ARTHUR JAFA
Akingdoncomethas , 2018 Video, color, sound, 180 min. Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection Promised gift, Whitney Museum of American Art
Arthur Jafa’s artistic practice is built through the sonic tonality of images, and their potential to create the same vibrational frequency as Black music. Jafa’s desire to create a Black cinema that operates in the same register as music fuses the sonic with the visual in a way that renders each frame and edit as a form of musical phrasing. In Akingdoncomethas (2018), this synesthetic tonality builds slowly, through a composition of TV recordings from the 1970s to 2017 showing gospel singers, choirs, and ministers from the Black church singing hymns and preaching to large congregations. Each song is sung from beginning to end, with extracts from the sung and spoken sermons interspersed between them. The symbiotic relationship between Black sacred music and the music industry in forging faith, community, and identity belies the deeper revolutionary potential of the Black church to effect lasting social change. Jafa foregrounds the profound implications of this, by showing the powerful role of the church as the cultural center of the fight against a system determined to crush Black people’s spirit, through preachers and singers whose complicated lives have epitomized that struggle. The video begins with a recording of Reverend Al Green singing “Jesus is Waiting,” for example, written by Green in 1973, three years before his switch from a successful soul singer to a minister after a personal tragedy, and Le’Andria Johnson appears three times at different stages of a long struggle to survive. Ten minutes into the video, footage of the disastrous California wildfires of 2018 appears, showing TV news clips of people fleeing and horses cantering down the road in confusion. These apocalyptic events (occurring over a year, as Jafa was making the video nearby in Los Angeles) reappear at the end of the video, along with fragments of the sermons and songs. A fast-moving silent montage of anguish, hope, faith, courage, and communing is overlaid with reflective piano music and other poignant sounds that point to the yawning gap between the hopes for a new future invoked in every face on the screen and the reality of the present. In a redemptive conclusion, the screen goes to black, and Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s “Beginnings (The First Minute of a New Day)” (1975) plays. “We want to be free / Yet we have no idea / Why we are struggling here / We’re searching out/ Our every doubt / And winning.. / Completely new / Completely new / Beginnings.”
Installation views: Arthur Jafa, Akingdoncomethas , 2018, in Mountain /Time, Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
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