As we are posting this, we are informed that Arthur Jafa has not been awarded the Mohn Public Recognition Award; and we can’t help wondering if he might have been at some competitive disadvantage simply because visitors to the Museum were unable to actually flip the plastic-sleeved pages of montaged/collaged magazine photos and image fragments held in the three-ring binders Jafa assembled as books or albums. The selection of double-page montage layouts give some sense of the innate poetic power of Jafa’s image-construction, their deep mythographic, narrative de- and reconstruction. Each juxtaposition – of ancient and contemporary, ritual and utilitarian, iconic and demotic (e.g., bathing suit models over Ballantyne Ale cans counterposed against an ancient Egyptian gilded stele) – offers fresh beauties and illuminations. But these are really multi-directional, multi-dimensional film montages – movies in four (or more) dimensions. Sealed off in their vitrines, the viewer cannot really plumb the morphing macro- and micro-narratives embedded in the successive pages. Would that the Hammer had provided facsimiles to actually page through. Still (if not ‘crashing’) – you don’t want to miss this ‘wave.’

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA 90024

Show runs thru August 28, 2016