Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Duke University Press, 2012

Andrews, Kehinde. Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century, Zed Books, 2018

ARTnews: Arthur Jafa’s Cinematography and Music Video: How a Foundational Artist First became a sensation in the world

Bennett, Michael. Things That White People Uncomfortable, Haymarket Books, 2018

Benston, Kimberley. Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism, Routledge, 2000

Black Month History: Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, the Message is Death

Cedric J. Robinson. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition Black Marxism. The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Contemporary And:  Seeking a new form of Black subjectivity: Love is the Message

Japtok, Martin, Rafiki Jenkins, Jerry. Authentic Blackness “Real Blackness”- Essays on the meaning of Blackness in Literature and Culture, Peter Lang, Black Studies and Critical Theory, 2011

Judith Benhamou Reports: Arthur Jafa about the black experience in America: “Love is the message, the Message is death”

L’Officiel Art: Arthur Jafa, black flow

M.S. Nelson, Angela. This is how we flow: rhythm in black Culture, University of South Carolina Press, 1999

New York Times Magazine:  Arthur Jafa in Bloom

Portraits:  Notes on the collection: Arthur Jafa’s Black Visual Intonation

Serpentine:  Arthur Jafa : A series of utterly improbable, yet extraordinary renditions

Tate:  Black Audio Film Collective

W. Mills, Charles. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Cornell University Press, 1998

Dash, Judy. Daughters of the Dust, 1991, 1h53 Min. 

Youtube: John Coltrane My Favourite Things

Myriam Ben Salah

I think movement is truly at the very core of your practice. Even more so, or at least as much as blackness or there.

Arthur Jafa

What do you mean by movement, in particular in this instance?

Myriam Ben Salah

I think in many ways, I guess the first with it I've been thinking about is the way you deal with blackness in your work, is something that's in motion, in movement.

Arthur Jafa

Oh yeah, in process for sure.

Myriam Ben Salah

Exactly, you never have anything static. You're never- hum- you're not in an illustration. There's always, hum, I guess the notion of transformation is really, truly a thread through your images and the representations that you do. Actually, as a matter of fact, you don't even necessarily represent blackness through the bodies that actually carry it. So it's really something in motion.

Arthur Jafa

Oh yeah. I really believe that. I mean, the term I will use I guess to this, is flux.

Myriam Ben Salah

Flux, yeah.

Arthur Jafa

You know, it's like constantly in flux. It's never like fixed or at the very least, it's just like you have poly rhythms. It's like multiple definitions on ideas of what blackness is that are in acting in very specific ways, depending on context. Sequencing, things like that. But this is really true.

Like I was thinking, I always use this analogy, sometimes. I was thinking about John Coltrane a lot. And I would say probably, arguably was certainly one, it was two or three most famous recordings that are my favorite things. And it's sort of paradigmatic in some ways, in many ways for saying because unlike sort of high free jazz in a way where people just start off in this like a white noise effect and you never really have tunes, like in some ways and free jazz, they dispense with tunes.

Like composition. But Coltrane likely take something like my favorite things, which you really see as him taking the artifact, the given and then subjecting them to a certain process. So you know what I mean. He does his improvisation thing, but it always circles back to a fairly straightforward rendition of the theme or the melody or the songs such as it is. And I saw it with say, like I felt, the reason was because it really wasn't about starting one place and getting to another place.

It was about the movement in between the two places. I mean, sort of circularity of it really was in some ways to emphasize that this wasn't about, you know, some notion of progress or these kinds of things or some, you know, sort of linear development. It was really about being in a way and being subject to process as a force, and so now it's stuff. So flux, for me, is like supercritical, like damage. It both is paradigmatic of blackness and also the way I want to present blackness when I, in fact, presented - you know - in reaction or in the grips of this power to make a paradigmatic aspect, which is, like I said, months.

Myriam Ben Salah

I felt like it was the same idea of a flux when you also say- when you also speak about the transition between being Africans and becoming black I think you say, becoming the illegitimate sons of the West. There is another-  at least other idea, again, of always flux, transition, constant movement that's kind of embedded in the very idea of blackness, it seems.

Arthur Jafa

I mean, certainly, as I understand it, because - you know - where I've grown up, like this funny American be like in early on when I first, I guess, left Mississippi more so than anything. And particularly in the early 80s when I first came in contact with these. So ideas of anti essentialism, what was essentialism and the sort of response mostly like to my British friends - you know - they were sort of proponents of I think most dislike Stuart Hall's idea, Instagram and symbolisms, stuff like that. Well, I'm not so much. I was like, oh, yeah, a crude idea. And - I was like, yes, I'm down with the intransigeants. And then, I realize, where they were coming from, I completely agree with you - you know. 

It's like, I was against antisense senseless not so much for essentialism, but against some of the ideas I used to say that can essentialism that you guys are critiquing is what I would term crude essentialism, which in fact the real time for most of people I knew at least I can speak for everybody didn't even exist anyway. So my grandmother, she would never use a term like “the black experience” per say, you know what I mean. But if she said black people are X, Y, Z, she knew full well that there was a distinction between a generalization about black people, which anecdotally in experientially - in fact - was true. And the fact that they're one and an exception. You know - she didn't have to say hybridity and things like this- you know - and I used to sometimes, like, I collapse that into this thing that I would say when I would say like, well, I'm interested in at least two things. I'm interested in the black experience, but I'm also interested in the experience of black people. And those two things are they have a complicated relationship to each other, but they actually aren't the same thing. And they're both true. They're both real and concrete- you know.

Myriam Ben Salah

I had a hard time with that work when I saw it, because I just couldn't really understand. And I think I was probably personally confusing whiteness and white people. And I was wondering why you were opposing sort of black people and white people. But actually, you were opposing blackness and whiteness, which now I understand as the same kind of opposition than there is between feminism and patriarchy, for example. You're not opposing men and women, you're opposing feminism in patriarchy.

Arthur Jafa

Yeah, I used to say that people almost all the time, I'd be like. If I have an agenda and I try not to pass -you know- like narrow agendas, please just say all the time it's really important. Like, say, understand, whiteness is a psychopathology. If you say that people get really weird, that it's like one or few things, I can say that it really stop people in their tracks when we see it, like in a very unadulterated way. But I used to say, for people to get used to the idea that whiteness and white people aren't the same thing and the only way to go to get used to it is if you actually start using it in a way that makes explicit what you're trying to give it. Now, what I always say, just like if I say against patriarchy, it doesn't mean I'm against men; it only means I'm against men who have demonstrated an ability to separate themselves out from patriarchal privilege. Right. So if I say, I'm against whiteness, it doesn't mean I'm against people of European descent or anything like that. It just means  they have sutured their identity in such calcified terms to whiteness that if you say whiteness is a psychopathology, they hear it as you saying they are psychopaths.

Myriam Ben Salah

Still in relation to the idea of flux, I wanted to talk to you about the last thing that I saw last time I saw you in real life, actually at the studio in February. The wave.

Arthur Jafa

The wave, yes.

Myriam Ben Salah

And, you know, I feel like I was really- I was really struck by the work that's your currently making. And just to give out some context- it's a wave that you're making with Pierre Lebaf. That's right, he’s working with you on it? And I felt like it's really- it's very simple visually. And it really encompasses so much of what's in your work. And you were mentioning that they can actually- you know- it has the back of Gordon and it has the sound from APEX. It has the skin of Miles Davis. And it has this, like beautiful and frightening aspect at the same time, which sort of relates to what you've been calling the object sublime. And I wanted you to talk more about your obsession with the wave. And -you know- it totally embodies the sense of permanent transformation and sort of non fixity of your practice. It's something that looks always the same, but that's constantly, constantly different.

Arthur Jafa

Right. Well, it's like -you know- a work this very much in process for one thing. So it's almost as soon as I have a conversation about it preceding you being fairies that affects the word has started changing because -you know- going back to this idea of flux, I'm still very much preoccupied with things not being fixed.

I don't want things being boxed, like even the things that I make, I want them to sort of supersede how I understand it. I mean, to me, that's almost like one of my primary criteria of something I'm actually working is that it, in fact supersedes my presumptions about what it is, you know, again, my criteria for anything me great a really, really good is like when I made the beginning to the best of my ability with a high level intentionality. And nevertheless, every time I look at, I also start seeing things in it that I didn't consciously, I wasn't consciously aware of or - I mean - I could sit in accidents and I think they are to a certain degree. But I guess, on a certain level we can; it doesn't matter whether they are accidents or not - you know - it's like they become - I would say - interpolated, co-opted, but they just become part and parcel of the totality of the work. You know, if a work doesn't do that a minimum amount of times, I don't necessarily consider it one of my best works. You know what I mean. So. 

You know, like APEX is a word that - I mean - I had such specific ideas about what it was and, in some ways, people's responses to it have superseded. Now that's a space where truly superseded because I never even thought of it as a work. It was just like an internal document that I was making, so to speak to track - you know - all the complicated ideas around the narrative that I had in mind. And with Love is a message is it”  - you know - it's different, much more so an example of a thing where I made some very conscious decisions about it. But at least for the first six months, I would just consider the same things that when people would point them out, it just seemed almost pedantic. It was almost like if I had been consciously aware of those things, they just seem too intentional. I would've almost maybe not even done it because they seem to want those in a certain respect. And I was wholly unaware, wholly, wholly unaware that those kinds of juxtapositions and stuff actually happened. So.

Myriam Ben Salah

And then, I want you to talk a little bit - I know that you've talked about this at length, but I guess, I feel like maybe the French audience is not as familiar with it - but if you could say a few words about what you define as black visual intonation, because it also relates to this idea of filmic movement in a way.

Arthur Jafa

Black Visual Intonation is at least two things. On one hand, it is a specific set of techniques and technical apparatus, that I have developed to manipulate motion, in films like motion or, you know, moving image, images like technical, real specific, like I can go on and on about it and how it works. And even like recently, I have like software applications that I've developed that allow me to have a lot more precise and even surgical control of it than I ever have had before. And also instrumentalise so that if I want to apply these things to large scale works, I can do it. Whereas in the past I can do it by hand, versions like in Love is the message. I'm doing these techniques by hand. But, you know, it's just the level of focus like granular focus it requires makes it impossible to do much. You know, like eight, ten minutes is about the max you could kind of do a piece where you actually were paying that much attention to some. As I compose, it's something totally microtones or something like operating in a micro tone register. It's just hard to get to the finish line. But this equipment, like I have one application called The Axle, and like that will allow me to sort of replicate a lot of these effects on larger scale works. And in particular, the way project is one of the first projects that I actually develop with the idea of applying utilizing that location. So in mine. But at the same time and the other definition of the Black Visual Intonation, we're really just had to do with this proposition, which again, was a very local proposition, this whole idea that, you know, you could create a black cinema, as I would say my matches a little bit with the power of beauty and alienation of black music, meaning taking music as paradigmatic not only in terms of like formally, but also the status of music in the world of the state of black music in the world, how it exists and its relationship to black people in relationship, to other people's relationship, to everybody. It is capacity to migrate. You know, it migrates in a very interesting, complicated and fascinating kind of way. You know, if you look at, you know, I've talked about before, techno in Detroit versus techno in Berlin, dub music in Jamaica, the Americans versus dub music again in Berlin, you know, in Berlin. But you know what I mean. But the whole idea of this capacity to travel in a certain kind of way, the viral dimension of blackness, I would say. Black music probably has as great a claim to any sort of artistic form of the 20th century in terms of a sort of byroade dimension, you know.

You could say that cinema spread everywhere, but it spreads with these structures. These very heavy structures had to be put in place. The mediation is a distribution of destruction's. The black music is just I mean, it's like Hovey, you know, somebody has a record, they put their record in their suitcase and they bring you back from Harlem to Paris. And that's it. Like what you hear. You can't you can't go back once you've heard black music.That it has. You know, so it is something about the whole idea of that as sort of a paradigmatic state or has an ideal in terms of black visual expressivity outside black vigilant nation black visual expressivity about who's going to try to be precise.

I would say something like this very specific local term, black intonation. Well, practically speaking, the way people are using it when they use that as the metric categorically would be something like black vs expressive, which is like a composite, is the whole idea that music is a space in which there's a sort of general consensus or acceptance that black music not only is a concrete and specific thing despite, that side, unquantifiable diversity and variety of this thing we call it, is not one thing.

Everybody knows that it is the paradigmatic example of something constantly in flux. It is constantly in flux. Right. So one hand is that. But at the same time, it's this whole idea, like, yeah, we want to replicate the body of the thing we want to make things with the level of formal complexity of black music. Well, we also want to replicate the state or status of the habit thing functions in the world. The things relationship, the black socio, the things relationship, the black people, the things relationship to the sort of - like - I want him to use that arc typical kind of surplus expressivity of black people in the world. That we not just express that we exhibit surplus expressivity and most people we can acknowledge that, you know, but like if Michael Jordan is somebody who goes to dark backs while they do a three 360, you can put the ball to the legs. They don't. Not in an exhibition, in the game. They do these things. You don't get more points for that. So why do we? What is about black people, the persistence in that kind of behavior? It's not efficient. It's not. It's just not an efficient expenditure advantage. Right. And you make the level of difficulty of what you're doing : greater. Right ? In a competitive circumstance. It's not like figure skating. Well, if you do it, extra time to get more points and complexity. So that's one of those emblematic contradiction, paradoxes of black expressivity is our assistance in doing more.

You know, this morning. What does that mean? What is it about? So for me, Black vision intonation, Black Visual Expressivity is the idea that in the space of music best demonstrated an accepted role for a whole series of - I think pretty straightforward, but not so much complex reasons, that that same level of development and complexity, you can't find in the space of visual expressivity. When I say visually expressive, I mean everything from, you know, making things like paintings or sculptures and stuff like that to how people dress and how people present themselves and how people penetrate space. All of which are apprehended visual, you know, as a visual thing. You don't listen to a person dance, you watch a person. And so that to me is also visual expressively. So how come the imbalance between, you know, black sort of virtuosity, let's say, in the space of musical productions of music. Yeah, but not up until a point, you know, not sort of an equivalent, sort of. level of like proficiency in this other space, in the complex set of reasons why that is, and also the kind of void that they create to know. 

Seemingly wanting to be feel, in the face of this absence, you know, I mean, it's like the space itself is asking for it. It's asking for what black expressivity in this arena looks like. So, despite the late start, the combination early, late start, a black aesthetics and contemporary art practice, I see the early start because, as I said a thousand times. Contemporary art practice, as we understand it, is impossible without the presence of black artifacts since the beginning of the century.

But the late start, because for all the other reasons, black people don't get to participate, had been able to participate in the visual arts arena in the 20th century until the last third, like literally the last twenty five years of the 20th century. You start to see the kind of insurgent force of black visual artists start to force their way into the space of participation. So it's not like we've always been making things, but that kind of like my time, you get post-World War, like, when you get to the 50s, in the late 50s and the 60s, there's a big surge. By time you get to the 70s is like knocking at the door in masses. And then it's like one person squirts through. That would be a blast. Yeah. So it's very interesting that despite the late start, he clearly is one of the five most dominant, prominent artistic figures of the 20th century. I think that's kind of almost indisputable at this point.

You don't know me. Yeah, he's right up there with just a little bit below Picasso. And do stop and maybe two or three other people. And not on a level like, oh, Basquiat is a better artist than they got. Not only sort of crew level, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the space in which that artist occupies in the collective consciousness of what it means to make a theme that is uniquely and singularly saw like nobody else's work. There've been a thousand imitators of Basquiat. Yet it is a parent's simplicity. But nobody has been able to replicate that at all.