“Arthur Jafa: Live Evil”, courtesy of Walther König, Köln
Live Evil, a palindrome as elegant as it is profound, is stamped into the boards of filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa’s new book. It’s the title of an album Miles Davis invoked in 1971, while playing at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. Jazz had been institutionalized, rendered respectable, and refurbished as a proper member of the establishment. But the essence of jazz was innovation and experimentation, a call to creation that he would protect by summoning chaos in its stead, like Jesus flipping tables to drive moneylenders out of the temple.
In 1982 Black Sabbath took the title “Live Evil” as their own, embracing the blasphemous barbarism of the colonial mind as their birthright. For Jafa, these two sides of the same coin coexist across a continuum, inextricably intertwined, yet not always visible to the naked eye. As a seer, Jafa crafts radical panoramas that liberate us from the prisons of the mind, playing with images as a jazz musician plays notes: melodic, harmonic and jarring, tempo shifting, discordant truths that flow together into something far greater than the sum of its parts.
Born and raised in Mississippi, Jafa got his start working as a cinematographer on groundbreaking films like Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994) before stepping into his own with Love Is the Message, The Message is Death in 2016. In the seven-minute film, Jafa unloads the clip, firing off 150 scenes of Black American life, drawn from YouTube videos that have become part of the endless scroll. Police brutality, domestic terrorism, and political uprisings appear alongside images of Martin Luther King Jr., LeBron James, and Barack Obama, while Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” plays. “What would America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?” a woman in the film asks.
Throughout his career, Jafa has confronted the vicious history of state-sanctioned violence against Black America, and the ways in which art, music, and culture have become a tool of survival against oppression. With Live Evil, which began as a 2022 exhibition at LUMA Arles in France, Jafa reflects on these themes through our layered experience of images, and the ways in which they can be used to subvert and upend the very racist dog whistles they were designed to reinforce.
“In writing of Black America’s ongoing saga of triumphs, traumas, and travails, James Baldwin declared ‘ours is a story that must be told again and again,’” legendary critic Greg Tate wrote in an essay included in the book. In Jafa’s hands, art, culture, and community became lifelines of survival, connecting people across space and time to freedom, beauty, and truth. “It seems to me that we’re in a state of perpetual post traumatic stress,” Jafa observed. “It’s like an epidemic that’s happening to us, but it’s not happening to the people around us. Therefore, our responses are really peculiar. Sometimes they seem like genius, sometimes they seem like psychosis. But it’s a very weird thing when you’re in the midst of an ongoing, somewhat phantom epidemic that’s not being treated like an epidemic even though we have experienced it as one.”
Therein lies the rub: homegrown fascism takes anti-blackness as its starting point so that the structures that uphold it are synonymous with democracy itself. One good shake of the tree and the root rot begins to show, revealing liberals and conservatives as two sides of the same coin. When domestic policy is rooted in racism but its history is obscured (ie. health insurance tied to employment), those whose foothold in privilege precipitously begins to slip may speak of living in a “dystopia” in a futile attempt to deny the complicity they once enjoyed with impunity.
But Jafa refuses to play along. Instead he looks at the space where Miles Davis and Ozzy Osbourne co-exist, where existence is resistance and refusal is a gift. As Norman Ajari wrote in the book, “Waiting for the huge revolution that will bring them down, Jafa’s work directly makes the choice to look at this world of opposition and dehumanization, but above all to explore the infinite creativity, the immense aesthetic power, the incalculable subjective intensity that comes to life deep within its interstices. From these tensions Jafa multiplies the combinations; so that evil lives.”
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