On Isaac Julien

I have seen Isaac Julien’s Once Again... (Statues Never Die) (2022) three times: at the Tate, at the Whitney, and now at the de Young, where it anchors the artist’s newest survey exhibition. It’s Julien’s best work, though Lessons of the Hour (2019), Julien’s twelve-channel ode to American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, comes very close.

But Once Again is best because it is also Julien’s last—“last” in the sense that, yes, it’s his latest major work, but also “last” in the sense that it would seem to mark the closure to a period of Julien’s artistic production. We can think about this as the closure of a period of “moving-image” work that once went by the name of “video,” a period of aesthetics and politics that was primarily concerned with the identities of peoples and mediums, especially as these could be shown to be overdetermined by institutions and disciplines, which video’s penchant for the multi-screen installation often modeled. In this, Once Again is a consummate work of video art, but a work that speaks to the form’s beginnings and ends. So what I want to say is that Once Again is the last work of video art that any of us will ever see, and Julien, The Last Video Artist.

Fragmentary, nonlinear, atmospheric, situational, the “content” of Once Again hinges on the figure of Alain Locke (played by André Holland), the intellectual engine of the Harlem Renaissance, who we see in conversation with famed collector of European and African art Albert C. Barnes (Danny Huston), and in a kind of pas de deux with sculptor Richmond Barthé (Devon Terrell). Filmed at the Barnes Collection, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford (where Locke was a Rhodes Scholar), and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the scenes of Once Again play out simultaneously across five screens that are positioned in such a way that it’s nearly impossible to see all of them at once. The mirrored walls that accompany the installation, as well as sculptures by Matthew Angelo Harrison of artifacts encased in machine-carved acrylic resin, multiply and materialize what one sees on the screens.

Isaac Julien, Pas de Deux No. 2 (1989/2016) from Looking for Langston, 1989. Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminum and framed, 58.1 x 74.5 cm. © Isaac Julien. Courtesy of the artist; Victoria Miro, London; and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.

To understand Once Again as the last work of video art, though, one has to look back to what Julien has described as its “prequel,” Looking for Langston (1989), the single-channel work that first brought Julien major attention as a creative talent and which sets the aesthetic tone for Once Again. Looking explores gay, raced, male desire through the visual, poetic, and sonic thematics of 1920s Harlem, with its supper-club speakeasies, cruising fields, and bedrooms. With this breakthrough work, Julien found a model—at once sensual and political—for his own artistic aspirations, and one that could break free of the documentary concerns that dominated his earliest works, such as Territories (1984), which addressed the racial tensions and violence that accompanied the Windrush generation of immigrants to the UK.

If Julien could be “looking” for a poetics of moving-image work in the 1980s, it would be one that wouldn’t give up his abiding political commitments formed from working through Central St. Martins School of Art and as part of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective (1983–92). It would also be thanks to that broader deregulation of economies and images that began in the 1970s, due in part to what we once called “globalization” and still call “neoliberalism,” which reached a crescendo with exhibitions such as “Magiciens de la Terre” (1989) at the Centre Pompidou and the 1993 Whitney Biennial, both touchstone shows that cast a wide discursive net over who and what would now be recognized in the precincts of high art.

Julien also came of age when experimental film and expanded cinema were already part of the art-school curriculum, if not the art-world conversation, especially among artists interested in film, and then video, not only as technical tools for makers but as that assemblage of social and ideological techniques which shaped representations as much as subjectivities and went under the name of an “apparatus.” And though some video works had been collected by major museums (Barbara London famously began bringing it into MoMA’s collections in 1975), it was only by the early 1990s that the Tate began to collect video in earnest and that established galleries began to show it with, presumably, some expectation of a market.

Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves, 2010. Nine-screen installation, 49:41 minutes. Image courtesy of de Young Museum, San Francisco. Photo by Henrik Kam.

All of which is to say that Julien arrived with Looking for Langston at just that moment when something like the “video artist” was born. It was a moment that shaped Julien’s decision to leave commercial filmmaking behind—see his Young Soul Rebels (1991)—and pursue the white cube of the museums and galleries, on his own account a more “innovative” context at the time.1

From here Julien would go on to create the body of work for which he has become well-known, works that address time and again the challenges, both physical and psychological, of migration and diaspora—Fantôme Afrique (2005); Ten Thousand Waves (2010); Western Union: Small Boats (2007)—and individual achievement, be they artistic (Baltimore, 2003), scientific (True North, 2004), or political (Lessons of the Hour, 2019).

But during this period, new forces of production (digital imaging; the smart phone) and distribution (the internet; social media) began to challenge whatever coherence belonged to the idea of “video art” and so the identity of the “video artist.” By the second decade of the new millennium, the nomenclature was shifting. Artists and their advocates began speaking of the “moving image.” Once Again … (Statues Never Die) then comes after the rise and the fall of the “video artist”: in its “wake”, even.2 In this work, Julien’s twin abiding concerns for diasporic, racialized identity, and for the individual who works within and against the limitations of that identity, are presented as at once present (in Locke and Barnes’s conversation; in Locke and Barthé’s “looks”) and resolutely past (things to be collected, inspected, and observed). The images in Once Again raise the questions of modernism’s roots in colonial plunder, of restitution, of collections themselves as “persons of interest” in the alleged crimes of modernity, and of the artist’s place in these scenes of history. But they do so in an installation that, in its very physical manifestation, suggests that all of these things, though before us as objects of high aesthetic interest, are, at the very same time, definitively behind us, in the space of the installation. They are never fully in front of us, nor wholly out of sight or out of mind. They are images for the archive as opposed to the op-ed page. Their history may not be settled, but nor is it subject to much debate.

Isaac Julien, Once Again … (Statues Never Die), 2022. Five-screen film installation, 32:32 minutes. Image courtesy of de Young Museum, San Francisco. Photo by Henrik Kam.

Between Looking for Langston and Once Again … (Statues Never Die), the poet has become a philosopher. The medium of agency is now one of reflection, self-consciously so (why else all the mirrors?), rather than composition (of the artistic self) struggling for recognition. The era of video art and the video artist is collapsed in the space of Once Again. What is left is what was always there: the beauty of a face, of a figure, of a turn of phrase—all of the things that film and then video made political, could make political, but which, in Julien’s hands, are now made to be seen behind museum glass, encased in acrylic, the amber of our age. What is left is the assertion of the artist, and the question of what is next: will it be a repetition of concerns with diasporic identity, of multi-screen installation as a way of unseating the viewer, both literally and figuratively? Or will it be something else, something that takes as given the nonlinearity of all our image “feeds” and the social fragmentation that attends them? Whatever the answer, it won’t be video art.

Isaac Julien’s “I Dream a World” is on view at the de Young Museum, San Francisco through July 13.