The consensus out of this year’s Venice Biennale was that the must-see pavilion was Austria’s, the artist of which was the subject of a profile in this week’s New Yorker, and that the can’t-miss off-site exhibition was “Helter Skelter” at the Fondazione Prada, which paired the work of Richard Prince with Arthur Jafa. I had the opportunity to interview Jafa about it for another publication and asked if he felt intimidated by the way everyone in Venice had taken to calling his exhibition “the real American pavilion.” He waved away the suggestion. He’d heard the tagline, but saw it more as a marketing stunt by his dealer Gavin Brown, something out of Sweet Smell of Success (1957). “It was like a chant,” Jafa said, “like he was casting a spell.”
Brown’s face, and Jafa’s market, sneaks into his video The White Album (2018), which is part of the Venice show and also currently on view as its own exhibition at the Hammer Museum. Jafa’s videos are a dense meal, and well worth their own exhibitions. In fact, if one could fault the Venice exhibition at all, it’s that one runs the risk of being overwhelmed. Following up on his breakthrough hit Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), The White Album is described in the press materials as “a social critique of whiteness,” which is putting it mildly. The work’s title reminds us that this is the Beatles record on which “Helter Skelter” appears, the song adopted by Charles Manson to refer to the white supremacist race war he hoped to start through his group’s murders.
“The White Album“
Artist: Arthur Jafa
Venue: The Hammer Museum
Address: 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024
Through: August 30, 2026
The film kicks off with a musician who is at least as good as the Beatles, Oneohtrix Point Never, whose 2017 music video for “The Pure And The Damned” features Robert Pattinson stalking a rural neighborhood with a sword until he squares off against a creature from a 1980s horror movie mid-meal. Jafa’s work has been ahead of its time in so many ways, but especially in the way it anticipated the mediums that would become dominant a decade later: the YouTube video essay and the social media deluge of images, which probably scratches the same itch that people used to scratch by channel surfing.
From there Jafa moves to Dylann Roof exiting Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston after his mass murder there. This isn’t funny at all, one of the few moments that doesn’t balance out the darkness with some kind of humor. Later in the film, a pale bearded man pulls a large assault rifle out of his jeans. It’s so comically large that you can’t believe he fit it in there. Then he fumbles reloading his clips in such a stupid way that you almost forget that each one represents a dozen people he hopes to kill.
There are embarrassing front-facing thoughts about race on camera, but related to this, and a little close to home, are the images of a young woman in Gavin Brown’s booth at an art fair. Unlike the racists, she seems very nice and smart, but she’s still going to have to talk about Jafa’s pieces, perhaps even the video in which she appears. His hyperawareness of the casual systems of oppression makes it difficult for anyone to talk, or write, about his work. As ever, you really have to hand it to Gavin Brown, whose solemn face appears in the video as a complicated tribute.
