The Atemporal Intonation of Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016)

Upon its 2016 premiere at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in New York, Arthur Jafa’s 2016 short film Love is the Message, The Message is Death established itself as a paradigm shifting piece of visual art which sought to encapsulate the energy, joy, pain, and memory of the black experience in America.[1] A collected amalgam of images comprised of internet clips, music videos, TV interviews, filmic excerpts, astronomic observation etc… Jafa’s work assembles these disparate images, recontextualizes them in relation to one another and scores them to Kanye West’s anthemic 2016 song, “Ultralight Beam”. The resulting 7-minute journey suspends viewers in an atemporal negotiation of memory, movement and image in a distinctly “idiomatic”[2] framework of “black visual intonation”.[3] Through his facilitation of apparently disjointed visual stimuli, Jafa is able to convey a nonverbal energy which seems to pulsate throughout the film. The images flow through memory and time, cohesively establishing a semiotic visual substrate that the audience is able to step within and experience via their collective, electrifying grandeur. This essay will navigate the various semiotics that Jafa’s work utilizes in Love is the Message, and address its atemporal approach to memory and visual/musical intonation. Furthermore, this essay will engage with scholars of African American ontology that can substantively categorize the various semiotic relationalities that Jafa’s work imbues, specifically those having to do with the history of racialized violence in the United States. These images find particular relevance in a #BlackLiveMatter media environment, in which they are culturally reconstituted due to their mediatic ubiquity. <a href="https://medium.com/@rodriguez.cisco818/the-atemporal-intonation-of-arthur-jafas-love-is-the-message-the-message-is-death-2016-7182cb29e7e8">Visit Now</a>