ARTHUR JAFA KEPT 200 BINDERS BEFORE THE NEW MUSEUM SHOW

ARTHUR JAFA KEPT 200 BINDERS BEFORE THE NEW MUSEUM SHOW

Arthur Jafa's Golden Lion winning video plays on a loop at the New Museum today. So does a wall of sculptures welded from crushed car parts, and a room built around more than 200 three ring binders that nobody outside his studio has read in full. I Am Tony, the largest survey of Jafa's work to date, opens September 24 across two floors, and the famous eight minute video everyone already knows is the least interesting thing in it.

The White Album and Love Is the Message already have wall labels and a Phaidon catalog. The two hundred plus binders of clipped images, the ones that built both of those videos in the first place, are the actual subject of a nearly forty year career, and this is the first time a museum has shown the raw sorting process instead of just the finished cut.

Two Hundred Binders, Cut From Magazines

Jafa has spent decades filling more than 200 three ring binders with images cut from art books, fashion spreads, history texts and pop culture magazines, an archive the New Museum is putting on public view for the first time inside I Am Tony. The binders sit alongside nine video installations, photographic works and sculptures welded from crushed car parts, the unglamorous material that rarely makes it into a write up built around the two marquee videos. Every montage Jafa has ever cut, including the ones with Golden Lion trophies attached, started as a page torn out of one of those binders. The show's title nods to Tony Williams, the jazz drummer Jafa has cited as a formative influence on his editing rhythm, not to the artist's own name.

Kanye West Scored the Piece Everyone Already Knows

Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, Jafa's best known work, runs eight minutes of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, police violence and Black cultural triumph cut to Kanye West's Ultralight Beam, not an original score. That soundtrack choice is why the video crossed out of the art world into music discourse the moment it premiered in 2016, passed around outside gallery walls the way a music video travels rather than the way a video installation usually does. It is also why a viewer who has never set foot in a museum can already recognize the piece before reading a single wall label.

Alex Greenberger Asks What the Images Do

ARTnews deputy editor Alex Greenberger frames the whole show around one question. "Arthur Jafa is asking: What do these images do?" Greenberger said. "How have they informed our politics for better and for worse?" That question is the binders, restated. Every clipped photo in those 200 volumes is Jafa asking the same thing about a single frame before he ever cuts it into a montage set to someone else's music.

The Torkwase Dyson survey now on view at Pace Gallery is working the same New York fall season, a different artist asking a related question about images, space and Black experience through paint instead of found footage. Two shows, ten blocks apart, arguing that the archive behind the work is worth as much attention as the finished object.

Most visitors will still spend more time in front of Love Is the Message than in front of any single binder page. An eight minute video with a Kanye West soundtrack is simply an easier sell than a vitrine of cut magazine clippings, and that is fine. The binders are not competing for foot traffic. They are the reason the famous video exists in the first place, and once a viewer knows that, the wall label on the piece everyone already recognizes reads differently.

The two hundred binders are the underrated story here, not the Golden Lion video or the catalog already covered elsewhere. Jafa has been building that archive for nearly forty years, longer than most artists getting profiled around him have been working at all, and I Am Tony is the first time the New Museum has let the public see the sorting process instead of just the eight minutes set to Ultralight Beam. Expect the binders, not the crushed car sculptures or the familiar reel, to be what critics are still writing about when the show closes January 4.