Fittingly for an artist who remixes history, Isaac Julien’s exhibition at Tate Britain begins before it begins.
As visitors approach the gallery, there’s a slight confusion of pathways. Ahead of you stands the entrance door, with a helpful museum staffer ready to take your ticket. Should we go in?
Sound and visuals, however, draw your attention elsewhere.
To the right of the door, Julien’s 1984 film Territories, an experimental documentary of revelers and police officers at the Notting Hill Carnival, plays on a loop. To the left Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983), documenting the community’s response to a young Black man’s death in police custody, plays simultaneously.
Unsure of the right ‘order’ in which to experience all this, I sat a while with both, as their soundtracks bled together in the exhibition’s echoing antechamber.
Reading the wall text that detailed the chronology of Julien’s life, I learned that these early films were made as part of the independent Black film and video collective Sankofa, which he co-founded. Only later did I learn what that name refers to:
In the Twi language of Ghana, sankofa means ‘to retrieve’ (literally, to go back and get) and refers also to a traditional symbol of a bird with feet facing forward even as its neck turns to carry a precious egg on its back.
The sankofa represents the loop of historical time, looking back to retrieve from the past what is needed to move forward into the future.
I’m reminded of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, inspired by a Paul Klee painting, whose face turns backward whilst the storm of historical progress propels him ahead. This quintessential concept of European modernism is itself a belated manifestation of a centuries-old African idea.
Already, this exhibition has me entangled in time.
The outer area of the gallery has offered me facts, both on the wall and in Julien’s early films. Though artfully collaged, the grainy Super 8 and VHS footage has the rough, verité quality we associate with agitprop, overtly ‘political’ art. . .
. . . once we pass through the door to the exhibition proper, though, we’re enveloped by another aesthetic altogether:
Glossy, artificial, composed. We’re in a black and white Hollywood world where multiple movie screens are reflected against walls of shimmering Mylar. Placed between the movie screens are bronze busts and statues.
We’ve experienced a chronic leap, moving from the very start of Julien’s film career directly to his newest work, Once Again… (Statues Never Die). A handsome, tuxedo-clad man wanders through moodily lit museum hallways and airy art studios, amongst sculptures Classical and modern, African and European. He types manifestos at an old-fashioned typewriter as a handsome lover lolls in bed. He stands in a snowstorm as its perfectly-formed white flakes swoon impossibly upward.
Actor Andre Holland (known for Moonlight) steps into the role of African-American scholar Alain Locke. The cinematography evokes the glorified imagery of an unmade Oscar-winning biopic, but no clear narrative emerges. Instead, the film is organized around a series of encounters (sexual, philosophical, colonial). At its center is a dialogue between Locke and art collector Albert C. Barnes outlining contrasting interpretations of African art, drawn from their actual writing.
Across its five screens, the work constantly shifts our perspective, showing us movements and moments from many angles simultaneously. Enfolded within it are other works of art, including Nii Kwate Owoo’s short documentary You Hide Me, which argued in 1970 for the restitution of African sculptures held in the British Museum back to their countries of origin.
Debates about museums’ collections are hotly topical yet, as Julien reminds us, ‘These debates are seen as new today, but they’re actually not new. They’ve just been articulated separately by different generations.’
It culminates in a stunning soundtrack moment from singer Alice Smith:
Visitors emerge from this immense aesthetic and intellectual overture into a new space of forking pathways. The rest of the exhibit presents six more of Julien’s films, which play in galleries arrayed like spokes from a central hub, to be selected in the order of your choice.
The most famous is his career breakthrough Looking for Langston (1989). Until watching the film here in its entirety, I’d known that it evoked the Harlem Renaissance world of poet Langston Hughes but I hadn’t realized quite how radically it remixes queer, Black culture from across history and across the Atlantic. Hughes’s work is recited alongside eulogies from James Baldwin’s funeral. Essex Hemphill’s prophetic poems are intoned over controversial images of Black men taken by Robert Mapplethorpe. Julien’s cast perform joyous vogue routines in an underground ballroom that sits simultaneously in 1920’s Harlem and London’s South Bank in the late 1980s, accompanied by a thumping house track:
The look of Langston clearly bears the stylistic influence of Derek Jarman, who mentored Julien. But the energy of this film is all its own, easily outpacing the often lugubrious tone of Jarman works like The Angelic Conversation (1985). Looking forward, one detects a lineage from Julien’s style to that of contemporary Black (and straight) directors like Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins, who employ some of the same aesthetics in the service of mainstream narrative filmmaking.
Julien’s smooth camera work privileges images of beauty, even as the intellectual complexity of his work, often centered around archival texts, makes a viewer’s mind crackle. In Lessons of the Hour (2019), a ten-screen meditation on the life and ideas of Frederick Douglass, Julien gives us some of the abolitionist’s most stirring speeches, delivered in lecture halls to audiences dressed in costumes of both past and present. Even as we encounter the political Douglass, however, we are met on other screens with his fractured personal life, in the figures of his estranged first wife Anna and second wife Helen, themselves separated by divisions of time, race, literacy and class.
In its upending of historical preconceptions and denial of any single vantage point, Julien’s work reminds me most closely of another Black, queer artist working not with visuals but words.
John Keene’s extraordinary collection Counternarratives refracts, elides and collides complex moments of colonial encounter through unusual formal devices. In ‘Persons and Places,’ for instance, he imagines two diary entries of the same day by the Black writer W.E.B. DuBois and his teacher at Harvard, the Spanish philosopher George Santayana. Presented in two columns that divide the page, the two pass each other on the street but do not speak.
Like Julien, Keene also takes inspiration from Langston Hughes, rendering his affair with the Mexican poet Xavier Villarrutia in ‘Blues,’ a short story whose brief phrases, separated by ellipses, suggest the fleeting glances and hidden implications of these two men delicately circling their unspoken desires:
. . . poetic language always carries the seed of something revolutionary . . . merely by being a testimony to one’s always complex and difficult interior journeys . . . in language you need to lose yourself . . . to recover yourself . . yes, Langston says, that too, so true . . . still talking they finish dinner, another round of drinks . . . Xavier mentions an early train back to New Haven . . . over Langston’s gentle objections he pays the bill . . . the male couple, now openly holding hands at their table, offer familial approval . . . we are not afraid of night . . . the next one will be my treat . . . shoulder to shoulder, fingers grazing . . . Xavier offers to have a cab drop him off . . . then abruptly says why don’t you come downtown with me . . .
Both Keene and Julien are engaged in what the scholar Saidiya Hartman has called ‘critical fabulation,’ the weaving together of detailed historical research with fictional narrative to fill in blanks in the historical record. Hartman describes a technique that can ‘displace the received or authorized account, to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.’ This approach offers us a means to consider the experiences of those, such as enslaved Africans, whose existence and thought are barely recognised in official histories.
Critical fabulation necessarily traffics in subjectivity since it aims to reclaim the very privilege of being a subject that has been denied to the historically marginalised. For queer historical figures, that also includes the subjective experience of desire.
One detects more than a hint of homophobia, therefore, when a mainstream critic like Laura Cumming, in The Observer, chides Julien’s camera for the way it ‘dwells on shimmering makeup, coiffed hair, buttons, stitches and velvet, on honed bodies and chiseled faces, bentwood furniture,’ which, to her taste, ‘slips in and out of The World of Interiors.’ His work, she sniffs, relies on ‘glossy, luxurious, swanky aesthetics made to carry the burden of history.’
According to Annette Richardson in Time Out, ‘Julien’s work is undeniably serious – his career started in the 1980s with an examination of the Black Atlantic – but he cannot resist making it beautiful. His indulgence of that urge leavens the message.’
To these critics, Julien’s gritty, early work would seem a more fitting vehicle for the themes he examines. But by insisting that this Black, queer artist stay inside predetermined frameworks they approve of they venture quite close to the pronouncements of Albert C. Barnes himself, who pigeonholed ‘Negro Art’ into a category determined by its ‘primitive’ origins and shaped by ‘suffering.’
Why shouldn’t historically serious subjects be entwined with a sensuality of representation? Must we consider the beautiful a form of indulgence? We experience time and trauma in the same bodies with which we experience desire.
Works like Julien’s – and Keene’s – explode those binaries and employ complex aesthetic strategies that imitate the experience of living within history, not just reading about it. Another of the films in this exhibition highlights the work of Italian-Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. Filming the sinuous movements of dancers against the spiraling structures of her buildings, Julien explores Bardi’s contention that time is not linear but ‘a marvelous entanglement, where at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.’
After some hours of taking in films, we depart the central gallery to find ourselves back where we — and Julien — started, re-encountering his earliest film about the killing of Collin Roach. Watching decades-old protest footage against police violence, we must consider how history still seems caught in an endless loop.
In the 21st century, we’ve become numb to the assertion that ‘everything is storytelling.’ To hold onto power, fascists narrate a linear story of progressive decline from a retrospective, imagined past (‘Make America Great Again’) and conveniently ignore the experiences of anyone outside their clans. To hold our attention, corporate streaming services feed us serialised narrative, a relentless succession of hooks and cliffhangers whose ultimate mission is not enlightenment or even entertainment but the unending intake of their ‘content’.
Sitting with Julien’s films is a bracing alternative to the ideology of the linear. You have until August 20th to visit Isaac Julien: What Freedom Is to Me. I urge you to block out a few hours and consider picking up one of those folding museum stools to carry around with you. Take your time. . .
The shortest film in the exhibit, Vagabondia, is positioned just at the exit, the point before we return to the beginning. A Black female figure roams the labyrinthine corridors of John Soanes’ Museum in London, just as we’ve wandered with Julien across the artefacts and affects of history.
Julien splits the image so that it reflects back on itself, creating a doubled, disorienting perspective which moves two ways at once.
To wander inside of Isaac Julien’s art is to consider time anew.