Arthur Jafa. Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.

Seven minutes, one song

Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death is a colour video with sound that Arthur Jafa completed in 2016. It runs about seven minutes, close to the length of the song underneath it: Kanye West's Ultralight Beam, the opening track of The Life of Pablo, released the same year.

Over the song runs an unbroken stream of images. Black and white archive. News footage. Phone video, shaky, blurred, shot vertically. Scenes from films, music videos, sports. Some footage shot by Jafa himself. All of it turns on Black life in America.

There is no narration. No captions naming people or places. Viewers recognise some faces and not others. The video does not stop to explain.

Cut to a beat

Jafa came from cinema. He was the cinematographer of Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust and worked for years behind the camera before the contemporary art world knew his name. That background shows in the editing.

The images are not ordered by date or by theme. They follow the song. When the voice drops, the pictures slow. When the choir rises, the cuts come thicker and faster. Some footage is slowed, some stutters, as if the film were trying to keep up with the viewer's pulse.

Jafa has spoken of wanting a cinema with the power and feeling of Black music. Love Is the Message tries that in seven minutes. It does not tell a story. It leads the way a song leads a listener.

So the video does not split into good parts and bad parts. An athlete rises to score, then someone is pinned to the pavement, then a woman dances in church. Each image changes the meaning of the one before.

Joy and violence in one stream

The title has two halves that face each other. Love is the message. The message is death. The video holds both and picks neither.

We see real joy: dancing, singing, sport, moments of lift. We also see real violence, much of it filmed by bystanders' cameras, the kind of footage that spread online in those years. They alternate so fast that neither can be felt alone.

That is what makes the work hard to watch and hard to forget. It gives no distance for commentary. It puts viewers inside the stream, where joy and pain arrive together, as they arrive in the lives it records. The song carries both sides too, with the breath of gospel and prayer: comfort and cry at once.

One work, many collections

The video was first shown in New York at the end of 2016 and was soon screened widely. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam received it together as a gift from the collector R.H. Defares, and other museums hold it too.

Its material is worth noting. A work built largely from existing images, many of which once scrolled past millions of phone screens, became something museums keep. Alone, those clips are easy to scroll past. Cut to a beat, they ask us to stay.

With a similar belief in music as a way a community keeps its memory, Cauleen Smith built a songbook for the poet Wanda Coleman. The forms differ, but both trust that a song can carry what a story cannot.