Arthur Jafa's Chicago Exhibition

What, if anything, is left to say about Arthur Jafa, the 63-year-old behemoth artist and cinematographer? With the new exhibition simply titled Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection which runs from June 1, 2024 until March 2, 2025, the stakes are high. After all, this is Chicago, the proverbial “City of Big Shoulders”—the metropolis of so many Black dignities working on art and politics: heavyweights like Gwendolyn Brooks, Mahalia Jackson, and Barack Obama.

Like any major city, Chicago is many things all at once. Yet, it is especially a Black city. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the city was a hub for Great Migration and during the 1980s, it became the capital of House music—a genre created for and by Black people that yet gained international acclaim.

In 2015, the city was the setting for Spike Lee’s 2015 exploration of Black-on-Black violence, Chiraq, and in recent years, Black communities have interrogated what some see as the city’s preferential treatment for asylum seekers from South America, even as traditionally Black populations on the city’s South and West Sides confront a legacy of neglect. At this critical point in the city’s history, what does Chicago offer Jafa? Alternatively, what does Jafa offer Chicago? 

Given the cogency of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition, the synergy between city and artist is fruitful; the MCA’s take on Arthur Jafa’s art is thoughtful, well-executed, and lends itself to ongoing conversation not only as to the Black experience in the United States but rather, the shared experience of Americans, increasingly affected by race-baiting politicians, 24-hour news cycles, and pop culture.

Not only has Jafa’s work been put on at prestigious institutions like Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain and the Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, but in 2019, he received the Golden Lion Award at the 58th Venice Biennale. Yet, the MCA’s show is more than a mere victory lap. 

Perhaps in order to prepare visitors for the expansive panoply of images that await them—Jafa’s almost schizophrenic juxtaposition of photographs, found footage, and pop culture detritus—the MCA thankfully opens with a five-minute conversation with Jafa.

Here, the artist describes himself as a type of griot, an African tribal storyteller who is charged with preserving the collective history of their tribe. In a city like Chicago, where the Black experience has been indelibly marked by both despair and transcendence, Jafa’s comments provide a preliminary read on the onslaught of divergent images that await us.

The first piece that confronts visitors is 2017’s LeRage, a life-size cutout of the Incredible Hulk painted black. Characteristic of Jafa’s work, LeRage—both in terms of influences and message—is enigmatic, overdetermined, a heady remix of everyday elements, mixed media, and selfhood. Is this two-dimensional standee an alter ego for the artist himself? Is this figure a superhero or villain? Is the Black experience in America best understood as supernatural or, rather, freakish?

In this same room, one finds two of Jafa’s smaller pieces that point up some of the genealogy of Blackness in America: 2017’s Ex-Slave Gordon, a plastic impression of an 1863 photograph of a whipped slave, and 2016’s Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio, a photograph that compares Disney’s iconic Mickey Mouse with a modern-day minstrel singer.

Thus Jafa, not unlike various public intellectuals in recent years, also interrogates a fundamental discrepancy in the American experience: while entertainment is replete with Black voices—stars like Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and Dave Chapelle—the material conditions of Black people (rates of incarceration, poverty, incidents of police brutality) continue to blight the idea of the American Dream. An anonymous woman wonders, “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?”

In one of the exhibition’s subsequent works, the video montage from 2016 titled “Love is the Message, the Message is Death.” This 7-minute patchwork of clips, accompanied by Kanye West’s gospel-inflected tune “Ultralight Beam,” previously won Jafa the Golden Lion. The awards committee explained that “Just as the film critiques a moment fraught with violence, in tenderly portraying the artist’s friends and family, it also speaks to our capacity for love.”

Such video collages comprise the rest of the MCA exhibit, where each is screened in a darkened room. They attempt to capture the promise and pitfalls of Black life in America at a time of heightened tension, when culture, art, and politics are, for better and for worse, subjected to constant mediation, scrutiny, and spin. As Jafa explains in the show’s opening video, his art constitutes an attempt “to be aligned with the superpower of Black power—which is keeping **** real.”

The artist’s raison d’être is perhaps most clearly rendered in 2013’s APEX, an 8-minute photo dump accompanied by a haunting, industrial beeping noise that falls in and out of sync with the transition of disparate images, flashing at the viewer at approximately one to two per second. Here, sun flares and microscopic images of mites, mutilated bodies, the rapper DMX, shark Bruce from Disney’s Finding Nemo, alongside Angela Davis and electrons forge a veritable jumble box of enigmatic associations. Jafa’s video assembles both reflect and trouble the American psyche, especially in terms of race.

Are Black Americans heroes or villains? Aliens or saviors? Parasites or entelechies? The barrage of visuals, combined with the arrhythmic beeps undoubtedly left a few museum patrons reaching for another Adderall. How else could one tolerate America’s uniquely nauseating mix of spectacle, freedom, and prudishness?

As Jafa explains—again, in the MCA’s introductory video—Black Americans have, across time, consistently been tasked with being the “canary in the mineshaft.” It’s hard not to understand his art as an attempt to capture this same thrilling danger in terms of both form and content.

The most theoretically challenging examples of Jafa’s work are in the final rooms of the MCA’s exhibition. In the show’s largest room, a jumbotron displays 2018’s akingdoncomethas—that is, the Christian phrase “A kingdom cometh as”—used in the context of the proverbial end of days.

The video consists of over 100 minutes of almost completely unedited footage from megachurches with largely Black parishioners. The immensity of the MCA’s room and the enormousness of the television screen underscores the piece’s enigmatic character and message: Are were, too, being brought into the fold of Black millenarianism? Or, rather, are we meant to interrogate the extent to which Christianity provides hope to the Black community? Are the likes of TD Jakes healers or huskers? The handful of stackable chairs at the back of the MCA’s large room adds to the work’s sense of voyeurism. 

In the adjacent room, Jafa points us in a different direction. Here, 2019’s The White Album shows a mashup of music videos, violence, and anonymous, white Americans describing their take on race relations.

When visitors emerge from the darkened series of rooms at the MCA, we find ourselves in front of a calming still from Jafa’s 2021 video AGHDRA. A set of notebooks and pencils are found on a large table, and a sign tells visitors: “You are invited to write your thoughts on the artist’s work, the themes of the exhibition, or anything else that came to mind as you experienced the artwork.”

For a brief moment in time, Chicagoans can pause for meditation: after all, Jafa’s frenetic take on race in America has more than a bit to tell us about what awaits us when we eventually exit the MCA’s doors and find our way out to the street.