“... the sun is the appropriate scale at which to consider what’s going on. It’s fundamentally an assertion that black people’s lives should be seen on a cosmological level... I see black people’s lives in epic, mythic terms. And, on a simpler level, I want you to look up at these things that are happening to black people, not down – the way you would stare at the sun.”

—Arthur Jafa interviewed by Frieze

Arthur Jafa’s work Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) was streamed online for free this past weekend by an international coalition of 13 museums, which included among others the Hirshhorn, Tate Modern, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” the seven-and-a-half-minute video is a loosely composed found-footage collage offered to us as the ultimate métarécit of “blackness” in America. The ideological confusion of the recent protests has given the contemporary art industry and its army of artists and academics a second lease on life — giving a sheen of newness to its long-standing ruminations on identity and momentarily pausing the COVID-ignited crisis over its raison d’être. Meanwhile, the “doubling down” on identity, discussed already by Laurie Rojas and the founding editors of Caesura back in 2016, is a symptom of the fears and desires of Anti-Trumpism that threatens now more than ever to paralyze any criticism under self-appointed inquisitorial tribunals. And thus art’s critical moment is happily abandoned once more. So, let us ask, what kind of critical experience, if any at all, does Love is the Message offer us? 

First of all, what is the “Message”? — Love: the studied postures of politicians and intellectuals, the uncontrolled snippets of social-media individuality; the dance, the music, the athletics, the sublime quality of defeated space and time. A hundred-year-old dance blends into an Instagram post as freely as a recent police murder is protested at a massive 1965 demonstration. We are invited to stare in ecstasy at the mystical identity of feelings and capacities that collectively animate this world where terror as well as the will to fight back, live, and dream in spite of everything (“trying to keep my faith” and “looking for more”), form the semblance of a continuous — albeit barbaric — chain of destruction, abuse, despair, catastrophe, and purportedly, hope. 

A semblance of sameness covers the surface of each image whose particular instances fail to confront against each other and the whole. Montage was the confrontation of one image with another in order to create new meaning. In Love is the Message, neither the particular image is kept long enough to speak by itself, nor does its combination say anything different. In a way, montage is used only to accentuate the most superficial aspects of each shot: “the solidarity of the athlete's father”, “the virtuosity of the black artist” or “the charm of Obama”. That’s why the fact that the image of the latter is visually compared with that of an enslaved child punished by law fails to sink in at all, and if it does, it’s quickly repressed under familiar litanies: “progress of the struggle” or “badness of racism”. What we get in each image is merely the shadow of its exchange value, the empty semblance of nostalgia. The cosmos of blackness is somewhere next to the cosmos of Lexus or Apple, which already in the 90s sold vintage New Left sentimentality —  and more successfully — both in terms of its formal ambitions within the culture industry of its time and its greater reach, compared to the limited niche of artworld elite that tune-in to watch Jafa’s video on their laptops. With the Getty watermark as its sophisticated effigy, aesthetic experience is now reduced to the satisfaction of recognizing the overwhelming power employed to make us empathize with what we are already supposed to believe.

Love is the Message, The Message is Death comes at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, a historical period where the nostalgia for pre-neoliberalism that has now taken to the streets was dealt with at the level of semblance. For instance, James Franco’s contemporaneous TV series 11.22.63, the story of an ordinary high school teacher who is taught time traveling in order to stop the assassination of JFK — to no avail. Or, Philippe Parreno’s June 8, 1968 (2011), a film based on Paul Fusco’s footage of the events after the assassination of RFK. Parreno carefully reconstructs the “form” of history — the view from the train of the mourners as the body was transported from New York to Washington — yet intentionally transforms every detail of landscape and characters. The latter in particular, less numerous and active than in the original, stare directly at the train, eerily giving an exaggerated sense of intentionality and constructedness to the whole. The intensity of Parreno’s images are the product of the counterintuitive feeling that the more the mourners feel posed and the whole completely constructed, the more we are persuaded of their immersion within the world of illusion. Parreno’s contradictory taking over of the historical moment of RFK’s assassination points to the impossibility of mourning that moment directly without succumbing to sentimentality —  i.e., the impossibility of being truly detached and ironical about its limited historical potential. At the same time, it enacts the aestheticization of that memory. The Kennedys’ moment is dreamed of as the possibility of freedom it never was, and 1968 is remembered in the 2010’s just as the 1920’s settled its dead weight on the mind of the 60’s. In a similar way, the celebration of black particularity in Jafa’s montage is but the redemption of a zombie — what already at its time was the undead corporeal remains of the failed project of emancipation beyond capitalism.

If Parreno and Jafa’s works can be considered part of the project of modern art since 1848 — if they at all can claim to “sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience” and be a “protest against reality” in all seriousness, then they irremediably suffer from the degraded consciousness of this project at the present. This recognition is not a condemnation of their work as “art,” but the realization that even the most committed and substantial aesthetic product of our moment is marked by the stigmata of a distorted society. The question is rather: how do they stand in relation to the scars passed on by the past? There is something incredibly mendacious about the present that unrecognizably disfigures the past in order to better assimilate it to its own ideology, which in turn imposes in the name of received tradition. Jafa’s omnipotent sun of tradition is there to remind us that what is considered freedom now is merely the allowance we are given to be a controlled emanation of society as it exists. From this viewpoint, all the misery and strivings of humanity are nothing but an indistinguishable glimmer in the indifferent vastness of eternal hell — one that still needs fresh souls. That’s what it would really mean to see blackness from a cosmological level. That is our rotten cynicism. If there is any hope now, it is the refusal to be paralyzed by the depth of the horror. What art that is a real protest against reality could offer us today is the opening of hell itself, the interrogation of all creative potential unrealized in the present as well as in the past, along with the refusal to bend to tradition where this appears most vulgar, narrow, and mean. Only the extent to which it clearly points to the necessity of continuing the incomplete project of modernity and the present limits to this process should the avant-garde and its engagements with the past be trusted. Otherwise, there are very few things in the past worth saving in the eyes of those for whom the promise of freedom has remained merely a promise. [±] //

[±] Thanks to Austin Carder and Madison Winston for helping me clarify some of these formulations, and also to Patrick Zapien for pointing my attention to the similarities between Jaffa and commercial advertisement, among other things.