Arthur Jafa, “nativemanson”
by Michael Shaw
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, California
Exhibition continues through December 14, 2024
December 6, 2024
Arthur Jafa, “BG,” 2024, still from video, 73:16 minutes. All images courtesy of Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles.
I first encountered Arthur Jafa’s work in the 2016 iteration of the Hammer Museum’s biannual survey “Made in L.A.” To me it was the standout of the entire show — even if it was just Jafa’s working-photo library. I was drawn into his wildly disparate gathering of images — often simply ripped from magazines — and sprawled across several vitrines in 3-ring binders, encompassing everything from African tribal scarification to fashion ads to athletes in motion. It all somehow coalesced into an enigmatic but ephemerally decipherable thread.
The contextual backstory of Jafa’s launch into the art world mainstream was as a cinematographer (most notably on Spike Lee’s great 1994 film, Crooklyn) as well as a filmmaker, emphasizing a sensibility that he would evolve from and merge with his artmaking. His working method has since expanded into a full interdisciplinary quiver of photography, sculptures, paintings, film, video and installation, all of which is present in “nativemanson.”
“Nativemanson” is a story of two floors. On the first floor is a film screened in a darkened room and an exhibition space with paintings, a large wall sculpture, and a wall of framed, mostly appropriated photos. Upstairs are two slide-show-like projections alongside a maze bursting with blown-up photos. The best is upstairs.
Arthur Jafa, “nativemanson,” 2024, installation view at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles.
There’s a lot to say about the film, titled “BG.” Jafa’s newest and latest cri de coeur is a highly ambitious production that re-cuts the climactic confrontation in Martin Scorsese’s classic, “Taxi Driver” (1976) as a grisly blaxploitation shooting spree. Instead of confronting the white pimp in the original film, antihero Travis Bickle shoots (and stabs) a series of Black pimps, new characters whom Jafa has seamlessly injected into Scorsese’s original scenes, reimaging a seemingly interminable bloodbath of Black casualties.
The realization of this screen makeover, a combination of filming new actors on a green screen and CGI, is so effective that even if you’ve seen the original, you might catch yourself wondering: ‘I don’t remember this much gore …’ The shoot-out sequences bring to mind Quentin Tarantino’s epic revenge fantasies in “Once a Upon a Time in Hollywood,” and, more aptly, “Django Unchained,” but in reverse. Jafa has brought sadistic violence upon these Black characters to make (the press release declares) “… explicit the racial animus that filters through ‘Taxi Driver.’” Not only does Tarantino himself agree, he even argued for keeping the pimp from the original script Black.
The other half of “BG” features a newly invented Black pimp named Scar — who at one point convincingly exchanges words with De Niro’s Bickle, prior to being shot by him — softly coaching himself in the mirror, a long, drawn-out meditation that on paper balances out the bloody shoot-out but is ultimately too cryptic to give the film as a whole a proper landing. It’s hard to see “BG” as Jafa’s literal response to Tarantino’s critique, given the artist’s autonomy and independent streak, but it’s also a challenge to grasp the racial animus interpretation while drowning in visceral sensationalism. Perhaps it’s a personal catharsis for Jafa, or an existential release for African Americans. Or, even though the project was completed well before the election, it (and Jafa) is fully cognizant of the ever-evolving, and not yet diminishing, racial animus that continues to simmer in this country.
Arthur Jafa, “SloPEX,” 2022, a dirge-like, slowed down version of the artist’s film “APEX” (2013),
stretching that work’s 8 minutes and 22 seconds to 33 minutes and 8 seconds.
The rest of the ground floor consists of paintings, a large-scale sculpture including deconstructed bicycle parts, and a wall of mainly appropriated photo collages. These latter are the strongest of the bunch and the truest to Jafa’s oeuvre. The paintings feel a bit too out of place, if still intriguing, but they finally come across as marketplace conceits.
Should your visit to the gallery be limited, head straight to the 2nd floor. There you’ll navigate a maze of blown-up photos occasionally affixed with a grounding if enigmatic object protruding from the wall. “Picture Unit (Structures) II” takes you through a 20th century journey that mashes slavery, Black oppression, and everyday African Americans with macabre pop culture and (white) punk and rock stars. Projected onto the glossy black exterior wall of the maze is “SloPEX,” a slowed-down reworking of Jafa’s 2013 film, “APEX.” On the far wall is the best piece in “nativemanson,” “Dirty Tesla,” a filmic slide-show propelled forward with the dark, steady chime of a soundtrack (a distant cousin to the ominous recurring notes underscoring the violent climax from “Taxi Driver/BG”).
“Dirty Tesla” is a more pronounced and fully formed incarnation of Jafa’s untitled collection of binder-bound images from that “Made in L.A.” debut, juxtaposing, in black and white images, dissections and re-mixes of an African American cultural iconography that zigzags through science and White culture, including the aforementioned rockers, punks, miscreants, and presumed outsiders, an inclusion which elides clear meaning. I see in it a thorny alignment of the Black point of view, with outlaws and quasi-revolutionaries. But it more likely intimates an inclusiveness, a merging that evades words. It’s another Rorshach test, albeit more nuanced than “BG.” To what extent are we segregated, are we together, or do we cross over … then, now, or ever?
