Isaac Julien's 'Once Again...(Statues Never Die)'

Image courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

As soon as you enter the space, you find that the dialectic of light and darkness is already at play. Then begins the piano, and notes that echo cavernously, consuming the space. In a haunting, projecting boom, Alice Smith begins vocalizing the words, “once again…”

Thus begins the multi-channel audio-visual component of Once Again…(Statues Never Die). 

There are five screens, oblique upon the floor, like choreographed dancers frozen in formation. Each screen shapeshifts before you, taking on different roles. Sweeping vistas of catalogued material, the aisles of a museum or an exhibition, perhaps a gallery. Stills of artifacts head on, each watching as you actively try to rework what your exchange with it entails.There is the sense of art, and then there is also the object, tagged and encased, informing you beyond itself to the fact of its having been examined. The filmic screen that receives the projected image, a slide show, a soft dreamscape of imagined memories. Figures speak over all of it, across time and space. There’s Alain Locke (portrayed on screen by André Holland), the first African American Rhodes scholar, acknowledged ‘architect’ of the Harlem Renaissance. There, he’s visiting Richmond Barthé (Devon Terrell) in his studio as he sculpts a male nude figure, reclaiming, transforming the realist mode and what it makes real. Then, discussing the vested interest of the collector in popularizing African art, with the collector himself, Albert Barnes (Danny Huston). Manipulation and expression intermingle in the contestation of who speaks, what is said. 

Commissioned by the Barnes Museum, this work is all about dialogue. How does an archive speak? What does the artifact say? It’s only natural to ask these questions, surrounded by screens and by the very artifacts on them. The viewer enters an exchange with these artifacts, those who made them, those who helped and got in the way. With the actors on screen, and the people they portray. With the history of archive, of institution, with the many layers of curation involved. These dialogues are amplified, multiplied, by the many presences, many direct, fragmented ways of regarding Once Again… (Statues Never Die). Five simultaneous, distinct screens sequentially mirror or juxtapose images of people, real, enacted, alongside masks and figurines. Sculptural figures that evoke both those who crafted them, and those whom they depict are there when you turn, there in the room with you, at the periphery. The many screens act almost as a chorus in song, the artifacts their benefactors, themselves the music of the maker. They are amplified by the reflective surface on all the walls, mirroring this exchange in a translucent haze. Artifact and culture, artist and actor, curator, museum, country, exhibit and viewer are all thrown into immediate, operative exchange. 

Invoked through this exchange are so many colliding ideas of history, and how it informs our sense of now. Of who gets to speak it and how it is spoken. The currency of the past, with all its complications. “Nothing is more galvanizing than a sense of past,” Locke supposedly says to Barnes. Ideas of art somehow sustain themselves, and the burden of this work to represent, one way or another, what the viewer thinks is represented, echoes conversation, concerns, across history. Still, the diegetic curator at the Barnes Museum stands before the collection on the screens before us, asking, ‘how many of me have died?’

Sir Isaac Julien is a critically acclaimed British artist whose art addresses race, gender, cultural identity, using the mediums of film, photography and installation - mediums that uniquely cover documentation as well as expression. When asked, “how do you figure the audiences for this work, where do they stand?” he replied that what he wanted to do was open the space, capture attention. “Everything is engagement,” he said. His intention is to encourage interaction. All things considered, this interaction has to happen variably, individually. It’s “not a traditional film that way.”

In response to the past he is digging up the archive in a reclamatory, celebratory manner. He offers that beyond contemplating the artifact, one must muse. His intention is to evoke this very musing, with emphasis on what he calls a ‘poetic restitution’. It is important to him that the individual is moved. That much is clear, surrounded by these compounded layers of curation, invocation, and dialogue, which really are layers of reactivation. One cannot help but listen to the voices as they speak, somehow, listen to one’s own self responding with more questions. 

Overall, the work suggests that the most productive way to realize that ‘statues never die’, is to keep asking them questions, to never leave the voices, histories, and lives to the sedimentation that comes from letting them settle. In doing this, its emphasis on a poetic restitution reminds us that art and artifact do not exist in a vacuum, or on the pedestals and encasements of an institution. Behind all works - those collected by Barnes, produced by Barthé, discussed by Locke - are rich, irreducible histories of expressive, intentional, artistic, and contextual impulse.

My position, like Sir Julien's, is that one must visit this installation. One must bear witness, listen, and configure their own position in response to the unending exchange of dealing with the past.As Alain Locke is found saying… ‘we do not seek to revive the past, but to create a new society.’