Episode 050 Arthur Jafa

Show Notes

This week on the show we’re in the artist’s studio visiting the one and only Arthur Jafa. From his extensive work in cinema, to his video art, sculpture, and other mixed media work shown in a contemporary art context – AJ’s work is often an embodiment of Black identity in America, and is in many ways a leader among a generation of artists creating defining a distinctly Black cinematic language. This extends as well into current projects on the more infrastructural / business side of the film industry in the form of his project Sun Haus. Visiting with AJ and hearing his story was a real treat, and it is one with many twists and turns – in our chat we trace his story all the way from growing up in Tupelo Mississippi in the 60s and 70s to today. and he takes us deeply inside the full kaleidoscope of influences, vibrations, and inspirations that he picked up along the way, and has integrated into his work as an artist and film maker: From gospel music – to James White and the Contortions, and from Oscar Micheaux to 2001 a Space Odyssey. Tune in to hear AJ’s story!

This episode is brought to you thanks the generous support of the Kramlich Art Foundation

Links from the conversation with Arthur Jafa
> SunHaus: https://sunhaus.us/
> Gladstone Gallery: https://www.gladstonegallery.com/artist/arthur-jafa/works

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Transcript 

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week, we are in the studio with an artist. 

[00:00:16] Arthur Jafa: Hi, I'm Arthur Jafa and I'm a artist and filmmaker.

[00:00:20] Ben: I have been wanting to sit down with Arthur Jafa on the show for quite some time now. AJ is one of those artists that is sort of a hub. It seems like so many of the artists I talk to know or have worked with him, been influenced by him or all of the above, from his work in cinema to his video, art, sculpture, and other mixed media work shown in a contemporary art context, AJ's work is often an embodiment of Black identity in America and in many ways, he is a leader among the generation of artists creating and defining a distinctly Black cinematic language. And as we'll hear in today's chat, this extends beyond his own work and deeply into the more infrastructural and business side of the film industry in the form of his project, SunHaus. I was really keen to sit down with AJ and hear his story because it's one that defies norms to say the least. And I had a lot of questions. For instance, on the one hand, from my naive perspective, it seemed like AJ popped up on the art world scene only relatively recently with his acclaimed to Love Is The Message when it debuted at Gavin Brown in 2016, and ever since he has taken on the art world by storm. But AJ also has this parallel life in film as a cinematographer, a director of photography and a director, having worked on some incredible things, including Daughters of the Dust, Crooklyn, Seven Songs for Malcolm X, music videos for Solange and much, much more. There are certainly more than a few artists who straddle, both presenting their work within the context of cinema, as well as the contemporary art world, but AJ is up there with the few that have done both to a very, very deep level. As you'll hear in our chat though, AJ is quite modest about his achievements. However, in this host's opinion, I think that the fact that very early in his film career, he won best cinematography at Sundance and in 2019, his contemporary art won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale speaks volumes. From gospel music to James White and the Contortions, and from Oscar Micheaux to 2001, A Space Odyssey, we cover so much ground in this chat and it was just so incredible to hear the full path of AJ's evolution from growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi in the sixties and seventies, all the way to today and the full kaleidoscope of influences, vibrations, and inspirations that he picked up along the way. Before we begin, though, I have some really exciting news that I wanted to share with all of you. I have been looking forward to sharing this week's episode with you not just because, well, Arthur Jafa, and not only because it's our 50th episode. But also because we have reached a great milestone. The show recently received a very generous donation from the Kramlich Art Foundation and thanks to their generosity we now have funding to ensure equitable speaking fees for our next 10 artists interviews. This absolutely wouldn't have been possible without the sport that many of you provided to support our past artists interviews and also your support just by tuning in each week. So in addition to sending a huge thank you to the Kramlich Art Foundation this week, I want to send a very big thank you to all of you for your support for the last 50 episodes. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Arthur Jafa. 

[00:03:48] Arthur Jafa: Inevitably, I always start off with Mississippi, cause I was born and bred in Mississippi. Oftentimes it would seem like people say they're from Mississippi and they mean their parents or their families are from Mississippi, but they actually want actually raised in Mississippi. I lived in New York for about 17 years and when I first got to New York It was really striking just how many people if they would hear you from Mississippi, they were like amazed you know what I, like actually from Mississippi, you know, northerners have some very funny ideas about being from the south. I really was raised in two places in Mississippi. The place I was born was Tupelo Mississippi, known to many people as a home of Elvis Presley. So I grew up hearing Elvis Presley on the radio and having people talk about Elvis Presley and things like that. But I grew up in Tupelo and when I was seven years old, my parents relocated to Clarksdale, Mississippi, which is in the heart of the Delta, the Mississippi Delta. In some ways, you know, it's hard to imagine at least in the Northern part of the state or the top half of the state, two places that could be as different as those two places were. Tupelo was the sort of model post segregated, Southern town and Clarksdale was you know, even though it was on the books, post segregated in practice, it was still pretty segregated, you know. I think the thing is if I had grown up, solely in either one of those environments, I'd be a very different personality, but I think it was the travel between the two on a essentially weekly basis for much of my life that I kind of think, defined certain aspects of my personality in particular I would say the sense of alienation or uh, being a stranger in a strange land a little bit, you know what I mean? I was always very, very conscious of context and how I fit into context and what was, you know, it kinda abnormalized everything for me in a way nothing was normal. When I was in Tupelo the kind of apparently easy interaction between whites and Blacks was something that I found very strange. But when I was in Clarksdale, the sort of almost like fundamental separation between whites and Blacks was something that I found a little strange as well. I think the flux between the two spaces is about as key an aspect of my temperament, personality, what I'm attracted to artistically or otherwise as anything. My first sort of interaction with aesthetics, you know, aesthetic values and stuff certainly, you know, are around Black music. The church I grew up in that I was born into was my grandmother's church uh, which was a Methodist church and you know, it was typical of many of the ideas about Black churches, the singing, the choirs, the ushers, all this kind of stuff. but when we relocated the Clarksdale after the first year there my parents moved I and my brothers to a Catholic school of private school and as a consequence of that, we started attending mass and eventually my parents converted and then ultimately, we kind of grew up inside of the Catholic church, even though the first church I knew, as I said, was a Methodist and or Baptist church in the case of my godmother and things like that. So also was that same thing as well the fluctuation between the Black church and the Catholic church was you know, whiplash. I would say my earliest two aesthetic experiences, I would say. And what I mean by aesthetic experiences, meaning not just an experience of like art or creativity or expressiveness, but an experience of art, creativity, or expressiveness, where one also was cognizant of the fact that this expression, was of an elevated sort. It wasn't a like kind of mundane or pedestrian expressiveness. It was something elevated. The earliest things I can really remember on my nervous system are kind of like Ray Charles and James Brown. My dad listened to a lot of Ray Charles. That's probably the first records I can remember him having. And James Brown was just such, um, omniscient presence in terms of Black popular music in the mid sixties going into the early seventies. I mean, I still think James Brown, the single most Olympian, Black music figure of the century, and being the single most Olympian Black music figure of the century means he was also certainly one, if not the most Olympian artistic figure of the 20th century. You know, that's consistent with my idea that Black music was the dominant cultural form of the 20th century, you know, so, my parents took me to a James Brown concert when I was really young, like three or four, maybe. I don't have any visual memory of it. I just remember the vibration of it, meaning not just the sonic vibration that he was producing, but the vibration of the people receiving the music and how people occupied that space collectively. You know what I mean? It's something that haunted me as much as one of my earliest memories was going to the world's fair in New York in 1964, which my parents took me to. And I would have this recurring dream for years of my parents having taken us the top of the empire state building and looking down, you know, at the streets from the top of the empire state building. Now another thing that had a really striking impact on me, in a more kind of closer proximity was I was at Howard university in the late seventies, early eighties, and uh, I was sitting in a library in the fine arts, department, and they had in addition to books, they had records. So I spent a lot of time just listening to things that I was interested in that I had read about perhaps, but didn't have access to like free jazz and things like that. But you In some way or another, I had took out a Mahalia Jackson record, don't know why uh, and was listening to it and had the strangest kinda response to it. I can still remember sitting in the library, listening to it. I was haunted by it. And I remember it took me about a week before I finally called my godmother Mrs. Hervine Reese and said, Hey, Ms. Hervine did, uh, did they ever go to church with you once Sunday? Cuz she, went to different church than my grandparents' church. And before I could even get it out of my mouth, she said, oh yeah. I brought you to church with me when Mahalia Jackson came to Tupelo and sang in my church and I wanted you to hear that, you know, and I can distinctly remember, I don't have any visual memory of Mahalia Jackson, but I remember listening to the singing that Sunday and thinking to myself in a very kind of inchoate kind way, but definitely thinking, wow, this is the same stuff I hear every Sunday, this is the same class of thing, but on a completely different level, you know what I mean? Just the resonance of it it was like, wow, this is a dinosaur, but this is a T-Rex and it wasn't like, I didn't grow up listening to gospel, but I used to listen to gospel music on television Oris Mays and things like that in the south, they had TV shows coming outta Memphis that would have gospel bands playing and stuff like that. But like not like records or anything. So I didn't know much anything about Mahalia Jackson, honestly. So when I sat in that library at Howard and heard that music. It really had a kinda, really intense effect on me because I, at that was the beginning of me thinking through like what aesthetics were. It wasn't just expressiveness. It was a class of expressiveness or values of beauty, values of expressiveness, stuff like that.

[00:11:57] Ben: You mentioned sitting in the library in fine arts department at Howard. So. I'm curious how you wound up there? Can, can you connect those dots for me? 

[00:12:06] Arthur Jafa: Well, I ended up at Howard because I would make a decision about where I, you know, where I was gonna go to school, you know, I was it's embarrassing to say a national merit scholar finalist and things like that. So I got a lot of scholarship offers, but I strange enough wanted to go Pratt Institute and they were not that interested. whatever my dad was like Princeton, and all these other places want you to come. Why won't you go there? And I just, I don't know. I just, you know, knucklehead and I was just like fixated and, you know, and like I say, the Pratt Institute, because I had just seen in a magazine of somewhere where they had like fashion designers coming outta Pratt, and then I knew they had an architecture program and things like that. So I think I was already sort of, interested in being in an environment where I could check out a lot of different things. You know what I mean? Even though I had always wanted to be an architect since I was, really young, like four or five. I never wavered. I always wanted to be an architect. And so I went to Howard to study architecture, my parents kind of decided okay, you're going to Howard. I didn't know much of anything about Howard. I think I would've probably at the time been not inclined to go to a HBUC just because I had some very sort of warped, you know, ideas at that point about Blackness and excellence and all these kinds of things. I think a big part of my motivation to go anywhere was just, I wanted to get as far away from Mississippi as I could, at that time I was really hell bent on getting out of the south anyway. So I didn't wanna go to Georgia tech. I didn't want to go to some of these other places that you know, were actively recruiting me and things like that. So I ended up at Howard and in many ways, it's the single best decision that my parents ever made for me. And not just because of Howard, Howard was a phenomenal place for a young person to go particularly coming from, you know, a deep south background. It's such a rich, repository and the Black thinkers and creatives who've come through Howard is, you know, like unparalleled, but the thing is it wasn't just Howard. It was DC. As I say, the Fertile Crescent, you know what I mean, Chocolate City, you know, I mean, it was a very Black place when I landed there, despite, it also being the capital and all that kind of stuff. It was a super Black city, and my experience of it. So, you know, I got there and it was just my best friend, Greg Tate used to always say, I was little like Forest Gump you know, I've always had a knack of just landing in interesting places and had an antenna for interesting stuff. So, when I think of DC in the time I spent there, I think of Howard and all the things I was exposed to there. But I also think of things like going to see the Bad Brains, a Minor Threat, you know, seeing the Bad Brains like I don't know, their fifth for six concert or something like that. I think they were Mind Power when I first saw them or something like that. So I saw 'em very, very early on seeing Black Flag come through the 930 club, you know, DC had a very intense music thing. I saw the Birthday Party, you know, I saw PiL I saw so many incredible things, you know, and then locally you had the whole, Go-go scene Trouble Funk and Rare Essence, Chuck Brown and Soul Searchers. My first intense exposure to reggae happened, in DC, it was the first time I was around anybody with dreadlocks, the first health food store I went to, you know, I can remember distinctly house sitting for a friend of mines, who was at Howard was a little older than me at the time. So it was the first time I spent any sort of solo time kinda off campus. So off of, you know, outside of Howard's footprint in a way. You know, and even just that weekend, the things I was exposed to, I remember me going to get the keys from her on a Friday, her walking over to the health food store the incense, the beans and shit in barrels, tofu, all this shit was super weird to me. Uh, At the time, you know, this is like, back in like 1980. So I just hadn't been exposed to stuff like that, you know? And, um, getting back to her house and having her pull away and just looking at her record collection and having like Alice Coltrane, I listened to a lot of weird shit. And she also had this book that Alice Coltrane had written called a monument eternal, which was a kind of autobiographical account that Alice Coltrane wrote about her experiences with Hinduism and spirituality after Coltrane died. Like all this sort of, it was very like Castaneda-esque experiences with Astro projection and different planes of reality. And, you know, so it was a very intense kinda weekend. So for me, that was very indicative of a lot of the things that I saw when I got to DC. DC had one of the most developed repertoire film theater networks, like in the US meaning, you know, at that time, like, you know, a Fellini film, well, how could you see a Fellini film? You couldn't see it on video and, you know, if you weren't in New York or something, it was really no way to see it when it came out. You know what I mean? Maybe you would see it on television. If you got lucky. The first time I saw 8 ½ was on television, sure. But all of a sudden I get to DC in the Circle Theater repertory chain, they would just print schedules like every three months and you could just tape it to your wall and, you know, they'd have the double features, The conformance and, Before the Revolution, we'll be playing for two days. And in the next two days, it would be like, Sergei Parajanov's films like Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in double feature with Solaris or something like that. You know what I mean? So I would just go put checks next to things that I was curious in seeing and when it came up, I would just go see things. So I spent an incredible amount of time just sitting in movie theaters, you know, which again, I say this is prior to having videos, where you could just pop things in when you wanted to see them. and it was just a incredibly rich and volatile experience of just being exposed to things, you know what I mean? And things that like, maybe in some instances I had read about, in other instances I hadn't and in a way I was like slowly weaving together the things that I grew up around, like I came to appreciate having grown up in the south, in the Delta, in Clarksdale in a way, you know, afterwards, after I was out of there in ways that I guess I probably couldn't have imagined, prior to going off to school and stuff. Sometimes I joke and say, Delta's like the Black Jurassic park, you know what I mean? It's like a place. Where Black, culturally speaking, you know, that live dinosaurs roaming around and I grew up in the midst of that. So, it's also a place where, you know, some of the more violent occurrences of the civil rights, struggle went down, you know, Emmett Till all these kinds of, a lot of that stuff happened, within the 200 mile radius where I grew up, you know, within 10 years prior to me being in those spaces. So this was like fairly recent, history, you know, when I was growing up in the south, in the Delta. You know, so it's a very charged environment. It was an environment where, you know, as I've said in the past, it's like, if Black music was the dominant culture form of the 20th century and Mississippi was ground zero for Black music, then that means Mississippi is ground zero for, you know, American culture in the 20th century. So it was an intense place to grow up. Culturally but psychically because of, I think the intensity of people's experiences who had grown up there, I mean the violence of it the sense of communion of it, you know, all these kinds of things. But I didn't really fully appreciate those things until I sort of got out of it in a way, you know, and, I got to Howard and just started reading intensely and having conversations with people who had very sophisticated and developed takes on what Blackness and Black culture was and was evolving into. You know, I heard the term Black power when I was in Mississippi, but by the time I got to DC, it had transformed evolved from Black power to Black consciousness. You know what I mean? When I talk about getting to DC and seeing things like, you know, going to American University, they had an American independent film program, but the screenings were open to the public. So you can go and say, I can remember one night seeing Peter Kubelka, Arnulf Rainer, Scorpio Rising and like, you know, Scenes from Under Childhood, Brakhage all in one night. So that's a very intense series of things to be exposed to for the first time. You know, you're going from a white light flicker film to, you know, Invocation of My Demon Brother, and then you could see those things in other places too. Like there was a space called the DC Space. And I remember seeing like, you know, Anger film programs there and things like that, you know, and then there was like the AFI was in DC, you know? So I remember going to see Hollis Frampton give a lecture and screen a bunch of films, like, you know, Magellan and I remember Gloria and things like that, so you know, it made the whole experience of being in DC, a very intense and kind of surreal experience in a way, you know what I mean? Cause you were just getting all this, um, input, in a way, you know, but that's how I was to go back to the vibration thing because more than anything, that's what I associate. You know, my early like twenties, you know, coming out of my teens into my early, you know, young adulthood I associated with being exposed to vibration, you know?

[00:21:56] Ben: Yeah. I don't know if you see it this way, but I hear this kind of very natural transition from a heavy influence of like music to film. You know, and I guess, as you're being exposed to all this incredible cinema, it sounds like you really latched onto that and it was like, really giving you a lot, did film I become the natural entry point for you for creativity? 

[00:22:19] Arthur Jafa: No, I don't think it was ever really like, you know, what you were gonna do with something as a career versus what was actually actively transpiring in your body in a way were two different things. Cause I was still very much studying architecture so, you know, I'm doing my architecture classes and stuff like that, but I'm going out and checking out all this shit, you know? And then at one point I was kind of like, well, I don't know if I want to do this architecture thing. And my parents were like, well, you're almost finished. You know, and I was like, yeah, I've been reading, you know, it was like Star Wars on the cover of like rolling stone magazine. And they're talking about college educated filmmakers, which is not something that ever occurred to me, you know, really actually proud of going to school. And my mom said, well, why don't you take some film classes at Howard while you're there, you know, for your minor and stuff like that. And just kind of stumbled down in the film department at Howard. And, you know, again, like this is a Forrest Gump thing, just sort of landed in ground zero in many ways, in terms of Black, independent cinema post mid seventies. I think it was ground zero other people might argue with it, but like the whole so-called UCLA rebellion to me is the greatest single, like effervescence of Black filmmakers who were thinking about Black cinema in ontological terms. That's how I would put it. They wouldn't necessarily put it like that, but you know, who were not just trying to make movies, but were really actively engaged with the question of what was Black cinema, what wasn't and what might it be, you know, which is maybe an even more important question to have. So I found myself studying with my mentor, Haile Gerima who was one of the three core members of, you know, the UCLA, so-called Black rebellion thing that would be Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima and Larry Clark, all of whom had a profound impact on my sense of cinema, and what it could be. And so, I mean, looking back on it now, it is crazy to think about it that Haile was just two years out of having left UCLA himself two or three years at the most. You know what I mean? So he was a very intense, very passionate professor to have and he also was friends, you know, Charles Barnett was his best friend. So very early on, I would see Killer of Sheep, like, we had the print so I can remember the first time it was shown to me and I was like, this thing is fucking slow. you know what I mean? Um, But you know, in time, just like, wow, this thing is really incredible. The first film by Oscar Micheaux I ever saw was at Howard. It was God's Step Children. Which is one of my favorite Oscar Micheaux films, but it was introduced to me by a professor there and he introduced the film by saying, now I'm going to show you what not to do, you know? and I remember looking at the film and thinking, yeah, this is pretty terrible, what he was saying, the colorism and things like that in it. But the first 15 and 20 minutes, I was like, this fucking thing is weird and interesting. You know what I mean? So I became very interested in who Oscar Micheaux was and, ultimately went to the Library of Congress and figured out that there were things they had then in collection that you could see, you just had to reserve them. I remember talking to um, staff there and them saying, well, anything that you see that you're even remotely interested in, just put it on the list because we have to pull it. And it's better to have more things than you have time to look at, and be able to go through those things. So I remember that one, it was like a week or two after we got out for the Christmas holiday. But before I went away, I spent like a week and a half going to the Library of Congress and just looking at as many Oscar Micheaux films as they had as much Stan Brakhage, as they had things like Edward O. Bland The Cry of Jazz, which, was just a title in the card catalog and I was like, what is this? I put it on the list, you know what I mean? So looking at, Kenneth Anger's films, looking at a bunch of Brakhage films that they had quite a few things. They were all prints at the library of Congress. So it was just like a 16 millimeter projector, and you would be in the little room and you would just, look at the prints. And then like articles and things. Like I remember pulling all of these like Oscar Micheaux had written in the Black newspapers, defenses of his films or articulations of what, he was trying to do and I remember reading stuff and saying, damn, this shit is so articulate. Like the things that Micheaux was talking about at the time, I thought were still like super relevant to, you know, the kinds of things that at that moment, in the early eighties seemed like uh, critical, for Black film. So it was a very, very intense moment for me, but that kind of moment was kind of perpetual, it just seemed at a certain point, and like, I said, in hindsight, DC was just an incredible place you know, to be at that moment in time.

[00:27:27] Ben: Yeah. One of the things that really fascinates me about you and your work is that. You know, although I think that there are more than a few artists who oscillate between the quote unquote film world and the quote unquote art world. I feel like you are one of the few artists and filmmakers I'm aware of who is incredibly successful at both. You know, it's like you have these kind of dual lives in a way and I guess I'm curious, you know, which came first, like, did you eventually just go and pursue your career in the film industry and work as a professional in that way, and then presenting your work within a contemporary art context came much later or how did that all unfold?

[00:28:12] Arthur Jafa: I always feel like the first thing I wanna do is like disabuse, people of PR or, things that people have seen before. I don't think of myself as having been that successful in film at all, it was just where I made a living. Like a lot of people, I mean, it was like a vocation in a way. I made work when I was at Howard in my early twenties I'm thinking of this one particular video film work that I made called Considerations, and it was the first thing that I sort of made that consolidated and I recognized my voice in it. You know? And in many ways, I feel like I've spent my entire career such as it is trying to negotiate my kind of um, confusion about what to do with it. It was too post Brakhage-eque in a way seemingly to have any sort of application in anything like what you would call a movie theater. I couldn't quite figure out what to do I knew it was an interesting thing and I knew it was my thing, but I kind of just put it aside. I mean, now it's the kind of thing you would just put on the internet. At the time I just sort of put it in the closet. Like once I sorta left Howard I never really finished, didn't graduate because Haile sent me out to work with Charles Burnett on his second feature, My Brother's Wedding. And, uh, I ended up being there for like four months, almost five months. Like I didn't get back to school that semester because I just got totally wrapped up in, you know, working on Charles' film. And then afterwards, Charles had been asked to direct a section of this film, that Third World News Reel produced called Mississippi Triangle, which was about the inter interactive relationship between white folks, Black folks, and Chinese folks in the Delta, and they had a Black crew of white crew and the Asian crew to go down and do the different sections and then they edit 'em together. And Charles asked me at the end of the summer, if I wanted to come down and, uh, work with him, on, on the Black section of the film, which I did because they were actually shooting in and around my hometown. So I ended up not getting back to DC too late to do school that semester. But, you know, coming back with a kind of very pronounced sense of what I was committed to doing, which at the time was being a filmmaker, you know, I mean, the architecture stuff had fallen by the wayside. I told my dad like dad, I think I'd rather be a failed filmmaker than a failed architect or something like that I remember saying to him but, um, I, think my freshman year at Howard, the east wing of the National Art Gallery at the had opened in DC, I. M. Pei had done the building and it was quite an acclaimed building at the time and architecture professor sent the students down to see the building, it had a Calder in the center of the building but there was a show of Rothko paintings. I almost wanna say they were from the Rothko chapel. I can't remember exactly, but they were very dark Rothko paintings and it just infuriated me. You know, I remember going up to see it and being like, this is utter bullshit. You know, this is just brown paintings, you know, and just being like angry this is white man shit, this is some white boy shit you know what I mean? This some bullshit, you know, and I could not get those things outta my mind. I must have gone back to see that show six or seven times. So like the architecture itself just receded, but Rothko still probably my favorite painter to this day just blew my mind, you know, in a way. And from that point onward, I sort of educated myself with regard to the history of, Western painting and art making and things like that. In the early eighties in 81, 82, my best friend, Greg had actually gotten a job at the Village Voice and had moved to New York and so I started quite frequently making a run from DC to New York. You know what I mean? few days here and there, it was my first time as a young adult being in New York. I had cousins in New York started oftentimes be in New York in the summer, but it was the first time I went up on my own volition. And that was just a really exciting moment to be in New York. You know, Hip Hop was happening, graffiti, you know, in the subways was intense, Basquiat, I remember going up to see James White and the Contortions, DNA and things like that, because I had bought those records down in DC, I remember buying the James White and the Contortions record in Georgetown, so I would be in New York and you would see, wow, DNA is playing and I would just go see them play, so it was a very intense, you know, again, Forest Gump kind of moment, you know, and then I went up and Greg had gotten to know and had worked with Linda Bryant who was always pretty mythic in our minds, but is becoming increasingly, more so now and is about to do a big thing at MoMA this year about JAM her art space Just Above Midtown gallery. She so closely associated with and, uh, sort of core member of, Dave Hammond's circle and things like that. So I met, David and Linda, at 20, when I was in New York and things like that and that's when David was mostly working in the streets, you know, and didn't have a art gallery and wasn't showing in the mainstream gallery stuff. So, you know, it was just an amazing moment to be there in New York and I remember very distinctly walking with Greg through the city very interested in the idea of being in art world in a way, you know, or interested in the energy that was around and I remember saying to him, you know what, I think I'm good. Like where I am. I mean, I just turned and said, I think I'm good. Meaning I was very excited about the kinds of films that I was starting to makle. And, uh, as much as I was attracted to not only Basquiat's success or access and the work, but attracted to the sort of implications of that success, you know what I mean? Like, wow, you could operate in the space. And as I said, I was very much an autodidact in this respect. I'd actually started to educate myself around, you know, the history of Western art, certainly in 20th century and just started to look at things, you know, again, it wasn't a split, like looking at an image like a moving image and then looking at a Seurat or Manet or Monet, you know what I mean? All those things were, closely intertwined for me. And then starting to think about Picasso and cubism and African art. Reading A.B. Spellman's book Four Lives in the Bebop Music and reading in particular, the sections on Orette Coleman and on Cecil Taylor had a profound impact on me because that was the first instance in which I was exposed to Black artists who were not just doing their thing at the highest level at the most intense, in many ways, noncommercial level, but also were theorizing about what they were doing. Orette had his whole harmolodic theory. Cecil had his whole African gold Black methodology thing, you know, and in particular reading Cecil had, in some ways the most singularly profound impact on my thinking around these things cause Cecil was so, well versed in the various manifestations of Black expressivity and Black cultural retention and things like that as anybody I've ever read. But at the same time, it wasn't narrow, you know, it was like that and Nijinsky and, modern dance and Martha Graham and all that, and in a lot of ways, it authorized me to be as Black as I wanted to be. But at the same time, not necessarily meant that that was closed off to anything else. You know what I mean? At a certain point, maybe I just gravitated to models, who made it right to being a Cecil Taylor and you know, music from Burundi and like the Birthday Party, you know what I mean? It just, wasn't a split for me. You know, I liked what I liked and I was always very interested in the notion of why I liked this thing or that thing. I was always interested in thinking through why I was attracted to the things that I was attracted to, but not necessarily trying to rationalize those things or authorize those things just was curious you know, why did I like PiL so much? Like in hindsight, It's obvious why I like PiL so much. The shit was funky as hell had dissonance, you know, had a bass player called Jah Wobble. You know what I mean? Of course I like, it was like the Sex Pistols crossed with Lee Perry or something, you know what I mean? So I think being surrounded by so many incredible instances of aesthetic actualization, emergent actualizations and not have anybody necessarily creating a hierarchy for me about it. So you know, I didn't necessarily feel like I had to choose between, Kenneth Anger and Tarkovsky or, Killer of Sheep and Stan Brakhage. But I always felt like my work was a very kind of organic reconciliation of any sort of fundamental tension between those things. You know what I mean?

[00:37:45] Ben: Yeah. It sounds like this exposure and just deep obsessive immersion and consumption of just like all of these different sources of creativity and different ways of making and different forms of culture, like this gave you this sort of confidence, especially it sounds like also because you had this vocation that you were now pursuing and you were like, there's this other way. I'm going to do this thing and that's okay. You know, the art world isn't the only option. So what we're talking about is still so long ago, and there's kind of some dots that I want to connect here because your work within what you know, let's call the contemporary art world. As far as I'm aware, and I might just be ignorant here. You know, it's my understanding that you popped up on that kind of radar in a big way with Love Is The Message The Message is Death, but that's not that long ago. So, I guess like what happened in those intervening years, you know, where you just kind of going all in on your career in film? 

[00:38:58] Arthur Jafa: Well, I would say like, a sketch of the trajectory was, uh, when I finished at Howard or when I dropped out, I married Julie Dash. We had a baby in 84 and I was very committed to this idea of, Black, independent cinema. We were in LA for a few years and then eventually moved to Atlanta mostly because my parents are there and we needed help with my daughter. And we sort of committed to producing Julie's uh, what turned out to be her debut feature film Daughters of the Dust. Initially we were gonna um, work with a professional cinematographer and, uh, we just had so little money that at a certain point. I just said to Julie, maybe I should do it, and she said yeah, I was hoping you were gonna come to that conclusion. So put my head down, you know, and kind of did it. I had shot a lot of shorts and things, but never anything in 35 millimeter. The only time I even touched the 35 millimeter camera was when I was loading film on Charles's project where I was, a camera assistant was just, loading in the film. So it was a big leap for me. I didn't necessarily envision having a career as a cinematographer. I was very much committed to being a filmmaker and uh, after we did daughters, it took us two years to basically get it finished, ran outta money because we just didn't know how to handle the money in, in hindsight, short version of it. Finally completed the film. It went to Sundance, which I didn't go, Julie went to, we just didn't have money for me to go as well. I'll never forget the call when she called me by and say AJ, guess what? And I was like, what? She was like, you won the cinematography award and I was like, what? It was crazy, cause I hadn't really shot anything since Daughters you know, I had started to work a little bit on documentaries and things like that, you know, and that slowly became my sort of vocation, how I kind of made a living. I mean, it was like the most lucrative thing I knew how to do. Most of the things that I shot were documentaries, a very close friend who very tragically died, very premature. Her name was Jackie Shearer she was a filmmaker. She's the first person I kind of remember actually hiring me to shoot something. She did a documentary on the 54th regimen for American masters on PBS. And that the first time I'd kind of been hired solo, you know, as a DP to shoot a documentary and once I moved to New York, it's essentially what I did and how I made a living, I shot for a lot of different people. Eventually daughters came out and Spike, initially he and Ernest Dickson came to a very, very early private screening of Daughters. As they were going out, said, great work AJ you wanna work with us? And I was like sure and I forgot about it and then I got a call later that week from Spike's office 40 Acres saying hey, look, we're following up because Spike is interested in you working on Malcolm X. I was like, what? Malcolm X? What? Like what, what? And he said, they're interested in you working as a second unit director of photography. And I was like, what? Cause when spike said it, I kind of thought he wanted me to work as a gofer or something, you know, as an assistant, I really did. It never occurred to me because it wasn't anything I was necessarily pursuing, and I was, often you can be as autodidact like insecure. I knew what I knew, but I didn't know what, I didn't know. I suspected I didn't know a lot. So I worked with Spike and Ernest somewhat tumultuously on Malcolm X. And then eventually afterwards spike asked me to shoot Crooklyn, which was an incredible career opportunity, you know, at the time. I was shooting commercials and music videos with Spike, and he asked me initially to shoot Crooklyn and I turned it down and said, wanna shoot features, you know? But in that way, that Spike is super persistent, you know what I mean? He kinda convinced me and, uh, you know, it was a tough shoot for me. I mean, I think, yeah, we both would admit it was a tough shoot, you know, and a really close friend of mine said he asked Spike at one point, why do you think it didn't work out with you and AJ? And he just said, Spike said, AJ just needs to be making films. Which I think was a very, you know, wise and astute observation, about me at the time. So I kind of came outta Crooklyn with a certain amount of momentum, I guess I would say. And attempted to manifest some technical things that I had been thinking about for a while. And so spent a couple of years trying to raise money, buy hardware and computer and things like that and failed miserably at that. That's why I say when people say I was successful in film, I started laughing. This was like the golden age of making music videos. You know what I mean? MTV finally had started to wholly embrace Black music videos. Not just Michael Jackson and maybe one or two other things, but, you know, you had Yo MTV Raps that transformed MTV. There was so much money floating around to shoot music, videos and stuff. I was interested in directing, but working, I guess, as a cinematographer and never really had that much success at it. I mean, certainly not as a director, I was never able to really convince anybody to let me do what I wanted to do. And I remember pitching really hard to different people. But I, sort of cobbled together, you know what I mean, a career such as it was. I would say by the time you start to get to the late nineties, I had gotten very, um, demoralized around the film thing. It just didn't seem like there was any space for me to kind of do the things that I was kind of interested in doing, you know. That in combination with my own, issues, mental health issues limitations, personality, limitations, and things like that, just couldn't quite figure out how to navigate it in a sense and, uh, got super demoralized and just said, fuck this film thing. I don't wanna do this. I'm gonna do the art thing. You know, and pretty much within six months of saying, I want to do the art thing. Had my first show selected for the Whitney biennial pretty quickly got offered a solo show, which I turned down because as I said to the dealer at the time, I don't think I'm ready for a solo show, I'm not even sure what I'm doing, you know what I mean? But I'm gonna get back to you, you know? And uh, had some relationships with folks in the art world, which were incredibly supportive, like, you know, Okwui Enwezor introduced me then to Hans Ulrich, Valerie Cassel was one of the first people to sort. She sent me out to Artpace to do a residency that was a tremendous opportunity. Larry Rinder was one of the curators at the Whitney biennial and then became the head of the Whitney uh, museum at the time and was a incredible supporter. But what I found very quickly was that I just didn't like the art world. And again, I remember saying something to Greg, like I think I'd rather be a failed filmmaker than a successful artist because I just got tired of things. Like it was super emblematic to me, like being invited to these parties on the up east side of just being on the Black face there. It just sort of, sort of wore me out at a certain point because I mean, it wasn't just the fact that I was the only Black face there was the fact that I felt like there was a tacit understanding that I would make a big deal of being the only Black face. So you had to pretend as if the shit was normal, you know, or else you would make everybody else uncomfortable and cramp everybody else's having fun. So very difficult to do the things that inevitably happened at parties network. I just was super alienated from it, super turned off by and just kind of walked away from it. Even though I had some very quick, early success. A really good friend of mine, Malik used to say like, even after my art thing jumped off, he said, oh yeah, AJ could have done that 20 years ago. Like in many ways the art context was a better context for me, temperamentally whereas the film thing. It was just always at odds. You know what I mean? Like you know, I like, Tarkovsky and Stan Brakhage and I was utterly committed to Black cinema. So you combine all those things into one, stew and it's like, not something that Hollywood was that interested in, you know what I mean? So the art thing just, I was like fishing the water in a way, you know, initially, and then ultimately, as I said, I was like stepped away from the art thing after two or three years, you know, and just said, nah, not looking back and didn't look back, just went in on the film thing, but didn't have much more success kind of bottom out around 2010 uh, rock bottom, had some things happen, navigated them somewhat successfully. I'm giving a somewhat evasive and schematic articulation of that period in my life, but definitely hit rock bottom, fought my way out of it with support, you know, and love from people in my life, friends and stuff, through Kahlil. He'd been asked to do a project for ZDF around the March on Washington, the 50th anniversary was coming up. So they had two nights of programming set ZDF in Germany and ARTE and they had asked Kahlil to do a project, which he turned out didn't have the time to do. And before he gave it back to him, just handed it off to me said, are you interested in this? I was like, yeah, I didn't even know what it was, but I was just kinda like, I'm not gonna kind of go backwards. You know what I mean? So I um, just wrote up a crazy treatment about how I wanted to approach it. I look back on it and I just think like, what were they thinking? But I think mostly what they were thinking was like, they just didn't have a lot of time and Kahlil had kind of, sort of signed off on it, you know? So I got to do it with little, no oversight, got to do what I wanted to do. It showed that the Black Star Film Festival showed at the New York Film Festival. I felt at best, it might get me some work in commercials or something like that. You know what I mean? And was hired to do a thing for Google, which went south really fast. Found myself, twiddling my thumbs in New York, uh, with nothing to do and, uh, put Love Is The Message together in about two hours. And then spent another two months after that, like fiddling with it. You know what I mean? A week and a half or so after I had edited that first version of it, I saw Kanye on, uh, Saturday Night Live and the second song he performed was Ultralight Beam. So interesting. So put the music on afterwards, edited, tweaked it a little bit afterwards and just started showing it with friends with the intention of putting it on YouTube and all of my friends, Khalil, probably more forcefully than anybody else said. Do not put it on YouTube. Do not put it YouTube, but I was like, but I wanna put it on YouTube so that people can see it. Don't put it on YouTube. Don't put it on YouTube. But Kahlil had a copy of it and uh, had, started to screen it at the Underground Museum prior to their, they have this summer screening, where they would show all kinds of things, but had started to show it as a kind of, you know, how they used to have the short films before the feature things he would show Love Is The Message. And I remember going up to the Underground Museum, for I think a Chris Marker film or something. I never forget this guy standing at the door, a dreadlock white guy and saying much respect brother. And I was like, Like, I didn't know what he was talking about. And then it became clear that he had been screening the film prior to the films in the series. And um, then he eventually was at art Basel in, uh, Switzerland showing his cut, the director's cut of Lemonade, which he had directed for Beyonce. I guess he screened Love Is The Message before that with no preface. And Gavin Brown was in the screening room. And as he said, fell out of his seat and rushed up to Kahlil afterwards and said, what the fuck was that, that you showed before Lemonade? He said, yeah, that's my friend AJ's thing, that's my boy's thing. So Gavin basically tracked me down, you know, a few weeks later talked about coming out to LA for us to meet. And I was like, oh, I'll be in New York in a week or so I'm shooting a documentary. Why don't we just get lunch or something afterwards shot the documentary. Went up to Harlem where Gavin's space was still under construction, met with him, ended up talking four or five hours. He called me first thing, the next morning said, I think we should do this. I said, do what? He said. Well, first of all, I think we should show this video. I said, well, you wanna, include in a group show or something next year? He said, no, I just wanna show the video by itself, which I couldn't quite get my head wrapped around. You know, you can have a show of one piece a video, no less. Uh, and I said, when he said in two weeks. What? It's crazy to me and it opened about three weeks later, you know? And, uh, just went the way it went, you know? And even today, You know, I oftentimes get like younger people in particular who know a little bit about my history as a filmmaker or my sort of, participation in the Black independent film culture thing. And they'll say you, you seem to have chosen the art thing over the film thing, you know? And do you think that's a more viable context for Black filmmakers, and I always laugh and just say, well, I didn't choose where the art world sort of chose me. You know, fell off a bus and bump my head and landed in the art world, you know.

 I remember seeing this show, these two filmmakers Nick Relph and I forget his partner's name. They showed these films at Gavin's space, downtown in Chelsea and uh, I remember going in there and thinking like, this is interesting, and this can show in the art context, because they just seemed like sort of the documentaries, you know, but it had a profound impact on me in terms of what I came to understand was possible to present in the art context, even though as again, like I said, when I did Love is the Message, it was the furthest thing from my mind. You know what I mean? It just never occurred to me, like, oh, you should try to show this in art context, it just never occurred to me. But you know, things like Douglas Gordon's things, you know what I mean like where he would just show a clip from Taxi Driver that was that moment where people were using film clips as like sort of readymades a little bit. You know, I had to get my head around that a little bit, the presentation of Douglas Gordon's work in the art world more than anything probably made me kinda understand how many of my interests, made sense in the art world as it was becoming, and maybe now is currently kind of constituted, you know, but then this is other thing too. When I used to contemplate being in the art world, I was the first thing I was thinking about was video. You know, I was thinking about, the kinds of things that, my favorite artists were doing, you know, my favorite artists were like on one hand, the whole Black art thing, which was like a Negro baseball league. You know what I mean? David Hammonds, Jack Whitten, you know, Noah Purifoy, there were things that I had seen that had a profound impact on me in terms of just artifacts and stuff. Even I remember as far back as uh, the late eighties, early nineties, when we were working on Daughters, going down to South Carolina, to scout locations and landing in the house of this woman, Vanessa Green, who we had met down there and she had this book of African aesthetics, and it had all this Yoruba sculpture and stuff in it and it blew my mind, like as profound or sort of, encounter as like maybe seeing 2001, you know, just seeing those sculptures and just filling them on my nervous system. And said, oh shit, I might have to choose. You know what I mean? Like it occurred to me then that I might have to choose between the art thing and the film thing. And this is like I said, this is 10 years after hitting New York and Basquiat and all this kind of stuff. And this is like, after Jean-Michel had died, because part of me saying, I think I'm good where I am. Wasn't just in terms of the work, it was like a kind of, I dunno if it was just intuitive, but largely intuitive or gut understanding that I might be talented enough to function in that context, but I had nothing like Jean-Michel's ability to navigate it. And uh, you know, he navigated it to a point, then it destroyed him too. And I was always a person who, you know, I was always more interested in being Mr. Spock than captain Kirk, you know, So I was a lot more Vulcan I think. I mean, Jean-Michel and I are like two weeks apart, age wise. And I think so often about him and, you know, if he had survived and what he could have produced but you know, it's like Charlie Parker or Miles Davis, you know, I would always pick a Miles Davis trajectory over Charlie Parker. And then Charlie Parker trajectory is more what Jean-Michel kinda um, I dunno if I would say he committed to it, but he kind conjured it, you know, he would often say things like, I want to be the Charlie Parker of the art world, the Jim Hendricks of the art world. And I had enough sense of my own limitations to never conjure things like that, you know? cause I just knew I wasn't equipped to survive the context. I wasn't equipped to survive the context at 40, like I was like, oh, this shit will destroy me. So I, gotta leave this, fucking shit along. But like I said, it just sort of tracked me down in a way. You know, I talked to Barbara Gladstone about this quite a bit, in getting to know her in the last year and a half, two years, much of what I, discussed with her was, you know, what it means to be a old artist who emerges, and , how it affects how you operate, how it affects how you understand what you're doing, you know? The majority of the work that I've made, certainly the non-video work. Everything else that's not video in many ways are ideas that I had developed thought about very intensely 20 years ago. I mean, there's a kind of Rip Vanwinkle-esque quality to my art career such as it is. You know, I definitely feel like a person who woke up in a way from a deep sleep, you know?

And I can talk about this a little bit because it's things I talk to Gavin, you know, and Barbara about like one of the qualities I think of my work is a weird, a little bit atypical combination of some of the energy that we associate with youth, you know, with like people who are emerging in their art careers, but in combination with a little bit of the gravitas you get when you've done things or thought about things for a long time. You know what I mean? It's a weird combination, you know, of things that I don't think it's that typical, typically as you get wiser and more versed and understand what it is you're trying to do, you have a little bit less energy, but then you can do more with the energy that you have as you get older. But I, I still think of my thing as being pretty emergent and pretty volatile. And it's only been, you know, six or seven years since Love is the Message. So, I'm not sure I have much sense of what my ceiling is. So I'm pretty certain that nobody else knows or where I'm going. It's a little unpredictable, you know?

[00:59:03] Ben: I love that. 

[00:59:04] Arthur Jafa: Yeah. And that's just the art thing. That's not even in the film thing, which is something that's, very, very quickly 

approaching, you know, 

[00:59:12] Ben: So, like I was telling you before, the only piece of year is that I've had the privilege of working hands on with, as a conservator. Is, akingdoncomethas. And uh yeah i was hoping to kind of dig into that piece a bit.

[00:59:28] Arthur Jafa: I mean, basically in a nutshell, it was in some ways a response to the response to love is a message, you know, I started to feel a little ambivalent about the kind of um, seemingly uncritical response to it, like positive response to it. The kinda overwhelming response to it just created a kind of ambivalence in me about the actual work itself. You know what I mean? I used to say it was like a kind of microwave epiphany about Black culture or the state of Blackness, you know, from the art world that I certainly never imagined. And in some ways it sort of actively pushes against the goals against some of my sort of fundamental understandings of the kinda inherently alienated quality of Black art and Black expressivity and Black people in general to society at large. You know what I mean? So there's a way where I started asking myself, like, is Love is the Message fucked up because too many white people like it, you know what I mean? So what's that about particularly something that figures or features so prominently, like Black death in it, you know what I mean? I started to have some real sort of ambivalence about it, so. Kind of very intuitively I moved towards making something that was very much antithesis of love is the message. There were no shortcuts. There was very little sort of, you know, Dziga Vertov-esque editorial sequencing, you know what I mean? It just feels very much like a mix tape or something that was just strong together, you know? I also like put it in a show and so my whole thing was like, this is evidence of Black expressivity at its very, very, very highest frequency. And I used to say, I would often look at it to just measure what I was doing against that. You know what I mean? To me, it required a certain amount of nerve to have an extended thing that had people operating at such a high level expressively. And have it in proximity with, the things I made, so to speak, and you know, and I was thinking about everything from Zidane you know, like Douglas Gordons and um, Philippe's film Zidane you know what I mean? Like, And Warhol and all the things that I always think about, and very much Gerhard Richter, you know, that E.V. Hill sermon in the very beginning of the film it's so blurry, you can't see what the people are doing in the wide shots. And I was like, yeah, it's like the Baader-Meinhof paintings. You know what I mean? 

[01:02:03] Ben: Yeah. Like 100% actually you touched exactly on, a kind of nerdy question that I have for you. One of the things that I've always wanted to ask you about that piece is, you know, you being a professional within the film world, a DP and a cinematographer, obviously you are highly attuned to image quality. But in that piece, you know, everything is appropriated of course it's ripped from the internet and it's highly compressed and there's a lossiness. So I was just curious like does that have any kind of significance to you or meaning in the work

[01:02:40] Arthur Jafa: Yeah, but on a very imminent kinda level, you know what I mean? It's not a deep thing. It's just, more indicative of my sort of very intense ambivalence about notions of quality. I mean, the most thought provoking, maybe productive thing any artist has ever said to me, That I remember as such was like in 99 or 2000, I was in the first international art show I was ever in. There's a show called Mirror's Edge. That was curated by Okwui Enwezor. And, um, when I went over to, UmeÃ¥ Sweden for the opening of the show, I ended up on a panel and I was sitting next to Thomas Hirschhorn. And, uh, he said something I never forgot. He said "energy, yes. Quality, no." I've never forgotten it. You know? And I feel like oftentimes the things that people say to you that strike you are the things that are crystallizing, something that you're already thinking about. You know what I mean? And so that energy yes, quality no, is something I'm like committed to on a very deeply situated ideological and spiritual level. You know what I mean? So as much as I certainly have a very finely tuned sense of, you know, what technical excellence looks like in film terms, I feel like it's very expanded. You know, my favorite cinematographers would be like Gordon Willis and Néstor Almendros, like on one hand, but the same time, you know, I don't know if anything they ever did had as much impact as Scorpio Rising, where quality of the image has very little to do with any sort of technical quality of the image. You know, Kodachrome that film stock that he used on, um, Scorpio Rising is a phenomenal chaneler of energy or something, you know what I mean? That actual film stock, the way the film grain moves around the way the chromatic you know, construction of film, stock functions, all that's really incredible, but it's not like fine grained. It's not like IMAX or something like that, you know? So, I like to think that my interests in those kinds of things are almost, to reference somebody who I sort of have a love, hate relationship, mostly love relationship. Like almost you know, Peter Gidal-esque materialist film sorta take on these things. Like you take these things and you divorce them from any kind of objective hierarchy of image quality. You know what I mean? And you just take it as a material thing. I used to laugh you know, even as far back as Love is the Message, when people were saying to me, like, you know, we can get this clip without the logos, like the watermarks and stuff. And I was like, why? It's not gonna stop the film from functioning. And maybe it's cool, you know, that you can see that these things are reappropriated. Reappropriation, wasn't the point, but it doesn't mean I'm not utterly aware of that aspect of, you know what I mean? One of my central metrics of a work being successful is that it is discrepant, you know, Kerry Marshall said when I asked him, what's the difference between painting and photography. He said, discrepancy, and if you're reading Nathaniel Mackey's writing on discrepance and things like that, you see, like for me, the analogy I've always used, you wanna make a work. That's powerful enough that if a Muslim stood in front of it, they would fall to their knees. But if a Christian stood in front of the same thing, they would fall to their knees or Zen, Buddhist would fall to their needs. Like, how do you make a thing? That's not singular in its, um, signification you know what I mean? But is flexible and complex and dialectical and discordant and discrepant, as a thing can be, you know, and that to me is very much in keeping with certain aspects of Blackness ontologically, the mix. You know what I mean? The miscegenant thing, all these kinds of stuff. So to me, akingdoncomethas was very much always that, it was always like, a series of Gerhard Richter paintings, strong together at the same time, it's a music video and a music documentary and, uh, kind of, uh, sociological treatises, on, Black spirituality, uh, when one of my best friends saw it, the first person I actually showed it to first thing she said was like, if I didn't know any better, AJ, I would think you were a believer. And we both laughed when she said that, cuz she tells I'm not, I'm a heretic or heathen and um, so I don't believe in this, Judeo Christian theology or anything like that. I mean, even though I was raised in the church, as I said but I do believe in Black people, believing you know what I mean? So in some way it's a study of not what Black people believe, but how Black people believe, you know, which I think is at the core of a lot of what I'm trying to get at in my work in general, what is the nature of how we believe and what is that superpower? Cause I do think it's a superpower because I think our ability to be able to imagine something into actual being has been, in some ways, certainly a critical, if not , the key to our ability to be able to survive, the Americas, you know, our experiences as people of African descent in the Americas. 

[01:08:10] Ben: So you have taken us on this incredible journey through your evolution as an artist and a filmmaker. But I'm curious AJ you know what is exciting you in the studio these days

[01:08:23] Arthur Jafa: Uh, you know, I got two things, you know, I'm, I'm still working to reach, not so much a reconciliation, but a more complex actualization of my two in some instances, polar, but maybe in other instances, unified interest in art and cinema. And in this sense, it's pretty consistent with, one of my, and I think this might be generational more than anything, like greatest artistic models than that would be obviously Andy Warhol you know, who both made incredible art paintings and things like that, but also made incredible films, so I never fundamentally accepted it as a split, you know, but I am definitely increasingly moving towards something very much like what you would call a movie. So I started a film company. We are just about halfway through our second year and, uh, it's called Sun Haus and it's very much set up to actualize a lot of my long standing interest in and commitment to , how to create an appropriate frame for platform for Black cinema. We've developed a lot of projects we're super excited about. I'm gonna direct my first feature in the late spring. It's very much with my long standing goal to create, you know, a film company model like Motown to a certain degree, to a very large degree. And on the art tip I'm, you know, interested in continuing to imagine new things to make things that I imagined a long time ago to be open to opportunities that arrive contingently, you know, I've kind of committed to creating a large scale piece, sculpturally certainly most ambitious thing I've ever attempted for the Bourse de Commerce for 2024. Very ambitious project in conjunction with doing some curating around the collection, you know, the Pinault collection and, you know, I've never really had a show in Paris. So it'll be my first big, large scale show in Paris. Yeah. So like in a nutshell, those are two things you know I want to keep surprising myself, I want to keep surprising the context in a way, you know, on the art thing, but also very much wanna make movies, you know, and sometimes people ask like, like art films, I'm like, no, like movies but also not with a narrow sense of what that is. Not necessarily Warhol's Empire, but you know, but not like, uh, Merchant and Ivory either, you know? 

[01:10:58] Ben: That's a lot of exciting stuff. That's awesome. So I wonder is there any advice that you'd like to leave here for maybe up and coming artists who are listening to the show?

[01:11:11] Arthur Jafa: I'm always hesitant to give people advice. Basically all I can kind of say is like, you just have to stay on your path, you know, and be committed to your bliss and the things that you're excited by. And those things invariably have to exist independent of whether, you achieve any sort of commercial success. Easy enough for me to say now, because you know, I'm succeeding commercially at the moment, but by and large, I think and maybe this is metaphysical more than anything, like one of the reasons I'm succeeding is because I've demonstrated, you know, the hard way, how committed I am to my particular vision of, what Black art, Black cinema, and, you know, AJ's actual artistic visions look like, you know, I'm committed to that independent of anybody else's, response either positively or negative, you know, and increasingly I like to say, my metric of successful work is work that is like mount Fuji, is that a good mountain or a bad mountain? It's a kind of absurd questioning, and what I mean by that is you know, is Mount Fuji a good mountain or a bad mountain, a beautiful mountain or ugly mountain, a excellent mountain or not excellent. You know what I mean? It's an absurd frame, I'm just more interested in things that are specific and concretely related to, and attempting to, in some ways render, or embody what it feels like to be me, and so it's not so much, any kind like empirically good or bad, it's, beyond a kind of value judgment of it. You know, Obviously people are gonna like certain things and not other things but from my point of view, I'm just really trying to make a thing that has a certain height sense of maybe ontological integrity or something, you know, that it's a thing. And it's a thing above and beyond what you or anybody else thinks about it?

[01:13:22] Ben: Well, Arthur Jafa thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was incredible. And just like, really nice to connect the dots with a lot of the parts of your story that I didn't know. And, um, yeah, just great to get to know you.

[01:13:35] Arthur Jafa: Okay, great. Same here, talk to you soon. Peace.

[01:13:38] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's show. As always, you can find the full transcript and show notes over at artandobsolescence.com. If you want to help support our work, there are multiple ways to do so over at artandobsolescence.com/donate, including our Patreon which unlocks access to all kinds of exclusive content, outtakes, and looks behind the scenes of the show. Art and Obsolescence is a sponsored project at the New York Foundation for the Arts and support for this episode was generously provided by the Kramlich Art Foundation until next time have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.