POLITICAL ART/ART AND POLITICS: Part One.

Introduction:

 Political Art as a category or genre of art history in the West is generally associated with the 1960s. A Marxist theoretical agenda gave it shape, form and legitimacy even if many who practiced or experienced it were hardly experts in political economy or understood the fine points of communist ideology. In the 1950s the world entered an era of apparently suffocating conformity dominated by the triumph of US politics and economy in the post-war era. This produced a generation of children who had known comfort and security – the first generation to have done so en masse for some time. In response, they turned against the mode of life and ideologies of their parents. This phenomenon first crystallised in Europe, but the same processes emerged in the US, Australia and elsewhere. One of the outcomes of US post-war triumphalism was a series of vicious post-colonial wars (most destructively in Vietnam), the rise of consumerism and mindless conformity at home, and the struggles of non-whites against the position of subordination and exploitation they had experienced for generations. The legacy of slavery within the US, the position of indigenous people in settler colonies (Australia, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand) and the sense of revulsion against the imminent threat of nuclear catastrophe played a part in the emergence of new political movements around the world in the 1960s.

France was the hotbed of the new revolutionary consciousness and the idea of political art emerged from this matrix. Art as an expression “of the people” rather than “of the elites” linked to socialist ideologies which went back to the Russian Revolution and was inspired to a degree by the same writings: Marx, Lenin and others. Among the most famous of the Leftist students in Paris was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, generally known as “Danny the Red”. He took a leading role in articulating the relation between Western capitalist society and political and social oppression, and remains a vivid presence in French intellectual circles today, now known for his environmental activism.

“Danny the Red” in 1968. Source: Haaretz, Israel, April 11, 2014. http://www.haaretz.com

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now “Danny the Green”. The Independent, London.  Saturday 13^th June 2009.

The young people caught up in the revolutionary sentiments of the 60s and 70s regarded a new popular form of art as an integral part of their revolutionary commitment. In Paris where politics was being played out daily and dramatically in pubic places students took over art studios and printing shops and produced a range of posters which appeared overnight on streets and buildings.

“Workers Unite: French and Immigrant”           “Be Young and Shut Up”

Students riot on the rue Gay-Lussac, Paris, 23 May 1968. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone/Getty Source: The Observer, McKenzie Wark Review.

View an 8 minute video from French National Archives summarising the key elements of the confrontation between police and students in May 68.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcDCsCGdOm4

Following the failure of the revolution, the political movement in France splintered. Ideology, tactics, and the mysterious role of particular individuals (especially Louis Althusser, prime theoretician of the student Left movement) resulted in the loss of any coherent platform or any means of continuing the struggle. The difference between political forms in the late 1960s and the mid-1970s was remarkable. Many subgroups and movements quickly emerged. Some attempted to overthrow the system through violence – including the first terrorist movements such as the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Brigadi Rossi (Red Brigades) in Italy.

Later, peaceful groups maintained opposition to the system through cultural processes.   The “Situationists Internationale” (The International Situationists) took their inspiration from the earlier cultural movements of the twenties and thirties, especially the dadaists and surrealists. They developed a contemporary style of communication which used cartoon and graphic novel styles to try to analyse why the revolution had failed. They did not want to “épater la bourgeoisie” (shock the bourgeois classes) but to work out what had gone wrong with Leftist theory. They combined a Marxist-style political analysis with a libertarian commitment. Theories which emerged from this movement included those of Guy Debord, who wrote presciently of The Society of the Spectacle, and Jean Baudrillard, who focussed attention on how media created reality, especially in his best-known early books The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society (1970) and Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972).

Other forms of art which became popular in the sixties and afterwards included abstraction, pop art, installations and happenings. These challenged the conventional gallery-based form of art, almost by definition, but political art needed to go further and directly challenge oppressive and anti-revolutionary social forms.

An enduring result has been a continuing tendency to identify and support forms of art which can be clearly understood as anti-normative. Social movements of the 70s and 80s led into some clearly articulated programs aimed at raising consciousness of moral and ideological issues otherwise suppressed or hidden by social normativity. One of the most powerful and pervasive was the rise of feminist art, or rather, forms of art which challenged the idea of patriarchal domination and demanded recognition and legitimation of feminine experience from a woman’s point of view. Art of course had for centuries been mainly the preserve of men, and women (and children) appeared as subjects of art, not creators of it. The feminist art movement demanded not just the inclusion of women as artists in their own right, but the recognition of women’s experience as a legitimate topic of art. Gay and Lesbian rights movements, the rise of AIDS, the position of immigrants and people of colour and recognition of the rights of the disabled also provided the ground against with a politically committed art could emerge. These elements remain today.

However the question of what is political in art has become far more complex. Theories of the 60s and 70s for instance identified all activities associated with warfare and militarism as an aspect of patriarchal class domination. War and violence were seen as part of masculine culture, to be challenged and rejected by all who sought a more just society. Those who experienced the expression of US imperialism, in particular, were cast as victims and if they were to play a role in this social construction of morality, it would be through their suffering. But the black and white clarity of such a view has faded to Fifty Shades. Contemporary art has moved beyond the simple dichotomies which made it so easy to identify “political art” in earlier decades. The question “What is political art” today is very hard to respond to.

Our analytical understanding of the image world, for instance, might suggest that now there is never anything but political art. Advertising offers an endless cornucopia of imagery directed at constituting our collective self-identities as consumers rather than citizens. Consumption and material signs of affluence have become central to the idea of art itself. Even if we reject the idea of advertising as a form of art (but how can we, when we consider for instance the fantastic creativity which goes into the photographic representation of luxury goods) the meaning of art, especially for its practitioners, has become relentlessly commercial. Artists are graded according to what their work will fetch in the market. A complex and immensely valuable infrastructure supports the circulation of fine art especially. (Isaac Julien explores this issue through his own art (below) and I will discuss the commodification of high art in a later piece].

To clarify the transformations in the concepts of political art from a feminist viewpoint it is interesting to compare the work of two very different women artists working across the period from the 1960s to the present. Nancy Spero throughout her long career created art works which directly challenged the injustices and insults suffered by the victims of US aggression in Vietnam, but went on to express, in dramatic forms, the cruelties and unfairness experienced by women throughout Western history. In contrast, An-My Lê, originally a Vietnamese refugee, focusses on military might and images of warfare from a much more nuanced point of view, creating remarkable images of the aesthetics of militarism.

NANCY SPERO

“Fuck you/Merde”. 1960, gouache and ink on paper.

Photograph: Nancy Spero @ Pompidou

 “I have deliberately attempted to distance my art from the Western emphasis on the subjective portrayal of individuality by using a hand-printing and collage technique utilizing zinc plates as an artist’s tool instead of a brush or palette knife. Figures derived from various cultures co-exist in simultaneous time … the figures themselves could become hieroglyphs – extensions of a text denoting rites of passage, birth to old age, motion and gesture … Woman as activator or protagonist dancing in procession, elegiac or celebrator a continuous presence engaged directly or glimpsed peripherally; the eye, as a moving camera, scans the re-imaging of women.”

Nancy Spero from an unpublished 1989 statement by the artist entitled “The Continuous Presence”.

http://www.artnet.com/awc/nancy-spero.html

Nancy Spero (1926-2009) was a well known New York City artist whose career spanned the years of the 1960s and 70s and stretched into the 2000s. Throughout this time she expressed a consistent political awareness and, working mainly in more ephemeral forms, remained an active participant in an art world which over time moved on beyond her primary commitments. Like a number of other women artists, she was married to an artist, Leon Golub, with whom she on occasion collaborated. His profile was at first far higher than hers and as was customary for the era from the 1940s-1960s she took second place to him, ran his home and looked after the children. But in later years, Leon Golub has been almost completely forgotten, whereas Nancy Spero went on making her remarkable and challenging art works into old age. She was a well-known activist strongly engaged with contemporary political and cultural affairs. She was also one of the pioneers in the representation of women’s personal and intimate experiences, including the delerious pleasures of birth and the cycles of life. Throughout her career she mostly worked on paper, using not only gouache and ink but also handprint and printed collage. This seems to have been a deliberate rejection of the oil-on-canvas forms of art, perhaps repudiating patriarchal conventions.

In the late 1950s-1960s she and her husband moved to Italy. She began to express interest in modernist representations of the human form, using narrative and art historical themes, even though Abstract Expressionism was then becoming the main trend in contemporary art. She was also exposed to and interested in the format, style and mood of Etruscan and Roman frescos and other antiquarian objects. She painted a series titled Black Paintings, depicting mythic themes including lovers, prostitutes and hybrid human-animal forms. In the 1950s she worked on a series on the theme of mothers and children. These heavy, blocked works look strong and contemporary today.

                                                  Mother and Children, 1956.

Returning to New York she was influenced by the images of Vietnam on television, and this led to her War Series (1966-70). These were small gouaches and inks on paper, showing the obscene destructiveness of war. The published pictures of her work of this period is fascinating in its simple schematism and sketchy mark making. While some images were over-blown and unsubtle (Peace, Helicopter and Hanging Christ 1968), others expressed a tentative grasp of the suffering in Vietnam without preaching (Helicopter and Victims 1968).

Peace, Helicopter and Hanging Christ     Helicopter and Victims

By the 1970s she, like most other politically active women, switched her attention to women and their representation in various media. Torture in Chile (1974) and Torture of Women, 1976 – a long scroll 125 feet in length – wove oral testimonies with images of women through history. Notes in Time on Women was another long scroll (210 feet), and again in The First Language (1979-81) she created a series of hand-printed, painted and collaged figures as a kind of “cast of characters”.   By 1988 she developed wall installations, where printed images were moved directly onto the walls of museums and public spaces. Her wall paintings in Chicago, Vienna, Dresden, Toronto and elsewhere continued to focus on the validity of female experience.

Victimage to Liberation

By the 1990s her style had undergone a complete turnaround. Rich and complex, sometimes reflective of art of the ancient world (e. g. The Flautist, 1995) her work in the 90s took on more certainty and determination.

                                                               The Flautist, 1995

In older age, her work continued to focus on themes of power and war. One recent project created installations based on small images of headsblown up and printed on aluminium, the metal prints then being cut out and suspended.

She died in 2009 at the age of 83. Her political commitment was expressed in the US press after her death, especially her anti-war activism and commitment to raising the status of women artists in a male art world. A retrospective of her work was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London (6 March 2011), featuring a lifetime of work which questions the artist’s duty in response to violence and suffering.

Her recurrent themes were evident in this show. Iconic feminist figures: Lilith, Medusa, the siren, the harpy, the Celtic fertility symbol with its open vulva were torn from their time and place and placed in conjunction in a delirious feminist chorus of “we are all here now”.   One of her more recent works, Azur, consisted of an entire wall covered with panels assembled in a massive frieze showing vestal virgins, Egyptian goddesses, porn stars and women being tortured.

                         Azur, Centre Pompidou Museum Publicity October 2010

She is sometimes compared with Louse Bourgeois. Both were married to more famous men, and both were rejected by the mainstream. Spero was not just an outsider, but much of her work looks like “outsider art”. The thematics of anti-war and pro-feminism are pushed very far in her work, although there is also demonstration of great subtlety and intelligence.

One critic, Laura Cumming, commented that her less overtly political work is her best. Perhaps this is because overtly political work itself no longer has a positive place in contemporary art, at least in comparison to its earlier dominance.[1] Assessment of work so clearly connected with a life-long political commitment, anti-war and pro-feminist, is difficult today especially as the work itself seems rather obvious and its themes generally outmoded or at least by-passed. While there are many admirably aesthetic and socially interesting elements, it becomes increasingly difficult not to turn aside with a degree of irritation at the obviousness of the imagery and its implications. The viewer today is inclined to say: well yes, obviously…

 An-My Lê.

An example of a very different form of political art, although with some common sources, is the work of Vietnamese-American photogapher An-My Lê. She was born in Saigon in 1960. Her family managed to leave Vietnam in 1975 as refugees and were resettled in the US. Today she identifies as Vietnamese-American and lives and works in New York, but has continued her connection with Vietnam. Her work is stimulating and unexpected. She examines war and its consequences, using elements of traditional documentary photography, frequently in conjunction with re-enactment. At first it is hard to see just where she is coming from with her work. On the one hand she seems to be looking at war as an historical event, showing the full panoply of military power through hardware and organisation, but in another way she forces a kind of beauty and aesthetic pleasure out of this normally severe and patriotic topic. In her on-going series “Events Ashore” – begun in 2005 and continuing – she documents her travels with the armed forces as they move to different sites of operation.

“Tanks”  from Small Wars 2001

From jungle warfare training in Indonesia to shipboard scenes her images remind us of the immense global circulation of people, resources, power and capital which continue unabated from year to year. Her eye captures strange moments and juxtapositions: a soldier in uniform sits patiently next to a Buddhist nun in Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship, Mercy, Vietnam (2010). This brilliant shot shows their equivalence in spite of their divergence. Both are bald, or almost so. Both sit facing the camera with their hands crossed in their laps. Both are silent – because no doubt they cannot speak to each other, yet there is a companionable kind of communication going on here.

Patient Admission, Hospital Ship, Vietnam 2010.

Although she shows military images which can be recognised at once as part of the canon of military representations in modern warfare, she also documents humanitarian missions such as those to Ghana and Senegal, relief efforts in Haiti, an aircract carriers deployed to Afghanistan and eventless days on a passage through the Suez Canal.

Beach Landing, Haiti, 2010

Her earlier work consists of careful and very traditionally shot photographs – relying on old style cameras using film resulting in the kind of picture which harks back to the golden days of black and white and to the visual or topographic documentary function of the photographer. Her work is now widely shown in the US, although there is little information available about her current reception in Vietnam.

Small Wars (Ambush 11) 1999-2002

Her photographs range from expansive to intimate, with machines dwarfed by vast landscapes in an expressive beauty. Her work has a debt to old-style landscape and portrait photography, expertly printed in a middle-gray scalereminiscent of Robert Adams. Returning to Vietnam in 1999 she expressed ideas of a lost homeland, evoking smell, memory, childhood stories and connection to war in the landscape. The alarming beauty of modern warfare, experienced by combatants wherever they are, is never far from her lens.

 Small Wars: Tracers                                                                                                                Source: http://www.aperture.org/shop/books/small-wars

Her Vietnam images do not document relics but engage the viewer with Lê’s own struggle to reconcile memories of her childhood in Vietnam with the landscape which now exists. In many of her photographs, calm tropical scenes are intersected by disturbing images which might be dive-bombing planes but are instead birds, while fires in the fields and structures on construction sites recall the presence of massacres, graves and napalm. In this way, Lê is using photography to trace a memorial landscape which does not any longer exist but which has left its traces as much in her mind’s eye as in the camera’s lens. This is an imaginative creation of a different kind of war photography.

At the end of this project she became aware of the existence of Vietnam War re-enactors in North Carolina who restage battles as well as the daily life and training of soldiers – both ex-Viet Cong and US forces. She photographed and participated in Vietnam War battles for four summers. Both documentary and staged, the work is conceptually rigorous and fascinating. Re-enacting soldiers sit for portraits and battle compositions reproduce classic war photojournalism. [2] These men have a passion for military history and take a formal approach to the precise re-enactment of specific battles and situations. Obviously guided by deep-seated psychological motivations, Lê found this a way to enter her own experiences of war “and adolescent fantasies about soldiers in uniform”. She says:

The re-enactors and I have each created a Vietnam of the mind and it is these two Vietnams which have collided in the resulting photographs. Here I experience Vietnam in America as I experienced America in Vietnam: worlds of conflict and beauty.

(Lê 2001 np).

An-My Lê. Small Wars: Explosion.  1999-2002. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of Murray Guy Gallery, New York.

Her series 29 Palms (2003-7) documents a military base of the same name located in the California desert. Soldiers train here before being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. This then is a rehearsal for war, rather than a re-enactment of it.

The importance and uniqueness of her vision is receiving increasing recognition. She will have a solo show in Baltimore in 2014, with twenty-one pieces selected from four of her series, “Vietnam” (1994-98, b & w); “Small wars” (1999-2002, b & w); “29 Palms” (2003-4, b & w); and “Events Ashore” (2005-present, colour).

Her work highlights the role of artist as observer, using artistic freedom to engage with the topic of military action which many would have rejected as complicit with a masculinist ethos. Of course today, with women participating equally in the military at every level, it is hard to maintain that war itself is anti-female. She is exploring a kind of politics, but one well beyond the conventional understandings of political art. Without doubt her identity as Vietnamese-American gives her a subject position which allows the development of this vision. What might seem, coming from another artist, to run the risk of being American hooray propaganda is in this context a kind of meditation on the meaning of war beyond the crude idea of national sovereignties. It reflects connections between past and present, and often opens up the sense of common humanity between those in combat and those they are working among. It is a shame she was not permitted to work in Iraq; the kind of documentation she might have provided would have given a dramatic balance to the conventional war images from television and movies. She gives a profound sense of “Being There”, no matter where that is.

Lê Family Photograph, Hûe, 1961. This Long Century.

References:

 An-My Lê. 2001. Small Wars: Landscape Stories. Cabinet, Issue 2, Spring, np. <http://www.landscapestories.net/issue-13/ls_13-019-an-my-le-small-wars?lang=en> [Accessed 17/4/14]

An-My Lê. nd. This Long Century. Photographs. <http://www.thislongcentury.com/?p=4254&c=120> [Accessed 4/4/14]

Centre Pompidou 2010.   On Nancy Spero@ Centre Pompidou. December. <http://artkritique.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/on-nancy-spero-centre-pompidou.html> [Accessed 14/4/14]

Bui, Phong. 2008. Nancy Spero in conversation with Phong Bui. The Brooklyn Rail. July 16^th.<http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/07/art/nancy-spero-in-conversation-with-phong-bui> [Accessed 5/4/14]

Falby, Mac. 2013. The military is not simply the military. Bmore<Art>, December 23.

<http://bmoreart.com/2013/12/the-military-is-not-simply-the-military-an-my-le-the-bma-by-mac-falby.html> [Accessed 12/4/14]

Ivry, Benjamin. 2010. Nancy Spero and Leon Golub: a politically relevant artistic couple. Jewish Daily Forward, 16/4/2010. Retrieved: 7/7/2011. <http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/127345/nancy-spero-and-leon-golub-a-politically-relevant/> [Accessed 12/4/14]

Mathews, John. 2010. On Nancy Spero @Centre Pompidou. ArtKritique, December 20^th.http://artkritique.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/on-nancy-spero-centre-pompidou.html [Accessed 17/4/2014].

Vine, Richard. 1997. Where the Wild Things were. Art in America, May, pp. 98-111.

Walker, Joanna S. 2009/10. Nancy Spero, 1926-2009. Art Monthly , 332,

[1] Source: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/mar/06/nancy-spero-serpentine-azur-review. See also: http://www.artnet.com/awc/nancy-spero.html

[2] This description comes from the bookshop site at: http://www.aperture.org/shop/books/small-wars#sthash.cel7dHmY.dpuf

ISAAC JULIEN: PLAYTIME

Roslyn Oxley9, Soudan Lane, Paddington, Sydney.

15^th March – 12^th April 2014

Isaac Julien: Publicity Still

Tucked away at the base of a majestic sandstone wall in Paddington, Roslyn Oxley’s gallery is a long-standing attraction for Sydney art-lovers, reputed for discernment without pretension. Established in 1982 and showing many rising stars, the gallery has moved to an exhibition program largely focussed on Asia-Pacific art, especially new arts of Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Prominent among the gallery’s represented artists are Hany Armanious and Michael Parekowhai (who represented Australia and New Zealand at the Venice Biennale in 2011) as well as Patricia Piccinini, Bill Henson and Tracy Moffatt.

This regional focus goes alongside a commitment to internationalisation. Artists such as Pierre et Gilles (1995), Robert Mapplethorpe (1996, 1997, 2000), Young British Artists Group Show (1996) and Moriko Mori (1997) led this trend in the 1990s, followed by Tracey Emin (2004) and Yayoi Kusama (five shows in the 2000s, most recently in 2012).

The recent installation by British film/video artist Isaac Julien continues it. However, Julien is not just an artist from another place, but an artist whose entire oeuvre has been concerned with the crossing of spaces, boundaries, identities and cultural forms, while exploring the relation between aesthetics and politics.

 Isaac Julien, King’s Cross, Sydney, March 2014. (Photograph: Annette Hamilton)

Born in London in 1960, of French Caribbean immigrant background, Julien embodies a bold transnationalism in life and work. Educated at Central St Martin’s School of Art with a BA in Fine Art Film, he went on to postgraduate study in audio-visual art in Brussels. Film, audio and photography in themed installations have become his signature mode, although the traverse to the present has been idiosyncratic at times. His art is well-known in film/video/politics circles, and he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001.

He began his work presenting intellectually engaged exercises in pop-cultural analysis which sustained the dynamism and sexy vitality of the era. Drama-documentary Looking for Langston (1989) gained a cult following with its exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.

His next major film was Young Soul Rebels, which won the Semaine de la critique prize for best film at the Cannes Film Festival.

Movie Poster

Julien’s work crosses the lines between film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture. He creates powerful visual narratives which draw on elements of these varied disciplines. His earlier art films such as Three (1996-9), Vagabondia (2000) and Paradise Omeros (2002) explore issues in race, class and sexuality, sustaining within his video-art strong allegoric narrative elements. The same elements guided his exploration of mythic images of the cowboy in the context of gay culture and the West, in The Long Road to Mazatlan (1999). Restaging scenes from films by Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol and David Hockney, he created a three-screen video installation mixing documentary with fiction, starring the Venezualan dancer and choreographer Javier de Frutos (see published conversation with B. Ruby Rich, 2002).

Few viewers of his recent projects would guess that another of his major works was a documentation of US Blaxploitation movies of the 1970s.  BaadAssss Cinema: a Bold Look at ‘70s Blaxploitation Films was released in 2003 by the New Video Group Inc studio, an independent film channel. It included interviews with Quentin Tarantino, Pam Grier and other actors and filmworkers of that era, and artfully intercut clips and segments from some of the famous films of the time. The DVD of the film is still commercially available.

The same year he showed an art-film version of this project in a lush multi-screen projection Baltimore, which added a sci-fi twist to the blaxploitation conventions. Shot on 16 mm film, transferred to DVD and projected onto three big screens, the piece featured Melvin Van Peebles, director of the seminal film Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAssss Song (1971), in a tribute to black urban cinema. Street scenes of a ghetto neighbourhood are presented with a soundtrack including fragments of dialogue from Sweetback, while the real Van Peebles and a Foxy Brown-looking black woman walk through city streets. They arrive at institutions such as the Walters Museum, where they view Renaissance art. They walk through the hallways of various storehouses of artifacts and social styles creating a metaphorical journey through representations of temporal experience in the city. In a central passage of the show, Van Peebles confronts black heroes from the wax museum including Martin Luther King Jr and Billie Holliday (and himself) positioned in a painting gallery full of historical paintings. The film captures both a nostalgic sense of the vitality of black urban life, a perceptual funk scene, alongside a curious conversation between fantasies in historical space and time (Reid, 2004).

Murray (2004, p. 92) comments that Baltimore is “a continuation of Julien’s cinematic engagement with the contemporary exigencies of art history and the importance of the museum as a battleground for cultural legitimacy”. Technically, Murray also identifies one of the distinguishing features of Julien’s work, a visually intoxicating quality produced by the sense of “floating” as the camera moves through spaces creating layers of impressions, clusters of conceptual relativities. His use of multiple screens creates the viewer as individual editor of the text, so the chain of meaning is constructed from the flow of images.

Three films in the mid 2000s offered reflections on journeying across continents and cultures. These included True North in 2004 and Fantôme Afrique in 2005. A third, Small Boats, made up a trilogy which was screened in various venues such as Metro Pictures gallery in Chelsea. These films work from “real” backstories, and then elaborate on the themes raised through the split-screen camera technique. True North concerns the African-American explorer Matthew Henson who was the first man to reach the North Pole, although the white Robert Peary has always been credited with the achievement. Filmed in Iceland and Northern Sweden, the imagery grew progressively frozen and the icy wastes enfolded the narrative. Fantôme Afrique was filmed in Burkino Faso, the heart of the film industry in Africa, mostly taking place in the searing golden light of the desert. Small Boats links dance and film, shown in a single stage-wide screen. The three were shown as a trilogy at BAM in 2007, and an excellent interview with Martina Kudlacek illuminates much about his thinking and techniques (Kudlacek with Julien, 2007). To a degree, this phase of Julien’s work can be labelled “post-colonial”, although he distances himself from association with the label, while acknowledging the deep theoretical engagement which characterises his approach.

In 2008 he completed a film which surprised his fans and dismayed many critics. Titled Derek it offered an homage to noted British film-maker Derek Jarman, who had died in 1994. Critics commented on the extent to which this film lacked the stylistic elegance and subtlety evident in his earlier works. The film was seen as a conventional hagiographic documentary. Actor Tilda Swinton was a close friend of Jarman’s and hers is the dominant voice in the film, which seems to be a didactic exploration of the position of the gay filmmaker in contemporary society.

http://www.zimbio.com  Sundance Portrait Session

Roger Cook (2008) offered a very negative commentary on the film’s political position, describing it as suffused with an “atmosphere of defensive ressentiment” (p. 38). Its “imperious political rhetoric” especially offended him, and his published critique in Art Monthly includes a particularly vicious unattributed quote about Julien himself: “It’s a spoilt bloke making spoilt films for spoilt people” (ibid). Nonetheless this piece does raise questions about the inextricability of politics and aesthetics (following Rancière) and suggests comparisons with Pasolini.

Julien moved from engagement with a single-screen cinema technology to the diverse potentials of multi-channel video installation (see Wu, Gough and Wall, 2012.  His most striking exploration of this form is in his work Ten Thousand Waves (2010), a 55 minute installation designed to be viewed on nine double-sided screens, allowing eighteen different views of the installation. The audience can move around and view from any vantage point. The work moves between China’s ancient past and present, exploring the movement of people across countries and continents, engaged in permanently unfinished journeys. Its primary inspiration came from the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004 in Britain, when 20 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned on a flooded sandbank in northwest England. Maggie Cheung, famed Chinese actor, portrays the Chinese goddess Mazu from Fujian Province, the home province of the cockle-pickers. The film recounts the story of 16^th century fishermen imperilled at sea. In a reenactment of classic 1930s film The Goddess, actress Zhao Xiaoshi plays the sea goddess who leads them to safety. The film is staged on the streets of modern and old Shanghai and uses music and sounds that fuse Eastern and Western traditions, with contributions from London-based musician Jah Wobble and the Chinese Dub Orchestra. The film took four years to research and create, and has been widely screened and praised around the world (MOMA publicity for installation, November 2013 – February 2-14).

Maggie Cheung in Ten Thousand Waves: publicity still

PLAYTIME

The project bears the same title as Jacques Tati’s 1967 film which offered a lightly constructed expression of dismay at the wreckage caused by modern capitalism (below, left: still from Tati’s Playtime)

PLAYTIME is a much more serious look at the same theme and is by far the most direct and articulate exploration of contemporary politics Julien has attempted. Although comments on the film frequently refer to it as exploring current debates on the relationship between capital and the art world, this theme is only one element in the piece. PLAYTIME and KAPITAL are shown simultaneously on endlessly looping screens in different but adjacent spaces. It is possible to move between them at any time, an illuminating viewing strategy. PLAYTIME consists of three elements, or chapters, set in three different cities defined by their relation to Capital: London, in the wake of financial deregulation; Reyjkjavik, where the 2008 crisis began, and Dubai, home of one of the world’s major financial markets. The main characters are played by actors enacting roles of The Collector, The Auctioneer, the Housekeeper and the Reporter, played by actors whose scripts are based on interviews between Julien and people affected by the financial crisis of 2007/8.

 KAPITAL, viewed in a dark room with just two chairs side by side and two sets of headphones, offers a documentary-style film of a real panel interview intercut with a variety of scenes reflecting the comments in the panel discussion. David Harvey, author of The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010), sits on the stage with Julien at the Hayward Gallery in London, along with an audience of critics theorists and curators.

David Harvey, from  http://www.wideopenschool.com/class/Choreographing%20Capital

What occurs is a reprise of a 1960s Marxist discussion, somehow dislocated by the inability of the classic theoretical apparatus to accommodate the bizarre nature of contemporary global capitalism. This is the terrain Julien wants to take us through, but it is an uncertain journey.  Entering debates so ethically charged and politically problematic is a dangerous manoeuvre.  In his earlier works, which could be interpreted as aesthetic ventures into post-colonial worlds, viewers would not be disturbed from their ideological comfort zones. PLAYTIME and KAPITAL demand a different awareness and cannot be shoeboxed in the same way. Julien is talking about late global capitalism and the operations of the art market as an element in the transnational economy, run by dodgy financiers, fast-talking auctioneers and vaguely stupid collectors, where art fetches stratospheric prices and finishes up being dusted on the walls of luxury high-rise apartments in Dubai where nobody lives. Of course not everybody is going to like it.

Richard Woodward, in New York’s Collector Daily (December 4 2013) doesn’t, and doesn’t pull his punches.

 It takes chutzpah for an artist to satirize the art market while fully benefiting from its largesse.  Isaac Julien’s show is full of this double-talk.  He is apparently upset at the gulf between rich and poor but views clueless collectors with disdain unless, of course, they happen to be shopping for one of his pieces … the artist manages to exhibit many of the hypocritical values his work wants us to abhor. 

The work in PLAYTIME is complex and interweaves thematic elements in unexpected ways. It begins with a vast empty office-space in London. Two men walk about in random patterns, speaking the kind of financial-speak we have come to expect in contemporary discourse. In fact, some of their speech comes directly from David Harvey in the KAPITAL section of the installation. The city is spread out below them: the idea of Distinction depends on the maintenance of Greed. The Boss (played by British actor Colin Salmon) speaks of his need to employ only the top PhD graduates from Universities such as Harvard and Yale. With them he can keep the wheels turning. He explains hedge funds in bizarre terms, using an analogy with men’s underpants. In several strangely beautiful scenes we see a vast airconditioned warehouse full of computers, which is all you can actually see of capitalism: the lights blinking on and off as markers of the market. At the end of the segment the Boss walks about playing the trumpet, perhaps sobbing.

In the Iceland segment, the landscape occupies the entire screen, with plumes of smoke rising and hovering over the water. The central figure is a man who lost his self-designed ultra-modern home in the financial crash. He seems entirely overwhelmed by an irresolvable tragedy, expressed physically through his tortured physicality and desperate expression. How is the viewer to respond? At first the viewer seems invited to identify with his pain. But soon one begins to ask, is it really such a terrible tragedy that a once-wealthy man lost his dream home? Isn’t his anguish and distress absurdly OTT? Why should people devote such passion to the building of “Their House”? What made it possible for him in the first place to acquire the capital which would allow him to engage in such a project? The vast empty premises of the Landsbankinn – one of the first banks to collapse – seems somehow appropriate to the icy wastes beyond.

The next London segment verges on satire. Actor James Franco plays a stereotypical art advisor extolling the value of contemporary art as a perfect investment for the diversification of a portfolio. As he walks up the stairs in a blank white-painted building he calls out numbers: 95, 100, 110, and for a moment you wonder what these figures refer to – but of course, they are millions, which is what the wealthy elites are now paying for art. At auctions the investors have advisers and agents on the phone, pushing prices up to astronomical levels supported by the insanity of the global economy. They can bid for and buy art from anywhere in the world, and they do: they come from Russia, from China, from Brazil. We meet the Auctioneer, in this case playing himself, Simon de Pury. He becomes anxious and excited before each major auction, eating an apple for luck.   One “painting” which consisted of a written text on a wall sold for 1.2 million, a super-modest price compared with the 42 million paid for a Roy Lichtenstein in 2011. Art and antiques became part of the equipage of the wealthy class in the post-crisis mistrust of esoteric financial instruments. The Global Financial Crisis helped the art market beyond anybody’s expectations. During the GFC only 50% of items offered for sale were sold: now it is nearer 90%, springing back after the huge Christie’s auction in Paris in March 2009. Chinese star Maggie Cheung, who appears in Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, plays the role of an eager interviewer. In reality, the two never were together and each segment was filmed separately and intercut artfully.

Meanwhile, in Dubai, the financial capital of the Middle East, a beautiful but sad housekeeper in a black and white uniform walks sadly back and forward through an empty luxury apartment.

Mercedes Cabral as The Housekeeper: publicity still

Played with a sensitive but unemotional demeanour by Mercedes Cabral, Filipina actor best known for playing in art house and independent films, this sector seems oddly out of adjustment with those preceding it. At times we seem to be overhearing an ethnographic interview, as she explains that she had to pay an agency 150,000 pesos to get the job in the first place. She needs the money to support her family at home. The inhabitants of the vast elegant apartment with its art pieces never appear. She dusts, and gazes. Long periods of silence accompany empty visuals of the vast city outlook with its lights and vehicles stranded in the midst of an empty sand desert, where she stands staring into the distance in the closing scene.

How can we understand contemporary capitalism: is it the same as it was, or are we seeing something  altogether different? Analysis of something so invisible and intangible seems an absurd venture. Images of riots, computers and banks of neon numbers as well as talking heads and actors who may or may not be playing themselves make it hard for most viewers, who may not be able to take in the theoretical issues being debated here, many of which go back to bitter political fights of the 1960s. But is a video installation the right place to be asking these questions?  Or are there other questions lurking behind which we haven’t yet asked?

Some commentators appear bemused. Others, such as Searle (2014) pick up on the uncertainty produced by Julien’s method while appreciating its strengths.

There is brilliance and disappointment in Playtime. A hybrid of fiction and documentary, the film makes it difficult to know what is real. I wander between the screens, lost in Julien’s cinematic subterfuge, and that, I think, is the point. 

Hybrids of documentary and fiction are common in literature, much less so in cinema, although re-enactment has become a common strategy in commercial television of recent times. Still, the breaking down of barriers between reality and imagination seems particularly challenging. For an art film-maker to be giving us a lesson in Marxist theory seems strange today although it was hardly unknown in the 1960s especially in the Latin American revolutionary context. For that lesson to be couched in the method of a hyper-developed media technology and elevated aesthetics is harder still to accommodate. It is hardly surprising If it proves almost impossible to say something which will be widely understood on a topic which is, for most people, entirely ungraspable.  What is fascinating is the extent to which Julien is willing to push the boundaries even while maintaining a certain tongue-in-cheek distancing from them. Unlike Searle (ibid) I didn’t find any longeurs in this work but I would have liked to see a bit more speed and directness in the Dubai section which seemed to link only vaguely to the direction of the other elements.

In terms of strategy of presentation, the use of two separate linked spaces, both lit only by reflected light from the screens, separated the viewer’s intellectual and aesthetic engagement. At Roslyn Oxley9 the main viewing area featured a long wide bench, on the edge of which viewers had to perch. Or, in some cases, lie down. When there were more viewers, they had to crouch on the floor.

This was an odd viewing experience, emphasising a kind of static loneliness in the encounter with the work, unlike previous projects which required active mobility from the viewer in constructing imaginative connections.   Its ability to connect with the intended audience is necessarily compromised by the peculiar position it opens for them. There is a quality of introspection which takes precedence over the usual sense of delerious enjoyment found in his work. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the great majority of consumers in the art market really do not want to discuss the urgent issues surrounding global capitalism, and Julien’s desire for them to reconsider does not make for a comfortable engagement.  Notwithstanding such critiques, the film is undeniably provocative and very beautiful.

REFERENCES

Art iT 2013 Isaac Julien Part 1.

<http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_feature_e/n6fMcR3eJU52sQuiTPqF >[Accessed 3 April 2014).

Cook, Roger. 2008. Isaac Julien’s Derek. Art Monthly, April, p. 315.

Harvey, David. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books.

Harvey, David. N.d. Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey. <http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/> [Accessed 6 April 2014)

Julien, Isaac. 2008. The way I see it: artists tackle ten existential questions. New Statesman, June 16,Vol 137 p. 40.

Kudlacek Martina and Isaac Julien. 2007. Isaac Julien. BOMB No 101 (Fall pp. 72-79. [Accessed 26/03/2014]

Murray, Soraya. 2004. Isaac Julien: Baltimore. Journal of Contemporary African Art, Summer, 92-93.

MOMA. 2013.   Isaac Julien: Ten Thousand Waves. The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. MOMA, New York: Publicity Materials.

Reid, Calvin. 2004. Funk Renaissance. Art in America. March, p. 92-95.

Searle, Adrian. 2014. Playtime. London. The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/29/playtime-james-franco-power-money-isaac-julien-capital

[Accessed 4^th April 2014]

Woodward, Richard. 2013. Isaac Julien PLAYTIME @ Metro Pictures. <http://collectordaily.com/isaac-julien-playtime-metro-pictures> [Accessed 4^th April 2014)]

Wu, Ge, Phillip Gough and Caitlin de Berigny Wall. Multiple-channel video installation as a precursor to transmedia-based art. 2012. Technoetic Arts: a Journal of Speculative Research, Vol 10, 2/3, pp. 329-339.

On post-colonialism in Julien’s art:  (Interview with ART iT)

ART iT: When you were starting out as an artist was post-colonial theory an inspiration for you, and did you actively use it in constructing your works?

IJ: Absolutely. I couldn’t have made my early films like Territories (1984) and Looking for Langston (1989) without it. Along with my peers I read Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Richard Dyer and, of course, Homi Bhabha’s famous essay “The Other Question” (1983). Then in 1988 I was on the editorial board of Screen journal with the cultural art critic Kobena Mercer. But I wasn’t exclusively interested in post-colonial theory. I was also interested in film theory and psychoanalysis and a translation of those ideas across media. In 1995 it was really exciting to attend the “Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation” conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which coincided with the making of my film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin White Mask (1996) in collaboration with Mark Nash, who was also an editor of Screen and a curator for documenta11. Steve McQueen made his first exhibition there and artists like Glenn Ligon and Lorna Simpson were also present in an exhibition that coincided with the conference, “Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Desire and Difference.” Retrospectively, you could see it as part of the formation of a conceptual Black arts movement – some might call it “post-Black” – in which there were these different nuances that developed in different practices.

But of course as an artist you evolve in different directions and engage with other discourses. In 1999 I made the film installation Long Road to Mazatlán, which was ostensibly about two cowboys in the American West and was nominated for the Turner Prize. It was a deliberately Warholian-type work and through it I think I was already challenging what I saw as the post-colonial paradigm. I purposely cast two white protagonists, one of whom was the choreographer and dancer Javier de Frutos, who collaborated with me on the project. Of course, they were queer, and there was this Warholian play with desire and the quotational Pop-art element, but I think I was already conscientiously trying to upend post-colonial expectations. Some of my friends saw the piece and told me, “Oh, that’s a bit odd for you to make, Isaac.” And I thought, “Well, that’s exactly my point!”
That said, I take it for granted that post-coloniality might be one of the themes in my work. It simply won’t be my sole theme of interest. Unfortunately, that’s not everybody’s point of view.