Isaac Julien Returns to the Cutting Room Floor of History

SAN FRANCISCO — Time folds unto itself and reflects historical and contemporary moments that have shaped society in Isaac Julien’s I Dream a World, the British artist’s first comprehensive museum survey, and his first retrospective in the United States, at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. Light bends around corners and cascades over mirrored walls as time stretches like silk across several galleries in the subterranean expanse of the museum’s corridors, beckoning pause and inquiry. 

Julien’s influential Looking for Langston (1989), which gave definition to the genre of New Queer Cinema, is presented in conversation with films on display for the first time, including “This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement” (1987).  His latest work, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022), returns to a question that has lingered among Black cultural workers and artists for decades: that of the return of stolen objects, looted from Africa during the centuries of European colonialism and dispossession, to their homelands. The film imagines a form of what Julien calls “poetic restitution,” alluding to contemporary debates on repatriation and the erasure of African material culture in Western art museums, as told through adapted written debates between preeminent philosopher and Black theorist Alain Locke and collector Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who established the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 1922. 

Julien and I sat down in the Koret Auditorium at the de Young to discuss his exhibition, some of the early artistic investigations that led to his multi-channel film works, the reverberating influence of African diasporic literary titans like Frantz Fanon and filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène and Spike Lee, and the role technology has played in his genre-defying visual practice. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hyperallergic: Much of your work deals with the lives of people who are on the margins of power and whose stories haven’t been accurately told in popular culture. History is often considered fixed and final. How do you wrestle with that through the visual language of filmmaking and reshape our idea of what is and what has been through moving images?

Isaac Julien: I started making work because I wanted to be involved in the self-creation of one’s image. I also wanted to be involved in creating a kind of mirror for oneself. That developed my interest in the question of absence and led to my curiosity about the archive. I realized that the inquiry into archives was not an absence, but a place for critical reinvention, because of course, the dominant histories are about a kind of erasure. There are always these hidden histories. I knew that because, as an art student, nobody ever spoke to me about a modern art movement that had Black artists at the forefront of it. Taking that as a starting point, in making a film like Looking for Langston about someone who was an icon, I realized at the same time that there was a world of a secret identity. How could one explore that world? There were people I was interested in like Frantz Fanon. I made a film called Black Skin White Mask in the mid-’90s, and I was really interested in his work because he was a psychiatrist and I felt that his writing at the time was a psychological reading of Black culture and White racism. I felt that it gave another way of looking at history from a Black perspective.

All of these things, for me, became a sort of film. I studied painting, but I felt that film encapsulated all art forms. The question of time was also attractive in the making of film, and all those things lead to the question of how you could creatively deal with this notion of erasure and absence and of histories which are pushed to the margins. And it’s not that I see them as in the margins — it’s that they’ve been constructed to be in the margins, but are actually histories that represent a lot of people’s desires and memories and live in the dominant culture.

H: That makes me think about Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) and the conversation between Dr. Barnes and Alain Locke. In your investigation of ideas, people, and ways of thinking and being on the margins, you clearly understand that’s where they’ve been purposefully placed, which is so poignant and critical to the film and the wider stories you’ve unearthed over your career. Can you dive deeper into that?

IJ: Alain Locke was a fascinating historian. He was a polymath and the first African-American Rhodes scholar at Oxford. He spoke several languages. He was immensely clever and smart. I was approached by the Barnes Museum to celebrate their 100th anniversary, and I came across a publication in the archive where both Alain Locke and Barnes had written about African art. What I was able to do was create a montage out of the articles, and here you have the presentation of a historical debate that was originally a written debate. It gets sort of translated into a gentlemen’s disagreement about the role of African art in Modernism. I like these sorts of entanglements and rearranging and appropriating what would be seen to be in the margins, and to say, “No, that is not in the margin, it’s the central story.”

H: Early in your career, what were some of the things that were happening in the world that drew you to make your first films? How much of that has changed?

IJ: We’re in a very ironic position at this moment in the world. We have leaders who are trying to, as it were, turn back the clock. When I first started, we were making work because we were trying to make an intervention at a particular moment in history into a culture that we were calling Black independent film culture. There was a debate taking place across the diaspora with filmmakers like Spike Lee, and Francophone African filmmakers as well.

H: Like Sembène?

IJ: Precisely. And so, there are all our different influences that we were looking at and taking as a point of departure for creating new Roots as it were, and making film works that would have the role of playing an intervention. But that was the ’80s. I would say in comparison to now, it’s almost déjà vu, because all those themes, and the urgency in addressing certain questions, are being laid on our shores at this very moment. This is very telling in Lessons of the Hour on Frederick Douglass, which I made in 2019. And in making that work, it forced me to go back to an early work that I had made, one of my first ones in 1983, called Who Killed Colin Roach?. It’s a story about a young Black man who’s found dead in the police station. All those initial questions are still questions today, which don’t have any resolution. I’m sure Douglass would’ve thought we’d come much further than we have.

H: Your career is marked by an expansion of the genre of film through multichannel installations. What in your artistic practice early on made you want to expand the visual language of film?

IJ: It became very important to me to make films how I wanted to make them. The other thing that happened was that some friends and colleagues were making work in a gallery context. I thought that was more fun. There was a moment when technology was changing, and if I was going to do a work in a museum context, it would have to be a bit different from making a film in a cinema context. Showing works in the museum or gallery context, and thinking how they could be different, led me to the use of multiple screens. The technology developed so that I could begin to work and collaborate with different editors and sound designers in an elaborate way. There’s certain works that you make where there’s paradigm shifts, like with Ten Thousand Waves.

H: As we see more calls for restitution of stolen objects from museums, what are your considerations of how these calls are significant within the contemporary moment? How have your films addressed this return of objects, but also the return of knowledge of the self and one’s own history and lineage?

IJ: The restitution debate is a really important one. If objects have been taken under very violent conditions, then their return is important. I think one really has to recognize that. I hope that a work like Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) is a contribution toward those debates. I see the work as a form of poetic restitution in the sense that I think there’s also another debate, which is about the way in which those objects, which became part of a Modernist debate around art history, are still left intact in terms of a narrative. This also has to be deconstructed to a certain extent and dismantled. We still have a debate surrounding the British Museum’s Benin bronzes and this sort of real stubbornness to not acknowledge that some items need to be returned. The debate, which is an ongoing one, highlights the imperial position of the museum in the West and the underpinning violence that is part of a lot of museums’ practices.

Also entangled in this debate is the Black or African-American perspective and how those movements interpreted their own practices. This is why the work of Alain Locke becomes very important because he’s in that debate, looking at these questions in a philosophical manner. You also have the work of sculptors who are working in that particular time, and the question of Black authorship is not given the same sort of attention. It’s not erasure, but there’s a kind of blurring out.  

H: A dismissal?

IJ: Yes. That’s why we have the Black Madonna statue in Once Again . . ., in the vitrine, that’s looking out.

H: Like a witness.

IJ: Yes, like a witness. Precisely. And so, it’s really an inversion in the work. There’s also an archival film in the work called You Hide Me, where you see Black antagonists who are looking at African sculptures in the basement of the British Museum. That was made 50 years ago, before arguments for the return of the Benin bronzes were being made.

H: A retrospective is a moment to look back at all one has accomplished, but we don’t often look at it as an opportunity to understand the present. As you showcase your biggest survey to date in a US institution, what do you feel is most important about presenting your works in this capacity and in this time?

IJ: The exhibition more or less begins in the ’80s with Looking for Langston from 1989. There’s also a short film, which I’ve never shown, called This Is Not an AIDS Advertisement, made in 1987. And so in a way, depending how you enter the exhibition, you can enter it through the ’80s and ’90s space into Baltimore, which has a more chronological kind of entry and you would end at Once Again . . ., which is where you get that meeting of the past and the present in the work. One is, of course, looking at the past in a survey exhibition, but there’s an uncanny part of the film because of the contemporary debate. It’s looking at these questions of restitution, which has been a debate for quite a long time.

With this exhibition, I want to call attention to how you look. The use of multiple screens is already calling attention to a different way of looking and paying attention, and perhaps commenting on how we look today and how we see. That’s the most unique thing about the exhibition.