I had the immense pleasure of meeting Isaac Julien in San Francisco on the occasion of his exhibition at Jessica Silverman Gallery located in Chinatown. Prior to flying to the US, I made sure to visit Isaac’s outstanding solo exhibition at Tate Britain, London, designed by David Adjaye. I was not only taken by the subtlety, visual language and complexity of the six video installations on display but also by the space that was crafted for the exhibition, which included an arena; a crossroads where visitors could meander, pause and take a breath before immersing themselves in the artworks. In Turkish, I would describe the cavernous axes between the rooms as a meydan, which translates to English as a socially charged public square.
Isaac’s meydan in the Tate held viewers together, along with expanded knowledge of the works via hanging photographs that were taken during the production of these films. It was a calm weekday afternoon when I first visited the show, and it was a busy final Friday when I paid a second visit. The second time, the cumulation of bodies in space and absorbed in the visual poetry of Isaac Julien emanated a kind of sensual poem, gliding from room to room.
Courtesy of Isaac Julien, Victoria Miro and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: Phillip Maisel
Fatos Üstek: Many congratulations on your breathtaking exhibition at Tate Britain. Though it was open for four months, the duration of the show somehow fell short of doing justice to the six outstanding works on show. Prior to our meeting today, I was looking at the extensive and very remarkable body of artistic practice that you have been accumulating for decades. In our conversation, I want to focus on three key areas in your work: narrative, surfaces and black queer desire. In addition, I’d like to explore concepts such as sensuality, the erotic, playfulness and the urban context. First, let’s explore the role of narrative in your practice. What does narrative mean for you?
Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi wrote about linear time as ‘a Western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement where, at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.’ The way that we think about narrative in the West has really not been so interesting to me, in my own work, and I think one of the things that attracted me to the idea of making a film about Lina was exactly this way that she thought about narrative as being a kind of fiction of the West. In a marvellous entanglement without a beginning or an end, any point can be an entry point. Lina challenges linear time, and this is one of the main manifestos at the core of the work that I made about her.
I like the idea of narrative carrying this sort of motive in my work, because the kind of time I am working with is interstitial, or expanded; maybe there’s a more lyrical or dialectical relationship to time. I see time as inhabiting this place where we can adhere to some of the conventions of narrative. I’m interested in telling the story, but not in the predictable, conventional way in which stories are often told. And, of course, one of the problems of making films is convention; people love the familiarity of genres and they love being told stories. They like to have an ending that brings a resolution. This form, in a way, gives people their identity, or a sense of closure around their identity. But I think it’s a fiction, or an alibi that we like to repeat to ourselves, and I think that repeating this alibi or leaving it unresolved is where a lot of the problems arise in relation to the protagonists in the stories. But I think it’s a fiction, or an alibi that we like to repeat to ourselves, and I think that repeating this alibi or leaving it unresolved is where a lot of problems can arise in relation to the position of a protagonist. For instance, is the protagonist representing a certain conventional gender role? When the conservatism creeps in, when you get into the Hollywoodian motif, the white subjects are at the centre of the frame while the other subjects are not in the frame at all. This cultural compulsion to repeat, in relation to the idea of what narrative is, is a really bad habit. And it needs to be broken, it needs to be torn apart. So in my work I’m very interested in completely breaking down those paradigms and conventions of narrative.
But, of course, you can also recognise these conventions as little motifs, I like the idea of playing with the audience using these motifs, meeting certain expectations, and then lightly dismantling them in some way. Like in Looking for Langston (1989), where, in the last scene, there are people who are pleased that there’s going to be an event of violence, some harm that is going to come to the house party that’s taking place. But in the end they arrive at the dance to find that everybody has escaped.
Fatos: And the record playing at the bar hints at the escape, and the innuendo of the situation …
Isaac: It’s more to do with the figment of the imagination that the stereotypes and the threat are already there within this narrative, which is implicated within the genre of thrillers. Whatever it is that people like to see, I like to introduce a twist. Part of my relationship with making work is about creating these twists in films.
To contradict myself, the most con-ventional film I ever made is Young Soul Rebels (1991), which is set in 1977, during the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Many people like this film. Me? I like parts of it, and parts of it I don’t particularly care for – the parts that do not particularly speak to me, because they’re playing within convention. And there goes my answer to all those people who ask me ‘When are you going to make a real film?’ I think Young Soul Rebels was a real film, with a narrative, in a conventional sense, responding to the level of expectation. Above all, everyone (including your discursive cultural studies scholars) is somehow involved with the populist aspect of narratives and enduring a kind of conservatism that is still just so alive.
Fatos: I really like that you’re basically trying to remove film from the immediate evocations of what a narrative is; you take us outside of our habitual understanding of a story with a beginning and an end, revolving around a protagonist or an experience.
There are a few ideas I want to explore with the question of narrative. One is your tendency to focus on a persona. I’m thinking of Langston Hughes (1901–67) in Looking for Langston, Frederick Douglass (1818–95) in Lessons of the Hour (2019), and Alain Locke (1885–1954) and Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951) in Once Again … (Statues Never Die) (2022). Alongside your portrayals of these specific, historically significant figures, you also introduce a different depiction of time that is extended time, and you support this with your use of multiple screens and practice of expanded cinema. Could you talk about your choice to centre the figure of the protagonist – so often a key feature of conventional narrative – in work that is simultaneously geared towards breaking the very paradigm of narrative convention?
Isaac: I make multiple versions of my works, so there’s a five-screen version of Once Again … (Statues Never Die) in the Tate exhibition, a work that was also shown in Sharjah, UAE. I’m also working on a two-screen or a double-screen version, and I might make a single-screen version, though I’m not quite sure. But I like this idea of versioning the piece, and that’s an element of my thinking about what narration is, questioning what is the narrative when doing the narrative. My selected protagonists are people who I want viewers to identify with in some way or another. And so in Statues you have Alain Locke’s character played by André Holland, you have Albert C. Barnes played by Danny Huston. And then you have other important characters, like the Bartok character who’s paid by Devon Terrell, and Sharlene Whyte, who plays Zora – a character looking at the question of restitution and the role of African material and sculptures in the film. And so, in a sense, as well as multiple versions you have multiple protagonists. When we were editing the two-screen version, I was talking to a younger editor who works with us at my studio – Adam Finch, who edits all my works – and he’d been working on this version, and I said to him, ‘you have to understand that there are different protagonists in the work, and want people to identify with them all, they’re not random.’ So besides the main protagonists, there is the Zora character, who is a woman observing and critiquing how the two men’s letters are in their conversation. She represents a more contemporaneous view on the debate on the question of restitution. Nii Kwate Owoo made You Hide Me (1970), which was shot in the stores at the British Museum and argues for the repatriation of Benin bronzes. Both that film and the essay film Statues Also Die (1953) by Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Ghislain Cloquet made their debut for anti-colonial sentiment. I want the character to cut through against that protagonist, as a counter-commentary. In a way, I see the different personas as core, and as response characters to what could be the central concern of the work.
In Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019), two protagonists play the same character. The younger and older are played respectively by Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro; mother and daughter play one character. Both the mature and younger Lina quote manifestos from various texts, portraying the architect at different moments in her life, sometimes at the same time. Here, I’m playing with the multi-screen form of the work, but also saying to the audience in a more Brechtian way that these characters are in between. They are performing Lina Bo Bardi for us, but we know that they are also not Lina Bo Bardi. I like this interstitial possibility of playing with the audience. Obviously they have the mannerisms of Lina Bo Bardi, they are dressed like Lina and in Lina’s locations, they are quoting Lina …
Fatos: It requires a suspension of disbelief, and it builds the narrative in a way that there are anchoring points, but those anchoring points are also floating. They’re not fixed in place. Could we perhaps now talk about your love of twists? In your work, there’s always this surprise element that is very much embedded in the narrative. Sometimes, for example, you’re talking about the refugee situation, or Chinese workers who have lost their lives, but then you bring in a component of dance to evoke that tragedy. Could you elaborate a bit more on the twists that you embed in your works – what are your sensual or sensory expectations of the surprise?
Isaac: One of the things that happens in the refugee or migrant narrative is that we hear all the proclamations. In a poem from the verse collection Ten Thousand Waves (2010) written by Wang Ping, she says:
we know how they died,
starved,
raped,
dehydrated,
drowned,
suffocated,
working to death,
working to death,
And we may be in the same boat, too.
There’s the idea of or desire for the betterment of life and the curiosity for travel, but travel is assigned to certain subjects newly from the West, who can be like flâneurs in the city, and marvel at the city and delight in the architectural motifs in the city … But there’s also the other kind of looking, which belongs to others who don’t have the same, let’s call it autonomy, but who nonetheless do view, and do look and do have subjectivities. When I was making Western Union: Small Boats (2007), for example, people were reacting to the dancers who are not black. I wanted to incorporate the thought that refugees of the future might not be black. The point of the idea of dance as a vehicle for talking about these questions is really connected in terms of bodies and movement, and provides different ways for us to approach these questions. So, for me, dance brings us straight to what someone like Derek Jarman used to call political lyricism –subtle yet meaningful hints in works of art.
One review of this work referred to it as stylistic, fashionable. I think what is actually the style and fashion of the dominant narrative is the way in which, in terms of genre, the reporting of these things, which are so insistently reported to us all the time, is always carried out in this realist mode of numbers and news fodder. The simple fact is, it doesn’t matter what people do, they will never stop the movement of people coming to the West.
Fatos: Exactly.
Isaac: They can put out manifestos, they can police them … The people will drown, people will die … It’s related to the question of the moralism of the so-called enlightenment mode, and the kind of rhetoric that it throws out there. I am taking the poetic licence of someone who comes from that background because of my own particular migrant background. I can take artistic licence in terms of how I want to portray those journeys because I see myself as somebody who’s talking about that close by. I’m not a migrant on the boat, but my parents came to Britain on a vessel, though a completely different one. We know about the Windrush scandal, we know how people with a Caribbean background are and have long been treated. We know the deep ambivalence and hypocrisy in British culture, which gives me the political and artistic licence to tell the story in whatever way I choose; my story is not about appeasing.
Dream Deferred (Once Again … (Statues Never Die)), 2022. Courtesy of Isaac Julien, Victoria Miro and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: Phillip Maisel
Fatos: Yeah, or pleasing?
Isaac: Yeah, I am against the dominant media, its narrations and how it construct lives. I’m interested in what kind of poetics get produced in these migratory stories, not for the sake of poetics, but for the sake of the re-articulations of resistance, which I know exist in the songs, in the movements, in the ways in which people resort to language in their struggles. Why would I not give that form consideration? It is a completely different perspective and a completely different experience.
Fatos: I think your attitude and approach strengthen your work. Your poetic approach builds an incomplete narrative, which becomes challenging for the Western mindsets that are habituated to understanding the world through truths, arrived at via categorical imperatives. The fact that your works do not fall into an easily identifiable category to judge, your methodology of introducing abstraction and grounding people with othered realities and historical facts perhaps becomes challenging for straightforward viewership. Ambiguity and uncertainty are not easy feelings for people who see the world through the lens of knowledge domination, who engage with the world through control, as they control their gaze, their understanding …
Isaac: I like the undoing of knowledge, and I like the undoing of perspective. The idea of grasping narrative in conventional ways, the packaging and management of these stories – I like the undoing of these things. And I like also the idea of transgression, in terms of style. And the way in which I might create a certain haptic relationship, escaping mere optics, and focusing on the sense of touch and vibration instead. I see these stories like they’re songs, and I see them as living out their time. The fact is that Western Union was made in 2007, but nearly 16 years later small boats are a problem for the English Channel. It took a long time, but they will consistently be a problem. It doesn’t matter how much the West throws at it, it’s just gonna be the other problem that they’ll have to deal with, because we’re not going away.
Fatos: I now want to introduce a twist myself, moving the conversation towards methods of transgression and focus on the surfaces that you construct. They are sensuous and highly detailed, but they’re very seductive. Can you talk us through your process of building your scenes, and how the surfaces in your work relate to desire?
Isaac: The question of desire in the work is present in relation to what would be ‘good taste’ when telling a story. This is connected to conventional, heteronormative assumptions. When someone might say ‘Oh, this work is very beautiful’, or ‘Is it too beautiful for this subject?’, I think to myself that, behind it, desire and sexuality are always at work. In fact, they are ubiquitous. So the so-called neutral position is a fiction; it is a distancing tool, because we need to distance ourselves from questions of desire in the Western and normative vein of ‘good taste.’ It is all underpinning how you look and view. I like the idea of contaminating the gaze with the ways I use the camera, within the construction of the subjects or the protagonists. I conducted research on Frederick Douglass, who, in his refashioning of himself from Frederick Bailey the slave – he and his wife constructed themselves into abolitionist subjects – reconstructed his persona using the immaculate clothes made by his wife, in plaid colours. If you like, ‘the’ man was being constructed by Douglass, from the abjection around slavery, and the pleasure that he took, and his pride in that display … You could take that as a motif for how I make my works. I’m making works in a similar way to making a painting in relation to an image. The question of desire is in the construction of the mise en scène, in the iconography, and it’s meant to signify this difference as a form of resistance.
But I think I can see that people can also read those images in a superficial way, which has to do with the ways in which these works are finished and constructed with a certain attention to decor and to the mise en scène. I know quite soon when people have such a one-dimensional reaction to them. I just can’t help that thing, the question of the affair of the contamination of these images, in the sublime aspect of the woods, when Frederick Douglass is in the forest and he’s taking on this landscape. He is at peace with nature. You could say that there’s a troubling aspect within nature … Looking at the tree reminds him of a child looking at a lynching, so the film shows the troubled nature of being stimulated within this very beautiful landscape. But I’m also trying to work with this terror that exists within the sublime. And of course, at the same time, there’s just desire. I think the sensuousness is connected to what I’m calling the quarrion sort of sensibility. In my point of view, it’s pathologised. It’s too beautiful, so the gaze has been pathologised …
Fatos: You describe forces that are in constant negotiation with one another, like beauty and atrocity, as being embedded together, entangled in a constant push and pull. I’m thinking of these finely detailed surfaces that the protagonists interact or exist with, and, as the viewer, I am pulled to the work with all my senses, not only my sight. These surfaces you construct are evocative of tangible, tactile experiences. Can you perhaps talk about your conception of the notion of the erotic with this in mind?
Isaac: There is an erotic element at work, and I think this haptic relationship is something I want to dwell on, because it’s important for us to have that sort of relationship to issues that people sublimate, to those that they disavow, that they pretend are not there.
What is the fetishisation of documentary realism in relation to the question of migrant experience and people moving from one space to another? They’re bodies, they’re living and breathing bodies. The question of desire that people want to repress is a disavowal. I’d like to bring those things into the work as a possibility for an identification that could be uncomfortable. And what do you do when desire is invisible, and when histories are not attainable?
I’m really interested in the idea of, and the desire for, reconstruction; the resurrection of those hidden histories, which are stalled in the archives, that perhaps can’t be pictured. They’re invisible because they’ve been sublimated. How can you give a picture to silence? But you know that there is a possibility of giving an image to those aspects of life. Returning to Statues, it’s really about trying to create the possibility for us to have this relationship. And sometimes it is more abstract, like in the film Vagabondia (2000), with its use of costumes and decor and this idea of the museum and the surfaces – in a way giving a mirror image to the modernity represented through that space, through the sonic. It’s also the way that the sonic works and sounds produce certain identifications, which unconsciously give the framing for us to view these questions of erased histories and invisible desires. It’s not just visual, it’s also sonic, and it’s in the sonic where the question of desire is actually sometimes most profoundly expressed.
The song by Alice Smith poses the question of where desire lies in relation to restitution, and what is the relationship to those in a more desiring way. Whether it is in Western Union: Small Boats, where we hear the song at the beginning, where she talks about having a kind of final destiny, never knowing when our destiny will be reached, or Blackberry’s song in Looking for Langston, where it’s there in the blues, it’s there in the song and it’s there in dance.
Fatos: Actually on that note, could we talk a bit more about black queer desire, and how you position the gaze and time of the unfolding of the sequence of events?
Isaac: What is the black gay gaze – which is a troubling gaze for critics and some audiences – in the work? I think it is able to give pitch to silences, and rearrange historical narratives, undoing and untidying all these binary visions. In a work like Statues, it is about the question of restitution, but then where does that leave the gaze for the black queer objects of desire, which may reside in the statues or sculptures of figuration, which have been disavowed in modernism? Nonetheless, it is there, perhaps in the theories of someone like Alain Locke. The pathology of Alain Locke with African American letters, or the fact that some people might say ‘He had some strange ideas,’ which he did, and the question of perversity and how that gets in a way mythologised within the letters, nonetheless doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some interesting ways of viewing culture. I think there’s that sort of work in Statues, which can be unsettling, which wants to unravel these neat divisions.
Where then is the black queer desire for those subjects in the diaspora, which can’t be reconciled by their return? Psychoanalytically there’s an idea that things can be returned. But we can’t return. There’s a space within those debates for the view that if those objects have been wrongly taken, and there’s been violence, then they need to be returned. But the question is, to which context?
All of those things to me are really interesting. I think that’s where the black queer gaze comes in critically. Kobena Mercer wrote his book on Alain Locke almost simultaneously when I was doing my work on him. We know each other quite well, but I didn’t know that he was making a whole book on Locke – it was kind of a surprise to me. I thought it was really interesting that in 2022 we both produced these different texts on the same figure. I guess the question, in a way, is why?
Lessons of the Hour is a ten-screen film installation examining the life and time of visionary African
American writer, abolitionist and a freed slave Frederick Douglass. The film has Douglass interact with other cultural icons of his time, and includes excerpts of his most remarkable speeches such as ‘Lessons of the Hour,’ ‘What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?’ and ‘Lecture on Pictures’. Courtesy of Isaac Julien and Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam
Fatos: There is definitely synchronicity in intellectual, artistic production. I think besides Alain Locke and other protagonists in Statues Never Die, I perceived the statues themselves as also the protagonists.
Isaac: Absolutely.
Fatos: My last question is about playfulness, especially when you are building the storyboards and the encounters amongst the protagonists, and mobilising the spectators through multiple screens and multi-sensorial, non-linear narratives. Perhaps we could bring in the idea of spaces for black queer desire?
Isaac: The first thing I will say is that I’m not so interested in building the space for black queer desire. I’m against essentialising, but at the same time there’s a way in which we speak for the space. We speak from different histories and subjectivities. So we’re not just signifying neutrality, or the fiction of a kind of universalism either. Something interesting I came across was a text of bell hooks, where she talked about the mythical diasporic dream space. This is one of the things that came out in an uncanny way in making Statues. The film was shot in black and white, and then we had the statues, which had a monochromatic look, and then the snow sequence, which references the bell hooks text where she talks about the autonomy of the artist. In the final line in Statues, you hear ‘As we mature as artists in the mythical diasporic dream space, a cult of infinite possibility is ready to receive us. This is artistic freedom, as pure and as solid as falling snow, as pure and unsullied as falling snow.’
This crystallised artistic freedom that bell hooks is referring to is what I’ve been striving towards in my work, which is encapsulated in this text that she wrote in my MOMA catalogue ten years ago. I returned to it when I was making the work because I felt I wanted to pay homage to the great late hooks. When we were shooting, I just wanted it to snow, and it actually happened – the snow fell over the original Barnes Foundation museum. There was a certain serendipity. I had already shot the snow sequence with Alex and Andre in London, but when that happened I knew we had the kind of finale I was going to draw from the bell hooks text, which is an abridged version. This question then arose of desire, and what that would look like in terms of space and the question of spectatorship …
At the Tate, it has been really interesting to see how people take to the space, and the way they view the works physically. Sometimes they want to view one screen, but then realise that viewing one screen isn’t really the way it should be viewed. Then they go to view the sculpture. I can see the mobile spectators coming to fruition, and some of the theories I have about how things could be viewed.
Fatos: t’s like a subtle play of movement of bodies and movements of minds perhaps … Thank you, Isaac, for this tremendously enjoyable conversation.
Isaac: Thank you.