Case in point: the Arthur Jafa-directed video for “4:44” by JAY-Z, which plays in a main floor gallery as a teaser to the exhibit proper. The clip finds Jafa shrinking the scope of his found footage video collage to an interpersonal, rather than institutional scale, deploying his typically jerky edit style toward catharsis for disloyal husbands. But this is a music video for the guy who once said “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man;” as Shawn Carter has climbed to capitalism’s upper echelons, his interest in fine art has come across like a well-funded branding exercise just as often as it has manifested genuinely intriguing work. And it’s hard to be upset this isn’t Jafa’s peak when his middling work remains choppily magnetic, deftly playing with the “gap between images,” the gestalt of their juxtaposition.
Though his practice includes sculptures and paintings, Jafa’s principle medium is video collage, assembling found footage to surprisingly disarming effect. The pacing of the Internet at large occasionally makes the juxtaposition in Jafa’s videos, which stack images of racialized policing, surveillance, and violence against memes, flexes, and interstellar imagery, feel quaint or predictable. And his work can be intentionally jarring to the point of offense, as when his 2020 video for Kanye West and Travis Scott collaboration “Wash Us in the Blood” utilized footage of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. But by and large, Jafa achieves a supercharged reaction thanks to his earnest desire to push audiences to confront capital letter Preconceptions about Race, both in society and in themselves.
