UK artist Isaac Julien currently has an installation piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. And it’s one of the best things I’ve seen in ages.
It’s
essentially nine films that project onto nine different screens, which are hung
at different angles and different heights in a huge gallery.
As a viewer,
you can sit in the middle of the screens and try to follow all the action, or you
can perch yourself off to the side and focus on two or three screens, then move
around as certain screens go dark and the film is projected onto a new screen
or multiple screens.
Sometimes the
film only fills one screen while at other times it fills all nine. It’s a
disorientating experience and it’s very easy to miss things. But that’s sort of
one of the points.
The film employs
news reports about a gang of at least 21 Chinese cockle pickers, all
low-paid slave labour immigrants to the UK, who were drowned by rising tides in
Morecambe Bay in Lancashire in 2004 as a launch point for a meditation on cultural
migration and identity.
The narrative
thrust, such as it is, interweaves either real or reimagined footage of the
police search for the bodies along the Morecambe coast, alongside a Chinese
myth about a wind spirit, Chinese calligraphy, a story about a mother who turns
to prostitution to feed her child, and behind-the-scenes footage about how the 55-minute
movie was made.
It’s a
beautiful piece of film-making that looks utterly stunning and it manages to be
thought-provoking, sad and moving, and the experience of sitting through it amplifies
the ideas of disorientation as the viewer is never quite sure where to follow
the narrative and can’t settle on one particular viewpoint.
The sound
track, featuring traditional Chinese music and Jah Wobble, is also amazing.
Installation
art usually leaves me cold. This didn’t. It was stunning and beautiful and
moving and thought-provoking. It beguiled, it amazed, it inspired, it provoked.
It did what the best art is supposed to do.
I was utterly
sold on it.
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