Christina Sharpe Daughters of the Dust American Art Museum

EVERYTHING ARTHUR JAFA produces is aimed at the joint of a blackness cinema that, every bit is his mantra, "replicates the power, beauty, and alienation of black music." ^one The artist, writer, and filmmaker asks: what could black philosophy look similar if given the space to manifest visually? What is the black thing? How does it experience? It matters little to Jafa what material form the inquiry takes, whether essays, films, or his piece of work as a producer and cinematographer on other directors' projects. Jafa, in all that he does, wants us to see and feel black as a way of knowing and existence in the world.

Jafa attributes his conceptually driven arroyo, in which "ideas precede the thing," ² to his training in architecture at Howard University in the late 1970s. Architecture, he says, was his kickoff dearest, because it'southward about putting ideas into practice. These origins shed light on the piece of work he has produced over the last ii decades. When you lot sentinel his films, read his writing, and peruse his notebooks, you get more than a glimpse into the mind of an artist. You see office of the blueprint for a primary project.

Jafa is non concerned with the business firm and then much every bit its foundation: how the walls are built, not what adorns them. A truly black picture palace, for Jafa, is not just one populated with black people and black narratives fabricated past black filmmakers, but one that is structurally and theoretically black. His approach is a departure from the attitudes that accept dominated black cinematic theory and practice for most of its history, attitudes that tend to prioritize the pedagogical power of the medium. ^three At that place are skilful reasons for this preoccupation. Representation of black life in the media has long operated equally a mechanism by which white America maintains social control, by creating and disseminating anti-black stereotypes and engineering telling absences. In the optics of many throughout the twentieth century, it fell to black filmmakers to offering correctives––positive images that could annul the racist ones already in circulation.

Jafa saw this conversation up close at Howard, when he beginning drifted from architecture toward film. The black filmmakers who were teaching at Howard at the fourth dimension—Haile Gerima, Alonzo Crawford, and Abiyi Ford—had moved beyond considerations of representation, focusing instead on working outside the Hollywood system to realize their production goals and foster an economically independent black cinematic circuit. Jafa sympathized with their position, simply, as he writes in "Black Visual Intonation," his most programmatic text on cinema, he "thought we had to ask more sophisticated questions nearly what Black cinema was and, in fact, could be." Why, Jafa wondered, did the work of Gerima, Crawford, and Ford "use what is essentially strictly classical Hollywood spatial continuity," and why must it exist in "binary opposition with Hollywood?" ⁴ By posing the question of what blackness cinema can or could be, Jafa engaged two unlike, merely interlocking timelines, not just asking what blackness cinema has ever already been—even if information technology was non seen equally such—besides as what it can exist in the present and in the future if it is nurtured and cared for.

Jafa turned to music, the most fully articulated ecosystem of black creative expression that we know, every bit a ground for exploring the potential of black cinema. Blackness music in the Americas, Jafa argues in "Black Visual Intonation," is a organisation that exists independently of Western idea'southward obsessions with progress. ⁵ As film critic James Snead writes, where white Western culture built into itself a desire for growth and incessant development that destroys the old for the sake of the new, blackness culture—and especially black music—highlights repetition, circulation, and flow. ⁶ Jafa builds on Snead's and others' recognition of the way that blackness bends or disregards the assumptions that undergird Western thought. Most specifically, he focuses on black music's tendency to "worry the note."

Jafa has worked to translate this idea of "worrying the annotation" into cinematic practice. The term is a mutation of "worried notation," a synonym of "blueish note," a note played or sung at a slightly different pitch than is standard in Western scales and notation. Worried notes are common in blues, jazz, and other blackness musical genres. They evince blackness music's tendency to treat sound as unstable, different the exacting constructions of Western harmony. Jafa plant an analogy in cinema's treatment of motion. In the early days of cinema, cameras had to exist hand-cranked, and the passage of time on-screen depended on the operator'south whims and the steadiness and strength of his arm. As in virtually other industries, standardization took over movie theatre as the twentieth century progressed. As a technique, Jafa's Black Visual Intonation (BVI) seeks to undo regulation by using nonmetronomic frame rates, or digital editing that emulates that upshot. Jafa thinks of BVI as the cinematic equivalent of worrying the annotation. If black music treats sound as unstable, and then black movie theatre treats time as inherently unstable as well.

Jafa uses BVI throughout his work. Most recently, he has employed it in Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, which debuted at Art Basel in 2016 and is now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The video comprises a symphony of clips and notwithstanding images, found in historical archives, pop music videos, and viral content on YouTube. Unsteady digital footage of a nighttime city street from Getty Images gives way to a clip from a silent film featuring black vaudeville comedian Bert Williams, which in turn yields to Michael Jackson dancing in the backseat of a car, followed by cell phone footage of a black crowd wilding out. Edited according to the specifications of Blackness Visual Intonation and set to Kanye Westward's "Ultralight Beam," Love Is The Message resonates on the same frequency as the blues, gospel, or fifty-fifty crud. For viewers without knowledge of Jafa's systematic process—the details of which he keeps shrouded in mystery—Love Is The Message feels simply cosmic. Every time I've watched the video, I've found myself unable to get through it without slipping into confused tears at some juncture—non tears of sadness, in hindsight, and not some articulatio genus-jerk reaction to Jafa's invocation of the tragedies that have befallen us as black Americans, but rather tears of recognition. The closest I can get to fairly describing the feeling is as something like an erotic of the black crowd, demolishing boundaries between ourselves and others, ourselves and our strongest feeling, equally it demolishes altitude and time.

If worrying the paradigm––equally ane might phone call Jafa'southward adaptation of the concept of the worried note to the art of montage––is a angle of regulated time, and then the presentation of hundreds of years of diasporic blackness on one screen in seven and a one-half minutes bends time until information technology'southward well-nigh doubled over and about to snap. His approach to image-sourcing results in moments that manifest what he calls "affective proximity"—a term borrowed from fellow filmmaker John Akomfrah—but that often feel more like small collisions. You're reminded that history had to be invented from memories and other traces, that somehow everything has always been happening all at one time. As in Love Is The Message, Jafa pays no attending to the integrity of linear time in compiling his notebooks, the countless thick volumes filled with neat collages that he has kept since the early days of his career. Recent volumes juxtapose printed posts from Jafa'southward Instagram account with magazine clippings and pages torn from art books. In i instance, photos of rapper Tupac Shakur and a vintage illustration showing Sarah Baartman––the "Hottentot Venus" who was displayed as a sideshow attraction at nineteenth-century European carnivals—announced side by side, adhered to a backdrop of photographs of mutilated bodies and snapshots of skinheads. The notebooks feel like a visual counterpart to the analytic for the experience of time laid out past Christina Sharpe, who describes black being and consciousness equally "living in the wake of slavery and constantly encountering a 'past that is not past.'" ⁷

Jafa treats fine art and images not as ends in themselves simply as tools for proving a concept. Love Is The Message was an experiment, as was Dreams Are Colder Than Decease (2013), a longer documentary that meditates on black life in America through a number of different on-screen speakers, such as artist Kara Walker, filmmaker Charles Burnett, musician Flying Lotus, and academics Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman. The film is a study of what information technology means to exist black today, setting recorded testimonies from his contemporaries to mundane footage of their daily lives and other images, some produced by Jafa, some collected. Like Love Is The Bulletin, this work too experiments with processes that subvert conventional filmic practice. Here, Jafa records sound and video of his subjects separately, gesturing toward the kind of black fugitivity and escape that his interviewees speak of, which in the context of the motion picture means an escape from regimes of visibility, from the camera as an amanuensis of the white gaze. In the final edit, the audio is out of sync with the footage, creating a non-indexical relationship between language and image.

Jafa's exhibition opening at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London this month includes experiments as well: a site-specific installation at the gallery too every bit performances, screenings, and other events throughout the city in locations that Jafa has cryptically identified as "black sites." The format of the exhibition returns his art to the earth of things. On many occasions, Jafa has claimed to be more than interested in "things" than in "art." ^viii Dissolving the infinite of his work's brandish into the city reflects how black art always exists in the world beyond the white cube. When I asked him about what exactly will be featured in the show—will we see more video? will the notebooks be at that place?—he answered vaguely. Jafa told me that "the questions precede the context." Here, as in most of his work, the question is not then much what, but how. What we build is less important than how we build it.

JAFA SAYS THAT a black way of knowing the world, existence in information technology, and moving through it has already been implemented on-screen, if y'all know how to look for information technology. It tin be constitute in the works of the kickoff major black American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, which will reach their centennial in the next few years. Jafa has described Micheaux's directorial style as matching the rhythms of Thelonius Monk, treating time similar putty, and demolishing linear composition. Though information technology was taught to him as an example of "what not to do," he argues that it is actually an early example of BVI. Equally Jafa says: "His shit is corking Hollywood. It's his own thing." The piece of work is a deliberate, xxx-yr intervention into the conventions of cinema. ⁹ This black way of knowing is implemented in now canonical works like Charles Burnett'southward Killer of Sheep (1978) and Haile Gerima's Bush Mama (1979). It is implemented in Julie Dash's 1991 masterpiece Daughters of the Dust—shot and produced by Jafa—which tells the story of 3 generations of Gullah women on the southeastern coast of the US at the turn of the twentieth century as their family unit prepares to migrate to the north. The film weaves together the family unit's past, nowadays, and hereafter; the film's narrator is the unborn kid of one of the women, just the child speaks from a perspective influenced directly by ancestral retentivity. Dash described the film's narrative structure as impressionistic and fragmented, "the mode an onetime relative would retell it, not linear but always coming back around." ^x Daughters of the Dust was made simply before the golden era of hip-hop music videos, which themselves are a sonically driven picture palace that speaks to the world of black aesthetics and philosophy at the turn of the millennium. Today, we find a similarly powerful array of narrative, artistic forms in the raw in black vernacular cinema circulating online, particularly on social media platforms similar Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and the defunct Vine.

Jafa's do is thus an deed of intendance. "We aren't the Wright Brothers," he told me. ¹¹ Black people can't but make something and hope it flies. The system has to be tended to. We tin talk virtually creating the "atmospheric condition of possibility" for a blackness movie house, only information technology's a whole other task to "construct and engineer" these conditions. ¹² Jafa, it seems, has an endless backlog of blueprints set up to meet the light.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW "Arthur Jafa: Beloved Is The Bulletin, The Message Is Expiry," at the Museum of Gimmicky Fine art, Los Angeles, through June 12.

COMING SOON Arthur Jafa'south solo exhibition, "A Serial of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions," at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, June 8–Sept. ten.

ARIA DEAN is a author, artist, and curator based in Los Angeles.

Endnotes

i. Interview with the author, Mar. 23, 2017, Los Angeles.

2. Ibid.

3. Critical theorist and filmmaker Frank Wilderson Iii writes that the bulk of blackness cinematic theory and do in the twentieth century was concerned with whether the production of the film and the representations within it either "hasten or arbitrate against . . . the tragic history and bleak futurity of [those] marked by slavery in the Western Hemisphere." Frank Wilderson Iii, Red, White, and Black: Picture palace and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2010, p. 59.

4. Arthur Jafa, "Blackness Visual Intonation," in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O'Meally, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 265.

5. Ibid. , p. 267.

six. James Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Blackness Civilisation" in The Jazz Cadence of American Civilisation, pp. 62–81.

7. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, N.C., Duke Academy Press, 2016, p. xiii.

eight. Including an interview with the author, Mar. 23, 2017, Los Angeles, and a talk with Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Los Angeles State Museum of Fine art, Dec. 14, 2016.

9. Peter Hessli, "The Notion of Treatment: Black Aesthetics and Motion picture: Interview with Arthur Jafa," in Oscar Micheaux and His Circumvolve: African American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, eds. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser, Bloomington, Indiana Academy Printing, 2016, pp. 11–17.

x. Sheila Dominion, "Managing director Defies Odds with First Feature, 'Daughters of the Dust,'" New York Times, Feb. 12, 1992, nytimes.com.

11. Interview with the author, Mar. 23, 2017,  Los Angeles.

12. Ibid.

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Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/worry-the-image-63266/