Arthur Jafa retells New York film history

Two and half years ago, on a cold November night in Harlem, the fourth floor of a former brewery on West 127th Street was crackling. On a screen, giant chunks of black earth ebbed and flowed like the delirious Atlantic, while actual plates of paella were passed around downstairs. Later, the empty dishes were almost hopping like the sizzling cuts of dark, wavy earth upstairs because the music had started and the crowd was responding. We were at the former space of the now-shuttered gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise for a screening of Arthur Jafa’s film AGHDRA (2021). The Spanish dinner was handled by Rirkrit Tiravanija who fed the zealous crowd with crispy rice before they ascended to absorb Jafa’s dizzying scenes of topographic disarray.

In this massive single-channel video, the sun was far off, hovering above the horizon before the lumpy, magma-like landscape swallowed the solar orb; we were passengers on an invisible boat, with our destination left vague. The unforgivingly choppy ride on wavy lava, however, was a task we were committed to. The 85-minute video showed AI-generated imagery of gargantuan coal-coloured rocks operating like ocean waves. After the turbulent collage of imagery in Jafa’s most celebrated video work, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), this film’s slow-burn quality had a hallucinatory appeal that stirred senses of comfort and peril into a baffling elixir.

Jafa is back in New York with concurrent exhibitions at Gladstone Gallery and 52 Walker. At Chelsea’s Gladstone, the 1 hour,13 minute-long new film, titled ***** (2024) combines the experiences of watching Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death and AGHDRA. Similar to the former, the work features existing imagery—in this case, Martin Scorsese’s Hollywood classic Taxi Driver (1976)—slowly looping into a collage of sequences that defy the original’s plot line or any traditional cinematic narrative in general. The video starts with the film’s bloodbath climax in which Travis Bickle, Robert de Niro’s racist taxi driver character, breaks into a hotel to rescue the child sex worker Iris, played by Jodie Foster, from a group of pimp paedophiles. Jafa has altered the original’s white pimps with Black actors through digital manipulation, returning the script to Paul Schrader’s original screenplay in which the characters were written as Black. Scorsese and the producers altered the characters’ race to avoid criticism and offered the role of lead pimp to Harvey Keitel. “How can you?” one pimp screams against Bickle’s bullets while grabbing him with his last remaining strength; once the scene reaches its finale with de Niro’s gesture of pretend trigger pulling with his bloody fingers, Jafa’s edit turns into a medley of scene cuts. In another critical scene, the protagonist encounters a group of Black pimps at a diner. The work echoes AGHDRA with its lingering nature, asking the audience to slow down and sit for the artist’s boiling sequences that repeat, break, and repeat again. Jafa’s way of conveying a statement is both in-yer-face and veiled; the looping violence in the six-minute finale never feels numbing despite multiple repetitions. It rather remains hammering, just like the artist’s shattering take on representation and white America’s misguided correctionalism.

Down in Tribeca, in the centre of ‘BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG’ [sic] at 52 Walker is, Picture Unit (Structures) II (2024), a mammoth maze in black mirrored acrylic and wood, decorated with dim lights and wallpaper images of various references that range from Iggy Pop to Danish photographer Jacob Holdt’s images of the American south, particularly the Black working class. The maze’s dim fixtures provide the only illumination in the gallery, with the structure’s sleek surface reflecting the surrounding wall-based work, which includes metal rails, painted pipes, anodized pipes, plastic pipes and feathers. The clean-cut pipes stretch across the wall with a bouncy airiness foreign to their sturdy materials and seem to glide towards a Dibond print of two figures, one posing seductively in her bra and the other doing the same while they show their top surgery.

On the opposite side of the maze is a line of Dibond print cutouts, titled Large Array II (2024). Large, standalone prints of Jafa’s subjects range from himself, Michel Foucault, fellow artists Cady Noland and Tourmaline, The Sex Pistols and other seemingly unrelated, sometimes anonymous, subjects. Monumental in scale, the whole installation recalls children’s pop-up books or stage props. The impressions which the cutout figures yield on the black mirror that slices through the gallery is a surface like the chunks of black rocks endlessly fluctuating in AGHDRA. Here, the finish is impossibly shiny and the reflections are fickle, but the undulation persists. Not unlike AGHDRA’s infinite crackling with openings and closings between the oscillating chunks, the smooth glass stretches what it reflects, pushing us back and forth between tangibility and fluidity on the infinite sea of a delirious earth.