Arthur Jafa

EO

What’s needed to further the development of Black Cinema?

AJ

The answer to that question depends on what you mean by Black Cinema. I have a very specific, somewhat formalist definition of Black Cinema. I think it’s a cinema that’s bound up in complex and intricate ways with Black people’s ability to self-determine and how Black people operate within the apparatus termed “cinema.”

A lot of times when people say, “Black Cinema,” they have in mind things like Donald Bogle’s book on the history of Black Cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. It’s a sociological history of Black people on the margins of cinema. I think that is a completely legitimate area of inquiry most Black people are familiar with, at least intuitively. We’re so preoccupied with representations because we understand, on some level, that representations affirm our lack of humanity and therefore, in part, legitimize the way society acts towards Black people. With that said, the Black cinema that I’m most interested in is one that replicates features Black cultural expression in general like, for instance, Black America’s relationship to our music.

EO

What’s at stake when producing this kind of work?

AJ

First, it’s about getting into the game. With Black people, there often comes a moment when we celebrate a person for getting into the game. I’ve thought, somewhat cynically, “A lot of people are winning at winning, but they’re not necessarily winning at art. We are just celebrating the fact that they exist.” While that’s a real and valid impulse, it’s bad when it gets conflated with excellence in a particular medium.

EO

We have to ask if the work is good.

AJ

I mention music as it’s a common base of understanding for Black people. It’s a framework that provides an understanding of protocols and metrics of excellence. I feel like every Black person has heard every bit of music we’ve ever made. You can have a transgenerational conversation with Black folks and seventy-five percent of the people participating in the conversation would’ve heard at least most of what is mentioned. It then becomes a question of medium. You could start by talking about the history of Black composers, whose compositions are definitionally Black, although they operate within a classical European tradition. I’m interested in a sociological definition with regard to what gets termed Black.

If you want to talk about soulfulness, efficacy, or the degree to which the music accurately describes or renders Black beings visible on all grounds (sociological, political, spiritual, existential) then there’s a body of music that’s wide and deep and diverse that we are referring to. It doesn’t include Black opera singers or Black composers of classical music. This is not to diminish those genres, but to simply underscore that that  production did not develop in response to the pressure. It was not forged by Black people’s experiences in America.

When we’re talking about the very concrete specifics of who Black people are and what we’ve experienced, Black music is the space that you want to go to. You could talk about Black dance as well, but as soon as you move out of the space of Black social dance and into the space of Black modern or postmodern dance, you’re delving into a space which the majority of Black people are not familiar with.

EO

If Black people have historically been objects or structuring devices in cinema, when did they become subjects?

AJ

Black people started making movies within the first five years of the existence of cinema. While it gets fuzzy when it comes to the specificity of cinema versus proto-cinema, Black filmmakers were making  movies from at least as early as 1915, 1916. Oscar Micheaux directed The Homesteader in 1918. It’s not dissimilar to when The Sugarhill Gang released Rapper’s Delight in 1979. Everyone claims it to be the beginning of hip-hop proper. Within the next three or four years, you get Kurtis Blow and all of the early progenitors of recorded hip-hop, because of course people like Grandmaster Cazwere doing hip-hop without being recorded. But from the beginnings of hip-hop as a recorded medium comes with Run DMC, like five, six, or seven years in.

By around 1930, 10 to 12 years in, Oscar Micheaux directed Ten Minutes To Live, which I think is a bonafide masterpiece. It holds a very high place in my personal pantheon of cinema. Prior to that, he does things like Within Our Gates which has really amazing renderings of lynchings, totally unlike anything that was seen until that point. Black people are certainly subjects in his films. There are other filmmakers as well, like Richard Maurice and Spencer Williams. There are lost filmmakers, too, like Eloyce King Patrick Gist, whose work only survives in fragments. That’s all within the first 10 to 20 years of cinema. We’ve always participated, but for mostly socioeconomic and sociopolitical reasons, we’ve been marginalized by and large. That hasn’t defined the larger space of the rendering of Black people. Hollywood movies, for instance, have treated Black people as objects.

EO

I was recently at MoMA and saw T. Hayes Hunter and Edwin Middleton’s Lime Kiln Club Field Day, (1914/2014). I was taken by the make-up on the Black actors.

AJ

I think you have to read those things, those protocols, in context. At the time, everyone who acted wore a lot of makeup. I saw my first Micheaux film when I was at Howard. It was Micheaux’s God’s Stepchildren, which is also a masterpiece. My professor at the time introduced it to us by saying, “Okay, I’ve shown you things that are paradigmatic of what we want to do, now let me show you great cinema.” He went on, “I’m going to show you what they say not to do.”

EO

In terms of your education, how central is Howard to the story?

AJ

That’s an unquantifiable question. Not to compare myself to Toni Morrison, but I saw something recently where she said, “When I was at Howard...” I thought, “To what degree did Toni Morrison become who she was because she was at Howard?” I hope that gets at the complexity of your question.

EO

What was happening at Howard? That’s more my question.

AJ

It’s important to keep in mind that Howard is situated in Washington D.C., which is home to both the American government and a lot of Black people. That disjunctiveness was a big part of it being the context in which I was incubated. It was preceded by my incubation in Mississippi. It’s like stepping from one incubation chamber to another. Howard is also an institution  that takes Blackness as a given. It takes Black people as fully invested human beings, thinkers, and subjects. Any institution that does that is a productive context to come into being in. With that said, it’s shot through with contradictions like any other institution.

EO

Why Howard?

AJ

I ended up there because I couldn’t  make a productive decision about where to go. [Laughs.] My parents put me in Howard. It’s hard to explain. Can anybody explain who they were when they were a teenager? I was not interested in Howard. I got fixated on Pratt because of something that I had read in Black Enterprise.

EO

So New York was on your mind?

AJ

Yes, I was interested in Pratt. I was interested in New York. I was interested in the sense that I had read that there was a Black cultural firmament in New York. I thought I might be able to get my education while being immersed in this other context. That context was broad. It included Black literature, Black fashion designers, and Black architects although there weren’t very many that I knew of at the time. I really wasn’t thinking about cinema—it wasn’t even in the equation. I remember my dad coming into my room and saying, “Son, why don’t you decide on any of these other schools? There are all these other schools that are interested in you.” I had the sense that they were thinking in pragmatic terms, like, “If you want to be an architect, you should go to a school that has a strong engineering and architectural engineering department.” So they were favoring schools like Georgia Tech. In hindsight, Georgia just wasn’t far enough away. I was trying to get out of the South, number one. I was trying to figure out how to get the fuck out of there. I don’t remember ever saying, “I want to go to Howard.” I just remember my parents saying, “You’re going to Howard University,” and they scooped me up and dropped me off there.

EO

What did architecture mean to you at that point?

AJ

Like, Frank Lloyd Wright. I wasn’t totally versed in the various schools of thought around architecture, but was interested in learning about the International Style. I didn’t know Mies van der Rohe. I certainly didn’t know Robert Venturi, but I became versed in the subject matter very quickly. Howard had a great library. I have a thing for libraries.

I grew up on the campus of a small Black college in Mississippi. One of my next-door neighbors, Mrs. Green, was the head librarian there. From the time I was in eighth grade, she gave me keys to the library. I would often fall asleep in the stacks. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad coming to get me after I had fallen asleep there. By the time I was in high school I essentially lived in the library. My first exposure to almost everything came in the form of  bound editions of magazines: Ebony, Popular Mechanics, Art in America. There used to be an art newspaper called New Art Examiner. It was a monthly magazine but came in a newspaper format. I can’t remember exactly when, but certainly before I went to Howard, they printed a picture of a work by Noah Purifoy that blew my mind. His work was the first thing that I ever saw that seemed to conjure traditional African art but that also deeply wasn’t.

EO

What was your first encounter with Black art?

AJ

My earliest points of reference for Black art were Charles White and Jacob Lawrence. I always say the most famous Black work of art is the Ernie Barnes painting, The Sugar Shack, which is the cover for Marvin Gaye’s I Want You. And the Good Times sitcom. Those were my earliest points of reference. Beyond that, I had my aunt Annette Anne Davis, who was a teaching artist, and Thomas Eloby, who was a painter I knew intimately. My aunt went to Benton College. She really should have been in New York but she never left Tupelo.

The first artwork I remember looking at intensely was one of her paintings. I think she made it in high school. It was a painting of the interior of a church. It hung right across from the foyer in my grandmother’s house that separated the living room and the outside. She also did a painting of my grandfather which sat in the den for years. I tried to locate this painting so I could put it up at my first show at the Serpentine. Nobody could find it. The second artist I mentioned, Thomas Eloby, lived in Clarksdale. My father actually tried to manage him at one point so we had a landscape of his in our living room during most of the years I spent in high school.

EO

So at this point, you’ve been exposed to art, your parents are educators, and you are thinking about architecture?

AJ

What does that mean, “You’ve been exposed to art?” I’m not challenging you, but it’s interesting to think about being exposed to art because I certainly wasn’t exposed to it knowingly. When I got to Washington D.C. I met my friend Greg Tate. I remember visiting his house and seeing prints on the wall and leafing through complicated art books on a lot of Black art. They could have very easily had a David Hammons Body Print on the wall. There was nothing like that in my house growing up.

EO

Where did the Tate’s live?

AJ

In D.C. on what they used to call the “Gold Coast.” It was a Black and very affluent area. But I don’t mean affluent with mansions or anything like that. Mr. And Mrs. Tate had a modest house. They were solidly middle-class class Black folks who lived in a neighborhood where most people were homeowners.

I didn’t grow up in a household very studied in the history of Black American art, which I don’t mean this as a value judgment. I lived in a trailer in 1967 when we moved to Clarksdale from Tupelo. The term “mobile home” is funny because, in the present,  it’s the emblem of a certain kind of economic abjection. In 1967, however,  “mobile home” connoted the futuristic, space-age. Our mobile home was basically a prefabricated home. It had furniture bolted into the infrastructure; it really felt like a space capsule. The decor it came with was pseudo-Spanish-themed. In the living room, there was a painting affixed to the wall of a female Flamenco musician playing a mandolin. I can remember my dad taking it off the wall and painting her Black when I was in the third grade. It was a formative moment for me in terms of thinking about art and Black people and the rendering of Black people in art.

EO

What did that instance mean for you?

AJ

I’m not sure if I could articulate what it told me, but it definitely spoke to something.

EO

I remember when I was a teenager, my mom was very thorough when it came to showing me how to cook, clean, pick out ripe vegetables, look for well-constructed clothes, etc. At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of her showing me how to do those things. I only now realized that these were tools she intuited would be important to me or for me, specifically, but at the time I thought it was common practice for parents to teach their children these skills.

AJ

In general, nobody necessarily said to me, “You have to do it like X, Y, and Z.” It’s just like, “This is the correct way to do it.” In Buddhist thought, a lot of that transference is said to occur through right thought and right actions. The thinking that leads us toward right actions is that which has allowed us to survive. While we don’t necessarily need to deeply interrogate the implications of certain modalities or protocols that we have collectively adopted, they are the protocols that have allowed us to stay in the game and survive. [Laughs.] You emulate, replicate, and at best transform or amplify or perfect those protocols. But, in the beginning, it’s often: “Do as I do. I don’t have time to explain to you why we do it this way, but just do as I do.”

EO

[Laughs.] It's very serious.

AJ

You can try to interrogate that mode of learning by having conversations on the superiority of street knowledge, but those specific conversations don’t reveal anything. No, you realize the importance of street knowledge in the downtime when you’re not in the most precarious circumstances. When you have a moment to contemplate, and you can finally say to a person, “You know what? I couldn’t explain to you why we were moving the way we were in the moment, because I was focused on surviving, on us surviving collectively.”

I think most people’s parents do things and forget to explain their motivations because they’re just trying to survive. They don’t necessarily even understand the full implications of why they’re doing things a certain way. I don’t know to what degree my dad was making a demonstrable point when he took the painting down off the wall, I just remember him taking the thing down and painting her. Like, one time, my mom was cooking collard greens in the pressure cooker and the pot exploded. The greens were scattered over everything. Years later, I would be on the floor and see a piece of dry collard green and pick it off. That instance and discovering Jackson Pollock are bound up in my mind.

EO

Have you always made those kinds of connections?

AJ

I don’t know how I make those kinds of connections. I can articulate and describe them, but I often don’t know how I got there. When I first encountered Pollock’s paintings I thought, “Oh yeah. That’s when the pressure cooker exploded and the collard greens splattered all over the interior of the living room.”

EO

What you’re describing makes me think of Apex, (2013).

AJ

At first, Apex was just a mood board. But, once I put it on a timeline...

EO

Something happened.

AJ

Yeah. My friend Malik Sayeed is the person who structured it temporally. I had Apex on my laptop and I would just click through the images and describe the relationships between them. It’s just like I used to do in my Untitled notebooks (1990-2007). Greg would always say to visitors, “Have you seen the books?,” or, “Have you gotten a tour of the books?” Seeing them and flipping through them on your own was one thing, which was certainly an experience. But when I flipped through them, I would have a running commentary about what it was that I was seeing: why I put this there and why I put that there. I was just so in sync. The pitch was the flow and it had an inherent beat from the flipping of the page. It had its own rhythm.

EO

Why did you make books?

AJ

Man, you gotta talk to my therapist about that. When I was young, I was always cutting out and collecting pictures. There was one period where I was obsessively cutting out ads for kung fu movies. At a certain point, it was Sears and Roebuck Christmas catalogs. I would just cut out the toys I wanted and put them in the book. They say there’s something inherently neurotic about collecting. [Laughs.]

EO

I’m interested in hearing about the moment it became art. That is, of course, a slippery distinction.

AJ

Well, the books grew out of the collecting. You grab something that strikes you. You want to own it, you want to possess it, because if you don’t possess it, then you would  never be in its specific presence again.

EO

There’s nothing more tragic than losing something that enticed you after a chance encounter.

AJ

Right, and when I made the notebooks searchable, repositories of images didn’t exist. Keeping an image that struck you had real utility. If you didn’t save it, you might never be able to find or see it again. I was always obsessed with magazines. It’s funny, last night, I got home, and my son Ayler was like, “Hey, I need to go to the grocery store. Can we go?” I was like, “Sure.” As he was shopping, I started gravitating towards the magazine rack. I realized that’s something I’ve been doing my entire life.

EO

What were you looking for?

AJ

For anything that caught my attention. It’s like when you’re writing and ask, “What am I looking for?” You go into a hole in your mind, and maybe you find gold, but basically, you’re looking for whatever you find. You’re looking for a vision of the world beyond the world that you exist in.

EO

How did you get from D.C. to New York?

AJ

I was gonna tell this story about being in D.C. I was at this newsstand and there was a German magazine. It had a photo essay  about Fela Kuti’s wives. There were at least six or seven  images of his wives and some images of them together around this  shrine. It was incredible, but I think it was like 35 bucks. I was like, “Fuck this, man, I’m not spending no $35 for no magazine,” and so I walked away. I couldn’t get the thing outta my mind, so I came back the next day or so. It was gone. I’ve seen other images of Fela’s wives, but I have never been able to find those exact images again. I’m haunted by that experience. The images circulate in my head, but that actual magazine, my ability to return to it and look at it closely and see things that I may not have been conscious of, is gone.

I constantly use this analogy with people. An old fashioned way of saying it might be, “you have to cast your net wide.” I tend to phrase it like, “You gotta have a large enough sample size to figure out what it is you’re drawn to.” Like if you have an apple sitting on the table and you say, “Why are you drawn to that?” Who the fuck knows? You might be drawn to it because you have a vitamin D deficiency, ain’t no way of knowing. It’s compulsive but I just like I didn’t want that feeling again—of accessing something and no longer having access to it. That feeling was a permanent component of my being prior to leaving Mississippi. It was an environment of limited access. I was interested in the larger world.

EO

What was Mississippi like?

AJ

That’s a scaling question to a certain degree. So much of my personality was shaped by not being in one environment, but moving back and forth between Clarksdale and Tupelo, which radically destabilized my sense of normal. I felt alienated in Clarksdale and alienated in Tupelo. In turn, alienation became a defining aspect of my personality.

As I’ve said a thousand times, Clarksdale was desegregated, and Tupelo was integrated. When you went from Clarksdale to Tupelo, you had to adopt a completely different set of protocols. Having two sets of operative protocols does something to you. I can remember that my cousin Sam and my aunt and uncle Bay and Helengot had HBO in Tupelo five years before there was any cable in Clarksdale.

EO

When was this?

AJ

Late seventies? It was prior to me going off to college. It was as significant a technological shift as pre- and post-internet. Prior to that, there were really only three, four television stations: ABC, NBC, and CBS, and then at some point, PBS came online. And the latter was public television, which means they didn’t have commercials. They screened weird things like Sesame Street, Zoom (1972 TV series), and Electric Company, programs that you wouldn’t see on normal TV. One show that had an indelible impression on me was Captain Kangaroo. There was this guy with this Dutch boy with blonde page hair. He was older and had a mustache—some very Tom Brown-ass-looking Jack. It was all shot with a single camera and played out across a stage that came to waist level. He would stand behind the stage and he had all these sorts of compatriots. Yogi Bear and the Flintstones, too. Yogi Bear in particular: I remember asking my dad when I was five years old if Yogi Bear was Black or white. The Prisoner, too, which was a James Bond-cum-Twilight Zone-esque television show. The credit sequence in the show had the prisoner being chased through the streets by this bubble. It was fucking surreal and weird. That stuff had a really profound impact on me. Fragments. I was listening to Beyoncé’s new record the other day. What’s the first song that goes, “...You Won’t Break My Soul?” That came out, and I was like, “That shit is catchy.” But then the album, Renaissance, came out, and I was like, “I don’t like this album, I’m not feeling this.”

EO

What happened?

AJ

I liked that one song but then skipped through the albums and thought, “I don’t like this, don’t like this, don’t like this.” I never listened to it again. In the meantime, on Instagram and Tiktok, there’s the “Cuff It” challenge. There are snippets of that album that have become memes on Instagram. I’m hearing all these super catchy shits and think, “Is that the album? I need to go back and listen to that album.” But then I go back and listen, and I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t like this album.”

The experience seems to be emblematic of sampling in hip-hop. People take moments from a song, even if it’s two bars, and it sounds magnificent. But then you go back and hear the actual song and the excerpt has got all this shit around it that gets in the way of the magnificence of that moment. I think what artists do with hip-hop happens  on Instagram and TikTok.

EO

Certainly.

AJ

I had a thought the other day, like, “Damn, Beyoncé has made a record, where she’s tried to structure a bunch of moments, some of which connect with people, some of which don’t.” It’s a record that’s built around the assumption that people are going to sample. The first time Megan Thee Stallion made an impression on me was on TikTok.

EO

“Savage”?

AJ

“Savage,” of course. If you go back and listen to the record, it’s good, but it’s not as good as it was at that moment. All the sisters are doing the Cuff It challenge. But when you hear that song, that moment is surrounded by a bunch of things. If you just took those moments and substituted any of them in, the shit wouldn’t work. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt that there’s something intentional about the fact that the music exists more on TikTok than anywhere else. I was wondering if she put out a video with that dance? Like, did she do that challenge or did somebody else create the choreography for that dance?

EO

She didn’t create the challenge, it originated on Tiktok. Recently, I thought to actually look at her complete discography. It became clear that how she approaches the release of each album depends on the technological landscape at the time.

AJ

I remember like ten years ago I had a truck and I was trying to consolidate all my stuff before I moved. I was sitting in the truck and Beyoncé came on the radio, and I was like “That’s fucking catchy, man, that’s really catchy.” It’s like hip-hop. It’s almost built out of soundbites. When I first heard that single from the recent album, I was like, “Oh shit, Beyoncé’s about to come out with some shit.” She takes that moment and loops the shit over and over. It’s amazing how it speaks to the history of hip-hop.

EO

It feels like it’s a condensed version of her entire discography. Beyoncé sampling Beyoncé. You’re listening to Beyoncé sing a Beyoncé song.

AJ

I can see that.

EO

I was watching Apex and realized that it wasn’t simply a collection of sequenced images. There’s a “signing” to them—a very specific energy. I tried to imagine what that energy felt like. Surrealism came to mind.

AJ

Right. The way I understand surrealism is informed by one of the earliest descriptions I heard of that movement: you put incongruous things next to one another and your mind tries to make sense of them. In turn, a certain energy is generated that we call surreal. The whole history of Dalí-ism is about these kinds of incongruities, discontinuities, and forced proximities, of which the greatest single example is a Black body in white space. Apex is certainly built on juxtaposition.

EO

When viewers watch Apex, they have no way to know how you intended for the sequenced images to interact. How did you learn to let go of authorial intent?

AJ

Apex, for me, has a certain internal narration. One of the things about Love is the Message—that’s also true of Apex—is that I made it in one, two-hour sitting. I didn’t turn to editing, I just strung things together, one after another. Then, a week or so later, I saw Kanye perform “Ultralight Beam” on Saturday Night Live. Two or three days later, I went online, I found the live recording of the song and I laid it over the images.

EO

The live track?

AJ

Yes. What you hear is a combination of the live recording from Saturday Night Live, the recording as he released it, and some unofficial covers.

EO

You’re layering and condensing the music in the same way Kanye does. It’s surprising because I've always felt the “liveness” and immediacy of the of the song. But I didn't realize it was actual component. It inherently changes the meaning Love is the Message.

AJ

Yeah, totally. Kanye’s genius is in chopping beats. He’s fearless. Many people don’t work with others purely out of ego. Kanye, meanwhile, has so much ego that he wouldn’t be afraid to have anyone sing on his record. He’s just like, like, “This is gonna be a Kanye West song with Aretha Franklin on it.” That’s his whole thing. He’s gonna swallow it all. His style of production reminds me of the Godard quote, “It’s not where you take it from, it’s where you take it to.” He’s the ultimate version of that. I might even argue that he’s not even chopping and screwing a beat but rather just saying, “This is the song. Let’s live in this universe.”

EO

He breaks it down to a molecular level and builds from there. I’m curious if Dan Graham is someone that you think with?

AJ

He’s certainly someone I have thought about a lot over the years. I’m interested in the hero journey of his practice. I’m interested in the pavilions. Above all, though, I’m interested in how he’s developed a physical motif for his conceptual practice. That kind of thing is important in terms of being able to sustain a career.

I saw Rock My Religion in the ’80s at a movie theater on Melrose in Los Angeles. At the time, I was trying to get my head wrapped around if it functioned as an art object or if he had just made a documentary that was adjacent to his practice as an artist. A bit later, Douglas Gordon’s work answered the questions an Graham’s work had raised for me initially. The difference between a film and an art object is a distinction that’s hard to put your finger on. If you look at the history of video in the art world, it certainly has much, if not more, to do with conceptual practices (performance, sculpture) that didn’t necessarily accord with the history of cinema per se. Douglas Gordon’s through a looking glass, (1999) clarified things for me. I would definitely say Dan Graham is a person who influenced me, but he’s not properly a progenitor of what I do. The former is a sort of paternal relationship. One of the people at the top of the “progenitor”  list for me would be Richard Prince. His move toward appropriation created the space for me to do the things I’m doing. And, in a certain capacity, Richard Prince’s work made Dan Graham and Douglas Gordon’s make sense to me, even though he doesn’t really do films. Appropriation is something I’m particularly interested in. I’m interested in how authority, period, and self-determinacy operate for Black people.

EO

It’s funny you mentioned Gordon, because one of my favorite books is Point Omega by Don DeLillo, which uses Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho as its structuring device for narrative.

AJ

I just read about that piece, but I’ve never seen it in its totality. Gordon was interested in the history of rock and roll. I strongly disagree with his thesis that rock and roll has much to do with the Quaker ceremony. The idea of trying to create a history of rock and roll that excludes Black people is certainly a reach by any stretch of the imagination. But, in any event, I still like the energy of it.

EO

You taught at Bard?

AJ

Yes, in their summer MFA program. I was invited there by Peggy Ahwesh as a visiting artist. I liked the process and meeting with the students, so I was invited to come back as an instructor. At the time, I didn’t have an art practice, and barely a film practice, but I thought a lot about art, aesthetics, and methodology. Over the course of five or six summers, I got to know a lot of interesting artists and students.

EO

I’m curious about the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq that you mentioned in your conversation with Mark Leckey in Cahiers d’art. You mentioned a moment a Bard inspired you to further investigate it?

AJ

Yes, David Leventhal gave a lecture exploring the iconography of the photographs. It was a close reading of Dunce caps, which captured everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the KKK. It’s memorable because there was a public meeting about the implications of Abu Ghraib and the American endeavor in the Middle East.

The lecture was also given in the wake of George Floyd’s death. David made a statement to the effect of, “One of the most troubling aspects of the imagery was that people could not imagine that kind of violence.” I tried not to choke. I think there were maybe one or two other Black people in the entire auditorium. David’s lecture was impressive, but that statement troubled me. There seemed to be a tacit expectation that I or one of the other people of color would stand up and object. At a certain point, I felt like everybody was looking at me. I asked myself, “Am I the only person here who’s not feeling gaslit by this whole thing?” At a certain point, I stood up and said, “Look, far be it for me to speak for Black people, but I don’t know if there are many Black people who couldn’t not imagine this kind of violence.” I remember Pauline Oliveros, a composer who taught at Bard for quite a long time stood up and said, “I grew up in Texas and what I’m seeing here is representative of the attitudes of everybody I grew up around.”

EO

I’ve always wondered, even long before I knew you, if the title of Love is the Message had anything to do with Marshall McLuhan’s thinking?

AJ

Not at all. I don’t mean to suggest that McLuhan’s insight, that “the medium is the message,” isn’t important. But it’s one of those insights that the implications of which have become so obvious. I know people have commented on the video’s archival dimension and its specific resonances, but I have always been somewhat resistant to that framing—the archival. I think it’s often lazy. They use that term in a way that often brings me up short. What’s not archival if you define it in that way? Not to be so strict, but I don’t think YouTube is an archive in any kind of classical sense of the word. WorldstarHipHop certainly isn’t.

EO

I want to talk about Dreams Are Colder than Death. Is it a documentary?

AJ

It’s a thing. [Laughs.] I guess you would probably classify it as an essay film. And it’s got a thesis. It’s not a singular thesis. You could say there’s a set of thematic preoccupations that coalesce around something like Black studies—not the academic field of Black studies, but the literal endeavor.

EO

How did you select the participants? Do you feel like the film’s meaning has changed since its initial release over ten years ago?

AJ

Some viewers may consider it differently from how they did then, but not me. It is what it always has been, which is not much more than a platform for people to speak their minds. Obviously, the people I selected shaped what the film ultimately became. But that was also done fairly intuitively. The project was something that Kahlil Joseph originally intended to do. He didn’t have time to do it so he sent it to me. At that particular moment in my life, I was chasing after any opportunities that seemed interesting, so I said yes. I barely knew what it was. Turns out, it was part of a slate of programming that was set to happen at the ZDF in Germany on the anniversary of the March on Washington.

I remember saying very clearly to the commissioner, “I’m not really interested in making something about 1953. I’ve seen a documentary multiple times over the years on PBS about the March on Washington. I am, however, interested in the afterlife of the March on Washington, especially because we’re in a “golden era” of Black billionaires and Black presidents while most Black folks just don’t seem happy to me.” I wanted to give people an opportunity to talk about how they’re feeling and thinking. I wanted it to be built around conversations, but I didn’t want to point cameras at anybody while they were talking because as soon as you point a camera at a Black person, the white gaze seems to intrude. Black people have evolved a very sophisticated set of strategies to avoid surveillance and to not offer up evidence of our thinking. In that capacity, I didn’t really interview anybody. What I had was a series of prompts, the first being, “Tell me what you think.”

EO

About what?

AJ

About whatever. It was very broad. People would talk, usually for about half an hour before they ran out of gas. I would just sit when they ran out of gas. I wouldn’t say anything. I’ve seen therapy before where the therapist doesn’t say anything and the patient tries to fill that empty space. I would just hold that space open. We’d always have at least three interlocutors. I realized it was very important not to have a one-on-one situation, but to create a kind of triangulation. It was also very important to not have people speak. I would ask some of the participants to just actively listen.

At some point when they finished telling me what they were thinking, I would say, “Okay, now that you’ve  told me what you’re thinking, tell me something that you know.” That prompt was really a way to get people to talk about those things that they felt strongly about. I’m still really proud of it. That film opened up a whole lot of possibilities for me. I don’t think I would have gotten to Love Is The Message had I not done Dreams Are Colder Than Death.

EO

It’s funny to hear about this March on Washington concept as you film almost everybody in motion. Like you watch Saidiya Hartman from across the street as she talks about the possibility of her life ending by an act of gratuitous violence.

AJ

When I got that shot a lot of people told me I shouldn’t use it because it’s unflattering. Not to brag, but it’s the single most iconic visual rendering of Saidiya ever. [Laughs.] Even if she hadn’t been speaking on top of it, it still would be.

EO

How do you develop your films?

AJ

Sketches, pictures, and talking all play big roles in my process. Often, I use images to corral ideas. Like, for AGHDRA, there was just no parameter. When we started, we were just asking, “What is this?”

EO

How long did it take to make that film?

AJ

We worked on it intermittently over the course of two years. Most of that time was during COVID, so we were working on it remotely. I would send the team images and talk about what they meant to me. They would also talk about how they saw the images.

EO

What does editing look like for you?

AJ

I try not to editorialize. People say things in my films that I vehemently disagree with. That’s another discrepancy: people assume that if you put something in the film, you agree with it. No. For instance, I disagree with Martine Syms’s assertion in Love Is The Message that we’re not aliens. I know what Martine intends and that she’s brilliant. But, in that particular instance, I don’t agree with her assertion. You know what I mean?

I’m a little ambivalent about declarative notions anyway. I have a lot of ambivalence about that tense, and so I’ve recently started to say things like, “I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying something to you now, but in my work, I’m not trying to say anything.” A lot of people think that the only way to make meaning is to declare. I don’t believe that to be the case. I try to have the work be synchronized with or recreate some of the state of Blackness without making it stated.

EO

In an interview for Artforum, with the former editor-in-chief, David Velasco, you talk about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work. There’s a metaphor you use where Basquiat was the catapult for this commercialization and movement of Black art and there’s a tsunami behind him. You reflect on being young at the time when Basquiat was first coming up, and how there weren’t many Black artists in the art world. How does it feel to have come of age during a time when there weren’t many reference points?

AJ

Well, that’s a two-hour conversation in and of itself. I was trying to make the point that Black participation is just not allowed after a certain point. It’s very difficult to describe what it feels like to be operating in a field in which you just can’t go to certain places or do certain things. When I was growing up, there was just nobody there but Jean-Michel in the mainstream art world.

I’m interested in what it takes to open up space for new kinds of participation. Even in the instances where we can put our finger on precisely what happened—for example, Jackie Robinson was the first Black man to integrate major league baseball—most of the time, that person is destroyed to such a degree that we can’t interrogate them about what it felt like to be that first Black person in a new arena. Like, was Rosa Parks the first lady of the civil rights movement? No, she wasn’t the first, she was just the first to not be rendered totally dysfunctional. This is no shade on her. In the case of Jean-Michel, he was destroyed. I mean, what kind of conversations could we have had with a 50-year old Jean-Michel? He succeeded, he penetrated a new space, but at the cost of his life. The two people I always like to say came in his immediate wake are Lorna Simpson and David Hammons. Most people would point to David, but I would say Lorna. She was absolutely the first Black artist I knew who got any traction in the art world. Very seldom do people talk about that. She’s very much not dysfunctional. She is, in fact, highly functional and very lucid about her experiences.

EO

How were Lorna and David received at the time when they entered into the consciousness of the mainstream art world?

AJ

Well, first of all, they were considered professionals. They were world-class artists who had to be taken seriously. We have to come up with a term to describe these kinds of people who, like I said, are really on the bleeding edge of paradigm shifts in society. There were thousands of Black artists who were studying, going to universities, practicing, and refining their craft in the U.S. since the 1930s and ’40s. It didn’t matter how good they were. The only two people who are generally identified as successful by museums and curators, not gallerists and collectors, are Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.

That distinction is crucial. Nobody was discussing Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence in the same breath as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. They weren’t in the same game. Not only was Lorna in the game, but she was excelling. In some ways, I can’t think of a better artist. David, likewise, smashed it, but he’s almost like Sauron. He’s a bit of a recluse in the mainstream art world—a person who sort of hovers above it.

EO

Can you talk about your relationship with John Akomfrah and Greg Tate? When I interviewed John, he spoke about how you all would meet at Kim’s Video and Music on St. Marks in the 1990s.

AJ

When you have a bunch of people who on some level, felt a sense of alienation in relationship to other Black people during their childhood and adolescence, one’s sense of self is confused. I know this to be the case with my friends from Britain—they’re all weirdos. Both those categories mark them as being, in one way or another, divergent, mutant. For people who came from other, smaller places, it’s a bit like an anarchist convention. It’s like a flock of Black swans, a flock of unimaginable possibilities. I would say the basis of many of my friendships cohere around a shared sense of alienation with respect to other Black people during childhood and adolescence. It’s certainly the case with John. I’ve talked about his narrative, how he was the grandson of a witch doctor who was on the wrong side of the equation in terms of the power-ship in Ghana which meant that John and his family became expatriates. When it came time for his family to leave Ghana, his  grandfather said, “I can’t make the voyage, I’m too much of my context; I’m not going anywhere.”

EO

Why did that happen again?

AJ

During the 1960s and ’70s. The tribe that John was associated with fell from political power. If they wanted to be certain they were going to survive, they had to leave the country. Before John left, his grandfather, who decided to stay in Africa, passed on to him a ring that was a material emblem of his status as a witch doctor. To be sure, he wasn’t literally a witch doctor, but something  like a philosopher. I remember John describing that his grandfather made sense of the chaos of the universe with various mechanisms and instruments: whether philosophical, psychic, private psychoanalytic, or political. When he handed John the ring, John became the heir to its function. I remember saying to John when he first told me the story, “The kind of films that you make quite literally do the work of your grandfather..”

EO

Where did you and John first meet?

AJ

The first time we had an extended hang was in Brooklyn in Bedford-Stuyvesant, sometime in the early 1990s. Black Audio was in New York to shoot something like Seven Songs for Malcolm X. It was the first time I really talked to John. We ended up in somebody’s bedroom in Brooklyn at 1:00 in the morning. We were sitting there talking and John asked me something to the effect of, “Why do you call yourself a Black artist?” He was essentially pressing the Stuart Hall, anti-essentialist conceit, namely: that by framing one’s self as Black you become complicit. I was like, “It’s very ironic that a filmmaker whose group is called Black Audio Field Collective doesn’t understand himself as a Black artist. Or, would you frame yourself as a Black artist?” It was the kind of discussion you have when you are on the same team with somebody and you’re strategizing about how you’re going to play it.

John told one of the most incredible stories about his relationship with his grandfather. He said that his grandfather didn’t give him the ring but swallowed it. John’s interpretation was that the witch doctoring tradition was done with. I have a completely different interpretation.  When John’s grandfather swallowed the ring, that didn’t mean it was over. What it meant was he had taught John the skills he needed to navigate the terrain, but that the map was not going to coincide with the terrain. I think he was at least partially convinced. That’s when I feel like we really became very close friends. To answer your original question, though, friendship, for me, really comes down to mutual insight, a capacity to exchange information, and a willingness to synchronize.

EO

What did it mean that you and John have such distinct styles of filmmaking?

AJ

I think the way I thought about cinema definitely informed his thinking over the years and vice versa. The way his films work certainly had a profound impact on my sense of not only what was possible, but what I might aspire to create. I also think that because both John and I function from a position that’s fundamentally insurgent, we’ve forged a sort of singular bond. It’s like we’ve gone to war together.

EO

Would you map the war metaphor onto how you feel about your position in the art world?

AJ

Yeah, for sure. The other day I was in a hospital talking to Tremaine Emory and made a remark about Virgil. I was like, “Losing Virgil was fundamentally different from the way I was upset about losing Greg. I feel like Virgil and I both understood ourselves as insurgent warlords—not warlords in a kingdom that has 1,000 horses and 1,000 troops, but guerrilla warlords whose war is persistent and imminent and never-ending.”

I do find solace with the people who came before me: the Toni Morrisons, the Barrocas, the John Coltranes. The first time I had dinner with Toni Morrison was at Manthia Diawara’s house. I remember saying to Toni, “All the gods are dying, what are we going to do? Who are we going to look to?” Toni looked at me and said, “Meaning, like me.” [Laughs.] She wasn’t shy about it. She knew that she was carrying the banner at that moment. She basically was like, “When the gods die, you look to yourself.” And then she said, “You look to me.” She didn’t have any false humility. She knew the level she was functioning at. She had nothing to be modest about. The point I’m trying to make is that it was so upsetting for Virgil to pass the way he did because when you raise a battle flag like that, somebody else has to pick it up. The people who are picking up the battle after you aren’t supposed to outlive you. But Virgil died when he was a young warlord. I should emphasize that nothing is guaranteed around this stuff. Just because somebody else thinks that you are talented and are part of this continuity doesn’t mean you’re going to necessarily fulfill your potential. You could just get shot in the subway or get cancer like Virgil, and that’s that.

EO

When do you think you came into your own as an artist?

AJ

I’ve never been a person who was like, “Okay. Now I’ve done it.” The first time my dad saw Daughters of the Dust, he said, “Son, take note of this moment, because you did an incredible job, you may never achieve this level of success again.” I remember being like, “This shit is not going to be on my tombstone. It’s going be a footnote before I’m done.” And it is a footnote. That’s how I’m wired. I still feel like I’m trying to prove something. If we as Black people have one job, it’s to supersede what has come before us. Just like it was Toni’s job to supersede Ralph Ellison and Baldwin. That was her project.

EO

What was it like winning the Gold Lion?

AJ

It was like being in the All-Star game for soccer when you’re playing basketball.

EO

Where does that leave you?

AJ

I’m still trying to actualize.