The show pairs two artists — one Black, one white — who have trained their vision for decades on both the US’s foundational violences and its rarer, complicated moments of beauty, through strategies of appropriation. Taken together, their work becomes a bracing indictment-slash-love letter to a deeply flawed nation.
But to my mind, what makes the exhibition even more quintessentially American is the fact that the curator seems — almost perversely — unable to face (or at least name) the racial implications of her own curatorial conceit.
D’Souza gets at the heart of what I’ve sensed about the show [from afar so far] but couldn’t articulate so well: that it doesn’t quite have a handle on what Jafa and Prince are actually doing as their work conveys the experiences of, respectively, Black and white culture.
Also, it still seems buck wild to me that this supposed powerful reckoning of The Real American Pavilion is happening at the Prada Foundation. Also, it still feels to me that a show titled Helter Skelter should have Cady Noland in it, and while I’m thinking about it, a Noland/Jafa show is something I would like to see.
Whether for utility or poetry, the alt text has not sunk into the lower layers of Gagosian Quarterly. Editor Wyatt Allgeier’s interview with Nancy Spector about her Arthur Jafa/Richard Prince show, “Helter Skelter” has exactly one image with an alt tag. The rest are from the related articles links in the footer:
Video still of orange, glowing orb against black background
The brochure is tall. If there were any plebeians in Venice rn, the show would open for them Saturday
I have read the gallery guide for Helter Skelter Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, Miuccia Prada’s two-artist show curated by Nancy Spector. I have created a mind palace and walked through it. I’m not sure these artists are operating on the same register.
The exhibition segregates them on the ground floor, and they get together in the fancy rooms upstairs. Spector notes shared ideas, themes, visuals, approaches, without forcing too hard. It feels more like parallel play than direct engagement or dialogue. [Which makes me very interested to see what Jafa and Prince’s collaborative zine ends up like; it could be the song of the summer.]
The image used to promote the show feels like its apotheosis. Prince’s iconic Rasta painting, Graduation (2008) and a Vodoun witch doctor from Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio (2019) are shown side by side, along with two other Canal Zone paintings, near the end of the show. In the text, Spector focuses on appropriation and juxtaposition, and Jafa’s critique of ownership in the historical context of chattel slavery.
[top] Arthur Jafa’s Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio, 2019, at Museum Brandhorst… cropped and combined [bottom] with Richard Prince’s Graduation, 2008, for the Prada Foundation show.
But the elision of Mickey Mouse feels crucial. Jafa has talked about how placing their images next to each other reveal Mickey and Damballah, the Vodoun spirit represented by the witch doctor, are two iterations of the same entity. Placing a whiteface figure next to Prince’s Rasta says blackface, without the hard “R.” But hanging Mickey next to Graduation brings out the minstrel in both.
The autobiography of desire echoes throughout the show, with each artist exploring the yearning of being someone else, an other. Prince made his Girlfriends photos because he “wanted to be a girlfriend.” And Jafa’s Man-Monster self-portrait embodies transformation in ways that resonate with his 2024 race-switching re-edit of Taxi Driver, BG, which in Venice is titled Ben Gazarra [is the misspelling intentional?].
installation view of Helter Skelter so that Mickey’s cropped out again, but that surprised Mickey face-like group of ovals isn’t. image: Fond. Prada via hypebeast, which I only read for the google images
What’s less clear, perhaps, in the show is that Prince testified that painting Rastas was an act of love, of desire, of substitution like the Girlfriends: he wanted to look like them, to be them. For all the real talk of the Black experience, white supremacy, and American masculinity, I feel like both of these artists are mapping the psychosexual contours of a violent, white, imperialist, colonialist elephant, while Spector and Prada are maybe saying, keep the blindfolds on.
Hélio Oiticica. Red Monochrome, 1959. Alkyd on board, 11 3/4 × 11 3/4 × 1 1/8″, collection: MoMA
It’s the image on top of Gladstone’s email announcement and MoMA’s exhibition information page, so I assume Hélio Oiticica’s Red Monochrome is included in Less is Morbid, Arthur Jafa’s Artist’s Choice exhibition organized with Thomas Lax, which opens next week.
A spin on the Miesian maxim which drove much of The Modern’s Modernism, Jafa’s title calls out “the way art institutions valued supposedly rational cultural disciplines over forms of life—Black, queer, and feminine, for example—imagined as excessive and chaotic. In response, Jafa suggests, ‘The answer to disorder in the universe is not genocide. The answer is in how we coexist.'”
