Artist's Choice: Arthur Jafa — Less Is Morbid

"Less Is Morbid is a counter death wish," says artist Arthur Jafa. Originally from Tupelo, Mississippi, and trained as an architect and cinematographer, he has become well-known for his collages, montages, assemblages, and installations — combining images imbued with what he calls "affective capacity," or the emotional power of association.

For this exhibition — the latest in MoMA's Artist's Choice series — Jafa has selected over 80 objects from the Museum's collection. Placing things beside one another, he creates relationships between pictures and between their makers: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Cy Twombly; Lygia Clark, Roy DeCarava, Kase2, and Ming Smith; Piet Mondrian and Lutisha Pettway. Many of the works share an allover approach to composition in which the picture exceeds its physical frame.

Seen together, the installation of works collapses typically opposed ideas and approaches — minimalist/maximalist, sparse/dense, atomic/cosmological, individual/collective — as well as the hierarchies that emerge from this kind of binary thinking.

Jafa's exhibition title puns on "less is more," an expression attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose steel column — a pillar of modernist architecture — is included in the exhibition. In the 20th century, this equation of simplicity with beauty and removal with order governed the collecting and display of art at places like MoMA. This axiom also extended to 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."