Circa 114: Article
Suturing the aesthetic and the political - multiple screens, multiple realities: An interview with Isaac Julien
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Isaac, you began as a painter and then migrated to photography and film, but in recent years you have moved away from the single-screen to the multiple-screen format. You use an interesting term, the 'meta-cinematic', in an interview with B. Ruby Rich (2002) to describe the impact of this move from the theatre into the gallery. Could you elaborate on this? David Frankel (Art Forum, 2003) describes this transition somewhat differently by referring to how you are now working in a "segmented [aesthetic] format," where there is often a slippage between a continuity and rupture of the image in your work. Could you begin by tracing the history and context for these conceptual and political transitions, indeed aesthetic migrations?
I think it stemmed from working in films as an artist and being interested in questions that moved beyond the normative, narrative expectations that the cinemagoing audience usually wants to receive. In a gallery context one was able to shift attention away from those narrative concerns to concerns which involved the questioning of spectatorship or the viewer. The viewer embodies a certain autonomy in a gallery context which is not necessarily one circumscribed by the kind of framing apparatus of cinema proper.
In a gallery context there is a shift in terms of audience and address. I see my work as being able to occupy several positions at any one time. I would say that my interest, which spanned from painting originally in a gallery context, became overshadowed by the development in media taking place up to the mid'80s, with the inauguration of Channel 4 Television.
When one began to really push formal questions in that context it was something that was questioned in the original moment of Channel 4. What they wanted were rather politically expedient expectations - for example, you were a 'black' filmmaker, you were expected to produce something that was going to be in a documentary realist mode and these aspirations were projected onto the independent film makers working at that time, who came from certain communities, which fulfilled a middleclass desire for the informative. There were social problems taking place in mainland Britain and somehow they had to be explained to a general white bourgeois audience. It was not necessarily the interest of audiences who were working class; they were interested in receiving a certain way of looking and reading images, which moved beyond just information. Now we live in a time of disinformation - everything has changed because we don't receive the necessary information that we need to analyse a political situation. My practice has been shifting and migrating from one way of making an intervention, which was, first of all, in broadcasting, and then cinema. In a cinema space a number of imperatives are projected onto you. You have to report from the 'field' about what is happening in the street. Those positions are important and necessary, but what was really important was for you to articulate them in a way that could be assimilated. The question that was always posed was 'Who is your audience?' If you produced anything that was vaguely experimental or involved in a metacinematic discourse, it was considered inauthentic and problematic. There were institutional expectations of the kinds of works you would make, if you were black.
Those things became quite claustrophobic, since I was interested in pursuing certain cultural or political questions twinned with an aesthetic approach. The move into a gallery context was also a reaction to both the political nature and the change in cultural climate that took place when the independent film sector had been completely disenfranchised after the shutting down of experimental film spaces, such as the schools located at St Martins School of Art and the Royal College, where filmmakers like Cerith Wyn Evans, John Maybury and Peter Greenaway all went. The interdisciplinary approaches were the raisons d'être of experimental film practice in these schools before the early '90s. You began to see the development of video art in a British context, which was very interesting in its reaction against television, as a response to Thatcherism, a development within a generation that had been drawn to VCR technologies, like Douglas Gordon, and later to digital technology. This dovetailed with the cultural artistic revolution that took place in the mid '90s, dubbed the 'Young British Artists' (YBA), when a younger generation of artists began to make film and video works. This video art was completely disconnected from that history and connected to a market place, in a gallery context.
You then have encapsulated in these two political moments a shift in my own practice, which comes about in the mid'90s because I sensed a possibility for exploring aesthetic questions influenced by the new digital technology. Because video projection allowed the possibility to show works with an almost filmic, visceral quality. Also in the mid-'90s several artists, such as Doug Aitken, EijaLiisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon, Steven McQueen, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Willie Doherty come to the fore. Hence there are so many artists working in this arena that it becomes quite dynamic, some may even say an orthodoxy, and in a way problematically supplants some of the original developments that took place in the '80s experimental-film and video scene. But perhaps not with the same kind of political radicality of an independent film culture that existed before.
Yes, it is interesting when you talk about those two historical and political moments, because there is a noted shift between your early Sankofa material in addition to perhaps Looking for Langston (1989) or even Young soul rebels (1991) and your more current work. In the earlier work there is a deliberate, in fact strategic attempt to deconstruct stereotype, born out of a desire and urgency to generate a new discourse on race and representation - an alternative discourse which was, as you say, part of a broader pedagogical and collective project. Whereas in the later work, and I am thinking of The long road to Mazatlán (2000), there is an equally deliberate foregrounding and negotiation of the very grain of the stereotype. This is twinned with a complex negotiation of multi-channels and a three-camera set-up, symptomatic of the move from the theatre into the art gallery. You are clearly exploring a different (though not entirely unrelated) set of questions with a different set of audiences in mind. What motivated this narrative and thematic shift to working with the seductive quality of the stereotype as both a site of fantasy and desire for the spectator?
I have been concerned with the question of time. Even with Looking for Langston (1989), an initial response to that film was 'why does it look so beautiful'? Why does an artist like you who is dealing with these subjects make a work which is quite formal, aesthetically developed and fairly stylised? This question is typical of how one is expected in certain circles to deliberately unsuture aesthetics and the representation of pleasure and politics. Somehow those two projects are considered separate. My interest is in trying to relocate questions of pleasure and politics within the same frame, which I have been involved with for some time. I call it the reparation of aesthetics'. I try to, at least in an ethical sense, rearticulate the wounding projected by the dominant regime of images that one is bombarded with and which indeed can be stereotypical. But I don't think I am interested in just undoing the stereotype.
It has been very productive to be involved in work which is connected to the notion of the developing phantasmatic aesthetic, where I utilise politics and fantasy together. Within Thatcherism, both her agenda and certain rightwing ideologies were fused together. This is tied to something we spoke about a lot in the mid-'80s: how could one think through such a dynamic, how could one get to grips with something which was developing at a much more deepseated level. These concerns are continued and developed in my gallery films such as The long road to Mazatlán (1999) and Baltimore (2003), which appropriate popular cultural motifs both from black and queer cultures. By that time, in the late '90s and early 2000, you begin to witness a global spectacularization in relation to these representations, and I started to think perhaps the only way you can rearticulate them is through a more ironic strategy. I did this by reviewing those modes of representation within the language in which those images get constructed, including my work for Baadasssss cinema (2002).
While my argument at the beginning was concerned with repudiating stereotypical representations (Looking for Langston), I realised that audiences are much more sophisticated than that. Some of this idea is born out of reading Judith Butler's essay Gender is burning. It is about the idea of the performative, of subjects re-performing an injury, foregrounding the wounding aspect and exploring how people who don't have the same recourse to the dominant culture are able to replay things in much more sophisticated ways. We have a more complicated relationship to those visual influences, since 49 it is also about 'bad pleasure'. In Baltimore it is the bad pleasure you receive from those kinds of images, deemed inappropriate and irredeemable, such as '70s Blaxploitation films, which were the antithesis of my earlier films I made as an independent filmmaker. I was also drawing on Stuart Hall, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's work on hegemony.
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Isaac Julien, Baltimore, 2003, triple-screen projection, 16mm b&w/colour film, DVD transfer, sound, 11'36''
courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery |
A metaphor that runs throughout much of your work is that of a 'haunting', eliciting a preoccupation with questions of history, memory, the phantasmatic and the cinematic - we see this also in the early Sankofa work. Yet all of these narrative elements seem to come together in Paradise omeros (2002). For me, this is a fascinating and timely piece, given the current discourse and debates surrounding migration. It is also a very sophisticated piece in the way in which it weaves fairly contested and contentious issues. On the one hand, Paradise omeros explores migration as both a narrative of physical and cultural displacement, a history of transposition in terms of the transatlantic passage through slavery, simultaneously dramatising the dated, nevertheless remembered, politics and practices of assimilation. Yet it also explores the wider implications of migration through a dramatisation of history, which takes the form of 'embodied memory', for example migrant histories as read through the sensual and the somatic. Could you imagine creating a work like this in a single-screen format or could you only create a work like this in a multiscreen format?
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| Isaac Julien, Paradise Omero, 2002, triple DVD projection, 16mm film transferred to DVD, 20'29''installation: Documenta 11_Platform5: Ausstellung/Exhibition, Binding Building, Kassel, Germany,courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery |
Actually, there is a single-screen version of Paradise omeros which has been shown in film-festival contexts. The single screen enables it to connect to a cinema audience, which has been built around my film work. The multi-screen works begin to interrogate and inhabit the multi-temporalities which the gallery offers by the multiscreen aesthetic approach I have developed in my practice. At the same time it meditates on the questions of vision. This digital technology continued my interest in cinematic techniques, thus enabling different ways of looking at the moving image, which draws attention to a multi-valiant viewing situation and also enables the transgression of time that can occur in and between frames side by side, in relation to each other. It is also a reflection on the processes of digitalisation, twinned with how you can experiment with the aesthetic in a way in which vision itself is questioned, for example: Why three screens? Why this mode of presentation? Of course it could be seen as a modern form of history painting - the triptych has a long art-historical legacy. You are able to have a different set of relationships to how you are viewing gallery films, in contrast to a normative narrative linear progression in the cinema. In multi-screen work you are utilising ideas of 'parallel montage', 5.1 surround-sound, not usually something you have in single-screen works. There is a more disjunctive and creative relationship that you can develop and explore around 'time' and 'memory' that cannot be experienced in singlescreen work in quite the same way.
Yet there is often a desire, at least in dominant debates on migration, to pin the migrant subject down, in fact to pin down migrant histories - to trace, map and control the trajectories of departure and destination. This desire to navigate and document migrant journeys can be interpreted as a form of violence in the form of surveillance. In Paradise omeros, however, migration is depicted within a much more complex global landscape. It engages with the politics and lived effects of globalisation but also challenges these global / local trajectories in very provocative ways.
In Paradise Omero you have the representation of the football which is meant to be a metaphor of the globe as an object and which travels in tandem along with the protagonist's geographical displacements. The football is gestured with and kicked around on the English football pitch. This inanimate object takes on a certain positionality connected to the Hansel Jules' character, who is the main protagonist in Paradise omeros. His migratory subjectivity is in constant motion in the piece, he and the ball shifting and moving across the different territories and geographical spaces. In the gallery context we witness these from different perspectives simultaneously and it is my hope that the viewer is able to view the piece more than once, through repeated viewings. The dialectic occurs when there is an ongoing relationship through the looping of the narrative. The thing that is important is not so much the debates around tracing the trajectory of where certain people are coming from and where they are going, but what kind of way does migration and travelling change a subject's subjectivity or a person's way of viewing or experiencing the world? The more we debate migrancy, the more we sensationalise the event but lose the migrant's voice, it seems to me. This is the dilemma that Derek Walcott's poem expresses within the piece - but the important point is that the protagonist is also able to find a language to describe the current experience that he is inhabiting, which questions his relationship to his sense of being. It is this kind of philosophical question that gets continually marginalised in the ideologies of subjecthood or nationhood in debates 'about national belonging'. What are the psychic transitions? I am interested in the notion of 'affect' in my earlier works where there is a much more ideological, perhaps political expediency at work. I was always interested in the 'interiority' of what was being said, and perhaps in these gallery works there is a possibility for this re-articulation to be more subtle but not less political.
The concept of 'créolité' is a term used quite a bit when critics engage with Paradise omeros but it is also rehearsed by artists and critics engaging with philosophies, politics and practices of globalisation and the legacy and transcendence of still entrenched postcolonial and imperial narratives of imperialism, in contrast to what is described as "accelerated processes of cultural syncretism" (Documenta 11_ Platform 3, 2003). And you've pointed to some of these complex configurations of identity with regard to the various transitions evident in your most recent work. Do you think that your future work will draw from and contribute to ongoing debates about créolité, since 'accelerated processes of cultural syncretism' are performed in unpredictable ways and cannot be easily documented? I raise this issue because it provides a marked contrast to a question asked of you a while ago, a question which highlights a certain type of prescriptive orthodoxy and desire on the part of certain audiences to have you clarify your position or describe how subject positions are inscribed in your work. The question was whether or not you work as a black, gay filmmaker and the answer you gave was, "I speak from that positionality, not for it." But if you were asked that question again today, how would you respond to it? Indeed, would you even want to answer it?
It would reveal more to me about the person who poses the question rather than how I see myself now as a film maker and artist. 'Time' changes positionality and the kind of questions that you may find interesting to answer; take, for example, our current imperial war, where we have Condoleeza Rice - a black Republican woman who's rumoured to be a lesbian in queer circles - at the forefront of marshalling the war in Iraq. The promise of radicality through one's identity - to be gay and black would be a nonsense nowadays. If someone wants to trace the trajectories to the kind of things I was was an empowering position in the same way that feminism was for women, and of course these questions never disappear. For example, the riots in Paradise omeros are not from the '80s. They are from the riots that took place in Northern England in 2001, in the very locations in England where the bombers who took their sad vengeance on the streets of London on 7 July 2005, came from; identity seems far more slippery now, and of course has come back to haunt the imperial centres.
Paradise omero is also a timely piece, because one of the critiques that has been directed at Labour's 'multicultural' policies in the UK, while obviously having moved on from the discourse and practice of assimilation, is that these policies have created a form of ethnic ghettoisation, where you now have a deep sense of disaffection amongst young minority subjects, in particular those who do not feel part of any civic society structure in any real or meaningful way. A very complex cultural and political malaise is emerging, and yet the response to it is quite simplistic and one-dimensional.
Very. If I were to link a word back to Paradise omeros, it would be Territories made in 1984. I think Territories poses a question about political discontent and it is a film I made over twenty years ago. It is a single-screen piece which has a multi-layered aesthetic approach and polyvalent in the way that is trying rearticulate political questions, which felt very urgent at that particular time. It is interesting to think about that film as one that had riot footage in it and then in 2002 there is yet another glimmer of it in Paradise omeros.
Though there is a very different security apparatus in place now.
Absolutly
What are you working on at the moment?
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Isaac Julien,True North series, 2004, triptych of digital prints
on Epson premiere photo glossy, edition of 6 images: 100 X 100cm each frame: 114 X 114 cm courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery |
I have just finished a four-scene piece called Fantôme créole for the Pompidou, which opened in May 2005. It will be shown in a threescreen version at the Victoria Miro Gallery in October 2005. The Pompidou combined True north, which re-frames a historical question around the possibility that Matthew Henson, an African-American explorer, supposedly the helper and partner of Robert E. Perry during his polar trek in 1909, perhaps got to the North Pole before him. Thirty years after Perry's death, he confessed to the danger and violence he experienced when he had made it known to Perry that maybe he got there first. My interest in this historical interpretation is also connected to the politics of the sublime and its relation to the trauma or the slave sublime, developed by Paul Gilroy, and this story in the fourscreen piece is then linked to the other location of Fantôme créole, which is West Africa. In the work, I trace the possibility of thinking about an imaginary political landscape. The place that I journey through is Burkina Faso, and I chose it because it is the country of Africa's most important film festival called 'Fespaco', a panAfrican film event. I explore the different locations and different architectural sites and spaces as a way of allowing us to move through these 'real' and 'imagined' geographical locations and spaces, and the juxtaposition gets played out in Fantome créole across the four screens.
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Isaac Julien,True North series, 2004, triptych of digital prints
on Epson premiere photo glossy, edition of 6 images: 100 X 100cm each frame: 114 X 114 cm courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery |
Is this your first four-screen piece?
Yes. It is quite a visually complex work illustrating an aesthetic shift. A shift that is also in Paradise omeros in that there are different locations being portrayed, but it is only at the end of Paradise omeros that you get this juxtaposition happening simultaneously when the two protagonists are walking backwards surrounded by concrete architecture, and you have this image of the bird of paradise flower from St. Lucia that blooms in the centre of the triptych. In Fantome créole one makes that mélange a prominent aesthetic quest.
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Isaac Julien,True North series, 2004, triptych of digital prints
on Epson premiere photo glossy, edition of 6 images: 100 X 100cm each frame: 114 X 114 cm courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery
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Did you coin the term 'post-cinematic video art'?
Yes
Áine O'Brian is Director of the Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice, School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.
With thanks to Elizabeth Bowley.
A season of Isaac Julien's films takes place at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 21 September 2005 - 15 January 2006.
