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Black Lives Linger
John Haberin New York City
Arthur Jafa and The Body Politic
Steve McQueen, David Hammons, and Mika Rottenberg
Arthur Jafa cuts rapidly between athletes, musicians, civic leaders, and celebrations. He delivers an emotionally charged display of African American culture and community.
Why, then, do they seem at every moment on the brink of death? Is it the very real threat of police violence—or only, in the words of a rapper accompanying them, a bad dream? They appear again in "The Body Politic," along with other videos now in the Met's collection by Steve McQueen, David Hammons, and Mika Rottenberg. 
While only three of four are African Americans, race and the body are still in question. For all these artists, their figures often do survive and even triumph. As a postscript, Jafa returns to the same gallery with a still larger presence, as big wheels refuse to churn and wildfire rages.
Racing, swooning, and dying
Close in on a runner—with the pain etched in his eyes, the sweat on his bare arms, his body close to collapse, and the finish line nowhere in sight. And then a supporting arm lays across his shoulder, and a smile breaks across his face. He has given everything, and he has won. Not everyone is so lucky in a film collage by Arthur Jafa. Its seven terrifying and exhilarating minutes include repeated humiliation by police and at least one fatal shooting. They dare anyone, of any race, to stand apart from black America.
Here black lives do not just come to an untimely end. They also give it their all, create, and matter. Jafa lingers longest, though, on heavily armed troops running forward and on men and women pleading for their lives. He captures them holding up their hands, walking backward, in fetal position on the ground. His very title commands respect but promises nothing: Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.
You will not recognize them all, not at this pace, although you will almost certainly try. They bring joyful noises and silent presences. The very familiarity of Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, James Brown, Martin Luther King, Jr., or President Obama makes the confrontations with police all the more painful and anonymous. Artful cuts turn on parallel poses and gestures not for their particular meaning or irony, but to unite them in their rhythm. On the soundtrack, Kanye West (without Virgil Abloh) does much the same with his repeated lyrics: "we are an ultralight beam."
Political art has a heavy burden. It has not just to keep up with the headlines, but also to match their impact. I thrilled to drawings by Shaun Leonardo but felt mostly disappointment with paintings on the theme of Black Lives Matter at the Studio Museum in Harlem, with African American protests in social media at the International Center of Photography, or even with Sandra Bland for Doreen Garner and with Carrie Mae Weems in Chelsea and in series at MoMA. Weems overlays colored circles on the face of police victims to emphasize the erasure of their identities and their lives, but I found the photos polished and distancing. Still, most often the news, too, can evoke anger and outrage, but not anguish or fear. Jafa can and does.
He does so through the public face of African American experience. He relies on found footage of iconic figures, public places, and epic moments. He leaves intact TV station logos and countdown seconds. Exit the gallery's new Harlem location, and ordinary people may come as a relief or a shock. One might even wonder whether Jafa is making a point of how the media reduce black lives to the equivalent of album covers for greatest hits. Perhaps, I thought for a moment, he sees something similar but more deadly in police profiling.
Still, these moments play out in public for good reason. They have become or will become part of your life as well. Musicians will bend close to the ground, the mike in their hands, and their audience will swoon. West will keep singing, "this is a bad dream," but "I'm trying to keep my faith." They do until the projection goes blank, as if they, like the runner, could no longer keep going. And then you have to decide who has won.
In a trance
Is love still the message, and is the message still death? For his video and his message, Jafa cut between violence at the hands of the police and African Americans in moments of victory in politics, culture, or sports. Their insistent rhythms bring home that black lives matter, and they matter just as much in moments of pride or humility, anger or despair. A year later, they return in "The Body Politic," at the Met Breuer. Its four videos leave open when the body becomes political—and when politics becomes a matter of bodily triumph or torment. The focused selection makes it easy to sit through them all in hope of finding out.
Only one runs more than eight minutes, and Steve McQueen even calls his Five Easy Pieces, from 1995. Its pieces do not run sequentially, no more than for Jafa, and cutting among them leaves bodies in that moment between stillness and motion. Are they African American bodies? A tightrope walker has no color beyond the white of his sneakers, and men with hula hoops divide into five pairs—with one in each pair dressed in white, the other as his silhouette or shadow. Blackness appears more explicitly with facial features, a woman in a glittery dress swaying, and a man taking stabs at jerking off. The frequent close-ups, like the view of the man in his underpants through a curtain of water, make them hypnotic but discomforting presences.
They, too, stop short of claiming victory, least of all for blackness. McQueen's takes his title from the movie about a white pianist in blue collar country—and maybe it is only my imagining, but I also thought of Bob Dylan:
They've got him in a trance.
One hand is tied to the tightrope walker.
The other is in his pants.
But then on Desolation Row "the riot squad, they're restless," and that was before Black Lives Matter.
Phat Free, by David Hammons and also from 1995, starts out in total blackness. Only after a couple of minutes does the elusive artist become visible, along with the source of the video's annoying sound. 
Hammons is kicking a bucket down the street, accompanied by equally jarring camera movements, grain, and glare. He could be punning on "kick the bucket" as the fate of an urban black male—or on "kicking a can down the street," as an expression for failure to take responsibility. Do not be too sure, though, not when Hammons relishes the joke. He may have nothing better to do, but he takes his time, kicks the bucket into his hands, and walks away.
Born in Argentina, Mika Rottenberg divides her body politic between New York and China. I might find the show more coherent if all four artists were African Americans, but oppression and the body know no bounds. She has made art from a black woman trapped in her own obesity, Third World workers, and Rottenberg herself barely able to punch her way out of a box. For NoNoseKnows in 2015, a plump blond "fetish worker" past bleak housing, finds a parking spot, and walks through door after door, topped by oversize soap bubbles. She ends up in a still more confined space, with food piling up by her side and flowers on the shelves demanding attention. Real laborers enter less voluntarily.
The women workers are under the stifling pressures of a pearl factory, but a New Yorker can feel their pain. One Chinese worker endlessly turns a wheel that appears to spin ropes in front of the blond woman, and feet stick out of a bucket of pearls. Food keeps piling up, unappetizing and uneaten, and her nose keeps growing. Finally her nose shrinks, the soap bubbles burst, she wipes the soles of the feet, and she leaves—only to take that same ride past the projects in the video's closed loop. Jafa takes his reality entirely from the media, McQueen and Hammons are just performing, and Rottenberg makes even a factory a stage set. Which is more real, more pressing, more artificial, or more in a trance?
Channeling fire
Arthur Jafa channels fire. He did so with athletes and musicians at the point of triumph or exhaustion, as Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It left no doubt that the fire raged in the African American community and its leaders as well. Two years later, he and his subjects channel it again, only starting with western wildfires, as "Air Above Mountains, Unknown Pleasures." It builds across a Harlem gallery's three floors, and it is in no hurry to put out the fires long enough to survey the damage. Blacks, he makes clear, have been living with the burn and dying from it for a long time.
They have done so at least since 1836, when a black man posing as a woman went on trial as a sex worker. If he were not operatic, camp, or threatening enough, Jafa poses in her place in a full-scale photo by the show's entrance, as La Scala. The artist is more than fleshy enough for the part. He takes until the top floor to let one in on the man's little secret—a pierced thong of cow skin in place of a vagina. A smaller photo poses a white baby as a boy king, behind body armor, with a video game on his cell phone. Whiteness has its privileges.
Southern whites get comfortable seats for more dangerous spectacles, too, as adults, but with blacks and sex workers very definitely looking on. That top room also holds seven-foot truck tires encased in chains, while music from Teddy Prendergrass plays in the background. One hangs like a backyard swing or a gallows, while the others tower over visitors from the floor. They all stand ready for dragging through the Mississippi muck and mire. Jafa associates Big Wheels with demolition derbies on the delta, his native territory, and the crash of his new Rolls Royce by Prendergrass with a trans prostitute in the passenger seat. The crash might be coming any minute, with black and white masculinity at stake, but it has already left silence in its wake.
Just in case one did not grasp the risks and temptations, found photos back downstairs show a lynching and Whitney Houston (also a subject for E. Jane Maxine) in a car, with troubled lips and closed eyes, only hours before her death. Did Dana Schutz desecrate or trivialize the death of Emmett Till for the 2017 Whitney Biennial? I think not, but her painting of an open casket was not half as brutal as the first grainy photograph, and rain on the windshield in the other could pass for tears. They frame a full wall for APEX GRID, small photos from the 2016 video collage, set against a gray background. They reduce its rhythms to a yearbook, but they look all the stranger and more familiar for that. Jafa's photo spreads at the 2018 art fairs, like the boy king, extend the exercise to white culture as well.
The fire rages more explicitly, again on video, on the central floor. The artist again moves among entertainment, politics, and danger less as alternative threats or pleasures than as a single unfolding experience. He shows an electrifying succession of black preachers and singers, with no effort to distinguish one role from the other. They and the choir can only channel the fire. They had better, for they play against footage from the wildfires and vain efforts to put the fires out. They seem on the wide-screen projection to have at least as large a stage.
They preach and sing about flesh, spirit, and change, and here nothing is simply a metaphor. It is not even simply black. Global warming feeds the fire, and the show's title quotes Cecil Taylor and Joy Division. Regardless, Jafa has to encompass the unknown along with pleasures, like the earlier message of love and death. The new video's title, akingdomcomethas, could refer to the everyday serenity of the Lord's Prayer or the Apocalypse. A show of mixed media and mixed messages risks losing focus at that, but the fire rages on.
Arthur Jafa ran at Gavin Brown's Enterprise through December 17, 2016, and again through June 10, 2018. Carrie Mae Weems ran at Jack Shainman through December 10, 2016, "The Body Politic" at The Met Breuer through September 3, 2017. A related review picks up Arthur Jafa in 2024.