“VIBES,” SAYS ARTHUR JAFA, clicking through images on a screen in his Los Angeles studio, all part of an extended mood board for a future project — photographs from the Harlem Renaissance, glamorous black-and-whites of vintage cars and fashion, work by Roy DeCarava — “more vibes”. It’s the morning after Jafa’s 58th birthday, and the polymathic artist, cinematographer, and theorist of black culture threw himself a party the night before in this space in the West Adams neighbourhood, not far from his home in Ladera Heights. The spotless studio is now empty save for a suite of computers and a large-scale photographic printer the size of a refrigerator. On one wall, there’s a sculpture: a seated man, his horrifically fissured back turned to the viewer. The work was inspired by an 1863 abolitionist photograph of a former slave identified as Gordon — it is at once abject and regal and, in Jafa’s 2017 rendition, creepily mesmerising. The space is new, a place to test out ideas before placing them in a gallery, and late in the day, he shows me a prototype that didn’t work out, tucked in the back: an adult-size oblong of industrial-grade plastic. It takes a few moments of mounting dread to understand that I’m looking at the bundled shape of a lynched woman, meant to be part of a series called “Hang Time”. “Now I have a $60,000 hat stand,” he says dryly.
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