Watch: The Book Voucher with Arthur Jafa: “Falling asleep in the stacks”

“For a big part of my life, there were no bookstores in my hometown,” Arthur Jafa, Los Angeles artist, filmmaker, and self-avowed bibliophile recently told Plaster. In the small Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale where he grew up in the 1960s, paperbacks were minor goods sold next to birthday cards in the stationery shop. But luckily his parents were professors at the local junior college and they lived next door to the school’s librarian. “I can remember as early as like, fifth or sixth grade, she would just give me the keys to the library,” Jafa recalled, and thus his obsession with books began. “Oftentimes I’d fall asleep in the stacks, and my dad would come and wake me up at midnight and come get me to take me home.”

For the latest episode of Book Voucher, Plaster had the extreme and surreal pleasure of trying to keep up with Jafa as he zipped through the aisles at Arcana Books in LA’s Culver City. (Because of a recent injury, he was getting around with KneeRover scooter, and lamented not customising his wheels.) The artist chose Arcana partly for its selection—elsewhere, “you will never find like 80% of this stuff”—and partly because of the way its shelves resemble the stacks of a library, he said. “It feels like home.”

In both words and images, Jafa is a consummate storyteller who disarmed us with his warmth and enthralled us with his encyclopedic range. His artistic works, notably the short films Love is the message, the message is death (2016) and Golden Lion-winning The White Album (2018), combine an expansive array of appropriated imagery into a cinematic arc—profound meditations on both the horrors and excellence of the Black American experience, offering neither narrative nor resolution. To shop with Jafa, to look over his shoulder as he flips through and narrates the pages, feels like hearing his artistic process out loud in real-time. Each book he plucked from the shelf triggered a formative memory in his life or in his practice or honed a different point in his continuously running train of thought.

Holding a title on polychrome sculpture, he recalled his first realisations that Greek and Roman sculptures were originally painted in vibrant colours, a grand epiphany that dispelled white supremacist notions built around their colourless remains. “This is a pretty cool book,” he said, before placing it back on the shelf. “I mean, I was hoping for some better illustrations.”

Through books on David Bowie, mandalas, African sculpture and beyond, all roads led back to the foundation of Jafa’s artistic practice: his perpetual search for an actualised Black pictorial and cinematic culture and an aesthetic language that would capture particular registers of alienation and the sublime. Pulling a few major influences from the stacks, he took a moment to admire the impact and precedent of artist Adrian Piper. “As a trained philosopher, and one of the most intense debaters, she has a history of being incredibly outspoken when it comes to the critical response to her work,” he said. He pulled out a book on the late Bill Traylor, an artist who was born into slavery in Alabama in 1853 and took up drawing in the twilight years of his life.

“I’m trying to tap into this,” Jafa said, paging through Traylor’s tempera paintings of animals and figures rendered in solid monochrome. “It’s not like trying to be willfully primitive and willfully unsophisticated. It’s just about being to a certain degree, unmediated, unconstrained.”