THOUGHTS: Arthur Jafa and the End of BLM Art, by Adam Lehrer
Is Arthur Jafa's exhibition at 52 Walker signs of BLM fatigue in contemporary art?
What’s talent but the ability to get away with something? – Tennessee Williams
BLM art was bound to reach its humiliating pinnacle at some point. It’s now been a decade since the movement formed in Ferguson in the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown and at least four years since it wormed its way into the center of almost every institution in America. The art world, as the financial arm of postgraduate MFA departments, was particularly vulnerable to total BLM takeover. God knows how many shows themed around racial injustice. God knows how many young black artists’ careers launched with the same academic jargon propelling them. Hell, David Zwirner was made so anxious by the amplification of BLM’s power that he opened an entirely new space, 52 Walker Gallery, in TriBeca to launch a new program helmed by curator Ebony L. Haynes that, at least at first, appeared to be a Zwirner space only for black artists (“David Zwirner Black”, a friend and I used to sneeringly address it as.) Recently, however, the gallery has “broadened its horizons” to include artists that aren’t specifically black (but still minorities, mostly) and claims to be centered around “Haynes’s focus on research based and conceptual practices.” No mentions of race made, curiously, almost as if the gallery is tacitly admitting that race as a gallery theme is both a dead end idea and, paradoxically, functionally racist.
I don’t believe that the success of any artist working within the gallery world is more a beneficiary of the last eight years of politics than filmmaker and installation artist Arthur Jafa. Jafa was already somewhat successful as a cinematographer prior to his entry to the art world. He did photography on films by Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and others. Hell, he even shot Eyes Wide Shut, which is stunning. He was clearly very good at it. Alas, in 2016, he introduced his seven-minute montage video/artist coming out statement Love is the Message, Love is Death.
It can’t be overstated just how perfectly timed this short clip, hilariously soundtracked by Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam” right before he went MAGA, was for the artist to rise above his station with the power of ideology gassing the tank. It was at the exact moment that white guilt had reached its absolute peak, and bourgeois art dealers and collectors were looking to off-load their rich boy shame onto anything remotely black. When this is the mode of thinking, talent becomes an after-thought. Because whatever skill Jafa had as a cinematographer doesn’t actually yield any actual conceptual or rigorous artistic thought in his art. Love is the Message, Love is Death is nothing more than a video montage of news clips, black stars singing, black athletes doing amazing shit, police beating the ever living fuck out of black guys and one girl, and so forth.