Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour-Frederick Douglass
Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2019 — five screen installation, National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
A Letter to My Daughter From an Occupied City
By Noah Stern
You, my daughter, who was born in the 100th bloom of the cherry blossoms on the tidal basin in Washington, D.C., loves to return to the city of your birth. It's a natural instinct, a homing instinct, nostalgia and memory and what we label "Predator pride," homage to the samurai codes of the science fiction film series and its "Yautja" species. These are the waters from which you emerged, red-hued and laughing/screaming into the Americas, our America, one nation, under G-d, with liberty and justice for all - though not all at the same time.
So we find ourselves revisiting the tidal basin during a rain-deluged April, huddled for shelter beneath the brutalist Minecraft caverns of the USDA, where you buy an “I ❤️DC emblazoned umbrella from the ice-cream trucks that line Independence Blvd. - and I, in the words of the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, "collaborate" with nature - getting soaked to the bone.
We are soggy and slick by the time we glimpse the bronze shoulders of Thomas Jefferson, his domed memorial marking the gateway to the basin. The trees are barren, windswept clean and raw - the only blossoms you witness are floating in the gutter beneath the (James) Wilson Arch, which rises a majestic 14m above the street.
Seeking respite from the Potomac's rising tide, we make our way up, far from the canals and railways and docks that once held sway to slave auctions and fetid river swamp-scent. Young National Guardsmen sip corruscating neon Gatorade, their conscripted duty, these Guards at the Raj, to slouch tall against the opprobrious visage of fearless leader which drapes 3 stories yon from the columns of the Department of Justice - its scales crooked, Il Duce's scowl pained as Ian McKellen's Richard III.
We pause for a first-person photo, middle-finger raised.
A reminder: The District is an occupied city. Keep your head down, your collar up, your Umbrella movement 雨傘運動 shield aloft. Keep the liberation of your imagination close, your future hopes furtive against the flags which whip against the storm.
It's a short walk to the National Portrait gallery - more guardsmen at the steps. Admission is (yet) free, the former patent office a sanctuary of light and cool against the damp and cloud-dark. The banners here celebrate Anna Mary Robertson Moses, nee Grandma.
Your eye is drawn to memory and spectacle, Nam June Paik's Electric Superhighway, the States, our states - how many have you lived in? - States which flicker in cathode ray splendor - America as Wonkavision. Adjacent a spinning pillar of LED light, Jenny Holzer's Babel/ing ("For SAAM," 2008) truisms still true, this cyclone of white light/white heat sweeping us like Dorothy into a cocoon of velvety darkness, carpeted benches, a theatre of stillness, a theatre of still-truth.
Sir Isaac Julien's LESSONS OF THE HOUR (2019) beckons us across five screens, early in the loop of a 28:44 run time. Mesmerized, immersed. We sit, sit still, and in Bellow's parlance, "I saw and I saw."
a man leading a horse
a regal man
a gentleman in british empire red velvet/then colonial indigo blue
Ray Fearon as Frederick Douglass.
Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2019.
An arcadian landscape (this landscape) the canopy of green, and gold, these same forests we've followed on our hikes, moccasin soft, the same Appalachian splendor drips off Aaron Copeland's tongue, the untamed wild, the pastoral of Michael Mann's "Last of the Mohicans," Hawkeye running thru the Americas, because if flaneur is the way of the old world city, then the peripatetic is the denizen of this New World.
A gentleman, this gentleman, Frederick Douglass,spine straight conjured by RSC actor Ray Fearon, his voice-over musings culled from the orator’s "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” and "Lectures on Pictures," and the eponymous 1893 address.
his fingertips trace the knotted bark of a serpentine tree, a hanging tree.
A song in my head, Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" channeled by Nina Simone channeling Bettye Lavette channeling Billie Holiday.
He/and we are minotaurs in the tangle of American primeval boscage, the Loblolly Pine, the Sugar Maple, the majestic Chestnut Oak.
Sit, I say. We are going nowhere. You are theatre-mode silent. You are already hooked.
Time and memory bubble and seafoam wash across the screens - the wonder wheel of LESSON OF THE HOUR is Julien's elliptical fluidity of then and now, Douglass's musings on the freedom of thought and his sojourns across the ocean an umbilical from then - to - now (and back again.)
Douglass's July 4th colliding with our looming sestercentennial, fireworks onscreen bloom over the shipyard ramparts of Fells Point (now) skyscrapers illuminated in potassium chlorate retinal burns, cotton fields and magnesium wool - strontium nitrate and barium and burnt copper mirrored in Baltimore City harbor of his education and awakening.
Multi-century audience.
Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2019.
the myopic drapery and regalia of the photographer's studio, adjustable stools and trompe l’oeil oil cloth backdrops
Douglass never smiles, his laser-gaze a political choice, a counter-revolt against the tyranny of the image, as he says..
“As to the moral and social influence of pictures, it would hardly be extravagant to say of it what Moore has said of ballads, ‘give me the making of a nation’s ballads and I care not who has the makings of its laws’. The picture and the ballad are alike, if not equally social forces. One reaching and swaying the heart by the eye, the other by the ear.”
a lectern, a lecture hall, a lecture —
douglass faces the amphitheatre in his thrall, in a spell, like a firing squad, a trial, muttonchopped gents of the 19th Century elbow-to-elbow patched next to a jury in contemporary garb, the 20th and 21st.
The alta borghesia, the patron, the awakened.
another potassium <flash> the image immortal.
The tyranny of the Daguerreian apparatus.
Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, 2019 — Smithsonian American Art Museum / National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
'Daguerre, by that simple and all-abounding sunlight has converted the planet into a picture gallery. Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, photographs, and electrotypes, good and bad, now adorn or disfigure all our dwellings. Man of all conditions may now see themselves as others see them.'
Time is a memory, time is (of) the essence, time is the warped bow of the wood on the peeling red barn.
the calcium phosphate exoskeleton crunch of Douglass's footprints
as they traverse the Wuthering height cliffs
and beachfront of the Isle of Skye.
"Pictures, like songs, should be left to make their own way into the world."
We sit for a cycle then another, my daughter, born in the 100th bloom of the cherry blossoms, the student of 8th grade American history, the constitutional duty desecrated by its outsourcing to a YouTube series you were bursting to share with me, your filmmaker father; "The Story of Us" — where else can an American teen learn the sacred text of her nation from a notorious rogue's gallery of historians (Diddy, Martha Stewart, DJT, John Lassiter, Garrison Keillor.)
You've learned more about America from LESSONS OF THE HOUR. We depart beneath a suspended staircase of Tommy Smith's raised golden fists ("Bridge," Glen Kaino, 2013–2014)
Glen Kaino, Bridge, 2013-2014 .
National Portrait Gallery atrium
The clouds have passed, the District sky smells of ozone and French marigold terpene. The escape route home passes the White House — the East Wing is gone, the people's house demolished. A wrestling ring rises in its rubble.
When you were mere months old, the university where I taught, named for our nation's father, once the site of the city's meridian, once a Civil War hospital, where Walt Whitman nursed the casualties — where the English department staff ladies said, bring the baby, bring the baby — there you are my daughter, in a pram, posed in a polaroid before the people's house.
Now the East wing is rubble, a desecration, a méprisant crime against L'enfant's design. In synagogue you are taught to face East, for East is Jerusalem, or East is Eden, and East of Eden is the Land of Nod, of Exile.
The sun shines upon your old neighborhood, this New Jerusalem, the U Street corridor, the "Chocolate CIty" of Duke Ellington and Roberta Flack, of Ben's Chili Bowl, of Ethiopian injera and Jamaican callaloo. Past the 17th street Stivers rowhouse which was our neighbor, built in slave ballast brick by Frederick Douglass, where he lived until his death.
"There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than all the people in these United States, in this very hour."
G-d bless you, my daughter, G-d bless our republic.
You bear witness to these LESSONS OF THE HOUR.
To the triumph of Frederick Douglass, the manumission of the image.
