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One Fine Show: “Arthur Jafa, The White Album” at the Hammer Museum

An intense examination of white identity and systemic power, Jafa's video collage-slash-mixtape never lets its darkness resolve into comfort.

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.”

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