At His Moment of Triumph, Arthur Jafa Is Looking for Trouble

What links Jafa’s art across mediums is the idea that items brought out of context and juxtaposed, whether metal pipes or appropriated YouTube clips, can develop expressive power beyond their original employ. It is precision work — obsessive micro-editing goes into the videos — that draws on a forager’s instinct for finding beauty in the ephemeral and mundane.

It invokes, as well, a particularly Black tradition — shaped by economic scarcity — of making art that transforms what is available. That impulse in Black creativity, in Jafa’s view, was a way to stake a claim in a largely hostile world. “It’s a form of radical determinacy in the face of the chaotic,” he said.

It connects, for instance, the craft of the D.J. — an analogy he offers for his video work — with the yard sculptures he saw in Mississippi, where he grew up between Tupelo in the hills and Clarksdale in the Delta, and where “people just felt compelled to make” things.