acknowledgments 8 foreword Glenn D. Lowry 9

1 Fire 10

2 Riot 20 Bad to Worse Paul Gilroy 34

3 mirror 46 Angelus Diasporae Kobena Mercer 56

4 Soul 70 Soul Patrol B. Ruby Rich 82

5 New York 94 WINTER bell hooks 106

6 mask 112 Reimagining Fanon Mark Nash 124

7 CONSERVE 136 Museums and Moving Images Giuliana Bruno 150

8 PLANET 164 Single to Multiple, Local to Global Christine Van Assche 178 Isaac Julien with Cynthia Rose Isaac Julien ntents 9 screen 186 Ten Thousand Waves Laura Mulvey 200 CO 10 Capital 212 Isaac Julien’s Workshop Stuart Hall 222

timeline 232 works 236 bibliography 242 exhibitions and screenings 241 biography 244 index 245 trustees of the museum of modern art 248 RIOT JULIEN RIOT ISAAC

With Cynthia Rose at 89 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, 4 London, 1994. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of © 2013 The Museum of Modern Art. Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves at All texts by Isaac Julien with Cynthia Rose The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2013 Isaac Julien November 25, 2013–February 17, 2014 “Bad to Worse” by Paul Gilroy © 2013 Paul Gilroy “Museums and Moving Images” by Giuliana Bruno The exhibition is supported by Mickey Straus, © 2013 Giuliana Bruno The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of “Reimagining Fanon” by Mark Nash © 2013 Mark Nash Modern Art, and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. All works by Isaac Julien © 2013 Isaac Julien

Additional funding is provided by the Copyright credits for certain illustrations are cited on p. 247. MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund. All rights reserved

Produced by the Department of Publications, Library of Congress Control Number: 2013948967 The Museum of Modern Art, New York ISBN: 978-0-87070-887-9

Edited by David Frankel Distributed in the United States and Canada by Designed by Pony Ltd., London (www.ponybox.co.uk) ARTBOOK | D.A.P., New York Production by Matthew Pimm 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10013 Printed and bound by OGI/1010 Printing Group Ltd., China www.artbook.com

This book is typeset in Univers 55 Roman, Distributed outside the United States and Canada by 55 Oblique and 65 Bold. Thames & Hudson Ltd The paper is 157gsm Kinmari Matt art. 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX www.thamesandhudson.com Published by The Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53 Street, New York, New York 10019 Cover: Isaac Julien. Green Screen Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves) (detail). 7 3 2010. Endura Ultra photograph, 70 ⁄8 in. × 7 ft. 10 ⁄8 in. (180 × 239.8 cm). See p. 207. Endpapers: Isaac Julien. Ten Thousand Waves. 2010. Installation view, Bass Museum, Miami, 2010. Nine-screen installation, 35mm film transferred to high-definition video, 9.2 surround sound, 49 min. 41 sec. Title spread: On the set of Western Union: small boats, 2007.

Printed in China COLOPHON ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC 6 Opposite: Photo-booth self-portrait with my friends 9 Mark Banks and Suresh Singh, 1979. 2 × 1 ⁄16 in. (5.1 × 4 cm) 8 ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS rich as those early encounters provided. provided. encounters early those as rich and intense, interesting, as been have would they doubt other means, and other other opportunities, but I routes, been have would there Perhaps possible? been have Video and Film Sankofa like collectives film would ’80s, early the in in England riots no been there films?Had make then and photographs take to learned Ihave would school, at teachers myart and Fortune, Jenny MacDowell, Noreen like people met Inot age? Had young that at art to exposed been have I would teens, inmy was I when down burnt not flat myparents’ Had different. been have might things nearly very how wondering begin to enough natural what—it’s to led what and first came what out work to is process the of part where inquiry; critical to everything subjecting and nostalgia resisting requires writing the where years; in time first the for sometimes friends, and artworks, songs, faces, ideas, feelings, events, at back looking requires research the kind—where this of abook Writing quality possible. highest the to images these inreproducing helpful especially were ActTwo-Um at team gifted technically his and Ingram Paul White. Steve and Nash, Mark Pyke, Steve Spalding, Nigel Museum, Soane’s John Sir Riddy, John Committee, Support Family Roach The Lyle Ashton-Harris, images: their reproduce me inletting permission kind their for thank to following the Ihave publication. in this explored contexts wider inthe but mywork for only not resource, historical asignificant become to evolving is and developed, being continually is archive The mywork. and documentation, production collection, my personal from contributions significant Julien with Studio, Isaac you. before book designed beautifully the for responsible ways inmany are They changes. last-minute numerous mention to not stride, intheir this of all taking for credit special deserve years, ten past the over books fantastic some making of pleasure the had Ihave Pony, whom with from Truswell Nigel and Sweeney Niall designers. for challenge aspecial is formats and themes, decades, several described. events the but book the just not shaping to crucial been has years thirty past the over friendship and work Their tells. it story inthe actors all are they book, the for essays fantastic writing as well As Hall. Mulvey, Stuart and Laura Van Assche, Christine B Mercer, Gilroy, Paul to Kobena thankful eternally I am earlier and book inthis insights critical their For knew. ever probably they than more mywork, into input critical had all have they because contribute to asked primarily were they mylifeblood, such as and academics, and curators, book. the to changes last-minute significant supporting for inPublications colleagues their and Pimm, Matthew Hudson, Chris to due also are Thanks be. could it knew all we as good as book this make helped has beginning the from project the of stewardship His encouragement. more even with responded David Museum, the for one unusual an be to out turned proposed mystudio book the When abook. with exhibition the accompanying of idea the to support early crucial gave Publications of Department inMoMA’s Frankel York David New chapter, book’s Museum. the at work the presenting of honor the Sabine by led teams, exhibitions and MoMA’sof curatorial due. are thanks where see to Sydney Sydney the at work the saw he since ever Waves Ten Thousand . Ru Closer to the present, things are clearer, and it’s easier easier it’s and clearer, are things present, the to Closer Much of this material is collected in the archive of the the of archive inthe collected is material this of Much spanning material visual with project archival An thinkers, important are writers book’s the of all Although inthis participant and colleague, friend, A long-time supporting for thank to Lowry Glenn Ihave First, by Rich, bell hooks, Mark Nash, Giuliana Giuliana Nash, Mark hooks, bell Rich, by B B re ie itwieser and Martin Hartung, I would not have have not Iwould Hartung, Martin and itwieser nnale in 2010. Without him and the support support the and him in2010. Without nnale B ro ok Dillon, Sunil Gupta, John Hewitt John Gupta, Sunil Dillon, ok B ru no, no,

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students of Goldsmiths’s Visual Cultures Department. Cultures Visual Goldsmiths’s of students the and Thornton, Sarah Sigurðsson, Eggert Ingvar Schuller, Gillian Slovo, Jean-Louis Rosenthal, Stephanie and Pawlik Tina Palsson, Hakan Matthee, Jean MacCabe, Colin Lepart, Henry Diane Kellgren, Nina Harvey, David Hall, Gilroy, Paul Stuart Gertler, Candida Gaafar, Rania Franco, James Fisher, Mark Finch, Adam Pury, De Simon Program, Studies Independent Art’s American of Museum Whitney industrious the of Clark Ron Cabral, Mercedes contributions: and comments, time, their for people following the to grateful already Iam but complete, yet not Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. Sydney. Gallery, Oxley9 Roslyn and Paulo, São Roesler, Nara Gallery Amsterdam; Mandos, Ron Galerie Paris; Gallery, Rech Almine Madrid Alvear, de Helga York; Galería New Pictures, Metro Gallery Miro Victoria kindness: and generosity, commitment, continued their for mygalleries to grateful I am work in a number of venues all over the world. world. the over all venues of inanumber work the of installation consistent the ensure to Thornton, Vicki Taylor, Molly and team, Hawley, Elly exhibitions studio’s my with tirelessly worked have Joyce Tom Nick and Cullen crew. production the of all and Zeitz, Jochen Wright, Tao,Zhao Scott Glenn Still, Maggie Swinton, Tilda ShangART, Savill, Libby Rosenthal, Stephanie Romain, Nadja Rech, Almine Pai, Tony and Oxley,Hsia-Hung Roslyn Obrist, Ulrich Hans Miro, Victoria Materkova, Nonna MacCabe, Kirby, Colin Simon Foundation, LUMA Foundation, Pace Linda Ibbot, Virginia Henn, Thorsten Goksel, Mustafa Yang Fudong, Finch, Adam Faull, Jan Fan, Huang Dwyer, Sam Coetzee, Mark Cheung, Maggie A Autograph at Sealy Mark thank to like would I executed. and on settled is idea final be much less of the work that is discussed in this book. inthis discussed is that work the of less much be would there collaboration, and insight, wisdom, his Without now. years thirty nearly for art make I how influenced has partner, lifelong my and theorist, film critic, curator, Nash, Finally, Mark everything. through support and book. inthe covered moment any as rewarding and fun as work of hours long these make helped friendship dear and skill, patience, Her book. the of mypart write helping and interviews conducting months and weeks, days, hours, many over me with sat Cynthia Sampson. Steve partner commitment. amazing their for them thank to I want possible been have not would book this detail, to attention meticulous and special their Without Coordinator. Studio Thornton Vicki and Archivist; Studio Thomas, Godet Charlie Researcher; Studio Szego, Stewart Dora Archivist; Studio John are: They possible publication this made has that perseverance their new project project new my on conducted work by shaped much been has writing Annette and Udo project: that on support their for again once thanks special deserve institutions and people following The Waves of Ten exhibition and Thousand acquisition MoMA’s accompany to published is it career, and Looking on for book Langston proposed earlier an with help Tanenbaumfor Ann and funding, seed inproviding help For their support through these and all of my projects, myprojects, of all and these through support their For A project of this kind has many inceptions before a a before inceptions many has kind this of A project My studio team has worked on Riot on worked has team studio My Riot Waves Ten of Thousand premiere the Since Isaac Julien Isaac all— you Thank love her for Julien, Rosemary mymother, thank to I want her and Rose Cynthia for reserved are thanks Special While While is forward-looking as well as retrospective: its its retrospective: as well as forward-looking is Riot looks back at the last thirty years of my life mylife of years thirty last the at back looks playtime B B lo er B omfield, Studio Researcher; Mel Francis Mel Researcher; Studio omfield, ra . At the time of writing that project is is project that writing of time the . At tie tie ndhorst, Helga De Alvear, Alvear, De Helga ndhorst, B er keley, Lisa Perez, Irit Rogoff, Rogoff, Irit Perez, keley, Lisa B P an d The Arts Council for for Council Arts d The B for over a year; it is is it ayear; over for ea trix Ruf, Ruf, trix , London; , London; , ART AV’s , ART

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foreword bringing bringing his most elaborate installation so far. First shown in the in the shown far. so First installation elaborate most his eye. the body, the to delighting but mind the to just not appeal they analysis, and research of processes barred no-holds- from emerge known best now is he which for installations video multiscreen enveloping the and works, photographic films, his Although sensual. lushly, is that swimmingly approach avisual and culture, global world’sdeveloping the of complexities the to sensitivity an acute commitment, political combining strength, and fascination aparticular has work his innovators striking of ageneration amid and changes, these of forefront in the been has Julien light. and movement of aspace into gallery museum quiet once the transformed turn in has fusion multilevel This movies. like the rather spectacle, rich and values production of high form an art to medium alternative a defiantly from video and art, video of home or gallery, the museum the into theater movie the from film taking decades, recent in video filmand transformed have who artists of group the of member aprominent is Julien Isaac his ambitious next work, to be titled titled be to work, next ambitious his making through way the of part agood already while who, himself, artist the to go must thanks final The sound. and images moving of installation Julien’s of challenges technical considerable the handled that crew the of made be must mention aparticular here and programs, extraordinary such produce skillfully so who staff the to grateful less no Iam Fund. Exhibition Annual MoMA the from funding additional with Art, Modern of Museum The of Junior Associates The and Art, Modern of Museum The Waves Ten of exhibition the and Thousand programs, other and exhibitions it. publish to opportunity the had have to delighted are we and catalogue, exhibition unlike atraditional quite is result The perspectives. own their provide they which on career, Julien’s of stages successive in the participants and of observers of group adistinguished by essays are chapters his Complementing development. autobiography—the and intellectual of his aesthetic own account artist’s professional of akind writing, about thinking been time some for had he him abook on with work might we show the accompany to that agreed, eagerly we and proposed, therefore Julien one. asecond creating soon Waves Ten on Thousand publication abeautiful project, this began Museum possibilities as an encompassing environment. work’s the with ways in unprecedented experiment to Julien allowed has Donald Donald in the MoMA at Ten installed Waves be shown, will Thousand been has it intricately orchestrated sound. Arranged somewhat differently wherever by accompanied and screens separate nine across spread images video complementary following by together puts viewer the that story in a migration and labor of realities current and social, and cinematic both history myth, in Ten China, Waves combines mostly Thousand in England, partly Set 2013 of Museum’s collection. in fall the the awork as in it present to proud extremely are we where MoMA, to come now has there—it it saw who those for experience in 2010—aSydney revelatory Director, The Museum of Modern Art Modern of Museum The Director, D.—Glenn Lowry This is true of none of Julien’s art more than Ten than more Waves Julien’s of Thousand none of art true is This We are always so grateful to those who help us to stage the Museum’s Museum’s the stage to us help who those to grateful so We always are the When Julien’s as work. fresh as way own in is its book This is supported by Mickey Straus, The Contemporary Arts Council of of Council Arts Contemporary The Straus, Mickey by supported is in so purpose little seemed there and produced, been already had B to The Museum of Modern Art. Modern of Ten Museum Waves The to Thousand . an d Catherine C. Marron Atrium, where the height of the space space the of height the where Atrium, Marron C. d Catherine playtime , has absorbed himself in in himself absorbed , has B ie nnale of of nnale ,

9 RIOT ISAAC JULIEN FIRE

11 RIOT ISAAC JULIEN Chapter 1 Preceding spread: Isaac Julien. Undressing Icons. 3 1990–99. Chromogenic color print, 15 ⁄8 × 23 in. (39 × 58.5 cm). Performance view, Edge 90 Biennale of Performance Art, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1990. The series documents the performance Undressing Icons (Looking for Langston), which took place in London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1990 and in Minneapolis in 1991. It consisted of tableaux vivants in places around each city, where the spectator encountered reenactments from the filmLooking for Langston (1989). The performances were made as a response to the experiences of censorship that I had during the making of the film. Opposite: Isaac Julien. Paradise Omeros. 2002. Still from three-screen installation, 16mm color film, video transfer, sound, 18 min. 51 sec. Left, Gaby Agis, my former pas-de-deux partner at the London Youth Dance Theatre. Below, top to bottom: photo-booth self-portrait, 1979. Saint Lucia Tourist Board. Belles in native costume. St. Lucia B.W.I. 1950s. Postcards. FIRE

My exposure to art dates back to my early teens in London. It came about through an unexpected combination: events that happened, people I met, and things I was seeking. I was the eldest child of five and both my father and my mother worked nights, so I had to look after all my brothers and sisters. My early existence was very much connected to that, and to reading and studying. Looking back, I think I’ve always had a double sense of myself. Maybe this was because my parents, who were from Saint Lucia, spoke French Creole to one another but would only speak to the rest of us in English, even though I could understand everything they were saying. I distinctly remember being at a party when I was very young—maybe five or six—and overhearing people say, “Gadé sé petit gason kon on makoumè” (Look at that effeminate boy!). When you have a sense of language where people talk about you and you’re not meant to understand—and yet you do—you start to read life very differently. Certainly that affected my understanding of things; I felt that what people say is never what they mean, that language and being each has its hidden, contradictory sense. If I see a photograph of myself from around this time, it seems to me a picture of someone who’s looking at things from a much older position. Because in my world I had to mature very quickly, there was never much chance of me remaining naïve. Early on there were two central goals in my mind: I didn’t want to live the life of my parents, nor did I want—ever—to work in a factory or a bank. I was very determined about it; there were things I wanted to do and things I didn’t want to do. I think this was a lot about not FIRE being heterosexual, but I could also see what working in those environments did. What really started to change things for me was my O-level art class.1 There I had a set of extraordinary teachers—people whose conversations

Chapter 1 opened up a brand-new world. I had one teacher, for instance, who always went to Marseille in the summers and who would talk about how people, artists, lived there. Another influential teacher was Mr. Price who, during life drawing, started explaining dialectical materialism. This was my first encounter with the idea of middle- classness. All my teachers were middle-class and they were also of the left. So we were having these conversations about Marx, about Trotsky, about socialism—all while I was ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC drawing and painting and making sculptures. I initially grew up on the Coventry Cross Estate, a fairly 12 notorious housing development in London’s East End Essentially I was bored, and I was also quite lonely. where by the time I was ten, practically everyone I knew I wanted to make connections and I knew these people had already been arrested. I didn’t quite understand this were interesting. but I could clearly see that between black boys and the I also discovered there were lots of people near police there was always some kind of encounter. I was me making film—people like Noreen MacDowell, very aware the police were not around to protect me. Alan Hayling, and Joy Chamberlain, all working in the My school—which was then called the Daneford School Newsreel film collective. Through Jenny Fortune, too, for Boys—sat between Brick Lane and the Hoxton area. I met a German political fugitive by the name of Anna. Now this is a center for the London art world, but during Although I had no idea at the time, this was really Astrid those years it was a political battleground. There had been Proll, who had been part of the Baader-Meinhof gang.4 a local wave of Asian immigration and young Bengali kids Both Jenny and Astrid had a definite influence over me. were just starting to enter schools. So things were So did a woman called Susan Shearer—Susan owned politically charged, with street gangs and vigilante a darkroom and she started to teach me photography. groups—all those sorts of things. Hoxton itself was a At the time, all I did was try to photograph my surroundings. stronghold of the far-right National Front political party. But right away I liked how the camera was technical. This made it a serious no-go area for any black person. Putting the film in, having to have a light meter, printing in Briefly, violence was part of my daily experience; it was the darkroom—I relished all of that. Through Susan, I also just another part of my going to school. met the people at Camerawork, another local collective This went on until 1975, when there was a serious fire engaged in photography. in our home—an event that ended up changing my life. This bohemian culture turned out to be quite Of course my parents were really upset, because we had artistically interesting. Take Alan Hayling, who later worked to move. But I was completely happy, because we were at Channel Four, at the Mentorn Media film production leaving a place where I was always being harassed. company, and at BBC Documentaries. Although Alan was Where I was called “secretary boy” because I bothered to very much a part of Newsreel, both he and Susan worked study, because I was making a clear choice to be different. at the same Ford plant as my dad. So my introduction to We moved to another estate—I was out of Coventry Cross. all this new culture was dissident; its art was all formed The block we moved into was nicer, plus it was on the in opposition to establishment politics. This is one of the estate’s edge, facing out. Across the street I could see a reasons why the role of today’s East End as an art-world little terrace, a row of Victorian two-up, two-down houses.2 headquarters seems so uncanny to me. When I was For me, our moving house started to transform growing up there, artists also led the dialogues, but back everything. This began with a building right around the then, they did it while trying to remake and re-create real corner—an East End landmark called Kingsley Hall. It’s a connections between art and life and politics. Even if they very important building, one linked to the Suffragettes, didn’t offer public art as such, one knew the public was to the General Strike of 1926, to the area’s whole history of always part of their discourse. left-wing politics. In the ’30s, Mahatma Gandhi once stayed Then, as we know, council housing and similar ways in it, and during the ’60s, R. D. Laing had practiced there. of housing oneself started to disappear. Property, as a It was through the Hall that I met a woman named means of investment, became the ultimate fetish—it Jenny Fortune. turned into the dominant means of securing one’s position. I encountered Jenny though a summer mural project, In the East End today, the privatization of public space something she had launched in tribute to the Suffragettes. is an obvious and defining feature of art’s presence. Jenny was campaigning to make the Hall a community It’s largely the privatization of both the art world and that center and right away, she introduced me to a lot of people. real estate, hand in hand, that has succeeded in redefining Some of them brought me into their photography, others those geographies. My East End, where I grew up and where into their filmmaking—all things at that time being done I was familiarized with the making of art, has vanished. in collectives. This workshop system, which had It’s been replaced by a new, branded contemporary developed out of the hippie counterculture, was based art—one whose deepest connections are to the market on representing not just working-class people but also and to Mayfair. But in its original form, before artists like their rights. More specifically, in our neighborhood, it was Rachel Whiteread and Tim Noble and Sue Webster and connected with the political group Big Flame. This was a the Chapman brothers defined it, there was another revolutionary socialist organization in which Jenny played East End. It was defined by different artistic ambitions and FIRE an active role.3 its “art world” never tried to define itself against the local. After meeting Jenny, I entered a different universe. I certainly don’t want to pretend that I’m outside On the one hand, there were all the things happening at of those changes. After all, as a kid, I dreamed my Kingsley Hall. Then directly across the street was the neighborhood would be gentrified. If a club like Shoreditch

Chapter 1 terrace we all knew as the “Acme Houses.” These were House had existed when I was growing up, I would have overseen by an artist-led charity that had turned them into been in there like a shot. But on the flip side, now we have artist housing and studios. I was very curious about those the Shard.5 That represents the presence of capital in the houses, so I started trying to befriend the people in them. city, it symbolizes the wealth that created all this modernity. Thanks to that, I encountered another oppositional Yet it’s all about the fact that while you are able look at it, culture. I remember once just walking into one house or you might be able to visit, you can never really inhabit where an artist was giving a performance. Retrospectively the inside. I think it may have been Stuart Brisley, but he was in a bath, My own formation in the East End was very different. it was all completely black . . . and I remember thinking, Opposite, top to bottom: photo-booth self-portrait with For me, just trying to learn was difficult, requiring the ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC the artist David Harrison, Saint Martins Alternative Fashion “God, these white people are strange. What on earth are Show, 1981. Photo-booth self-portraits with Josephine day-to-day negotiation of local boundaries. Learning was they up to?” At the same time, I wanted to know more. McNally, a friend from Saint Martins, 1980. This page, top to also punctuated by powerful news from elsewhere, bottom: (Left to right) Joseph Julien, my father (deceased),

14 me aged 4, and Rosemary Julien, my mother, with my brother Jeffrey Julien (deceased). London, 1964: still from Paradise Omeros. Opposite, top to bottom: Anti-Nazi League poster, The National Front is a Nazi Front, 1978. Stop Mary Whitehouse poster, 1978. My Sex Pistols concert tickets, 1976. Below: with Ray, a Saint Martins friend, “jumbling”—visiting jumble or garage sales, 1981. Bottom, left to right: with of things like the 1976 uprisings in Soweto. I clearly record, c. 1980; on Chelmsford Road, Walthamstow, 1978; Even though I couldn’t afford to buy anything remember being terrified by newspaper photos showing on Kings Road, London, 1979. from them, after 1976 my friends and I went to the South African school kids being shot. It was images such boutique Seditionaries. Equally, we later haunted as those that made me see how young black people Antony Price together.7 Those fashions would quickly were represented. That was something I recognized permeate the mainstream, but at the time, they were before I learned to articulate it. underground, and we reveled in our styles; we enjoyed Closer to home, we had our own oppositional the status and the tribelike nature of beings who could organizations: there was Rock Against Racism, Big Flame, recognize one other by how we dressed—as well as by the Anti-Nazi League, the International Marxist Group our connection to sounds and to dance. We considered (IMG), and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). the mainstream and the rest “naff” . . . truly unstylish. Most of these arose in the mid-’70s, around the time The appreciation of music mattered as much to us as it did of punk rock—and as with punk, most were very to our elders. But it mattered in a sense that was our own. middle-class groupings. I myself preferred the more At eighteen, I left secondary school, and I more or less anarchistic groups, and the East End saw a lot of circling spent a whole year clubbing. A lot of that time was spent around the Trotskyists. But I flirted with any organization at the Embassy Club in Old Bond Street, which was a bit that seemed interested in me, even when I knew it was like London’s Studio 54. There I was able to check out just for expedient reasons. At one point my mum went people like Bryan Ferry and Bianca Jagger. Andy Warhol completely ballistic about all this. That was in 1976, very often used to appear in that nightclub and just being when the WRP was knocking on our door each day.6 around him was rather curious. It gave me clues that By 1977 I was passionate about dance. So I trained between pop culture and my own experience there might for two years in the London Youth Dance Theatre. actually be some possibilities. I even remember thinking We performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall and Sadler’s Wells, that—in a way—a part of me wanted to be like Warhol. but I also went to see experimental groups—companies Warhol was a key because, with him, one had both the like Rosemary Butcher and Extemporary Dance. I met life-style and the art. Gaby Agis too; she was my pas de deux partner. Gaby went Of course I couldn’t actually afford to go to the on to work with people like Michael Clark and become a Embassy Club. The way I managed that was, on proponent of collaborative performance. weekends I would haunt the East London jumble sales I also felt an abstract link to dance and performance. and “antique fairs.” Then I would head to the King’s Road The way I’ve extrapolated those two things in my work is and sell whatever I’d found. I sold my finds at two places, to think about them in relation to the body, to the use of Antiquarius and 20th Century Box.8 I also used to buy nonactors and to the mise en scène that gets created secondhand clothes from Seditionaries so I could start by a camera. In works like Looking for Langston (1989), assembling a wardrobe of my own. All this had a certain Three (1999), and Western Union: small boats (2007), entrepreneurial aspect, in that I could look at the clothes there’s a direct correlation with both choreography stylish people were wearing, and could read magazines and performance. All of that stems from my first, like Vogue and go into certain shops, and then assimilate teenage interest in dance. But it also comes out of the that into a very similar look. In strict fashion terms it was later disco culture—that was another thing that helped a kind of “passing,” but it was also a punk-derived DIY. me take my early dance interests into a more theatrical, One night at the Embassy Club there was a conceptual arena. performance piece that restaged the siege of the Iranian The other big thing for me during the disco ’70s was, Embassy in 1980.9 The real thing had involved terrorists, of course, the questioning of my sexuality. One benefit hostages, and the army, but in the Embassy version, of growing up when I did was that I could see many it was the dance floor that got stormed and it was the possibilities, many identities, that weren’t simply singer Marilyn who was rescued. The next day, all this heterosexual. One had the hippy cultures and one made the front page of Newsline. The general idea in that had the left. But I also had pop culture, and in pop piece was, “These decadent upper-class types were all culture—in music, certainly—there were many more mocking this terrible moment.” It really went on about forms of identification on offer. One had Marc Bolan, one had David Bowie, and one had all the androgynous aspects of glam rock. At the same time, there was the whole evolution and development of gay culture. FIRE Of course, it wasn’t exactly developing where I lived! But my first encounters with it did come through school, through a few friends who, as it turned out, were mostly gay. From my art teachers, too, there was a slightly more

Chapter 1 liberal approach. Nevertheless, at my school, the only time that I could come out—in any way at all—was after O-levels, when most of my class left but I stayed on. By the time I was sixteen, I was going out to a nightclub in Essex called Lacy Ladies. It was a hard place to get into, because there was a color bar. The only way you could get around this was if you went with white friends, and I already had a few of those. But the door policy also took in how you dressed. How you looked was ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC evaluated, and as I came to understand that, it made a deep impression. One had to dress in a particular style. 16 how low and vile that was. I remember thinking, “Well, I never, ever viewed being gay as disadvantageous. I just I was there, I saw that, and I go to that club.” saw it as enriching to my life. But one of the things I had It made me think about the whole idea of trespassing: to slowly acknowledge was the very real existence of a trespassing between club culture, politics, and one’s gay racism. sexual identity. I started thinking about that as something It was through the fusion of club culture, fashion, both quite dangerous and very attractive. I felt sure that and music—and through those early meetings with as an artist, I wanted access to that energy. Jenny Fortune and Astrid Proll—that I started to figure out I was already convinced I wanted to go to art some basic artistic correlations. This was also spurred by school, so I did a pre-foundation course at City & East coming more into Central London and especially into London College. That was when I made my first real Bloomsbury, where I would later make my home. I first video, called How Gays Are Stereotyped in the Media. came at age sixteen, to visit the bookshop Gay’s the Word. I’d love to see that video now, because what I did was cut There, from the moment I steeled myself to walk in the out models and pages from Gay Left magazine, then add an door, I found that left culture and gay politics were analysis of the gay subtext in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). crystallized. This was the first place I found the kinds of I remember one teacher said it would be more “interesting” writing I treasure, articles like “In Defence of Disco” by if I had talked a bit more more about being black and gay. Richard Dyer. Now, that shop is just around the corner Well, those facts would take me a lot longer to address. from my home, and it’s been there thirty years. They took around nine years to be able to articulate, In terms of desire, much of my art remains concerned starting with Territories (1984), then The Passion of with those early questions and conflicts. In one sense, Remembrance (1986), This Is Not an aids Advertisement of course, it’s all about art, and it always has been. (1987), and finallyLooking for Langston. But the serious art world has sometimes conceived of me As far as my own identity, being between different as an outsider. Maybe that’s why I retain such a concern groups—gay disco culture, black soulboy culture, and with theory, and with making arguments that connect to white middle-class activist culture—was sometimes a debates in that realm. Certainly I’ve never just been painful and difficult way to exist. I had friends and I was interested in art for art’s sake. But my work does have a able to exert a certain invention, which I could manage schism and a confrontation: it has things that are “high with a certain style. But although I became fairly fluid and art,” experimental and modernist, but at the same time it cosmopolitan, most other people tended to stay in their retains my political focus. separate groups. Internally, also, negotiating all those different movements and allegiances was hardly simple. So I remember thinking, “I’m being interpreted by so many different factions; how can all my identities ever cohere?” In fact this was something that was not so easily managed; it took time to attain my own position. For instance, I’ve always been interested in the art part of fashion and in self-styling. By itself, gay culture was

sometimes insufficient for that. Because some parts of it endnotes remained quite normative and almost bland… . . . let’s just 1 . In English schools at the time, students took a set of exams say they were conventional. When you went out to a gay called O-levels (ordinary levels), usually at the age of sixteen, club, for instance, you would never hear James Brown— that determined the nature of their continuing education. you would not hear hard funk. The music was never These were followed by a second set of exams, A-levels (advanced levels), usually taken at the age of eighteen and quite as good as at those mixed or straight venues where important for entrance to university and further education. I also went. A-levels were the gateway to middle-classness, and where Still, the more identities one could have, I felt, the I grew up, to do them was the exception. more interesting. I liked the idea of having a gay identity 2 . Row houses with two rooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs (and an outside privy) were a feature of Victorian because it was different from merely having a black identity. working-class architecture. 3 . Descended from Italy’s Lotta Continua group, Big Flame began in 1970 at Liverpool’s Halewood Ford plant. In London, it took root at the Ford plant in Dagenham. 4 . I always knew Astrid as “Anna Puttuick.” Along with several

FIRE others I met, she worked at Lesney’s toy factory in Homerton. They produced Matchbox model cars. 5 . Renzo Piano’s seventy-two-story luxury housing, office, and hotel complex is at the time of writing the United Kingdom’s tallest building. 6 . To counteract the right-wing Sun and Daily Mail, the WRP had

Chapter 1 its own daily paper, Newsline. Every day, they would drop this off at our home. 7 . Seditionaries (formerly sex) was Malcom McLaren’s and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road boutique; Antony Price designs were initially found at Plaza, but after 1979, he opened his own shop, also on the King’s Road. 8 . Retail landmarks from a post-’60s King’s Road, Antiquarius and 20th Century Box bought and sold antiques. Antiquarius was a market comprising numerous separate dealers. Its building is currently occupied by the American

ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC chain Anthropologie. 9 . From April 30 to May 5 1980, six men took twenty-six people hostage in London’s Iranian Embassy, on the south side of Hyde Park. After one hostage was killed, the government sent Opposite, left to right: Gay Left magazine no. 9, 1979.

18 an elite Special Forces unit to storm the embassy and end Black Music magazine, May 1977. Above: Isaac Julien. the siege. This they did, but not without deaths of both captors Before Paradise. 2002. Pigment ink prints, triptych, 3 3 and captives. each: 39 ⁄8 × 39 ⁄8 in. (100 × 100 cm). RIOT

21 RIOT ISAAC JULIEN Chapter 2 Preceding spread, left to right: Rod Iverson and Hugh Williams, two Saint Martins film students, and me during the filming of Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983), just before the camera crew was harassed by Stoke Newington police. This page: Polaroids taken on the set of Young Soul Rebels, 1991. At bottom right in the photo at bottom right is Nina Kellgren, director of photography on Young Soul Rebels, Looking for Langston (1989), and many other projects of mine. Opposite, top to bottom: “Pull a Muscle,” photo spread showing me with Joey Attawia, i-D magazine no. 6, August 1981 (the “Sex & sweat is best” issue). “Young Soul Rebels” article in Interview magazine, January 1992, showing me with Sophie Okonedo. With friends, 1980, including on my right Mark Banks. Mark and many of the others in this photo have sadly since passed away. RIOT

When I arrived at Saint Martins School of Art, in 1980, punk rock was still very much in the air. Everyone knew Saint Martins was where the Sex Pistols had played their first concert, in 1975. Of course I’d grown up with music as an important cultural expression. But I was very into the language of punk—by which I mean the movement’s dress and its political posture. For me, the real point of punk was its DIY attitude: the principle that anyone could make, complete, and benefit from a homemade thing. Also, with relationship to dress and to styling, punk championed amalgamating elements that normally never went together. All that, of course, resonated with Saint Martins students. Back then, the influence of club cultures was dominant on the art of almost everyone at the school.1 Through London’s weekly pop music papers we knew all about the punk trajectory in the States. But there was a cultural difference between our U.K.-U.S. worlds that I think derived from English politics. For me, the importance of punk came from the Sex Pistols’ intervention in the Silver Jubilee and from the ways punk used Situationism.2 Of course, for its sounds alone, the movement had a broad appeal. But as much as I liked the dissidence of the music, it wasn’t something I would ever really dance to. Early on, I had identified myself as a soulboy. Basically, this meant you were interested in funk music and you got involved in buying specific import records— records that were quite expensive, so you had to really save up for them. Those commodities helped you to create a relationship to the culture of black America, and also, in a sense, to wider black representations. These were very significant things, because where I actually lived the landscape was so barren. RIOT Somehow, in England, this also meant you weren’t in the past. It denoted something about the advancement of black cultures, something that was being represented through the music. So, from early on, collecting albums

Chapter 2 was important. Being able to own them, being able to play them—that formed a central part of one’s new identity. A new identity that, through going to clubs such as Lacy Ladies, Global Village, and the 100 Club, became more pronounced. The ways in which we were able to congregate were important. From the mid-’70s, we had this younger group of people trying to fashion themselves in their own modern manner, one that was opposed to the fashionings ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC taking place around reggae. Most of my fellow art 22 This page, top to bottom: with the milliners Paul Bernstock and Thelma Speirs before an evening at the Kinky Gerlinky club night where I met Hanif Kureishi, 1991; David Harrison on the Bow Bridge Estate; David’s performance at the Saint Martins Alternative Fashion show, 1981. Opposite, top to bottom: front cover of The Observer, September 29, 1985. students, of course, were involved in post-punk music. My camera crew and I are harassed by Stoke Newington So they didn’t really understand what these import police during the filming ofWho Killed Colin Roach?, 1983. To my right, Rod Iverson of the London Media Research Group. sounds and their culture meant. Yet to me, that whole kind of relationship to America, and especially to black America, was exciting. It had its own kind of futuristic aspect, like “This is what black people might be in the future.” Also, I think my love of dance and movement actually comes from James Brown. Certainly it came from the idea that when you’re dancing, then you really mean something. You’re producing meaning, both in movement and in that core response to musicality—in all its tonal, atonal, and rhythmic aspects. There’s a way in which, when I started making works of my own, I was always comparing those works to records. Even now, when I make a piece, I feel I’m making a record. All the works have to be hits—which is to say they have to work in a particular manner and in a particular way. I’ve always seen myself as working from this kind of position. For me, rhythm is really, really central to the creation of structure. After all, a central reconciliation of funk is its sense that there’s no conflict between beauty and politics. Funk manages to contain both things in one—and that’s where I think what I do relates to music. I feel my work is a translation of that same impulse into a different arena. When I started at Saint Martins, I could count the other black students there on one hand. Every time I entered the doors, I was stopped and made to show my pass; every day, I had to prove I belonged there. Outside of that, however, my foundation course was a hoot. I already knew a lot of people who did fashion, people such as Paul Bernstock and Dencil Williams.3 I soon met others, like Hamish Bowles, Peter Doig, and David Harrison.4 I also met Sacha Craddock, who would go on to write and curate, and I met a lot of painting students through David Harrison. David actually lived not far from me; I had often seen him walking on our estate with his pink poodle, and I’d always wanted to find out who he was, so one day I followed him from the East End right up to Saint Martins. David’s best mate was John Galliano, so we three used to hang out together. My first Super 8 film,Portrait of the Artist David Harrison (1980), featured David and his poodle. To subsidize my studies, however, I needed to have a job. So I became a dresser in the West End production of Evita, at the Prince Edward Theatre in Old Compton Street. Because I had become preoccupied with Super 8 film, this led me into making a piece called The Dresser (1980). But the Evita job was interesting on its own terms too, just because of all the synchronization in the show. Through selling secondhand clothes, I already had a RIOT relation to fabric, and from dance, I knew a bit about the backstage life. But it was through Evita that I learned about major-league orchestration. That taught me a great deal about how big projects are structured and about how a

Chapter 2 whole series of events needs to happen. It also gave me some insight into the psyches of actors. Really, it was a bit like being the eldest child again—having responsibilities and learning not to be intimidated by taking charge. That was something vital that I learned outside of the college. During my second year at Saint Martins, we had the Brixton riots. That was the biggest event in my new life, those riots. I had already seen their prototype during Notting Hill Carnival. Every summer Carnival took place ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC in this emotional moment, one that was always situated between pleasure and danger. Because its displays were 24 threatening, this became a regular confrontation through came out of just such a conversation, one connected to ritual. Yet at the same time, it was extremely exciting and black gay desire and to photography. But it was really born it gave you license to express yourself in the daylight. of thinking about the textuality that belongs to the Rather than tucked away in the dark, you were on a public innermost life of one’s consciousness. The main point was stage. There, I came to see how violent disturbances could to make certain this remained the focus—and to ensure seem like new ways of articulating a self. one approached the work in an artistic, poetic manner. Once things got out of hand, however, there was anarchy. This was a different reaction to the race-relations In all the uprisings and eruptions of the 1980s I saw that paradigm reinforced by the riots. But for me, those riots kind of powerful, dissident energy over and over. It was are absolutely where pieces like Looking for Langston like Carnival had forecast the whole year of riots in 1981: come from; I don’t feel they would have been produced Brixton, London; Handsworth, Birmingham; Chapeltown, under “normal” circumstances. Langston wasn’t the first Leeds; Toxteth, Liverpool; and Sheffield. This sort of anger work I made after them, though; that was a videotape is something very important, in fact it’s been a driving called Who Killed Colin Roach? aspect of my making work. But at that time in my life—and I still think making works like Colin Roach was very for the first time—I was finally getting a chance to reflect important—partly because it was so clearly a campaigning on what I was making. project, yet when it was finished, in 1983, it was mostly It was then that I made the choice to do Fine Art/Film shown side-by-side with experimental works. Colin Roach at Saint Martins. So the spring of ‘81 also marked my first was usually shown in venues meant for video art. So activist encounters with experimental film, which I first saw as tapes connected to political campaigns were seen as very exclusive, very elitist—right away, I regarded it as a another side to, not just video art, but also documentary. language that excluded me. Nevertheless, I was fascinated At the time, I was very excited by video. There were by its painterly aspects. The other thing I found attractive a lot of videomakers, such as Derek Jarman, who came to about it was more political: those works broke down Saint Martins to show us work. For instance, Jack Goldstein preconceptions of what “film” should be. showed his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer loop (1975). By 1981, Of course the riots had an effect on every young too, London had what critics called the “New Romantic black person. For us, the immediate consequence was Cinema”—very baroque and homoerotic Super 8 films that all black artists were suddenly lumped together, being made by people like Cerith Wyn Evans and John we were all seen in the same frame of reference. In the Maybury. These were featured in A Certain Sensibility, groups we went on to form, like Sankofa Film and Video, the first real show of its kind, at the ICA in 1981. At the time, all of us were caught up in that nebulous working position: I myself was going clubbing at Le Beat Route on Greek Street, either you had to think about making work of a respondent I’d come across a great text on the riots in ZG magazine, nature or you made works that could define you outside of and I was discovering the work of Félix Guattari.5 Some of all that. At least, those were the two main kinds of response. this would end up closer to home than I realized at the time: There was also a third, however, which was to work against the author of that ZG piece, published under the byline the grain of all the expectations, lest they foreclose your “Pablo,” was Paul Gilroy, who would become a long-term autonomy as an artist. friend and colleague. Paul’s text was conceptually quite The riots did force the hand of some institutions, close to theoretical texts I’d been reading, but his voice which had to come up with the will to forge new domains. felt closer to mine in that he was describing what was In these, for the first time, certain questions could be posed. happening in the streets of London, and reflecting my own After that, it was all about how one might choose to frame feelings about the body politic both during and since those those questions. It became entirely a matter of one’s own early riots in Britain. Not just Paul, though, but all of this versioning and one’s vision. seemed tremendously exciting, because I was discovering The most interesting question for me proved to be: a discourse that was already happening. what did black artists actually want to say? What would I also got involved in a black gay discussion group that their art look like if its internal dialogues were made included people like the writer Kobena Mercer. Within this accessible to a wider audience? Looking for Langston we had our own Foucauldian reading group, where we started looking into the family and at social welfare. This was because, in social services, we had discovered another line of attack—one where psychiatry was being applied to pathologize and vilify black sexualities. RIOT That discussion group developed a strong affiliation with what would later become postcolonial studies. This gave us a language with which to contest established models, patterns we saw as racist, outmoded, and Eurocentric.

Chapter 2 More important, it really helped to create debates—debates Opposite, top to bottom: able to reach beyond the binarism that, at least to me, Smash the Back Lash! seemed to surround all black subjects. I felt like one could demonstration leaflet, 1985. finally avoid all the antique moralisms. One had more Haringey Black Action poster, freedom to seek subtleties and make discoveries. 1985. The Sankofa Film and Video Collective, left to right: Martina This was a time when politics were literally all around me. Attille, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, For example, I stumbled into the story of Who Killed Colin Maureen Blackwood, and me. Roach? : I was coming out of an East End jumble sale one c. 1988–89. This page, top to Saturday when a march passed by protesting a death in ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC bottom: Jack Goldstein. Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer. 1975. Still from police custody. It turned out that Colin Roach, the young 16mm film, color, sound, 3 min. black man in question, had lived quite near my home. Steve Pyke. Derek Jarman. 1983.

26 3 Bromide print, 14 ⁄4 × 15 in. (37.6 × 38 cm). ZG magazine no. 3, 1981, with cover art by Robert Longo. Which meant, of course, that Mrs. Roach could have been my mother, that his family could easily have been my own. This took me back to the radical workshops of my teens and the whole idea of the camera as a street weapon. So I wanted to make a work that would embody dual perspectives. One of these would be inside the black families’ reactions to this death. The other would show responses to black community organizers. I insisted that my camera be engaged in the politics, so it was positioned very deliberately opposite the traditional media. This was at a time when video was still finding its language, when video art was still somewhat undefined. Yet I was determined to appropriate those early video-art techniques to make my campaign tape. I wanted to utilize this camera taken out of an art school context and repurpose its technology for the street. I wanted to redirect the gaze of the ruling media. My real aim was to turn that gaze on the police, because, in Colin Roach, they are the people rioting. That piece, in one way, was very much a local response, but it was also meant to contest some things I was being taught. Specifically, it was in reply to a tutor who had told me, “Isaac, no working-class person will understand these films.” Of course my works back then Above: flyers for a rally in Hackney, London, in 1983 calling were just experimental films, scratches on film, really—and for an inquiry into the death of Colin Roach, and for the Roach Family Support Committee. Right: The Voice, “London’s First they were indeed quite arty. So part of me had been forced Black Newspaper,” with the headline “Colin’s Father Cleared,” to think, Well . . . maybe she’s right. June 4, 1983. Colin’s father, James Roach, had been arrested Colin Roach, however, was my demonstration against during a protest march. Below and opposite: Isaac Julien. her view. It was made to say, “I can do the same work Who Killed Colin Roach? 1983. Stills from U-matic video, as you and I can tell a tale. But I can also make quite color, sound, 34 min. 42 sec. Opposite, top: Roy Cornwall (later DOP on Territories) is harassed by police; opposite, experimental things.” That came from a very typical center: the parents of Colin Roach. kind of student rebellion, but also because I myself felt driven—specially since, by the time Who Killed Colin Roach? was done, I was being approached by Channel 4 television. This was the moment when we founded Sankofa Film and Video.6 Going into 1982, I had received a visit from Nadine Marsh-Edwards, a student at Goldsmiths College. She’d heard that there was a black student doing film at Saint Martins, so she came along to find out what I was up to. That little visit was really the start of everything; before long, with Robert Crusz, Martina Attile, and Maureen Blackwood, we were running off to meetings with Channel 4, the ACTT (an industry union), and the Greater London Council for the Arts.7 This was the first time I encountered the term “ethnic minorities.” I had never, ever thought about myself in those kinds of terms. But at the GLC, you had both the “celebration of difference” and its standardization. When it came to organizing, because of my history with workshops such as Newsreel, I already understood a lot of the ways one needed to think. I had absorbed RIOT the concept of collectives, I knew what they were and I understood how you went about forming one. I was also acquainted with the people who handled funding. Usually they were white; certainly they were middle-class;

Chapter 2 and always they thought of themselves as politically liberal. I understood that whole culture because through Noreen MacDowell, Jenny Fortune, and Astrid Proll, I’d already been engaged with it. That’s why I joined the ACTT, as a sound recordist: once you were a member you could form a workshop, and that’s how you became entitled to apply for grants. There was a whole process, a mixture of public and private funding, but one requirement was “an integrated practice.” ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC This meant you had to provide training, give workshops, and conduct seminars. In Sankofa we embarked on doing 28 all of those, but we disliked them and never really did them well. However, one of the things that developed out of the program, out of that notion of an integrated practice, was an agenda of films to make over five years. We were required to construct a remit for that amount of time. So Sankofa’s formation was always a strategy—but I think it was also a game. It was a game in which we all participated, or at least I participated while knowing it was a strategy. I don’t think I ever took it all completely seriously—too much of it was ticking boxes to get at money. Yet the ethos behind it was connected to the community. In the wake of the riots, there had been a genuine acknowledgment that voices were excluded. Then real platforms were provided for their representation. People would identify and seek out those different communities: black people, Asians, women, gays and lesbians. All this led to a large number of collectives and workshops, groups such as Ceddo, Cinema Action, ReTake, and, up in the North of England, Amber.8 The name we took for our own, Sankofa, comes from a Ghanaian proverb. That name was given to us by Kobena Mercer, and our logo became a bird flying into the future with its head turned back—our acknowledgment of the past and of history. This also had associations with Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” the meditations he had drawn from Paul Klee’s 1920 watercolor Angelus Novus. I think I saw myself, in Sankofa Film and Video, as one member of an artistic avant-garde. But back then, there were a lot of avant-gardes; there were a lot of different, equally interesting groups. That’s how I first met Jimmy Somerville, for instance, because he was involved in a gay video collective.9 That was a lesbian and gay teenagers’ group, mostly comprised of people involved with the club night Movements. There was Movements and, next to Kings Cross, there was the Bell, a famous gay pub where you would find people like the Pet Shop Boys, Cerith Wyn Evans, John Maybury—and Derek Jarman. Theirs was another artistic milieu, one that mixed experimental film, politics, and pop video. Back then, a real essentialism surrounded moving images. There was a big demarcation between film and video, between those people who saw themselves as video artists and those who insisted on seeing themselves as filmmakers. Video artists would only work on video—because to them that was the point, and they felt video constituted its own aesthetic. I was more interested in a cross-fertilization of forms. So, when I made Territories, in 1984, I shot on Super 8 film, put it onto video, experimented with those images, and then refilmed them in 16mm. I remained keen to disband all the categories. RIOT This was just when Chris Marker’s filmSans Soleil had been released. In that, I could see all these different aesthetic registers, such as the technical ways he was thinking about memory and how that was treated through

Chapter 2 video solarization. Sans Soleil radicalized how we in Sankofa were thinking, both about video and about documentary. Chris Marker’s work, which took a film-essay form, had the idea of wrestling with film. But he was also wrestling with the archive. Marker was grappling with video-art effects, too, but not just to have them present in a piece. That, I think, Above: members of Sankofa filming during a demonstration has been my basic problem with abstract film: I feel that in in Brixton against the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of formal terms, it might be radically interesting, but in terms 1984, a controversial bill that granted the police considerable of content, it’s never radical enough. ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC extra powers: Maureen Blackwood (holding boom), me (holding headphones), and Robert Crusz (holding camera). Marker developed a formal vocabulary of his own, one Opposite, top to bottom: with Sankofa member Martina that facilitates an extraordinary musicality. That’s exactly Attille and the film historian Jim Pines, 1987; Sankofa member

30 Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Nina Kellgren, and a crew member in the Sankofa office in Bloomsbury, 1985; Martina Attille in the Sankofa office, 1985. Opposite: Chris Marker. Sans Soleil. 1983. Stills from 16mm transferred to 35mm film, color and black and white, sound, 100 min. Below: Isaac Julien. Lost Boundaries. 2003. Still from Super 8 film, color, sound, 4 min. The still shows footage of the filming ofThe Passion of Remembrance, a film produced what I was also searching for; there were acoustic aspects by Sankofa in 1986; 16mm, color, sound, 95 min. I wanted to replicate visually. For instance, the whole idea of scratching, which had come from America, was well installed in our music vocabulary. For me this became a really central question: how could one have musicality, how is it best represented? That association with musicality is partly what gave a rhythmic and conceptual structure to Territories. Of course I wanted to make a political piece about policing—about policing and also about desire. Yet after all this time, people still return to that work, and I think it’s because of its rigorous conceptual aspects. One might associate them with the video art of its era, but it’s something that was developed from bringing different interests together. Another thing that proved provocative with Territories was a particular critique it received. I clearly remember the moment after I made that work, because I was offered a place at the London Film and Television School.10 People were saying, “Well, Isaac, Who Killed Colin Roach? was great. But Territories, isn’t that a little too Godardian?”. Meaning too experimental. That’s when I began to question the whole idea of what might seem most “appropriate” for the person who is black. In my hands, the poetic approach of Territories— its representation of black subjectivity—was suddenly somehow seen as being suspect. But in fact I was very interested in formal questions. I wanted to experiment, to create different visual auras, play with time, play within the film using factual material. I wanted to find out how things could be visually poeticized. My ultimate aim, really, was to create a style for political remembering. But works such as Who Killed Colin Roach?, Territories, and The Passion of Remembrance (1986)—essentially those were all responses to the riots. They were made in answer to certain fixed ways of looking. But not just ways of looking at black cultures; they were also involved with ways we might feel about ourselves. endnotes 1 . This began with the “Blitz Kids”, a group of regulars such as Steve Strange (Steven Harrington) and Marilyn (Peter Robinson) at Covent Garden’s Blitz Club known for their outrageous and androgynous dress, and morphed into the New Romantic movement; the Blitz Club (which closed in 1980) was not far from Saint Martins, in Covent Garden. 2 . The queen’s Silver Jubilee, celebrated in the summer of 1977, had gained an unexpected soundtrack in the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.” Greil Marcus gives an interesting analysis of punk and Situationism in his 1990 book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press). 3 . Paul Bernstock and Dencil Williams ran a club night, White Trash. With Thelma Speirs, Paul founded the London

RIOT milliners’ Bernstock Speirs. 4 . Hamish Bowles went on to become international editor for Vogue; in Britain, both Peter Doig and David Harrison are represented by the same gallery as myself, Victoria Miro. 5 . What I was reading was the Anti-Oedipus volume of Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Chapter 2 In 1984, Guattari’s thoughts about deterritorialization would inspire my title for Territories. 6 . The collective Sankofa Film and Video was set up in the summer of 1983 by Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Robert Crusz, Martina Attile, Maureen Blackwood, and myself. 7 . This was the “cultural committee” of the Greater London Council, London’s Labour-controlled governing body. 8 . Amber predated the others, but received funding from the same initiatives. 9 . Jimmy later founded the pop group Bronski Beat and, before

ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC his solo career, formed The Communards with Richard Coles (now ordained in the Church of England). 10 . In 1984, the director of the National Film and Television School, Colin Young, offered me a place; I was the second

32 black student ever given one. So I spent one day there. At the end of it, however, I had to turn around and tell Colin, “This just ain’t for me.” 34 ISAAC JULIEN RIOT Chapter 2

BAD TO WORSE Paul Gilroy It was rioting that first put me into contact with Isaac. The “uprisings” of 1981 were an explosive culmination of black communities’ bitter struggles against the habitual racism of Britain’s police; Isaac’s early films surveyed criticism of the criminal-justice system that had nurtured that rebellion, the context for our initial encounters. His work was supported financially, in a small but significant way, by London’s last, great radical experiment in local government: the Greater London Council, led by Ken Livingstone and abolished by Margaret Thatcher. Remembering that period in the city’s life has become difficult not least because the neoliberal moods that hold sway these days require a disaggregation of history, which deteriorates into an undifferentiated past. If historical sensibilities reappear at all, they are likely to be no more than an aimless plethora of fragmented and firmly localized “back stories.” Since that mechanism obstructs the workings of countermemory, the wheel of opposition has to be invented over and over again. Perhaps that is enough? The presentation of recent disorders as unprecedented eruptions of mindless violence has made it vital to remember England’s earlier riots and to appreciate their enormous impact on the country. Mass antipolice violence centered on London’s Notting Hill carnival had begun in 1976. In 1981, rioting stretched across several months, during which the national mood became increasingly anxious and fearful. The race war once predicted by the Conservative politician Enoch Powell appeared more plausible after the scale of antipolice rioting had shifted from smoldering quotidian resentment to spectacular resistance. In 1976, in a sign of acting locally and thinking globally that would soon be routine, a young militant mob, mindful of what had been going on in the embattled schools of Apartheid South Africa, began to chant “Soweto, Soweto” at London’s bewildered and defeated police force. The same patterns were continued as dusk fell upon the West London street celebrations a year later and the bricks and bottles started to soar overhead once again to the accompaniment of Dennis Brown’s rude new cut of the Heptones’ “Equal Rights” and the sly, subaltern snarl of Culture’s “The Baldhead Bridge.” Similarly righteous demands for justice and reciprocity outside of race echoed through many confrontations with white supremacist skinheads and organized neo-fascists, leading up to the 1979 election that brought Thatcher’s combative government to power. The rioting that continued sporadically between April and July of 1981 was rooted in young people’s particular experiences of inequality. It was also configured by a dawning sense of the chronic, intractable character of the crisis and of the unholy forces unleashed by accelerating AD TO Gilroy AD TO Paul WORSE

B deindustrialization of urban zones. The city of Liverpool was particularly significant because of its close links to Ireland—where a “low-intensity” RIOT Chapter 2 ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC 36 Preceding spread and opposite: Isaac Julien. Territories. 1984. Stills from 16mm color film, sound, 24 min. 12 sec. 38 ISAAC JULIEN RIOT Chapter 2 RIOT BAD TO WORSE Paul Gilroy

RIOT Opposite, top to bottom: Who Killed Colin Roach? without money. without shopping going of pleasures transient the only brings power on assault diffuse their that point the to contracted has rioters the of imagination political The unremarkable. often is gender, marginality and class, of axes the across interaction convivial and diversity, invalue iconized new discovered has culture consumer of dreamscape gaudy the Internet, of Colin Roach, Aseta Simms, Kelso Cochrane, Cartoon Campbell, Campbell, Cartoon Cochrane, Kelso Simms, Aseta Roach, Colin of presence spectral the To way, another accommodate to it we are how put after. an and before of a sense strong a a line—todraw to create sufficient have been politics, and culture both conditions racism that way in the and in life Social contemporary. in the publishable was than disturbances July the of interpretation considered and accurate whileYorkamore the New provided Times settlement, of failure the demonstrated events the that The minorities.” Economist “ethnic country’s the to confined narrowly from far was riots nationwide in the participation that show data 1981 arrest The futurelessness. of diagnosis fatal the mediate to which with insubordination punk no was there time this and pervasive, was adopted. be could “managedof decline” strategy aDetroit-style if city the of fate likely the debating been quietly had cabinet Thatcher’s that reveal eventually would records government released Recently settlement. of areas other country’s the than settlers Caribbean by dominated less and century twentieth the than community—older black its of character the underway—and was war It is now hard to judge whether those events should still be considered considered be still should events those whether judge to hard now is It ten multiracial neighbohoods. least at littered glass shattered and rocks east, in the Walthamstow to west in the Chiswick from and north, in the Newington From districts. a dozen half from rose smoke of palls and London, of streets the through heard be still could alarms burglar and sirens but control, under Once the flames and the adrenalin had subsided, a sense of hopelessness hopelessness of sense a subsided, had adrenalin the and flames the Once facing anarchy.”facing “we are said, he cities, some In date. to widespread most the were week, second its entered cities inner dilapidated in the violence of epidemic the as came which disturbances, the that said official Government Asenior looting. and burning rioting, of on a spree youths Asian and white black, of thousands control to fought firemen and policemen as today early and yesterday England across towns and cities adozen than in more erupted violence urban Spreading B ri tish press at the at time: tish press still from Territories from still B ut w ut B e must ask whether changes in the politics of race, race, of politics in the changes whether ask e must y 5 . Still from from . Still a . B m at . , most of the violence had been brought brought been had violence the of , most B tersea and and tersea ri tain has moved on. Amplified by the the by Amplified on. moved has tain 1

B ri xton in the south to Stoke Stoke to south in the xton B ri tain’s welfare-state tain’s welfare-state trumpeted trumpeted

Roger Sylvester, Joy Gardner, and Stephen Lawrence? To name just a and the rest grow shorter, their figures can still serve as mnemonic aids few of those who either died at the hands of Britain’s police or suffered that are bigger and more important even in their duppied state than the from their repeated failure to deliver the justice on which plausible minimal information recorded in the relevant Wikipedia entries. democracy relies. Is it better to think of those undead figures as Isaac’s initial step was to try to keep Colin’s death close at hand. emissaries, duppies from a bygone age charged with the impossible Remembering Colin and the others who have shared his fate provided a burdens of remembrance and redemption? How might the mysteries of means to affirm not a closed or fixed identity but a mode of solidarity, their deaths bear witness not only to the consistency and potency of and the precious possibility of acting in concert against injustice and racial violence but to the possibility that we now find ourselves in a the antisocial processes with which it is bound up. The footage Isaac different time? In 1983, the eloquent and compelling contributions made shot of the demonstrations demanding the truth about Colin’s death by Benjamin Zephaniah, Neil “Mad Professor” Fraser, and Barnor Hesse remains painful to watch. It shows London as gray and harsh. Today, the to Isaac’s Who Killed Colin Roach? aspired to that evasive possibility. police still snigger when we protest, but that reaction is less frequent. The long arc of our country’s chronic, multilayered crisis—economic, The ubiquity of cell phone cameras makes smirks and abuse more of political, and cultural—supports the opposite conclusion: it suggests that a risk. They are usually concealed behind a mask. Contempt can be against the movement they animated and their own best efforts and hopes, veneered by the professionalization required under the neoliberal ethos we remain stalled in the same dismal phase of our postimperial history. of customer care, or hidden beneath the armor of military equipment: The crisis has reappeared, and it is less than ever an immediate economic flame-retardant clothing, balaclava-ed helmets, batons, and riot shields. question, whether of agno-capitalism’s global flows and ebbs, complex Now that governmental feminism sanctions the combat of female financial instruments, or the terminal decline in British manufacturing. soldiers and the sacred institution of marriage is open to all, regardless of Rather, this fluctuating condition, by turns melancholic, nostalgic, whom they desire, perhaps the long-denied possibility of being and anxious, encompasses profound cultural and psychological aspects. simultaneously both black and English has become, at the very least, The longer historical perspective that racism always seeks to deny us a theoretical possibility. For now, neoliberal culture is comfortable with directs attention toward the pathological consequences of departed that outcome. If the traditional exclusion of blackness from Britishness empire, which are forbiddingly complex and remain to be worked through. has indeed been modified, we must be scrupulous in acknowledging Today, that oversight requires engaging the morbidity of a corporate other, related processes that unfold at slower tempos and defy the idea populism that is driving forward a sequence of unending civilizationist of linear upward progress where race and nation are concerned. Not only conflicts, aimed impossibly at restoring a greatness that can never does our sense of time and our understanding of Britain’s postcolonial be revived. This raises postcolonial and indeed racial and national issues history assume a different aspect when the absurd saga of black bearing upon questions of identity and thwarted belonging, upon the sufferation is placed in the foreground, but the significance of racism in recognition of difference and the persistence of racial misrecognition. shaping the country’s polity and, in particular, in strengthening the Also at issue are the enduring significance of alterity and the hateful but endlessly productive populist strand in its political culture determination to know which differences will be different enough to becomes harder to overlook. matter in a neoliberal era that is emphatically multicultural and enjoys The war on terror took many tools from the lexicon of immigration a voracious appetite for exotica. law, and much of the hatred that is now directed at Islam draws directly That disposition may be unexpected. It does not, of course, mean that on earlier racist tendencies in British politics. The rioting of summer 2011 Stills from Who Killed Colin Roach? racism is over and done with; as the whole world has become a erupted in the same locations that had been aflame three decades earlier. counterinsurgency battlefield, new forms of racism have emerged. That recurrence alone promotes an analysis in which things can be both We are not yet clear exactly how digital technologies and the social and worse and better than they were—a change that would be sufficient to cultural relations they foster are altering the operations of human make this a different moment: a new conjuncture in which reacquaintance memory and cognition, but we know that they have incubated virtual and with Who Killed Colin Roach? and Territories becomes even more urgent immaterial racisms and created novel repositories of racial feeling. and valuable. We know that the disruption they have introduced has registered in the In preparing this essay, I was surprised to be made to remember that AD TO Gilroy AD TO Paul WORSE

B ebbing of Britain’s once-militant postcolonial movement for justice and in my preacademic life as a journalist, I had penned an enthusiastic review liberation from racial hierarchy. However, as the half-lives of Colin Roach of the Colin Roach film when it was first released. Watching it again today, RIOT Chapter 2 AAC JULIEN RIOT AAC IS 40 I still see it as a pointed piece of Du Bois–ian art as propaganda. It was part of a protracted community campaign that endures in today’s demands for an end to residually color-coded varieties of justice and police impunity. Three decades ago, I was more shocked still to find out that Isaac had discovered some angry, anonymous words of mine and folded them into the poetic commentary that flows throughTerritories while the world-inverting history of carnival is laid out, the butcher’s apron catches fire, and transgressive love combines with militant class feeling to demand a deeper democracy than Mrs. Thatcher’s cohorts were prepared to countenance. Territories invokes the Notting Hill Carnival as an already syncretized precedent for contemporary patterns of intermixture and recombination. The ludic spirits of disorderly, traditional Mas supplied dynamic new foundations for the rebel culture of the sound systems. In London, Jamaica could mesh with Trinidad and the small islands. The loud demands for dignity that resulted from their asymmetrical communion provided a double warrant: for healing and for saturnalia. But these public O Gilroy Paul WORSE excesses were enacted in the blitzed, decaying postwar streets that were AD T

B now home. That bleak, cold, joyless urban environment was host to the new geography of power that was being invented out of the “low- Stills from Who Killed Colin Roach?, with Benjamin Zephaniah intensity” war underway close by in the six counties of Northern Ireland. at opposite bottom. That claim may seem far fetched to a contemporary audience, but it was a view held not only by leftists concerned with what we used to call “civil liberties,” and the creeping corrosiveness of states of emergency, but by senior police ideologues who detected in the resistance of “second generation” black settlers an unwelcome potential for escalation to Irish

RIOT levels of violent disorder. Babylon was determined to prevent the formation of “no-go areas” in which the opposition of workless, hopeless “colored school-leavers” could leaven into the out-and-out rebellion that was seen as the biocultural proclivity of slaves and their descendants. The significance of the carnival was far greater than those problematic Chapter 2 ethnic inclinations. In Territories, the growing power of organized sound and music counterpoints the visual montage and is articulated with it aesthetically. Our narrators sit at a Steenbeck editing machine, underscoring their responsibilities as mediators, but the DJs and MCs who make up People’s War are not positioned at that distance. Under the time-stretching impact of what we must call a dub aesthetic—one grasping the shock that only the unintelligible can communicate—the

ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC film demands to be encountered as a remix. Its repeated phrases, oscillations, and orchestrations depart from reggae; their relocation to the gray northern metropolis has opened them to the emergent power

42 of hip-hop and what we used to call “electro.” That too is layered into the real-time revolutionary rhythms of Coxsone’s Studio 1 in Jamaica. Here is the demotic pulse of a truly populist modernism and we do “Feel Like Jumping.” Its dissident spirit is propelled by the energy of ritual repetition, of ceaseless versioning. The infrastructure, as always, is the sound of the drum, and its most insistent, compelling voice is Style Still from Territories. Scott’s timely, machinic hybrid of funk and reggae. The intellectual and political spirit of these exhilarating experiments must have thrived in the space between the Saint Martins art school, where Isaac had studied, and London’s black social movement against state harassment. However, I suspect that its fissile core was provided by debates in and around London’s Gay Black Group of the early 1980s—a collective of extraordinary young people whose enterprise and vision await the historians that their subsequent achievements merit. It would be putting it very mildly to say that aids changed the organizational priorities and strategic calculations of that political body. The epiphany of the new disease transformed everything. It worlded the local, generating new alliances and enemies, prompting new varieties of care and fear, danger and responsibility. By robbing us of so many lovely, brilliant, and insightful human beings, it produced new ways of thinking about politics and culture that could not be confined to their melancholic origins, as well as a preference for political mobilization over the work of mourning. In Isaac’s case, the demand to savor life lived against the horizon of death yielded eventually to a larger diasporic ambition in which British blackness might start—as it had done through the export of our distinctive lovers rock reggae—to work upon and expand the creative and ethical horizons of Caribbean political culture. This was the task that he would take up in his later filmThe Darker Side of Black (1994). Territories and Who Killed Colin Roach? are among the best documents with which we can explain why the conflicts of the 1980s arose and why they must now be examined again. Those battles made Britain into a different kind of society—a precarious market society. The last few years have taught us that it will be a more militarized, more unequal formation, entirely beyond the reach of courageous artistic interventions of this vintage type. Just as Territories predicted, the novel nomos required by the new variety of control has made us all suspect, all surveilled. Now, these creative residues of the militant past, and the ghosts they conjure, offer a valuable chance to re-endow insurgent history in the regressive order to which we are in danger of becoming resigned. O Gilroy Paul WORSE AD T B RIOT Chapter 2 ISAAC JULIEN RIOT ISAAC

endnotes 1 . R. W. Apple, “New Riots Sweep England’s Cities; ‘Anarchy’

44 Feared,” New York Times, July 11, 1981, available online at www.nytimes.com/1981/07/11/world/new-riots-sweep- england-s-cities-anarchy-feared.html. 246 ISAAC JULIEN RIOT index L L L L K Kellgren, 15 Rosemary: Julien, works: works: 117, 51, 18, 88, 176 149, 126, theory: on L My 24; Beautiful Hanif, Kureishi, 77, 235 Barbara: Kruger, 31 Paul: Klee, 119 David: King, 119Kennard, Peter: Kelly, L ee ee au and am ac Center Stage wan, Stanley, Center 132, 148, 166–168, 166 166–168, 148, 132, True 174, North 235; 154, 149, Dream) Conservator’s 176, 193, 202, 226, 234; Trussed 234; 226, 202, 176, 193, 18, This is Not an AIDS Advertisement AIDS an Not is This 118, 181,54, 181 234; 234; 191, 189, 210, 226, 181, 149, 184, 146, 18 Mask 143; 173–75, 173–75, spread Western Union: small boats 150–52 Langston 234; 92 34–35 31, 32, Territories 235; 232, 226, 235; 235; 130, 130, 93 100–101 218–19, 123–25 Th 234; 234; 22 234; small boats 234; 101, 104, 212–30, 102, 104, 175, 181, 198, 225, 234 225, 181, 175, 198, 104, 102, Rebels Soul Young 219, 233; 132, 44, 24 97, – 194 186–192 186–210, 119, 184, 133, 132, Waves Ten Thousand BaadAsssss Cinema 210, 224 189, 154, 149, 145, 132, Lost Boundaries Lost 234; 233, 225, 216, 110 61 –27, 26 33 Looking for Langston 144 Créole 17 Fantôme Afrique Fantôme 234; 224, 202, 189, Laundrette Hunter in Colour in White and Black 210, 234; 193, 189, 160 149, 235; 235; to Mazatl Leopard 180 Dragon She’s Gotta Have It Have Gotta She’s Thing an, Jacques: 62, 126 62, Jacques: an, , Ang, Crouching Tiger,, Ang, Hidden Jungle Fever Jungle 77, 149; 79, , Spike: The Night of The The of Night The ghton, Charles, pedusa: 174 pedusa: , , Fantôme Fantôme 234; 226, 202, 176, 193, 3, , 27, 28 , 32, 33 , 32, , 99

, 122, 132, 143, 188, 189, 189 189, 188, 143, 132, , 122, e Darker Side of Black of Side e Darker ; esman, Knight: 101 Knight: esman,

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): 5 ): ork: ork: 2; 2; , Paley, Paley, political groups and parties: Anti- parties: and groups political Julien (M. Tom Whiskey Glyn, Philpot, 31 Boys: Shop Pet Paris, Pace, Ozawa, 77 Craig: Owens, Platt Platt The Battle of Algiers of Battle The Gillo, Pontecorvo, L’Hypothèse du Tableau Volé Volé Tableau du L’Hypothèse Raúl, Ruiz, fous Maîtres Les 149; 145, Jean: Rouch, 188 Stephanie: Rosenthal, Rogoff, 27–28 Colin: Roach, 77, 88, 50, 39, 36, 31, 32, 26, 24, riots: Riggs, 97 John: Riddy, 85 82, Ruby: B. Rich, 215, 219, 220 Reykjavik: Re Alain:Resnais, 52 Renoir, Jean: 175 Reid, Queen S Seditionaries: 17, 233 188 sculpture: as film 13, 158; sculpture: Screen 120, 104, 98, 96, Glenn: Wright, Scott 88 Ridley: Scott, 29–31, 26, Video: and Film Sankofa 112–13 Colin: Salmon, 175 16, Wells: Sadler’s 88 Ken: Russell, Ruan 68 House: Royal Reichek, 181, 183 74, 78, 44, 43, 23, reggae: Reagan, Ronald: 92, 232 184 176, 183, Jacques: Rancière, 101, 102–3 Yvonne: Rainer, 193 149, William: Raban, Queen 88 David: Puttnam, 86 74, 75, 32, 23, 16, rock: punk Pudovkin, Vsevolod: 119 115, 50, 176 126, psychoanalysis: 233 29, 15, 18, Astrid: Proll, proletariat: 219, 227 Powell, Potter, Sally: 88 115postcolonialism: 51, 176 27, 134, 40, theory: postcolonial Ru Sex Pistols: Pistols: Sex 111, 108, 98, 85, 50, 27, 16, 49, Sexuality: Singleton, John, Singleton, 74, 74 32, 23, Jubilee: Silver 59 51, 53, cinema: silent “Sicilian Holocaust”: 174 101 Cindy: Sherman, 15 Susan: Shearer, 206 204, 191, 198, Shanghai: E Zaire) L Party: 16 Party: Revolutionary 16; Workers Racism: M 126; Party: Communist (Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting) Stolen the of (Hypothesis 234 219, 232, 145, 142, 215, 234, 235 215, 234, 142, 215, 225 86, 75–9, 72, 50–2, 130 145 115 52 S 225, 226 T SC P SC shdie, Salman: 72 Salman: shdie, ea ake: ave the Queen”: 32, 88, 233 88, 32, Queen”: the ave ar L L

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