Arthur Jafa’s Vital New Museum Survey Is a Horror Show for the Ages

In a self-portrait from 1988, Arthur Jafa holds his camera to a mirror and stares upward, meeting both his own reflected face and the gaze of his viewer simultaneously. When it was first published in Artforum, the photograph was called Self-Portrait. But at some point, Jafa changed it to Monster, the title it holds today.

The renaming of Monster is, I think, a telling gesture, especially because Jafa’s films and videos are filled with terrifying creatures. Some are human, some are not, and most end up getting ignored, for whatever reason, by the critics and curators who write about Jafa’s oeuvre, which may just count as the most influential body of work produced by any living artist active today.

Think, for example, of Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), the video that is justly regarded as Jafa’s magnum opus. Across seven minutes, Jafa montages an astonishing array of visual material related to Black life in the US, from the police killing of Walter Scott to grainy footage of the Notorious B.I.G. rapping. Set to Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” the piece is typically regarded as a salute to the survival of Black Americans in spite of so much death and disaster. But Jafa also includes two appropriated movie clips that seem at odds with that notion: one showing the monster from Cloverfield, laying waste to New York City; the other showing the Xenomorph from Alien salivating before chowing down on its prey.

More monsters show up in APEX (2013), which features 841 images played in quick succession across eight and a half minutes. In between pictures of partially mutilated heads, faraway planets, and African masks, there is a picture of the poster for Jaws and a still from a “Lord of the Rings” movie showing Gollum, whose madness turned him into a scaly-skinned, sharp-toothed cave dweller. And even more monsters can be found in sculptural works such as LeRage (2017), which shows a grayscale version of the Incredible Hulk smashing his fist into the ground and sending debris flying.

Given this horde of creatures, it’s possible to call Jafa’s art a horror show. Certainly, his recently opened New Museum survey, the exquisite “I Am Tony” (on view through January 3), makes the case that this is a fair description.

Curators Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari have parceled nearly four decades’ worth of art across two floors of the New York museum, casting much of the exhibition in inky darkness. Stare deep enough into the show’s abyss, and you will find a mix of terror and transcendence that is appropriate to Jafa’s oeuvre. I was only somewhat surprised to encounter the Xenomorph once more, this time in The Last Wave (2020), a wall-filling mural in which the alien is set alongside images of a solar eclipse, a New Order album cover, Michael Jackson performing, Billie Holliday in her coffin, and countless other visions.

Billed as his largest show to date, the exhibition is a vital one for Jafa, whose route to the center of the art world was unconventional. Having been obsessed with movies since childhood, Jafa went on to make a significant contribution to film history during the 1990s, lensing features directed by Spike Lee, Julie Dash (to whom he was once married), and John Akomfrah. He also worked as a second-unit cinematographer on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. But Jafa’s New Museum exhibition, which is less a typical survey than an immersive project in its own right, shows that he was making art simultaneously, even when most mainstream galleries weren’t showing it.

The show largely elides the cinematic part of his career and focuses instead on his visual art, which it presents in a nonlinear manner. Visitors can, of course, find well-known works by Jafa, including The White Album (2019), the video essay about whiteness that won him the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. But these pieces do not form the show’s core. Love Is the Message, his most acclaimed work, is so deemphasized that it is relegated to a small side gallery, where its triumphant song can barely be heard amid his other videos’ screams and rumbles.

The great revelation of the exhibition is Jafa’s early work, which begins the impulse toward horror seen throughout his more recent work. Notebooks (1988–2007), a series of binders featuring images appropriated from books, magazines, and other print sources, is given a hallway of its own. One of the binders combines an advertisement for an MF DOOM album and a photograph by Cindy Sherman that shows the artist maniacally smiling while wearing a silvery mask. The collage enacts an uneasy racial dynamic: MF DOOM was a Black rapper known for cloaking his face in metal, while Sherman is a white artist whose disguises have included blackface.

The sense of menace was continued more obliquely in 2002 with My Black Death, for which Jafa exhibited his own Pontiac Trans Am, part of which he crushed and left alongside the vehicle’s front half. Rarely exhibited and here remade with another Trans Am as MBD_Trans Am (2026), the piece is paired with an ominous booming sound that is both alluring and repellent.

This collision of horror and beauty is key to Jafa’s work, which proposes terror as a basic condition of life. “For me personally, I think Black being is intrinsically bound up with horror,” Jafa once told the curator Helen Molesworth. “I don’t think you can get around it. It can’t be reconciled, or theorized away. One has to accept it, to live with it.” Or, as Simone White puts in the catalog for the Jafa show, the work evinces the line of thinking that “blackness cannot exist without terror. Including intrablack terror.” (She also notes that this conception of Blackness is “not a settled thing” among many thinkers, and goes on to praise Jafa for “the whiff of shit he stirs up in powerful circles of black criticism.”)

Jafa’s remarks to Molesworth may help explain his cryptic 2021 video AGHDRA, in which a computer-generated ocean churns on for well over an hour, its waters filled with broken rocks. Set beneath a gorgeous sun at what may either be dawn or dusk, this sea occasionally stutters and reverses before continuing to roll all over again. Like MBD_Trans Am, the video has a foreboding din for its score, except that in this case the horror is even more explicit. For what it’s worth, back in 2021, Jafa told me that the piece has its roots in a Godzilla movie he saw in Tokyo with his son and a friend.

AGHDRA is presented in a large, dim gallery at the end of the New Museum show alongside a “Picture Unit,” a walk-in structure resembling a maze whose walls are lined with more scary imagery, including a vision of white eyes peeking out from a void. Neither AGHDRA nor the “Picture Unit” contain any of the monsters seen elsewhere in the exhibition, but they do not need to, either, to make their point. They are about the sense that danger lurks everywhere.

It’s a sentiment Jafa makes explicit with a metal plaque appended to a wall near the exhibition’s end. When I went to the show, I just about missed this work because of the lack of light, but once I saw the sculpture, I couldn’t unsee the words that it bears: “AMERICA IS A SATANIC CULT.” The true monsters are all around us. There is no escape.