African American video artist Arthur Jafa presented his 2016 montage video essay titled Love is the Message, The Message is Death that has been displayed in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the High Museum of Art. The 7 minute video essay is set Ultralight Beam, a song written by Kanye West featuring a verse by Chance the Rapper, both African American hip-hop artists from Chicago. The visual essay consists of montage footage of short excerpts that is representative of African American culture in the United States. Footage ranges from early 20th century political footage to 21st century popular culture footage and political footage representative of the Black community; the popular culture footage ranges from music, film, dance, and iconic figures such as Serena Williams and Kobe Bryant.
In the video Arthur Jafa: APEX|Artist Stories, Jafa speaks on his project and how it just happened to come about due to the collection of the footage that seemed to have this commonality. The piece is intended for a Black audience and those that can relate to African American culture but the heavier political scenes or the scenes in which some can’t relate to become visuals for non-Africans Americans to listen in, as Jafa said. The video features contrasting scenes from both a hard past and a hard present with a simultaneous paradoxy as popular African American culture becomes representative of the United States as a whole but yet African Americans still face hardships related to their slave past and the idea of them as second-class citizens.
In combination with Professor Kwame Phillips’ uncensored explicit video essay on police brutality in the United States, both reaffirm the undeniable abuse and serve as visual evidence to people who were not at the scene that in fact the hardships African Americans have to face are still ongoing and to an extreme degree. Both highlight the role of the African American that includes a difficult and different reality to White Americans and almost any other ethnicity in the United States. But as well shines light on the grave inequality in the ‘land of the free‘ that is gravely undermined and misrepresented in the media. Misrepresented in a country that has been built from the ground up based on Orientalist violence–whether it be against Blacks, Mexicans, or Natives–in which Orientalism is deeply ingrained into the history of the country and the role of the White American.
Photo: Roberto Apa. Courtesy: Gavin Brown’s enterprise New York / Rome
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