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"I'll tell you what freedom is to me. No fear" - Nina Simone
Freedom/Diasporic Dream-Space No.1 (2022)
Crikey! You'd need nearly four hours to sit through every film showing at Tate Britain as part of Isaac Julien's What Freedom Is To Me. As my ticket was for 3pm and the Tate closes at 6pm that was never an option for me and, to be honest, I'm not sure I'm patient enough anyway. Some of the films are very slow, very uneventful.
Others, however, are excellent. Julien, like many video artists, is a tricky act for me to get my head around. I always wonder if we're supposed to watch entire films or, as suggested by the gallery, to become a 'mobile spectator' and dip in and out of rooms almost at whim, taking in whatever takes our fancy. I erred more towards the latter but there's a slightly anal part of me that insisted on at least some structure.
The show starts in the foyer, you don't even need a ticket for that bit, with a bit of history about Julien (who was born, in London, in 1960) and how his art mixes poetry, video, painting, music, and even dance to tell stories about social justice, about black and gay lives and how, during his career, his art has extended into bigger, far more conceptual, pieces. While his video art began with one screen installations, they now often contain up to five or more screens. How are you supposed to watch all of them at the same time?
As it's Julien's biggest solo show to date there's even a chronology of his life and the events he's lived through. Starting in 1957 when his parents, Rosemary and Joseph, emigrated to London from St Lucia and Julien's birth three years later, the timeline goes on to take in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, St Lucia's independence from Britain, the New Cross house fire of January 1981 in which thirteen young people died, the Black People's Day of Action which followed that fire, the death of twenty-three Chinese people working as cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004, the killing of Mark Duggan in Tottenham and the riots that followed in 2011, 2017's Grenfell Tower fire in which seventy-two people lost their lives, the Windrush Scandal, and the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis three years ago.
Culturally it takes in the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Notting Hill Carnival, and Rock Against Racism, and personally it takes in Julien being nominated for The Turner Prize in 2001, being awarded a CBE and elected a Royal Academician in 2018 and his curating of Rock My Soul at the Victoria Miro Gallery in 2019 (something I wrote about at the time).
TERRITORIES (1984)
He's seen a lot and he's done a lot. What Freedom Is To Me isn't in strict chronological order but the first work I had a look at was the second earliest one on show. 1984's TERRITORIES is an experimental documentary about Notting Hill Carnival which reflects on its history as a symbol of resistance within the Caribbean communities of London and elsewhere. It also takes in some of the police hostility that carnival goers would often experience. It captures the essence of Carnival well but it's no replacement for actually being at Carnival.
While TERRITORIES explores Julien's black identity, 1987's THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISEMENT celebrates his queerness. It aims to look at how, under the threat of AIDS - and the negative stereotypes of gay men perpetuated in the media at the time, sexual desire in gay communities was still able to thrive. It would have been a brave piece of work at the time and it still stands up as relevant now. Even if society has, ever so slowly and still not far enough, progressed.
THIS IS NOT AN AIDS ADVERTISMENT (1987)
LOST BOUNDARIES (1986)
Some of the works on show, like LOST BOUNDARIES from 1986, I couldn't get my head round at all. They were so experimental and avant-garde that they became almost completely abstract to me. I'm not saying they're no good but I found I preferred it when Julien got political. Which in 1983's WHO KILLED COLIN ROACH? he certainly did.
Colin Roach, a black British man, was just twenty-one years old when he was shot dead at the entrance of Stoke Newington police station in 1982. The suspected police cover up that followed incited protests against racism and police violence in the UK and Julien was not the only person to tackle the Roach killing. Music by The Special AKA, The Ragga Twins, and Sinead O'Connor (who sadly died, far too young, this week) and a poem by Benjamin Zephaniah also tackled what to many looks to be a huge injustice and certainly not an isolated incident of this kind when it comes to the Metropolitan Police.
WHO KILLED COLIN ROACH? (1983)
ONCE AGAIN... (STATUES NEVER DIE) (2022)
When he's not tackling racism, homophobia, and politics (or making confusing experimental films - or both), Julien often seems to find himself looking back to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. ONCE AGAIN... (STATUES NEVER DIE) is based around a conversation between the philosopher and educator Alan Locke and the collector and exhibitor of African material culture Albert C. Barnes and again explores black queer desire.
I must confess my ignorance and admit I don't know the slightest thing about either Locke or Barnes and very little about the Harlem Renaissance. To be honest, this piece didn't really help me. It was huge and confusing though, at times, compelling and featured statues, staircases, and talking heads. It was all a bit too much to take in. I certainly didn't last thirty-two minutes (the length of the five separate films all playing at the same time).
Richmond Barthe - Black Madonna (1961)
ONCE AGAIN... (STATUES NEVER DIE) (2022)
ONCE AGAIN... (STATUES NEVER DIE) (2022)
The next room worked much better and was, in fact - for me, the most powerful piece in the show. Two films were being shown over three screens. WESTERN UNION:SMALL BOATS and TEN THOUSAND WAVES both interrogated the experience of people's migration across countries and continents and both films do it in a moving, and all too human, way.
The reference to small boats is, of course, no accident. The furore over immigration and small boats is no new thing, this work was made in 2007 and could have been earlier, but often the debate is framed in dismissive and xenophobic terms. Many do look at it as a human tragedy but still not on the scale they really ought to. Others choose to actively celebrate people, children even, dying at the bottom of the sea. These are the people I have removed from my life.
Julien looks at what these migrations do to the people involved and but also how they leave their trace in monuments and architecture. It's most brilliantly done in the TEN THOUSAND WAVES part of the film (there's a bit of a blur between the two hence the double captioning) which responds to the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004 by weaving footage of contemporary China with ancient myths (the story of the goddess Mazu from Fujian province where the Chinese cockle pickers had travelled from) and also including film of the search for them went they went missing. It's tragic, it's moving but it also gives a humanity to a group of people who have been treated as a collective rather than a set of individuals.
WESTERN UNION:SMALL BOATS (2007)
TEN THOUSAND WAVES (2010)
WESTERN UNION:SMALL BOATS (2007)
WESTERN UNION:SMALL BOATS (2007)
WESTERN UNION:SMALL BOATS (2007)
LOOKING FOR LANGSTON (1989)
LOOKING FOR LANGSTON (1989)
LESSONS OF THE HOUR takes on another historical figure, the American abolitionist, freedom fighter, activist, and writer Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). This is a good one with a little bit more narrative structure (though at times still tricky to follow). It tells of Douglass' journey, his travels to England, Scotland, and Ireland, and his campaigns against slavery.
It includes excerpts of Douglass' speeches including one in which he spoke about how photography (at the point, a recent invention) would have the power to influence human relationships and power balances. There's also a lot of shots of brooding landscapes and people riding horses. You can see, on many levels, what attracted Julien to this subject.
LESSONS OF THE HOUR (2019)
LESSONS OF THE HOUR (2019)
The Lady of the Lake (Lessons of the Hour) (2019)
LINA BO BARDI - A MARVELOUS ENTANGLEMENT (2019)
Other subjects are a little more obscure, recherche even. Lina Bo Bardi appears to have been an interesting architect (with buildings in Sao Paulo, Salvador, and Bahia) but I learned that from looking at her Wikipedia page and not at Julien's film inspired by her. Which featured the Brazilian actors Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres talking to each other about linearity and non-linearity. I found it repetitive and a bit pointless and I didn't stay for anywhere near the thirty-nine minutes the film lasted.
I couldn't. I didn't have enough time. The galleries weren't open late enough. The final room, sadly, was only moderately better. I had high hopes of VAGABONDIA as it was filmed in the very interesting Sir John Soane's Museum in London's Lincoln's Inn Fields. But the film itself, about the dreams and fantasies of conservator walking the museum at night - Night At The Museum, was visually impressive but not particularly interesting.
Which, with a couple of honourable exceptions - mentioned earlier, was roughly my experience of What Freedom Is To Me. I don't doubt Isaac Julien is an important artist making profound and multi-layered work but it's just that without some, or lots of, preparatory learning before attending the show much of it went over my head. Maybe I'm a thicko. Maybe the art is too cold. Maybe it's too demanding. I'm not sure. But if all his work was as potent as pieces like TEN THOUSAND WAVES I'd have written a very different account of my Sunday at the gallery.
VAGABONDIA (2020)
VAGABONDIA (2020)
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