#arthur jaffa

[blakegopnik]

THE WEEKLY PIC: I feel pretty certain that video is the great medium of the last 20 years, used for our most important and impressive art. That’s why it has always struck me as strange that video still gets such short shrift in museums’ permanent collections: Go to any art museum and you’ll have plenty of chances for quiet contemplation of its paintings and sculptures; it’s unlikely you’ll get the same quality time with its videos.  Right now, the Metropolitan Museum has taken steps to reverse that  neglect. A whole floor of its Breuer building has been set aside to screen a number of contemporary videos that it owns, grouped under the title “The Body Politic.” Each piece has been given a room to itself and invites our undivided attention.

The images I’ve chosen for today’s Pic are from the piece that most impressed me. Called “Love is the Message, the Message is Death,” it was completed just last year by the artist Arthur Jafa. (He’s best known as a cinematographer.) In just about 7 minutes of found video clips, Jafa provides a compendium of some of the most harrowing, poignant and also uplifting moments in African American history, experience and culture. We get footage of the great Miles Davis and of Barack Obama, but also of cops aggressing young black girls and boys, and even little children. At one point a young woman’s voice asks why America’s love of Black entertainment can’t be matched by a love of Black people.

Jafa’s video gave me new access to that emotional and cultural split, and what it must be like to live deep inside it.

For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.

[dotmo]

“I mean, ​[Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death] is very much obviously concerned and preoccupied with black people being shot down like dogs, that’s for sure. But it’s also obviously about how magnificent black people are, you know? We are treated in a certain fashion and we respond in a certain fashion. And I think the way we respond is superhuman.” ⍆ Arthur Jaffa ⍅

[3lectricladyland]

Arthur Jaffa

[indierav-blog]

…Their anxiety was about the recognition of their powerlessness to control the perception of the black community. If you’re in a society where you’re the minority and you have no control over your own representation, and you know, too, that it’s a segregated society where most white people do not have intimate relationships with black people, whether it comes from white filmmakers or black filmmakers, they will take what they see as truth. There’s a certain part of the community that’s anxiety-ridden about this. They don’t want to just admit that, essentially, there’s a certain way in which blacks, the black community, and black people in general, always get stomped on around white presumptions about who black people are. It’s like, their lack of information becomes the starting point for the production of black representation. That interpolation really crushes black people.

~Arthur Jaffa, as quoted by bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies

[indierav-blog]

We don't associate black Americans with mysteriousness, because the social structure has always demanded that we put white people at ease. And if we don't put white people at ease, they don't know how to deal with us. It's like the dark, silent Negro who is the most frightening thing, because he must be the one who's plotting the slave revolt, though that might be the farthest thing from that person's mind.

~Arthur Jaffa, as quoted by bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies