CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/12/2021

Essential reading: Arthur Jafa’s ‘MAGNUMB’ is a new release this week

Featured stills are from Arthur Jafa’s indelible Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death (2016), reproduced from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated survey, published to accompany the exhibition on view now through October 2021 in Humlebaek, Denmark. “Writing about the work of Arthur Jafa is a daunting task, due in no small part to the conceptual and emotional density of the material,” Jared Sexton writes. “One has to approach it slowly and let it wash over you in waves: light waves, sounds waves, tidal waves, waves of emotion. There’s a whole intertextual universe that it draws from—folklore, history, literature, music, philosophy, religion—that in turn draws you into prolonged study, however and wherever you take it up. It is difficult to do any justice to it, whether considering the particular works that will debut in this exhibition or the larger body of work that anyone moving through the art world over the last decade is trying to get their heads around. Or trying to get their arms around, to embrace it or commune with it or wrestle with it. No matter your approach, though, the work will knock you on your ass. But only after first announcing there is, by design, no furniture to sit on, no handrails to guide you, no stairs, no ramp, no elevator, no portal to get you where you need to be.”