Arthur Jafa and the Weight of an Image

The first time I saw Arthur Jafa’s “Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death” was in November 2016 at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, just days after the presidential election. Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” filled the room while Jafa moved through images of Black life at an almost rapid fire pace that barely gave you time to settle into one. Family footage, athletes, musicians, police violence, famous faces, people I didn’t recognize.

I remember the feeling more than any single image. The film had this strange push and pull to it. Something beautiful would sit beside something brutal, something intimate beside something pulled from television. The film was only a few minutes long, but it stayed with me. I thought about that experience again on September 22, walking through the media preview of Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony at the New Museum.

The show spans the museum’s third and fourth floors and is Jafa’s first U.S. museum survey to bring together the full range of his practice, from film and photography to sculpture, painting and installation. The title comes from the hugely influential jazz drummer Tony Williams and the exhibition includes works like “Love Is the Message” and “The White Album” alongside more recent pieces and new work.

One of the collections I spent the most time with were the binders. They’re dense with images Jafa has collected over the years: anonymous family photographs, magazine clippings, advertisements, scans of album covers and historical material. Marvin Gaye, MF DOOM, and more portraits that feel culturally familiar and others that look like they were dug up from a time capsule.

One spread had a clipping of Goodyear tires beside an ancient African totem. Elsewhere, a private-looking family photograph sits in the same visual field as a celebrity. Jafa has been collecting clipped images since he was young, long before the moving-image work that made him widely known. Seeing that habit laid out physically, page after page, made me realize how much of his practice comes down to placement. Not necessarily symbolism, and not always some hidden connection to decode. But there’s a certain charge created by putting one image beside another and you catch that quite a lot throughout I Am Tony.

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There’s “akingdoncomethas,” his 2018 compilation of sermons, performances and footage pulled from Black church culture. “La Scala,” also from 2018, shows Jafa inhabiting the image of Mary Jones, a Black sex worker in 19th-century New York. Then there’s “AGHDRA,” which is almost a complete departure visually from his more collagist setups and instead he stages a digitally rendered black ocean that feels unnervingly relaxing and ripped from a cozy life sim.

More recent work pushes that language around even further, including “BEN GAZARRA,” his reworking of the violent ending of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, as well as larger paintings and new moving-image pieces that a strike a nerve and entice you for a longer stare.

What stood out to me in the newer films was how familiar some of the material felt. TikToks, phone videos, goth LARPers, random pieces of internet culture that you could easily scroll past and forget five seconds later. Inside the museum, you can’t really scroll past them as you would on your phone. A clip that might normally disappear into your feed suddenly sits there long enough for you to wonder why Jafa chose it, what you noticed in it and what you might have ignored the first time around.

That felt especially interesting to me because the internet we have now is way different from the one that existed when “Love Is the Message” came out in 2016. We were already drowning in images then, but the pace now feels even more overwhelming. War footage, memes, music videos, family photos, ads, violence and strangers filming themselves can all appear in the same minute.

Jafa’s work has always made sense inside that kind of collision. His films move through images of Black American life that have already passed through news media, television or social platforms, but he puts them beside music, sports, family moments, dancing and all these smaller gestures that feel much more intimate.

“Black life can be celebrated, copied, watched, feared and consumed at the same time. His work doesn’t really try to untangle that.”

The New Museum describes Jafa as “often placing the nation’s growing awareness of the history of institutional violence directed toward the Black community against the backdrop of the ascension of Black culture, music, and entertainment in American national identity.” That tension’s definitely there, but seeing the work in person, it feels less like an argument Jafa’s making and more like a condition or a service he’s always coming back to. Black life can be celebrated, copied, watched, feared and consumed at the same time. His work doesn’t seem to try to untangle all of that.

In recent interviews, Jafa has described the exhibition as something closer to a record or a DJ set than a traditional survey. I kind of got that walking through the show. Some images register right away, while others sit with you and come back later. By the time I left the New Museum, I was thinking again about Harlem in 2016 and how differently images move through the world now. There’s an overwhelming amount of them, they move faster and most of us probably spend less time with each one. Seeing that same kind of imagery blown up on a museum screen can also give it a slightly dystopian flavor, especially when so much of it already comes from the endless scroll.

What Jafa still seems interested in, though, is what happens when you actually stop and spend time with an image. There’s a vulnerability in that, and yeah a lot of discomfort too. Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony opens to the public September 24 at the New Museum in New York and runs through January 3, 2027.

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002