At the end of last month a coalition of 13 museums responding to the world-wide uprising against racism and police brutality came together to live-stream, for 48 hours, Arthur Jafa’s iconic film: Love is the Message, the Message is Death.
The seven-and-a-half-minute 2016 work is a poignant and harrowing meditation on Black plight, Black resilience, and a damning portrait of police brutality against Black bodies. The footage used is mostly open-sourced; harvested from the internet, the work meticulously intersperses watermarked photographs of civil rights leaders with police footage of the LA Riots and snippets of now-iconic performances alongside smartphone captures of anonymous figures in moments of both elation and suffering. The work’s imagery alternates between familiar and obscure, clear and cryptic, joyous and violent, delightful and despairing. The result is a pathos-filled montage that acts as a testament to Jafa’s ability to reclaim and subvert media’s representational modes towards the Black subject, offering, in turn, a profoundly experiential flurry of insights into complex histories and lived experiences.
Love is the Message, the Message is Death propelled Jafa into almost immediate international recognition. He has since gone on to become an art world darling, exhibiting in the latest iteration of the Venice Biennale and awarded the Golden Lion for best artist. The film is widely lauded as one of the most important video works of our generation, and yet — perhaps even by virtue of its illustriousness — it had never been easy to see. The work’s limited editions were swiftly purchased by connected collectors and accessioned into museums, making access to the work contingent on these institutions’ willingness to display it. The temporary free-circulation of Love is the Message, the Message is Death, at the beginning of the month, was a rare departure from its usual dwellings. The film can usually only be found playing in darkened rooms at select institutions –– the vast majority of which have received ardent recent criticism for their failure to engage BIPOC communities in any meaningful way.
The museum’s decision to stream the work freely was timely: the recent protests were galvanized in large part by the wide-spread circulation of captured footage showing horrific instances of Black death, and Jafa’s piece, both its content and its momentary free access, was particularly fitting. The choice of severing it from the rarified context of fine art museums and propel it into the world at such a grand scale was a widely welcomed move, speaking to the renewed urgency of the film, as well as Jafa’s own comfort with the autonomy of its power. The writer was astonished to find out she was equally detonated by the film’s force seeing it on her phone, in the park on a bright sunny day than watching it on a large screen with surround sound at a glitzy museum in Miami.
The decision to make the work publicly available for a limited period of time might have been timely for other reasons: 48 hours after the livestream ended, Kanye West released “Wash Us in the Blood,” a single from his upcoming album God’s Country, ostensibly coming this fall. The song was released with an accompanying video, available on YouTube, directed by Jafa.
Kanye is a contentious figure in the present moment for many reasons, and the new-found centrality of his figure in the context of Jafa’s work is a fraught one for several reasons. Kanye’s support for the current president, who continues to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as his slew of comments against bodily autonomy of women, and his statements against police abolition, have propelled large parts of the population to see him as a direct hindrance to a proper understanding of the themes Jafa’s films usually attempt to shine light on.
“Wash us In the Blood,” made in Jafa’s signature found-footage assemblage style, can be easily read as an even more pointed exploration of the same subjects gleaned from Love is the Message. The video is clear in its indictment of continued violence against the Black community: Jafa includes footage of Ahmaud Arbery jogging shortly before he is mercilessly shot and killed, and footage of Breonna Taylor laughing and dancing sometime before being murdered by the police while sleeping in her own home. The inclusion of these all-too recognizable people, who have become well-known by virtue of their unjust death, updates the collective history gleaned from Love is the Message: making them decisively of this moment.
However, Kanye’s centrality in this video, made clear by intermittent footage of previous live performances, as well as frequent appearances of his face under a CGI’d mask, ultimately skew the message of this video in insidious ways. Jafa’s decision to re-play these already too-eagerly circulated instances of Black death in the context of a promotional video for Kanye’s music pervert the sense of collective plight into a spectacle, one that ultimately operates in service of bestowing gravitas and importance to a single figure –– one that has undermined the proper wide-spread understanding of these very issues.
Jafa’s production of the video for “Wash Us in the Blood” means his work is now available for anyone to see at any time –– a fantastic subversion of the institutional gatekeepers that have kept his work away from the general public almost immediately after it came into being. Free to circulate in perpetuity, and bolstered by Kanye’s notoriety, “Wash us in The Blood” has been seen almost 10 million times in less than two weeks. Here we have a work by a master of montage that is unchained by the rarefied museum context. There is no denying the newfound impact of footage in Jafa’s hands, and his work, in its explicit messaging, is a powerful propagator of an urgent message.
And yet, ultimately, Arthur Jafa has inserted a project that strives to reveal the violent injustice against subjugated bodies in the context of new work by a public figure that has continuously propagated, in the recent past, messages that have directly hindered this mission. The question that arises: is it an ethical price to pay for wide-spread circulation?
Clara received her undergraduate degree in Art History and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, as well as a Master’s in Art History, at Stanford University.
