CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/25/2025

'Live Evil' is essential Arthur Jafa

Featured images are from new release Arthur Jafa: Live Evil, the highly anticipated, 360-page artist’s book / catalog expanding upon the Los Angeles artist’s major recent survey at LUMA Arles. Heavily illustrated by full-page details in Jafa’s inimitable lyrical, confrontational and juxtapositional style, the book also contains essays by some of today’s most powerful writers on art, film, theory and race, alongside several deep interviews with Jafa. In conversation with Saidiya Hartman, Jafa states: “Someone I love said, ‘Hey, Black culture perpetually operates in a state of emergency.’ And I think about that statement over and over again because of the duality of the term “emergency.” On one hand, it means, obviously, that Black cultures operate in a constant state of crisis. And that crisis undergirds the character of so many things we do, the intensity with which we do them, including the way that improvisation— which is just structured accident—is such a singular aspect of what we do in all these spheres. That sense of improvisation involves taking the idea of crisis and formalizing it, making it a formal component. You have to do it now. When it’s time for you to improvise, everybody points to you, you got to go. When it’s time for you to freestyle, you got to go. You can’t refer to your notes, you can’t compose yourself. You just have to do it. But at the same time, I’m starting to think of “emergency” as perpetually in this state of emergence, ontologically speaking, as a way to try to understand how it is that Black Americans function, and I guess I’m specifically thinking about Black Americans in the US right now, even though I think this quality is characteristic of Black folks across the diaspora.
I was recently asked to write an introduction to this book on one of my mentors. I said one of the things that he taught me was how contingent our craft was and how for us, the question of who you modeled yourself on wasn’t just the difference between succeeding and failing, but it was the difference between life and death. You know what I mean? This sense of life-and-death intensity means that for us, invention is not a matter of simply getting a patent; it’s the difference between surviving and not surviving.”