Arthur Jafa's New Museum Survey Rejects“Austerity”

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Artist Arthur Jafa, 65, has unveiled a new survey exhibition at the New Museum titled“I Am Tony,” which diverges from traditional, austere museum presentations. The exhibition, which opened recently, features films, video installations, paintings, wallpapers, sculpture, and photographic objects spanning nearly 40 years of his career, filling two floors of the museum.

Jafa told CULTURED a few days after the opening that he is no longer interested in the conventional“austerity” favored by standard museum shows.“I've done them,” he stated.“I just don't want to do it anymore.” Instead, he advocates for an approach he calls“besidedness,” where elements are“freely embodied, rather than constrained by imposed conceptual infrastructures, whether they be historical, aesthetic, or even just fucking interior design.”

The survey includes significant works such as Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death ( 2016 ), which brought him widespread recognition, and The White Album ( 2018 ), for which he received the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Jafa conceptualizes the exhibition as an exploration of sequencing, intentionally avoiding a prescribed route for visitors. He remarked that viewers can“do the show backwards, or on hands and knees, or upside down.”

Black music serves as the“paradigmatic structure” for the Tupelo, Mississippi-born artist, and the exhibition is named after Tony Williams, the polyrhythmic jazz drummer who collaborated with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Jafa distinguishes between rhythm and pacing, explaining that pacing relates to how quickly and deeply a viewer can absorb an image. He illustrated this with his works APEX ( 2013 ), which is not in the current show, and SloPEX ( 2022 ). While APEX features a metronomic sequence of stills set to Robert Hood's techno, SloPEX reuses those stills, slows them down fivefold, and removes the color, demonstrating his interest in re-contextualizing existing material at a new tempo.

Jafa elaborated on his concept of pacing during the interview.“People have asked me about rhythm, but not pacing,” he said.“They aren't quite the same thing. Pacing, in my mind, is somehow bound up with rhythm's relationship to the audience's ability to perceive what is in front of them. Rhythm is more strictly a formal or metric dimension. I'm very, very interested in how quickly or slowly or deeply or shallowly an audience apprehends or can process images.” He added that his primary challenge as an artist is to hold a person's attention,“almost above and beyond the quote-unquote content of the work.”

Regarding SloPEX as an experiment in distortion, Jafa confirmed that he changed none of the images from APEX, only slowing down the sound and visuals fivefold and removing color to create a more consistent visual field. He recalled showing the slowed-down version to Gavin Brown, who responded,“Oh, wow. It's definitely something.”

Jafa favors open LED presentations for some works, which allow visitors to move freely without needing darkened rooms or light and sound locks, unlike a traditional“black box” setup that can create a“dead end.” However, for works like Love Is the Message, headphones are necessary to prevent a“cacophony” from its audio components, such as Kanye's“Ultralight Beam.”

The artist noted that the“DJ and the selector” significantly influenced the exhibition's installation. He recounted that when he first presented his model for displaying the works, most outside his team found it excessive.“Less is morbid, in my opinion,” Jafa stated, citing Amy Sillman's 2019 MoMA exhibition“The Shape of Shape” as an inspiration for creating a“solo show that feels like the greatest group show you've ever seen.” He has been incorporating wallpapers into his solo shows since his first at the Serpentine in 2017, using them to present sequence, structure, and scale. He also credited Massimiliano Gioni for including the car installation My Black Death, remade for this show as MBD_Trans Am.

We previously reported:

Arthur Jafa's extensive survey,“I Am Tony,” is now on view at the New Museum in New York, featuring challenging works that explore Black history and culture.

A new survey of Arthur Jafa's work,“I Am Tony,” at the New Museum explores themes of horror and Black experience across nearly four decades.

Source: Cultured Magazine

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