Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death

The presentation of Arthur Jafa’s 2016 film Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in January and February this year overlapped with the city’s Black History Month celebrations. The hypnotic six-and-a-half-minute-long video works through rapid-fire images of state-sponsored anti-Black violence and ordinary Black life and Black excellence, sourced from found footage and Jafa’s own films, and soundtracked by the Kanye West song “Ultralight Beam.”

I was mesmerized by the film, and I felt overarching dread growing in my body as I watched it. And as a Black viewer, that feeling was intensely familiar—though it was strange to witness something so uncomfortable while seated next to a white man, shoes off, laid out on the bench, with every indication that he was at ease. While the film acts as a commentary on the ubiquitous social media spectacle of violence against Black people, I am suspicious of its ambition to rehearse the anxiety that the circulation of these images produces in many of us. This is not to say that Jafa should not have made the film, but rather that Black viewers simply may not want to see it, or may prefer to view it at home. Meanwhile, with Love Is the Message as the MAC’s sole exhibition in the context of Black History Month, the museum appeared to use the film to offer non-Black viewers a voyeuristic, racial catharsis at the expense of any Black people who may have been in the room. The choice feels haunted by colonial imaginations of Black people as somehow impervious to feeling, and therefore expendable in the name of a larger project.

Circling back to Jafa’s desire to “force cinema to respond…to who we are as a people,” I am left wondering about the procedure he imagined. Love Is the Message is a masterpiece in terms of its manipulation of the viewer’s empathy—though I felt myself treated as a casualty in the process. Can Black artists tell our painful stories without re-inflicting their violence onto other members of our community? Or, to tip it another way: What is the responsibility of museums to Black museum-goers when presenting Black art? Can institutions centre Black experience without feeding into colonial imaginings of us? Overall, I am waiting for the day Black trauma is no longer used as a vessel for non-Black self-reflection. These are complicated questions, and we deserve more nuanced answers.