Arhtur Jafa's 'White Album' goes on view at the Hammer

AFTERIMAGE

A still from Arthur Jafa's The White Album (2018), at the Hammer Museum. (Arthur Jafa / Gladstone)

In 2016, the Hammer Museum’s Made in LA biennial featured several vitrines filled with three-ring binders that displayed curious juxtapositions of images taken from newspapers, magazines, and other sources. A photograph of Black woman in a fashionable white ensemble, for example, was paired with an image of Congolese statuary. Serena Williams spiking a tennis ball materialized alongside what appears to be a nude dancer extending an arm — two bodies in the throes of ecstatic motion. Some images echoed each other in color and form; each seemed to heighten the significance of the next. The notebooks belonged to LA artist Arthur Jafa, who at the time was better known for his moviemaking than his art, having worked as a cinematographer on films by esteemed directors like Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and Stanley Kubrick.

Now Jafa is back at the Hammer, with his incisive video work, The White Album (2018), which went on view last week. The circumstances this time around are very different than a decade ago. Back then, he was known primarily among small circles of filmmakers and art world insiders, now his name resonates broadly. The same year that he displayed his notebooks at the Hammer, the artist also presented a seven-minute video piece titled Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death at the Manhattan art gallery of Gavin Brown that rattled the art world to its core. A frantic supercut set to “Ultralight Beam” by the musician now known as Ye (formerly Kanye West), it wove together the traumas and triumphs of the Black experience in the United States. The footage featured exhilarating sequences of song, dance, and protest, as well as cruel episodes of police brutality that landed like a punch to the sternum. In 2017, it was shown at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art; profiles of Jafa in T Magazine and The New Yorker followed.

The White Album is a very different work — one that demands more time (it’s nearly 30 minutes long) and has a looser rhythmic cadence, combining a few quick cuts with much longer sequences that allow some of the film’s subjects the space to express their ideas (at times, quite uncomfortably). Like much of his work, The White Album is pieced together largely out of found footage, from music videos, social media posts, and television broadcasts — though it does include cinematic portraits of some of the artist’s colleagues.

In one scene, you might see a cartoonish clip of Iggy Pop crooning “The Pure and the Damned,” taken from the video for his moody collaboration with electronica musician Oneohtrix Point Never; in another, a young blonde woman opens a confused diatribe about race with the cringe-inducing declaration, “Let me start by saying that I am the farthest person from being racist...” There is joy: a Celtics fan dances exuberantly to Bon Jovi. But the threat of violence looms. One social media clip features a man who shows off the military-grade ammunition he has hidden in his clothing — like some prelude to a mass shooting. And visible elsewhere in the piece is Dylann Roof, the gunman who murdered nine Black parishioners in South Carolina in 2015.

If Love Is The Message took Blackness as its subject, The White Album centers on Whiteness — a slippery subject since Whiteness operates more as a societal default, a condition most easily defined by what it is not. Power and privilege are undercurrents, but Jafa leaves the piece open-ended. “He’s giving you a rubric,” says Hammer curator Erin Christovale. “How do you want to approach the conversation? Who do you relate to most in this cast of characters that he’s assembled? I see it as a strategy of welcoming everybody to the conversation. Rather than, ‘This is my individual view as an artist, and you’re either in agreement with me or you’re not.’”

Arthur Jafa. (Arthur Jafa / Gladstone)

Commissioned by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and first presented in 2018, the piece went on view the following year at the 58th Venice Biennale, where it won the Golden Lion. In its citation, the jury described it as “an essay, a poem, and portraiture.” It’s also about the ways in which existing images — even a throwaway social media post — can be made electric through smart juxtaposition or “affective proximity,” as Jafa describes it, borrowing a phrase from filmmaker John Akomfrah. This powerful collage style is something that links him stylistically to other important members of the LA film community, including members fo the LA Rebellion such as Ben Caldwell, whose 1977 experimental film I & I: An African Allegory (which I wrote about last year), employed many of the same techniques.

“Jafa operates as the visual equivalent of a DJ,” wrote critic Colony Little in Artnet when The White Album first debuted, “building a succession of images that take viewers on an emotional journey, like songs in a set.” The experience is at once painful, riveting, awkward, and, at times, mordantly funny. Few are the artists who can conjure those contradictory sentiments all at once.

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Arthur Jafa: The White Album is on view at the Hammer Museum through August 30th; hammer.ucla.edu.

One of the artist’s earlier works, APEX (2013) is also on view in What A Wonderful World, an installation of video works at the Variety Arts Theater downtown through March 20th. Hannah Tishkoff wrote about it for Art Insider last month.

And if you happen to be cruising through New York, an engaging exhibition organized by Jafa, Less Is Morbid, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through July 5th.

AFTERIMAGE

A still from Arthur Jafa's The White Album (2018), at the Hammer Museum. (Arthur Jafa / Gladstone)

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