Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony

America is beautiful. America is broken. America is Black. In I Am Tony, America is sampled, remixed, mashed up, and spit back out in a torrent of found footage and photographs. Sacred. Profane. High. Low. Saint. Meme. Martyr. Mostly Black with some white, and little bits of blue.

They are images we see everywhere. Jim Crow South. Civil Rights. Black Lives Matter. The Bloods. The police. The kind you know even when you think you don’t. Jafa brings them together in one furious song. Collisions become syncopations. Interruptions become part of the composition.

Music will envelop you in here. Everything from gospel and jazz to punk and metal. Aretha cries out. Jimi vibrates. Sid Vicious is viscous beside The Notorious B.I.G. Kanye, whose “Ultralight Beam,” the soundtrack to Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016).

Detroit is here, too. The machinery and the bodies that built it. A sepulchral Trans Am. A giant tire wrapped in golden chains. The American dream made heavy by its own making.

Behind it are some other very American industries: crime, police, prisons, surveillance, punishment. The shootout in Taxi Driver. Hendrix being arrested. Michael Jackson being interrogated by police.

Let yourself drown in AGHDRA (2021) on the fourth floor. It’s a vast, computer-generated black sea, with the setting sun on the horizon. The waves look like rolling lava, or maybe scorched earth breaking apart. The surround sound hits hard. Like Berghain hard.

Next to it, glossy black walls rise to form a monument. Inside, Jafa’s hall of saints: a congregation of figures he uses everywhere, in different ways, Jimi Hendrix on guitar, Epic Kitten of the Month, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. In Jafa's universe, images and sounds in circulation make and remake the sacred.

A rhythm rolls beneath this show. Everything swings, everything shuffles. Everything repeats. Nothing resolves. What might otherwise register as evidence or spectacle starts to move like speech in church. Voices calling. Voices answering, accelerating into praise, the hallelujah version.

The rhythm is meant to be joined.

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) started his career as a cinematographer, working on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Spike Lee’s Crooklyn, and later on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In the late 1990s, his work increasingly moved into art, photography, sculpture, and installation. In 2014, he co-founded the production company TNEG with Elissa Blount-Moorhead and Malik Sayeed to support Black independent cinema. Across it all runs the same question: How might the beauty, power, and complexity of Black experience become visual form? I Am Tony, named for jazz drummer Tony Williams, brings that question into the room at full volume.