Arthur Jafa Produces a Nauseating Disappointment with a Revisionist Take on ‘Taxi Driver’

If you recognize every image that Arthur Jafa has appropriated for his art in the past, you are in need of a digital detox.

Some of Jafa’s pictures are famous: readily available stills from notable films, glamour shots of pop stars, photographs of ugly moments from American history that have appeared in textbooks. But many more of his images are considerably less well-known: the various Instagram Reels and YouTube clips, for example, that Jafa has pilfered from the internet and re-presented for gallery viewers in a string of acclaimed videos, most notably 2016’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his famed elegy for the tenuousness of Black life that crams more than 100 pieces of footage into less than 8 minutes.

Tracking down the source for all this imagery is a pointless exercise—Jafa’s intent, it often seems, is to let all his pictures run free, reveling in the friction that results from when they rub up against one another, shorn of their initial context, as they might be on social media feeds. Which makes it a surprise that, for his latest video, he has lifted a very recognizable sequence from a very famous movie: the brothel massacre that concludes Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, a character study about Travis Bickle, a lonely cabbie who tries to find his place in New York City through vigilantism. (While the film hasn’t been a core reference to Jafa previously, two years ago, he spoke approvingly of a 1999 Douglas Gordon video that appropriates and modulates a different Taxi Driver scene.)

Travis’s bloody bid for attention is seen, over and over, in Jafa’s 73-minute ***** (2024), which presents the sequence half a dozen or so times. But the video, which recently debuted at Gladstone Gallery in New York, contains a twist: everyone Travis murders is now Black, not white. In a particularly strange gesture, the cops who arrive too late are also now Black.

The fascinating concept is rooted in the film’s mythology. Screenwriter Paul Schrader had initially written Sport, the pimp in control of the film’s bordello, as a Black man. But, according to critic Amy Taubin, Schrader and Scorsese ended up whitening Sport, fearing protests during screenings of Taxi Driver. Now, Jafa has undone that editorial decision, subbing out Harvey Keitel’s Sport for one energetically played by actor Jerrel O’Neal, who has been seamlessly integrated into Scorsese’s original footage by Jafa, a cinematographer by training.

That footage appears to shapeshift in Jafa’s hands, becoming liquid and subject to change. At each turn, there is a new surprise: certain shots drop out while a few are added, and periodically, some aural cues are elided entirely, so that mouths move but emit no noise. What we get is a succession of violent imagery that probably should come with a trigger warning. (The original film is equally graphic, and was even slightly altered to avoid an X rating, but Scorsese, unlike Jafa, spends a lot of time preparing viewers for this shocking scene.)

Here’s what ensues: A Black man being shot in the gut and dying quickly. A Black man getting several fingers blown off before screaming for his life, being knifed in the hand, then having his head exploded open, spraying crimson across a grimy wall. A Black man being gunned down at close range, then falling through a beaded curtain. Some shots are ported over unchanged: Jodie Foster, playing a young sex worker, screams in terror while Robert De Niro, performing as Travis, fails to put a bullet in his brain because he’s run out of ammo. Then it all starts over again. And again, and again, and again, perhaps not unlike the horrifying footage of snuffed-out Black life that has become an unfortunate staple of our current moment.

Arthur Jafa, ,*****, 2024

Jafa has said the film’s title can be pronounced as “Redacted,” though he hasn’t specified which word is censored). This seems like a sign that he’s trying to more explicitly draw out the racism that is just barely concealed within Schrader’s script. “My Travis Bickle is Dylann Roof,” Jafa recently told the New York Times, referring to the white supremacist who shot nine people in a Black church in Charleston in 2015.

But to what end? If the point is to portray Travis as a racist, Taxi Driver already did that. There’s a scene where Travis executes a Black man holding up a bodega. Travis is told by the shopkeeper, played by a Puerto Rican actor, to flee the scene, and he does so, leaving the would-be robber hunched over and bleeding out before the shopkeeper finishes off the job using a baseball bat. There is no attempt to diffuse the mugging, no attempt not to shoot him. The lack of consequences for Travis’s actions is plenty of proof that his racial animus is rewarded by the police, who apparently choose not to investigate the killing. Jafa doesn’t refer to that scene.

If the point of ***** is to take on Travis’s point of view, Taxi Driver already did that, too. In one shot, the camera situates the viewer in Travis’s eyes, tracing his hand as it holds a gun to a window, pointed at unaware passersby in a park far below. Travis never fires the revolver in that take, but he doesn’t have to—we know what he’s capable of, and we know enough to be scared. Jafa doesn’t allude to that part either.

Severing the climax from all that comes before it risks simplifying the film’s politics, which is hardly an endorsement of Travis’s inceldom, anyway. Jafa might have done better to go after a different work indebted to Taxi Driver: Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019), a film with an icky racial revision of its own in the form of an allusion to the Central Park Five, whose members are now Caucasian, not Black, in Phillips’s telling. Some critiqued Phillips’s film for elisions such as that one, but generally, they didn’t stick—Joker grossed $1 billion at the box office and won two Oscars, a rarity for a superhero movie. That should make it ripe for critique. But Jafa punches down, targeting a 48-year-old film rather than its 5-year-old derivative, whose values already feel dated.

Arthur Jafa, ,*****, 2024

Every so often in *****, though, there are moments of spellbinding imagination. At one point, O’Neal’s pimp, now rechristened Scar by Jafa, intones a soliloquy while puffing on a cigarette. For but a few minutes, Jafa has given this character’s original incarnation the inner life he deserved and never had. And at a later point, Jafa re-edits one shot so that Travis does succeed in offing himself, as though the artist were offering wish fulfillment for viewers who have slogged through the hour or so preceding this.

Then Jafa cuts the sequence short, fades out Bernard Herrman’s score, and restarts the clip, leading us back into the bordello, where the violence begins anew. ***** is a sad Möbius strip of a film that contains nothing to mark its opening or ending. You will want to escape its nihilistic loop, but you may find that you cannot.

Similarly, if you travel downtown to 52 Walker, where Jafa is having another, more successful solo show, you may find yourself lost in his maze-like sculpture Picture Unit (Structures) II (2024), a walk-in installation that, from the outside, looks like a black, gleaming Minimalist object. Inside, one is met with more of Jafa’s appropriated imagery: wall-size pictures of planets; an enlarged still from the last film he showed in New York, AGHDRA (2022); a lo-res shot of a dead body in a living room, splayed out beneath a couch with an American flag draped over it. Shocked by that corpse, I tried to seek an exit and realized the only obvious way out was to view more of Jafa’s pictures.

Those borrowed shots continue outside Picture Unit in the form of an assembly of cutouts, some of which have holes bore through them. These sculptures allude to similar ones by Cady Noland of Patty Hearst (from her Symbionese Liberation Army days). Noland’s portrait, featuring her hands in front of her face, is here appropriated by Jafa. He places her beside an image from 1970 of artist Adrian Piper, performing with a sock stuffed into her mouth. What do Piper and Noland have to do with, say, a black lamb with a red ribbon around its neck or a group of rock musicians? Nothing, except that the images all ended up in Jafa’s archive, as have many others that he has arranged, seemingly at random, in the form of binders.

Arthur Jafa, Large Array II, 2024.

In these works and related ones elsewhere in the 52 Walker show, Jafa envisions a state in which anyone and anything can be seen by everyone. That state is hardly a desirable one for Jafa, who implies that the only means of survival is avoiding the watchful gaze of others. Aptly, at various points, the gallery’s lighting is turned down, making it so that it is impossible to get a good look at Jafa’s art.

The only thing that is readily visible during those moments is the inside of Picture Unit and a video playing outside the structure, LOML (2022), whose slower segments correspond with the periods of relative darkness. The video is meant as a tribute to Jafa’s friend, the deceased writer Greg Tate, who did not appear on-screen for the section of it that I caught. Instead, there was footage of Kanye West, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, tornadoes, and what appeared to be police violence against a person pinned down to the ground.

Never mind all that—Jafa’s cascade of stolen imagery is nowhere near as compelling as the pauses that induce darkness in the gallery. During one, the grainy contours of a figure could be seen moving through a field of black. Think of it as “going dark,” to borrow the concept of a recent Guggenheim Museum show, or merely consider it a moment to breathe. Either way, it offers a welcome respite from the horrors of *****.