Isaac Julien: Eros Cruises the Museum in a Filmmaker's Dreams

i l l EROS CRUISES THE MUSEUM IN A FILMMAKER'S DREAMS Holland Cotter T he British artist and independent filmmaker Isaac Julien, 40, is best known in this country for his rhapsodic Looking for Langston, which made a beleaguered appearance at the New York Film Festival in 1990. Based on the figure of the AfricanAmerican poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967), this was no plodding Hollywood bio-pic but a floridly seductive reverie on what it meant - what it means - to be black, beautiful and homosexual in America. Most previous portraits of Hughes had tiptoed around the question of his sexual orientation, as if to preserve the integrity of an icon. Mr. Julien addressed it head-on, and the boom, predictably, fell. The Hughes estate threatened to sue if any of the poet's work was quoted in the film, forcing last-minute editing that left stretches of silence on the soundtrack. The funny thing is that Hughes, were he alive now, would probably love this shrewd, sexy tribute. It neither makes a hero of him nor diminishes him as a person. It pushes no overt political envelopes, though it is intensely political. Most important, it is pure poetry: a docu-dream-drama with an interracial cast of hunks and angels and a tone as sad and fevered as a late-night love song. Mr. Julien has gone on to make other films, including one on the revolutionary political thinker Frantz Fanon. And in the process he's helped to redefine film as an art genre. Through his use of stylized 70 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art i I SAAC JU LI EN Vagabondia, 2 0 0 0 . Double D V D rear projection video. Installation, detail/still. movement and tableaux vivants he has linked the medium with painting and performance art. So it's no surprise that he has increasingly geared his output to gallery exhibition. The results can be sampled in two impressive exhibitions: The Film Art of Isaac Julien, at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and Isaac Julien: Vagabondia, at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Bard show, organized by Amada Cruz, director of the Curatorial Studies museum, is by far the larger of the two, without being all that large. In addition to a continuous screening of Looking for Langston, it is made up of one short film, three video installations and a selection of photographs and prints spun off from them. And in it Mr. Julien gets full-dress treatment: the whole museum has been turned over to him. This is as it should be, not only because his work is good, but because museums are one of his recurrent images, as repressive bastions of authority and as theaters where cultural dramas get acted out. The first piece at Bard, the film titled The Attendant (1993), is actually set in a museum: Wilberforce House in Hull, England, which is devoted to the history of slavery. It's a real place, though in Mr. Julien's hands it looks surreal. The plot revolves around sexual fantasies aroused in a middleaged black male museum guard — or attendant — by a young white male visitor. Much of the action takes place after closing time. As the guard paces the galleries, a huge 19th-century painting titled Slaves on the West Coast of Africa, by the French artist Francois-Auguste Biard, comes to life, its melodramatic scene of a white master bending over a dying black slave transformed into an up-to-date, leatherclad sadomasochistic grouping. Next, there's an erotic scene between the guard and the young man in a gallery hung with soft-core drawings by Tom of Finland, one of many references to contemporary art in the film. Their cries are overheard by a third character, a black woman called the conservator, who approvingly listens through the wall as she cleans the museum's picture frames. Is she the guard's wife? Has she facilitated the tryst? Mr. Julien leaves such questions unanswered. In the last scene, the guard stands in a dimly lighted theater performing the final aria, Remember Me, from...