mean they saw them and they realized that they were looking at artifacts that understood the world in a very non-Cartesian kind of post, Einstein, you know, relative moment. In other words, a lot of times like an African sculpture is a figure looked at from multiple vantages in space. And that’s like a radical break with the Western vanishing port single ego, I am, all that stuff is bound up, these visual systems are bound up together. So when they see these artifacts, it just blows open this whole system that they had. And so hence they do Cubism, which is basically like seeing objects from multiple vantages simultaneously. But the thing they don’t fully understand or don’t get because they are still looking at it from a Western frame, even though it’s an alien artifact, is that what they’re calling multiple fixed vantages because they understand things as fixed vantages, but it’s just a single fixed vantage in the Western art system. It’s not a fixed vantage; it’s a dynamic vantage. So like Robert Farris Thompson pointed out that a lot of those African artifacts that ended up on pedestals in the West, you know, object subject relations and stuff, subjects have agency, objects don’t and they just sit there and they get, you know, moved around. You move around as a person with agency and see that thing from different perspectives. But in a traditional context, those artifacts moved around the viewer as much as the viewer moved around the artifact ’cause oftentimes those things would be on people’s heads being danced.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah. They were functional.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. They had agency.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) And I was saying this to somebody once, and they said oh, A.J., they don’t really have an agency; they’re still being driven by subjects, meaning there are actually subjects dancing the objects. But I said no, that’s how you depend on the world, how you understand the world ’cause in vodun –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Then that object –
— (Arthur Jafa) Is driving the person.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Absolutely. Absolutely.
— (Arthur Jafa) Is riding the person like a horse, right.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Absolutely. Yeah.
— (Arthur Jafa) So it’s a radically reorientation of the relationship between foreground, background, object, subject, slave, master, all these kinds of things and so –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) So power looking relations, the whole thing.
— (Arthur Jafa) Exactly, all of that. So you see that in that work. And then I always like to also point out too this is why Duchamp is the baddest of any of them cats because he made his paintings new descending that are that same thing, looking at an object from multiple points in time and space. You see the body at the top of the stairs and at the bottom of the stairs simultaneously. But Duchamp was just smarter than anybody else around him. I believe that. And he piqued something that nobody else piqued, which is that besides the fact that these things were incredibly dense configurations of black or African philosophy, right, and so they had different ideas about the world and how the world was structured, a lot of the power o these things had to do with the fact that they were radically alienated, meaning they were radically in opposition to the context in which they found theirself, and that produced a certain kind of energy.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Absolutely.
— (Arthur Jafa) And Duchamp was interested in that, and I really think that’s how he came up with the “Urinal” because he was trying to figure out how to replicate the energy, the power of that tension that was happening. And, you know, I still think Duchamp – I know I’ve debated this with people. He may not be the best artist of the 20th century ’cause the best is so relative but –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) He’s the smartest.
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, I think his work opened up some questions that everybody’s still trying to answer like both you and I in terms of our use of quote unquote “found footage,” like what’s on the other side of a readymade.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Right. Right.
— (Arthur Jafa) You know, so and that was just with African artifacts. That’s not to speak of when you got negroes actually on site making shit, which is what happened with the music again. It totally transformed everything, even when you were talking about listening to music to structure your thing. It’s like Lee Krasner has described it. Like when Jackson Pollock was making paintings, he would listen to a jazz record like 200 times in a row. He would just put it on a loop and listen to the same record while he was painting. Now if you were painting a tree or an apple or a person, maybe what you’re listening to doesn’t matter as much, but if you’re not painting anything, there’s no subject and you’re painting except the process of putting down a painting, I think the music you listen to really does matter.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And for me and for I think a lot of filmmakers, it’s really about a kind of emotional register, which I’ve mentioned earlier. And what I feel like, and this is something that we might have in common, this background of this kind of spiritual background, this church background – I’m trying to segue into the gospel real quick because I feel like that’s something that I’m thinking through a lot. I’m not religious, you know, so to speak. I’m more so of this kind of primordial African tradition, spiritual tradition now, but I was steeped in this Pentecostal kind of Church of God of Christ tradition.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And it is kind of, even though I’m not in that, it still kind of lurks and lingers all over me.
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, it’s the gold standard for us.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Correct. Absolutely. Like it don’t –
— (Arthur Jafa) It ain’t jazz. It ain’t pop music, as much as I think it changed pop, the faces and all that.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Absolutely.
— (Arthur Jafa) It’s not. The gold standard of emotional authenticity is still in the church.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Is the church. Yeah. So we’ve got some gospel clips that I want to bring in.
— (Arthur Jafa) Okay.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Which one do you want to see?
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, you tell me. We’ll play one of yours.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Let’s go – the one that says “I am God.” It’s a shorter one.
— (Arthur Jafa) Okay.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) ’Cause I know I think we only have a few more minutes.
— (Arthur Jafa) Oh, shit. We got 15 minutes.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Arthur be talking.
— (Arthur Jafa) I can barely inhale in 15 minutes. It’s just like –
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) Oh, sorry, wrong hit.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) The one that says –
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. Sorry. I hit the Smithsonian clips.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay.
— (Arthur Jafa) Okay. Which one did you want?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) The first one. So this was one that I listened to a lot. My mama put it on all the time when I was a kid, and I just think the affirmation of “I am God” is really amazing. And plus she’s giving you rock and roll, like hardcore prototype, proto rock and roll it feels like.
[video clip – music]
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) That’s like a bop.
[music]
— (Arthur Jafa) Segue.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) It’s a real bob, like it still bangs. So when I was little – and I grew up in the nineties. I was born in ’84. But I grew up in the nineties, and you all remember nineties R&B. So my mother is an ordained minister. My father’s side is all ministers, my grandfather, my father, great-grandfather, super religious. So there was an embargo on secular music in my home. I could not listen to, you know, Jodeci. I mean crazy, right. We had to listen to all gospel. So I’m like a gospel connoisseur, you know, and so I would find the ones that, you know, had a little, you know, a little bop, you know.
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And then I would, of course, sneak Tupac and, you know, Quad City DJ’s and all the other nineties shit that people were listening to. But we had to stay, you know, in the blood of the lamb constantly, you know. And I’m grateful for it now, but back then I was like what is wrong with this lady, you know, I just want to hear En Vogue, I want to hear Whitney Houston. But yeah, I love gospel.
— (Arthur Jafa) We started to have a little bit of a conversation about Whitney Houston and we kinda, she was like –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I don’t want to argue with you in front of these good people.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. She’s like don’t, don’t, you can’t be, you can’t be –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Should we have the Whitney convo? ’Cause I have a Whitney clip now. We can play it now, and we can have the convo since you want to talk about Whitney.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) I mean you know I can stomp Whitney with my clip. You know my clip will stomp Whitney.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) What clip you got?
— (Arthur Jafa) You know the one, Le’Andria.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that’ll stomp Whitney. So we can talk about Whitney, but I think you should play your clip.
— (Arthur Jafa) Okay. Look –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) If you want.
— (Arthur Jafa) Whitney, of course, is magnificent, but to me, what Whitney represents more than anything, and it’s probably not fair to reduce an actual person, but, you know, to an idea, but, you know, the person was over there, but when we trying to understand the world and it’s over here, I think it’s different. You know, I try to be very clinical on a certain level about it. And for me, what Whitney mostly represents at the end of the day is a certain de-evolution of black music. Okay.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I hear that.
— (Arthur Jafa) And I don’t mean like she’s not virtuoso and all that kind of stuff.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) She’s a virtuoso.
— (Arthur Jafa) But we know virtuosity don’t make you the best.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) That’s true.
— (Arthur Jafa) It just doesn’t.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And I’m not saying she’s the best. You know, I come from the church so I see the best all the time.
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m just saying like for me like despite her obvious gifts and talent, at the end of the day I think when we look back at it a hundred years from now, what we’re going to think Whitney represents is a kind of disconnection of the formal dimensions of gospel black music from real authentic feeling.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Do you feel like this is because of her kind of platformed as a pop star because of what she was going through?
— (Arthur Jafa) No, because like there’s a ton of pop stars who do incredible stuff inside of the pop arena, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, James Brown, you can go on and on. Like, you know, there’s a lot of people who do something, but like for me, like she opens the doors for Christine Aguilera and all these people who do all this bla-bla-bla-bla-blip. They do all these power techniques.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) They take the form minus the emotion.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. They do all these power techniques, and it doesn’t mean anything.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And you feel like that’s her fault?
— (Arthur Jafa) No, I don’t think it’s her fault; I think she’s emblematic of it.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay.
— (Arthur Jafa) Because I do think she was born into a tradition where she should have been something else, but she actually took a bad – it’s like Darth Vader or something, you know.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) The force, she had the force, but she went to the dark side.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Now I really want to play my clip. Listen, to me, when you say she went to the dark side, and I don’t want to remove her –
— (Arthur Jafa) Come on, she totally went to the dark side.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Let me finish. I don’t want to remove her agency ’cause she was a fully formed human being, but she has Svengalis around her. You think Whitney Houston is making and plotting her entire career? It’s Clive Davis. [inaudible]
— (Arthur Jafa) No. No, you can’t demonize Clive Davis.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Oh, but we can demonize Whitney Houston?
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m not demonizing her. I’m not demonizing her.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I told you I don’t want to argue with Arthur on this stage.
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m saying what she’s emblematic of. I’m not demonizing her. But Clive Davis is not responsible for Whitney Houston’s choices.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay. Can we table this for when we argue on the phone? ’Cause look.
— (Arthur Jafa) Oh, five minutes.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m just saying.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Let’s see another clip. Come on. Let’s let the Holy Ghost feel this place. Right, mama? [laughs]
— (Arthur Jafa) Hang on.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I think we should show Whitney though since you want to drag her. I feel like we need to – we need to kind of –
— (Arthur Jafa) We can show Whitney. I’m just saying. Yeah. They’ve seen Whitney.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Back to the discussion and the phrasing, the way that – I feel like in black music, and one thing that I’m taking from black music is this notion of phrasing, the way that the language is being delivered, and this is what you see in gospel, this is what you see in jazz. You know, like there’s all of these riffs, all of these kind of like electric moves that are being done with the language.
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, see, to me at the end of the day, that’s a form of argument. That’s like –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) That’s what I’m talking about, form.
— (Arthur Jafa) But I’m just saying by that same token we could say Christina Aguilera is one of the greatest R&B –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Form and emotion. Like you said, they’re devoid of that. Form and emotion.
— (Arthur Jafa) I think both of them are devoid.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I don’t think Whitney Houston is devoid of emotion when she was singing.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. Anyway, I can [inaudible].
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Let’s watch the gospel clip. [laughs]
— (Arthur Jafa) I mean not to equate a person’s artistic realizations with their circumstances because we know our circumstances are complicated, but I think man, it’s so deep we could just have a conversation about the whole trajectory of Whitney Houston being Cissy Houston’s daughter, being Dionne Warwick’s –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Cousin.
— (Arthur Jafa) Niece, cousin kinda, right. I mean I’m about to say stuff I don’t even want to say it – I don’t even want to say it in public ’cause I don’t want to get in trouble.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Let’s table it for the phone argument.
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And let’s just watch the gospel thing. Yeah, ’cause this is gonna be really beautiful.
[video clip]
— (Arthur Jafa) I don’t want to start this.
[video clip]
[applause]
— (Arthur Jafa) Now for real, come on.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) We’re not comparing the two.
— (Arthur Jafa) Whitney’s bad, but she never –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah, this is something else. Yeah.
— (Arthur Jafa) She never touched that.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) No. This is something else. But Whitney is from the tradition though. Let’s not forget that.
— (Arthur Jafa) I didn’t say she wasn’t from tradition. I never said that.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) She’s from tradition.
— (Arthur Jafa) She actually is in the tradition. That’s why it’s such a fall.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay. We said we was gonna table that for the conversation on the phone, brother. Okay. I think there might be questions, right?
— (Arthur Jafa) Any questions?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Although I want to show my trailer now.
— (Saisha Grayson) As I said, they can go on for a very long time, but I want to give you guys a chance to ask a few questions as well. So [inaudible].
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You have to walk to the mic I think. She’s good.
— (Female speaker) I’m just curious. You’ve kind of showed us this, but I’d really like to know when you’re inspired or when you’re working, what music and what artist do you listen to?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I mean a lot of, a lot of jazz. I like a lot of Alice Coltrane. I think she’s brilliant. I listen to Erykah Badu a lot. She’s from Dallas like myself. I listen to a lot of contemporary music, but I listen to a lot of the older stuff. Nina Simone is like my favorite artist of all time. If we’re talking about a consummate genius, to me, she is exemplar. She’s above everybody else. That’s just in my opinion. I think Stevie Wonder is phenomenal. I’m listening to a lot of old soul, a lot of R&B. I just got into some crazy weird like free jazz. Ornette Coleman is from D-FW Metroplex, which is where I’m from in Texas. So I’ve really been thinking about a lot of his work too. It’s so strange and weird. Anything that’s like a mood, a vibe, a tone.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah, me, I just, I don’t know. You know, there are certain things I always listen to, but I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s a specific thing. Like increasingly I look at shit from YouTube. I mean I’m really taking most of my inspiration from that. I mean but this is after 30-some years of listening to everything that Miles Davis or John Coltrane or Billie Holiday ever recorded, you know. But like in terms of just a space of what I’m really inspired by, like I honestly think my man go Mary, go Mary, like honestly, who in Hollywood has done a moment more powerful than that? I’m sorry.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m just like, I’m gonna do the high low thing, but I’m just saying empirically speaking, can you think of a single moment in cinema in the last 10 years that could stand next to that? That would wipe the screen with anything you put next to it. And I could show you a hundred more things off of YouTube that would do the same thing. So let’s just keep it, you know, for real, like for real, for real.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) YouTube is gold.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah, ’cause it’s black people completely unmediated.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Mhm.
— (Arthur Jafa) That’s what’s great about it. That’s why so much of it’s shit too ’cause it’s unmediated, but inside of that space, black people get to do exactly what they want to do. I mean yeah, I could show you there’s this cat named Miscellaneous who’s really like phenomenal who really is, he is an artist like for real in video, and it’s really incredible. Again, it would just blow anything anybody’s doing away, you know.
— (Female speaker) Thank you.
— (Female speaker) Thank you. For me, a great artist stabs me in my heart or my mind. And today I feel like both of your work has done that simultaneously. So it’s really an honor to have you here in D.C., and you’ve just increased the IQ in a super-smart town all that much more. I’m really grateful. And I guess I have a question about process. And there was something also that you mentioned earlier. This is gonna be – it’s kinda like three points. You said something about –
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, let’s just keep it to one.
— (Female speaker) I am.
— (Arthur Jafa) Keep it to one point.
— (Female speaker) But I’m just going to put something out there. You mentioned something about we’re not trying to get a file and then in playing all of your clips, what really came to me and comes to me when I see your work is that there’s a speaking of truth that has its own agency in an artist’s work, and I just wonder in your process of creating, when the truth is unleashed, how can you possibly even ultimately control that? Like I know that there are more eyes on you every year you work. Am I asking the question clearly? Maybe not.
— (Arthur Jafa) Clear enough.
— (Female speaker) I mean I guess I’m asking about the balance of speaking your truth as you do so clearly and continuing to do that fearlessly no matter what I guess I’m asking. Can you talk about your process a little bit with regard to fearlessness?
— (Arthur Jafa) Look, I try not to over mythologize what I do. I just go for the dope shit.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) Like honestly.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Period.
— (Arthur Jafa) I don’t be thinking about truth or none of that stuff or, you know, even politics. All that comes in afterwards. A lot of the best things that I’ve done I didn’t even completely understand them ’til afterwards. I’ve been showing like even “Love is a Message,” I would be showing things and see things that I mean I swear I did not see that. And once you see it, it seems so almost like I know if I hadn’t seen it, if I wouldn’t have even kept it in there ’cause it seems too premeditated almost, and I didn’t even see it and somebody well what about soandso, and I was just like yeah, you know. I try to just take credit, you know, for everything.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) But like honestly, that really is, you know, I’ve been a little funny, but I’m being really honest about that. My thing is to be – like somebody asked me this recently, and I sort of answered it like this, and I like the way the answer came out. They were asking me about how was I understanding myself and people seeing me and all this kind of stuff, and I was like yeah, I’m doing pretty good now. You know what I mean? I’m happy, you know. People ask me if I’m happy all the time, and I’m like well, I don’t know if there’s a yes/no answer to that question. It’s an existential question. But yeah, I’m doing all right now. But the reason I feel very confident about where I’m at now and what I’m doing and what I’m committed to ’cause I know it’s not ultimately about me. And I’m not trying to be egoless or anything like that. I have an ego just like anybody else, but there’s a point at which you realize that you’re part of something that’s larger than you. That’s what I was trying to map out earlier when I was saying the cinema coming together with the music, which is really just black aesthetics. It’s bigger than you. Like John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles, all of them bad cats, but you cannot discuss any of them out of the context of who they were surrounded by. And that clearly is something that’s happening with regards to black people specifically entering into the art world, which is a context which in 1999 when I had my first show and was in a Biennale, I dropped out of the art world, essentially walked away from it two years later ’cause I got tired of going to parties and I was the only black person there. It’s radically different now. It ran me away. It really literally ran me away from the art thing ’cause I was like I’d rather be with the failed black filmmakers than the successful black artists because there was more sense of community. So I try to understand myself as a thing before I’m a person or an artist, anything. I’m an emanation of something that’s happening. All these forces, black aesthetics, African people coming to these shows, all these kind of things, I’m a drop in a tsunami. It’s coming. It’s about to change everything for real. I truly believe that.
– (Female speaker) Thank you very much.
[applause]
— (Female speaker) So that ties perfectly into what I wanted to ask. I have a parent that has been incarcerated for 16 years that was recently released, and I felt emotion and compelled to share my story in order to inspire others that are also similar to myself. That’s something I’ve always kept hidden through the majority of my life, and I was just wondering what advice you would give for that initial of removing yourself and your ego from your work in order to reach that higher purpose ’cause there’s that initial standoff that can kind of make you hesitate from jumping into a work that you want to create.
— (Arthur Jafa) Look, I wasn’t suggesting you remove your ego from it. I think when we say ego, I don’t necessarily think it’s the classic Freudian whatever construction or ego. I think black people gotta have an ego just to survive the shit.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) A big one. Exactly.
— (Arthur Jafa) Do not give up your ego. You gotta have your ego to survive this, right? Like I’ll give you a perfect example. Oh, ego, everybody got ego. Okay, you wouldn’t find more raging egos in any art form than you would in hip-hop, right? Most people would agree like, you know, just the Wu-Tang Clan.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Yeah.
— (Arthur Jafa) They’re not egos? They’re all egos.
— (Female speaker) Exactly.
— (Arthur Jafa) They’re super egos, right. But they’re in a band together. That completely goes against the Western logic we’ve been taught, like egos don’t work together. But if you look at the whole history of black people creating things, there’s no split between having the biggest ego in the world and working with other big egos. It’s like X-Men or Super Friends or some shit. You need your ego. Keep your ego.
— (Female speaker) Can I say one more thing just in addition to that?
— (Arthur Jafa) Sure.
— (Female speaker) Just in terms of if you feel almost shy because the society was created to almost make it feel shameful to be able to share a story about incarceration, to remove the ego of being afraid of how that’s going to be receptive.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Think of the people that you’re talking to.
— (Female speaker) Exactly.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Are the people who need to hear what you have to say, right. Get real clear about who your audience is and what you’re trying to say to them. That clarity for me kind of helps remove any of these kind of questions or doubts.
— (Female speaker) Exactly.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Usually I have a feeling that’s bubbling up inside of me, whether it be rage or whether it be whimsy, and I know I want to communicate that, I want to reflect that to a very, very specific group of people. I want them to feel that as well.
— (Female speaker) Thank you.
— (Arthur Jafa) Now just to add to what Ja’Tovia said, it’s feeling, it’s your feeling. You gotta respect your feelings around these things and do – even with black people, you can’t even wait for black people. You have to do what you feel in your heart you should be doing, and that’s what you do. You commit to your vision of the world and hopefully black people get with it or somebody gets with it, but it doesn’t matter. You have to do what you think is right.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Period. Thank you.
[applause]
— (David McDuffy) Hey, what’s up, you all? I just want to say thank you for having this conversation today and your contributions to the culture. My name’s David McDuffy. And Arthur Jafa, you’re mentioned the fact that sometimes you don’t premediate what it is that you’re doing, and I know you’ve spoken before that one of those moments was the fact that Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam” on “Love is a Message” was something that gotta happen in terms of the way the rhythm or the flow, and I find it interesting that as you all are having this conversation about spirituality today, he just did his Sunday Service at Howard University.
— (Arthur Jafa) He did it at Howard today?
— (David McDuffy) Yeah.
— (Arthur Jafa) Damn.
— (David McDuffy) Yeah.
[laughter]
— (David McDuffy) Yeah. So could you, one, if you both could kind of give your views on Kanye’s Sunday Service. And if you can tie in also maybe like what you think or if there’s an artist that you feel black cinema could be the soundtrack for, who do you think that black artist would be?
— (Arthur Jafa) Hold up. I want to completely understand. If there’s an artist –
— (David McDuffy) So you liken cinema with black music. Do you think that there’s a musician, it could be living or dead, preferably living, that has a music or mood or tone that resonates at the level of cinema that you think it should match?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) It’s hard to choose one.
— (Arthur Jafa) That’s a thousand people, man.
— (David McDuffy) Okay.
— (Arthur Jafa) I mean I’m not trying to be funny, but it’s just like this whole dynamic I’m talking about of black people and this whole tension with cinema. Like if you think a silent film, what’s the soundtrack for silent film? Ragtime. That’s black people’s music. I think that completely is not an accident. And like if you look at “Shaft” or “Super Fly” like that, you can’t tell me what Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes did. That was a breakthrough in terms of soundtracks and movies. Like even is you listen to that stuff now, they got that right. The cinema was dragging behind that music. That music was dragging those films forward into –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Even in the nineties.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) If you’re talking about “Waiting to Exhale,” when you talking about “Set it Off.”
— (Arthur Jafa) Is anybody talking about “Waiting to Exhale?”
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I’m talking about the music, the soundtrack dragging the movie. That soundtrack, the waiting –
— (Arthur Jafa) It didn’t even drag that movie. It just left it behind.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) The “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack is so, it’s a beautiful soundtrack.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. But I’m just saying that’s not like – how many people are looking at “Super Fly” now –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And thinking about the music?
— (Arthur Jafa) But how many people are listening to the “Super Fly” album now?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Okay. I’m listening to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack.
— (Arthur Jafa) That’s what I’m saying. But that’s what I’m saying. So I mean just back to his question, it’s like there’s a zillion things. Like classical music, for example, most people do not have classical music as part of their actual social life day to day.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) No.
— (Arthur Jafa) Most people understand classical music ’cause it’s been used in cinema. It’s a platform. It means that music in that context does not have to function like – pop music, the environment of pop music is like a battle royale. It’s like, you know, a bunch of people in there fighting, survival of the fittest. Classical music is like a goldfish in a bowl, right, and there’s something beautiful about a goldfish, you know, flicking around in a bowl, but it’s not the ocean. Pop music is like the ocean, do or die. But there’s something to be said about having a fish in a bowl. And what cinema will provide is the context where black music doesn’t always have to do triple summersaults just to get heard.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) It could just be the fish.
— (Arthur Java) It could just be the fish.
— (Saisha Grayson) Okay. Hi. So we’re going to have –
— (Arthur Java) Oh, Sunday Service. Just ’cause on the religious thing he’s right.
— (Saisha Grayson) Okay.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Sunday Service is –
— (Saisha Grayson) And then we’re going to have just two more questions and we’re going to try to answer them in five minutes ’cause we’ve run fully 15 minutes over.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) We’re 15 minutes over.
— (Arthur Jafa) Ooh, 15 whole minutes.
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) You’re a mess. Did you see Sunday Service?
— (Arthur Jafa) It’s amazing. Sunday Service is amazing. Kanye is, as often is the case, I don’t want to say he’s leading so much, but where he goes is where a lot of us are going I think.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And I have some problems with Kanye Sunday Service, right.
— (Arthur Jafa) You have a problem with Sunday Service or him?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I have some problems with him and Sunday Service, quiet as it’s kept, because I feel like he’s using Sunday Service as this kind of – it feels like this kind of platform where he’s aggregating a bunch of people around emotion to what end?
— (Arthur Jafa) That’s same in any church.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) My question is to what end?
[applause]
— (Arthur Jafa) You could say that about any church.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Of course, and I do. I critique the church openly, the homophobia, the capitalism, the patriarchy.
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, that’s what I’m trying to say. That critique –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) So let me –
— (Arthur Jafa) That critique –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Ooh.
— (Arthur Jafa) – could hold for any church. I’m just sorry. You can’t –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And it can hold for any church, and I do, I’ve given you the critique for the church so I’m giving you the critique for Kanye and Sunday Service. It’s beautiful.
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) The young people are here. It’s beautiful and it sounds great.
— (Arthur Jafa) But young people will clap about anything.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) That’s not true. That’s not true.
— (Arthur Jafa) Yeah. You can find a young person who will clap almost about anything.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) They clap for you. They love you.
— (Arthur Jafa) That’s what I’m saying. They’ll clap about anything.
[laughter]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) My point is I can’t look at Sunday Service, I can’t look at any artist removed from their context, removed from what they support. I’m anti-fascist. I’m anti white supremacy, and I feel like you can’t cloak gospel over fascism, right. You can’t use Sunday Service as this opportunity to aggregate all of these wonderful beautiful people with these amazing voices and still be aligning yourself with violence, with like such a raw form of like open violence.
— (Arthur Jafa) When did he do that? I just want to know.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) When did he do that? [laughs]
[applause]
— (Arthur Jafa) No. I’m just trying to say –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) When did Kanye West align himself with fascism?
— (Arthur Jafa) You mean like when he wore the Trump hat?
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) That one time, is that what you’re insinuating?
— (Arthur Jafa) No. No, no, no, no, I’m not insinuating that. I’m saying –
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I think Kanye West is a genius. To me, he’s the Miles Davis of hip-hop. He’s shaping and shifting and he’s leading like you said. However, I have some problems. That’s all. You can tell him to call me. I know you’re a friend.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) Or as somebody put it, he’s my boy. And as I say, he ain’t my boy. I’m think I’m not into discarding black people.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I didn’t say he’s cancelled.
— (Arthur Jafa) Hold up. I’m just saying let me finish.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) I didn’t cancel nobody. I’m not here with [unintelligible].
— (Arthur Jafa) I’m not one to discard black people ’cause they said some crazy shit because a bunch of us say crazy shit.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) All the time.
— (Arthur Jafa) And do crazy shit.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) All the time.
— (Arthur Jafa) Even in the church.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) All the time.
— (Arthur Jafa) So I don’t understand why he’s getting singled out.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Because he asked the question.
[laughter]
— (Arthur Jafa) He asked about Sunday Service.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) And I told you about Sunday Service and the person who leads Sunday Service. Are there other questions, brother in the hat?
[applause]
— (Male speaker) Speaking to that in a less political way, I was fortunate enough to be at Sunday Service this morning and then coming here and hearing [unintelligible] and being steeped in the Pentecostal tradition myself, as a film MFA student at Howard, I’ve had conversation with Dr. Mazori concerning your theory on cinematography as it is, I guess you’ve likened it to jazz, and speaking to Miles Davis, I think this ties in. If you can share with that or even in this case cinematography possibly being akin to gospel and the feeling that it evokes.
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, they could be.
— (Male speaker) Could be. [laughs]
— (Arthur Jafa) Well, mostly it’s not obviously. Very clearly it’s not. A hundred and 20 second version. When I studied at Howard University, my mentor was Haile Gerima. They proposed the idea to us, which he had brought with him from UCLA, that there could be a black cinema, meaning a cinema that was authentically an expression of how black people saw the world, but it had to be transformed. But when they first gave it to me, the way they talked about it was in I would say somewhat reductively political and aesthetic terms. You know, politics and aesthetics, that’s still a big feel, but if you asked them what is black cinema after they said it had black people in it or it was political or stuff, they couldn’t answer beyond a certain point. In other words, I didn’t think polemics, a polemic answer it’s just what black people do was enough. And so one of the things I became very preoccupied with was technically and formally how is it different. Like we actually say it’s different not ’cause we feel it a certain way, but how is it actually different? Black music is clearly different from other music. You can talk about how it’s different. It’s sort of a propensity towards rhythm. It’s [unintelligible]. There’s a lot of things you can talk about. So it seemed to me very quickly that we had to figure out how to take the medium technically speaking and transform it so that it was better suited to express how we see the world. I’ll give you one quick example. Like I’m very obsessed with this idea of motion and cinema. Motion is the very basis of cinema. But if you look at motion and cinema as it exists now, it is very much a manifestation of what I would say a Western view of the world. In other words, cinema went down a particular path of regulation. It got regulated. Like if you look at silent film, they use what I call, inadvertently, but they use what I call irregular exposure intervals. All that means is that basically when you crank a camera by hand, the space between the exposures is uneven. It’s not the same. When motorized cameras came in, a lot of people think that motorized cameras displaced hand-crank cameras immediately, almost like moving from a horse-drawn buggy, then you got a car, who wants to have a buggy? No, it wasn’t like that. It took 20 years for motorized cameras to displace handcrank cameras produce motion that did something very different from motorized cameras, right. The only reason motorized cameras displaced hand-crank cameras is because when sound came and the engineer stepped in and overruled the artist and said in order to achieve perfect sync, right, the camera and the recorder has to be driven metronomically, meaning the space between each bit had to be the same, right. That’s an engineering decision. It had nothing to do with art, right. So what happened is now everything that we see, whether you shoot at 24 frames per second or 48 frames per second, it doesn’t mean it’s all metronomic. The gap between each exposure is always the same. So it’s very important to me for us to re-un-engineer that. You know what I mean? To reverse engineer that and go back to irregular exposure intervals because there’s a certain possibility there to synchronize that with things like black vocal intonation, right. You can make motion that actually will be transfixing. Like when you hear Aretha Franklin or James Brown, that’s like if you sample them, you hear [makes noise] and you know it’s James Brown. It’s not what he’s singing. There’s actually something about his tonal signature that registers for black people. We have to start there. We have to make a two-second motion that you know is a black motion and then build from there.
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Arthur Jafa is a genius of the American South. I’m grateful to have him here with me, and I’m grateful to have you all.
— (Arthur Jafa) Thank you, Ja’Tovia.
[applause]
— (Ja’Tovia Gary) Thank you all.
— (Arthur Jafa) Thanks for coming out.
[applause]
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