One way into Arthur Jafa’s creative process is to understand he loves Michael Jackson —performer, visionary, iconoclast; jokester whose laughing sleights-of-hand have been submerged beneath tales of heartache, abuse, exploitation, untimely death . . . that wholly true grim narrative that’s not the whole truth. He (correctly) thinks Off the Wall is Jackson’s masterwork, that the spirit (and Spirit) captured through that album’s peerless pop are a kaleidoscope capture of Blackness that distills, redefines and catapults-into-the-stratosphere Black creativity. The Afros (surrealists, futurists, pessimists) are all correct in seeing themselves in Jafa’s work, but what we all forget sometimes when we engage his films, photos, sculptures, and installations is there’s a wicked sense of play in play, and beneath the exhumation and presentation of Black pain struggle and genocide is a boundless love of Black people & culture that cannot disentangle the flawless spin / crotch grab / moonwalk / laughing eyes / child prodigy / adult genius / hee HEE from the strange fruit / bombed churches / stolen land / rapes & castrations / forced labor & unacknowledged creativity / geniuses driven mad by the endless repetition of it all. It’s the falling in love with Blackness that makes Jafa high; it’s the being in love that makes him cry, cry, cry . . . —Ernest Hardy
Across three decades, Arthur Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artifacts and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are honored to present the artist’s first major exhibition in Los Angeles, marking his representation by Sprüth Magers, in the city where Jafa has built his career as a filmmaker and artist. Titled nativemanson, the exhibition highlights the range of his practice through recent wall works, sculptures and moving images, including his latest film, BG (2024).
The first work visitors encounter in the exhibition, BG seamlessly blends shots from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver—specifically its culminating, gut-wrenching brothel shootout—with re-edited and newly filmed passages that manipulate the original movie’s image and sound. In Jafa’s hands, Taxi Driver’s protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), moves through a sequence of killings of Black pimps and johns, rather than the white characters that appear in Scorsese’s film, in hopes of “rescuing” the preteen Iris (Jodie Foster).
This reworking, which unfolds in layered, unrelenting repetitions over the course of an hour, brings to life the original version of Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver script, in which those killed were written as Black. It also intersperses new scenes of the African American pimp, Scar (Jerrel O’Neal), murmuring and lost in thought, set to a looping phrase from Stevie Wonder’s love anthem “As.” BG thus makes explicit the racial animus that filters through Taxi Driver, as seen through Bickle’s antisocial, violent white lens, while also creating space for Black self-possession.
Other recent films demonstrate Jafa’s keen eye for montage, generating potent resonances and meanings by sequencing one image after another—many drawn from the vast compendium of collected images that informs much of his practice. SloPEX (2022) is a dirge-like, slowed down version of the artist’s celebrated film APEX (2013), stretching that work’s 8 minutes and 22 seconds to just over 33 minutes. Like a clock or a metronome, SloPEX’s stills move from one to the next, ticking time click by click: historical images, portraits of musicians and other cultural figures, artworks, and photographs of space and microbes; as well as the recurring forms of Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat and other animated creatures, along with humans clad in masks, face paint and sunglasses that seem to echo the characters’ features.
Jafa’s juxtapositions—this time of moving-image sequences, both found and filmed by Jafa—appear also in Dirty Tesla (2021). Fight scenes from the tabloid website WorldStarHipHop.com are interspersed with TikTok videos, interviews with Jean- Michel Basquiat and Michael Jackson (the latter for a grand jury), lyrical close-ups of other Black performers, and views of the sun and celestial bodies, merging visual grandeur with online grit.
The projections of SloPEX and Dirty Tesla are mirrored in the reflective black walls of Picture Unit (Structures) II (2024), an architectural passageway that translates Jafa’s assemblage impulse into three dimensions. As viewers enter the maze-like structure, they are met with a gruesome crime scene photo of Sharon Tate—calling to mind the wordplay in the exhibition’s title, nativemanson—and views of other celebrities who found both incredible heights and tragic ends. Though each image is expressive in its own right, Jafa’s selections tease out overlapping themes and narratives of artistic and personal freedoms, concretized in part through the repeated image of the motorcycle. Exuding their metallic, industrial power—and their ever present risk and danger— bikes appear on set with experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, with the characters of Easy Rider, and in the hands of Oakland’s East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club.
A motorcycle and bicycle frames also feature in Jafa’s new large-scale sculpture composed of metal rails (engineered by the artist), an array of pipes and weathered blue tarp. Untitled (2024) stages these hard and soft elements along the wall in a way that evokes a drawing in space, using the materials’ natural inclinations to stretch, bend and hang, while also coaxing them into unexpected configurations. Jafa’s sculpture nods to Minimalism yet through his own maximalist lens of varied textures and layered references.
Other wall-based works in nativemanson attest to Jafa’s inventive use of diverse mediums. Untitled_Grid, Sprüth Magers (2024) explodes his image bank across an entire wall, creating clusters of meaning that center Black life amid the backdrop of twentieth and twenty-first-century cultural touchstones. Like notes in a musical composition, Jafa’s original photographs mingle with appropriated images, posters and artwork, each presented in an artist-designed frame reminiscent of his industrial rails.
In paintings such as Blue Silence (2024), Jafa’s punctuated use of found images takes a new form; connected by passages of thick black brushstrokes and impasto are a worn, halo-like cover of Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (a portrait shot by photographer Lee Friedlander) opposite the cover of LeRoi Jones’ book Blues People and part of a “Xenomorph” head from the movie Alien, originally conceived from designs by the artist H. R. Giger. Epic Fail (2024) similarly overlays musical and artistic references, but employs a much different means of production. Picking up the vehicular theme from elsewhere in the show, vinyl car wraps are stretched over aluminum panel—the same wraps installed on Teslas and other cars across Los Angeles. At the center of a large periwinkle-blue field, Jafa reproduces two artworks that picture a type of failure, and were also used by famous bands: William Rimmer’s 1870 fallen-angel figure, Evening (The Fall of Day) —altered to become Led Zeppelin’s logo—and James Earle Fraser’s sculpture End of the Trail (1893), depicting a defeated Native American figure on horseback, later adapted for the cover of the Beach Boys’ 1971 album, Surf’s Up.
Epic Fail, like all works in nativemanson and throughout Jafa’s growing oeuvre, emphasizes his virtuosic use of associative meaning, whether through collected images or his own staged interventions. Bold and revelatory in their depiction of Black cultural production, Jafa's works across various media continue to drive conversations in contemporary art today.
Arthur Jafa (*1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) lives and works in Los Angeles. Jafa’s films have been presented at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals, and recent solo exhibitions of his artwork include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2024), LUMA Foundation, Arles (2023), Louisiana Museum, Humblebæk and Glenstone, Potomac, MD (both 2021), Fundação Serralves, Porto and Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (both 2020), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (both 2018), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main (all 2024), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Baltimore Museum of Art and 14th Gwangju Biennale (all 2023), Musée national des beaux-arts, Québec, Aspen Art Museum and Bangkok Art Biennale (all 2022), and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York, New Museum, New York and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (all 2021). In 2019, he received the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale.
