Video, projection, colour and sound (stereo)
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/arthur-jafa-27568" aria-label="More by Arthur Jafa" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Arthur Jafa</a>
Love is Message Message is Death
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of North American Acquisitions Committee 2019
<p><span>Love is the Message, The Message is Death </span>2016 is a seven-minute video made up of clips assembled from various sources and collaged together. The video is shown as a projection in a single-room installation. Jafa’s sources include historical material (for instance, footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights marches); contemporary clips from news media (such as President Barack Obama singing <span>Amazing Grace</span> in Charleston after delivering the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of nine people murdered by the white supremacist Dylann Roof); clips that have gone viral after being uploaded from mobile phones onto the internet (a policeman killing Walter Scott by shooting him in the back in 2015; another policeman drawing a gun on teenage girls at a Texas pool party in the same year); footage of African American athletes and musicians (for instance, Muhammad Ali, Lebron James, Serena Williams, John Coltrane, the Notorious B.I.G., Beyoncé); footage of dancing and swag surfing from worldstarhiphop.com; fragments of works by other artists (Kahlil Joseph’s <span>Until the Quiet Comes</span> 2012; Martine Syms’s <span>The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto</span> 2015); Jafa’s personal video from his daughter’s wedding; footage of writer Saidiya Hartman from Jafa’s documentary film <span>Dreams are Colder than Death</span> 2013; and imagery from horror films and films of solar flares. This material is set to Kanye West’s song <span>Ultralight Beam</span> (2016). The audio is broken up at various points, including in the middle of the film where the actor and activist Amandla Stenberg asks, ‘What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?’</p>
time-based media video projection colour sound stereo
28 March 2019 – 12 May 2019
2019-05-12
28 March 2019 – 12 May 2019
2019-05-12
2019-03-28
Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/
2019-03-28
Arthur Jafa
Exhibition
Love is the Message, The Message is Death
duration: 7min, 33sec
Lent by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of North American Acquisitions Committee 2019
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<p>
<i>Love is the Message, The Message is Death </i>2016 is a seven-minute video made up of clips assembled from various sources and collaged together. The video is shown as a projection in a single-room installation. Jafa’s sources include historical material (for instance, footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights marches); contemporary clips from news media (such as President Barack Obama singing <i>Amazing Grace</i> in Charleston after delivering the eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of nine people murdered by the white supremacist Dylann Roof); clips that have gone viral after being uploaded from mobile phones onto the internet (a policeman killing Walter Scott by shooting him in the back in 2015; another policeman drawing a gun on teenage girls at a Texas pool party in the same year); footage of African American athletes and musicians (for instance, Muhammad Ali, Lebron James, Serena Williams, John Coltrane, the Notorious B.I.G., Beyoncé); footage of dancing and swag surfing from worldstarhiphop.com; fragments of works by other artists (Kahlil Joseph’s <i>Until the Quiet Comes</i> 2012; Martine Syms’s <i>The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto</i> 2015); Jafa’s personal video from his daughter’s wedding; footage of writer Saidiya Hartman from Jafa’s documentary film <i>Dreams are Colder than Death</i> 2013; and imagery from horror films and films of solar flares. This material is set to Kanye West’s song <i>Ultralight Beam</i> (2016). The audio is broken up at various points, including in the middle of the film where the actor and activist Amandla Stenberg asks, ‘What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?’</p>
<p>In an interview with writer Antwaun Sargent, Jafa described his process of collecting the clips to make the film, explaining that it was assembled intuitively and quite quickly from an archive of material collected over several years. Discussing his approach to juxtaposition, Jafa referred to John Akomfrah’s concept of ‘affective proximity’ (Sargent 2017, accessed 20 March 2018; all subsequent quotes are from this source unless otherwise stated). When two different clips are placed in sequence, each affects the other and a ‘new harmonic’ is created. Jafa’s language here connects to his ambition ‘to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music’. In <i>Love is the Message, The Message is Death</i>, which takes some of its title from MFSB’s Philadelphia hit <i>Love is the Message</i> (1973), Jafa thus seeks to extend Black music’s ability to express both the pain and joy of the African American experience.</p>
<p>The work oscillates between scenes of historic and contemporary violence inflicted on Black Americans by individuals and institutions, and scenes of religious ecstasy, athletic prowess, intense poetic and musical performance, and of individual and communal dancing – ‘a black display of black excellence’, as Jafa has explained (Clayton 2018, p.163). Recognising that oppression and expression have gone together since the beginning of the slave trade, Jafa’s work provokes questions about the continuation of racist violence in present-day America and about the continued resilience and creativity of Black culture in the face of such violence.</p>
<p>Jafa has spoken about his ambition with <i>Love is the Message, The Message is Death</i> to make a film that is both specific to the Black experience and also universal in its access, asking ‘The question is how come we can’t be as black as we are and still be universal?’ (Sargent 2017, accessed 20 March 2018.) Jafa has stated his intention to ‘make work that addresses black people’ (Clayton 2018, p.161), citing Kerry James Marshall (born 1955) as an artist who shares this position, however he hopes that any viewer can identify with his work. In relation to this, he has connected <i>Love is the Message, The Message is Death </i>to a wider art history that includes the seventeenth-century Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s <i>Ecstasy of Saint Teresa</i> 1647–52 (Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome), and other works which express religious passion and a coming together of extreme pain and joy.</p>
<p>While most of the visual material in the film is very clearly connected to African American experience, it is also interspersed with images of the sun and solar flares. Jafa has explained that this is part of an ‘assertion that Black people’s lives should be seen on a cosmological level’ (Clayton 2018, p.162). Reflecting on Fred Moten’s writing on jazz, Jafa has also said that the footage of flares bursting outwards and then being absorbed back into the sun is an allegory for the way in which individual performers in a jazz group will perform a solo before being absorbed into the entity of the group. Jafa sees the ‘tension between the ego and the group’ as productive and as a way in which Black creators creatively negotiate an ‘antagonistic environment’ (ibid., p.163).</p>
<p>
<i>Love is the Message, The Message is Death</i> was first shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York in 2016; it has been shown in many museums across the United States since then and widely written about. The film exists in an edition of thirteen plus two artist’s proofs; Tate’s copy is number eleven in the main edition.</p>
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<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Greg Tate, ‘The Changeling Mise-En-Scene: Arthur Jafa’s Meta Love and the New Black Reportage’, in <i>Arthur Jafa: The Message is Death</i>, exhibition catalogue, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York 2016, unpaginated.<br/>Antwaun Sargent, ‘Arthur Jafa and the Future of Black Cinema’, <i>Interview Magazine</i>, January 2017, online at <a href="https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/arthur-jafa">https://www.inerviewmagazine.com/art/arthur-jafa</a>, accessed 20 March 2018.<br/>Jace Clayton, ‘As Brilliant as the Sun: Jace Clayton interviews Arthur Jafa’, <i>Frieze</i>, no.192, January–February 2018, pp.160–4.</p>
<p>Mark Godfrey<br/>March 2018</p>
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Summary
2023-09-27T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT