Arthur Jafa’s Odyssey of Appropriation

I was reminded of “2001” in the show’s opening rooms. In Kubrick’s prologue, an ape realizes that a bone can be used as a weapon, then flings it into the sky, where it pinwheels and suddenly becomes a spaceship, the narrative leaping forward millions of years. It’s the old Freudian lesson of civilization as sublimated aggression, and Jafa seems keen to rehearse it. “Ex-Slave Gordon” (2017) is a plastic sculpture based on a famous photo of a man who escaped a Louisiana plantation, his back covered in scars from being whipped. The man isn’t humanized or made whole by the incarnation; the plastic makes his wounds look chintzy, like a wall ornament you could buy on Temu. The implied critique, that Black suffering is just another commodity in our online superstore, is produced by transforming an image of nineteenth-century violence into contemporary kitsch. That’s Jafa’s go-to method when creating objects in two or three dimensions. Like the time warp of the rotating bone-ship, his work entangles opposites across a historical divide, generating friction between an old medium and a new image, or vice versa.

Jafa launched his career as a cinematographer, and if you go back to his early work there are traces of the future video artist. At the start of Spike Lee’s “Crooklyn” (1994), for which Jafa served as the director of photography, the camera flits around Bed-Stuy, showing un-narrated snippets of life: children racing down the street, jumping rope, and playing hopscotch; adults looking out windows or chatting in the sunshine. The critic bell hooks, in a review of the film, noted how Jafa’s sequence subverted the typical suffering of Black characters in American cinema, depicting instead the pleasures of Black life. Jafa has said that he doesn’t do remedial art, that he sees himself as more of an “undertaker” than an uplifter, but at the New Museum there’s plenty of exuberance and uplift—such as “akingdoncomethas” (2018), an hour-and-forty-five-minute video of gospel choirs and church sermons spliced together. Admittedly, the gospel footage turns into something oversweet, and is punctuated by three minutes of California wildfires. (“Crooklyn,” too, is ultimately a film about death.) If part of the message is about love, it’s always, for Jafa, a love that leans toward the grave.

Massimiliano Gioni, who was recently named director of the New Museum, has described the installation as a “freestyle” hang. One room has a charmingly drunken salon-style layout, with pictures suspended at random heights; another has a dozen or so large cutouts of artists and intellectuals (Sid Vicious, Miles Davis, Foucault) stuffed along one wall; on the fourth floor, there’s even a full-sized Pontiac Firebird. The show feels like a cross between a teen-ager’s paradise and a regional-history museum in the process of deinstallation. There’s also an enormous maze that winds through one room, with an exterior clad in black acrylic—so that it looks like a Minimalist sculpture—and an interior lined with images. The maze is dimly lit, so you’re restricted to blurry glimpses of the art: a large ear, a massacre, a reproduction of Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” a self-portrait. For decades, Jafa has cut out and collected anything in magazines that’s caught his interest, and here he recodes the cool indifference of Minimalism with a personalized collage. It’s a bit like cracking open a Donald Judd only to find a scrapbook inside.