Arthur Jafa
Love is the Message, The Message is Death

In seven-and-a-half minutes, Arthur Jafa's roller-coaster montage video Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) traverses the African American experience as a tale of resilience. It exemplifies Jafa's goal to craft a 'black cinema', with strong ties to music, responsive to the 'existential, political, and spiritual'.

Jafa intercuts footage he shot with excerpts from movies, newscasts, sports coverage, music clips, and citizen videos, much of it downloaded from YouTube. Scenes of trauma, racism, grief, and routine police violence are shuffled with others of joy, defiance, and creative brilliance, including performances by exceptional black athletes, dancers, and musicians.

We see Miles Davis and Martin Luther King, Michael Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, Serena Williams and Aretha Franklin. We see an unarmed black man being shot in the back. We see Cam Newton scoring a touchdown and a police officer forcing a teenage girl to the ground. There's Jafa's daughter on her wedding day and Barack Obama singing 'Amazing Grace' at a Charleston church where nine people were murdered by a white supremacist. There are shots from The Birth of a Nation and Alien and close-ups of the sun. 

Jafa's juxtapositions prompt us to connect incommensurable images. He sets his kaleidoscopic, scrapbook of African American life, history, and identity to Kanye West's plaintive gospel hip-hop anthem 'Ultralight Beam', with associations ricocheting between the images and West’s poignant lyrics. Jafa's title nods to the 1970s song 'Love Is the Message' by MFSB (known from the television show Soul Train) and the 1973 science-fiction story 'Love Is the Plan and the Plan Is Death' by James Tiptree Jr (aka Alice Bradley Sheldon).

Love is the Message is widely considered a defining work of its moment, but it seemed to come from nowhere. It was first exhibited publicly at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in Harlem in 2016, just days after Trump was elected. At the time, Jafa was a noted cinematographer, but largely unknown as an artist. The work's rapturous reception catapulted him into the centre of international art-world attention.

But Jafa later said he felt conflicted by the way Love is the Message was so easily embraced by white audiences, as if they could suddenly empathise with the black experience after just a few minutes watching it. He would joke that it was his Purple Rain. He said: 

I'm super-pleased when white people like my work, or are interested in it, or provoked by it. But I'm talking to black people, not to everybody. I'm certainly not trying to talk to white people, and I don’t think it serves white people to be spoken to. It makes them feel like they're the centre of the universe.

Jafa's next two collage videos would continue but also complicate the approach taken with Love Is the Message. The half-hour long The White Album (2019)—which won Jafa the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale that year—offered a parallel inquiry, tackling 'whiteness'. At over 100 minutes, Akingdoncomethas (also 2019) was an epic compilation of scenes of black megachurch services, featuring a procession of preachers and gospel singers—but few famous faces, few success stories; no roller coaster, no catharsis. Its title suggests hopeful waiting, the world to come, deliverance. 

Love is the Message is a time capsule. We view it now, eight years on, as history has moved around it—with Jafa's rise, West's fall, and Trump again seeking the presidency.