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In the British popular media there is an abiding stereotype of the young British artist as white, heterosexual and working class: Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tim Nobel and Sue Webster, Martin Creed and, despite the hyphenated name, Sam Taylor-Wood. However, this image of the whiter-than-white, straight and street-credible yBa – cultivated by the mainstream media in order to form a seamless counterpoint to the Brit-pop personas of the Gallagher brothers and the Brit-sport demi-god status of David Beckham – is firmly challenged by the presence within that milieu of a number of prominent British artists who subvert this stereotype. Tracy Emin, probably the most visible yBa after Hirst, is part Turkish, the Chapman brothers are part Cypriot, and Steve McQueen and Chris Ofili – who represented the UK at this year’s Venice Biennale – are both black British. The facts paint a far more realistic picture of the composition of this generation of British artists than the media hype, and it is one that more closely approximates the truly multi-cultural and ethnically diverse Britain of the early twenty-first century.

One aspect of the stereotype that is rarely challenged is sexual orientation. In fact a certain hypergendered heteroposing is at the core of many of the personas projected and much of the work produced, from the Chapman’s tough-guy, bar room-brawling image to Emin’s continued insistence on the sexualisation of her own history and Lucas’s page-three, lavatory-wall critique of British attitudes to sex. Isaac Julien is, by generation and working practice, surely to be included in the group known as the yBas, even though he did not gain an MA from Goldsmiths; but this is yet another hallowed tenet of the yBa myth that is at heart unsubstantiated – neither did many of the other recognised members of the group. But by being both black British and out homosexual he further undermines the neoconservativism of a Blairite, New Labour vision of a ‘Cool Britannia’ populated by white, straight, street-savvy cultural protagonists.





Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002, where many people in the UK had their first real chance to see his work properly presented, Julien duels with the ‘burden of representation’, the unfortunate legacy of the multicultural arts funding agenda of the post-Scarman report 1980s and ’90s, which tended to support only those artists from so-called ‘ethnic-minorities’ whose work focused on issues of ‘identity’ and ‘ethnicity’. In fact Julien was a founder member of the Sankofa black film and video collective, which was jointly funded by the Arts Council and the British Film Institute. However, although he does negotiate issues of queer and black identity in most of his work – from his key film Looking for Langston (1989) to the more recent Paradise Omeros (2002) – Julien succeeds in avoiding a stereotypical, politically-correct, postcolonialist position by conflating a highly developed theoretical and issue-based sensibility to an almost baroque filmic display of formalist aesthetics and sumptuous, multilayered cinematography. It is because Julien astutely balances an ideological and political agenda with a lush and sensual cinematic sensibility that he is able to make work that has the ability – like other successful works in the yBa canon – to appeal to a mass audience while at the same time fulfilling the demanding criteria of a transnational neo-avant-gardism.

The principal formal apparatus that Julien utilises in his ‘gallery films’ is the two- or, more usually, three-screen projection. First seen in the closing sequences of Abel Gance’s epic 1927 masterpiece Napoleon, the technique is now more associated with experimental film of the 1960s and the occasional contemporary suspense thriller such as 24 Hours, or Run Lola Run, where it is used to show simultaneous events. Julien uses the technique in a far more inventive way, not only as a means of disrupting a purely narrative reading of the content, but also as a visual trope for a non-hierarchical, non-Western and radicalised scopic encapsulation of a phantastical and poetic imaginary. This presentation is well demonstrated in works such as The Long Road to Mazatlán (1999), Paradise Omeros (2002, in its Documenta XI format) and his most recent work Baltimore (2003), which was shown at Victoria Miro Gallery in September/October of this year.

At Victoria Miro Paradise Omeros was shown in an edited one-screen version, shot on 16mm before transfer to DVD, retaining the lush colour and rich tonality of the original medium, but losing some of the three-screen version’s fragmentary and discursive qualities. Segueing back and forth from Julien’s native St Lucia to London, contrasts are developed between a mythic Caribbean paradise and a dystopian 1950s London of exile and migration. Loosely based on Derek Walcott’s book-length Homeric poem Omeros (1990), whose subject is the 1940s and ’50s migration of West Indians to Britain, Julien’s gallery film collapses the historical and political aspects of the effects of globalisation into the sphere of the personal, through the lens of a poetic and phantasmagoric imagination.

Upstairs, Baltimore was shown in its full three-screen format. It is an ambitiously filmic short that incorporates a strong element of science-fiction, in the style of The Matrix, conflated with references to blaxploitation films of the 1970s, such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) – actor Melvin van Peebles, a veteran from the original films is a leading protagonist – and edgy meditations on the power structures and political ramifications of the museum as a site of social and cultural construction. Figures from the Baltimore Great Blacks in Wax Museum are transplanted to the Walters Art Museum with its El Grecos and classical sculptures, highlighting the way in which the privileging of a Eurocentric cultural aesthetic within museological practice marginalises the cultural artefacts of various ethnic and social groups that are considered as ‘other’.

Earlier work such as Trussed (1996) was simultaneously shown at Sketch, the chic West-End venue that combines haute restaurant, club, bar, tearooms and gallery. The unique aspect of the gallery is its stunning 360-degree screening facility, which was ideally suited to Julien’s multi-screen aesthetic. Repeated versions of the films were shown at differing start times, or juxtaposed in reversed projection, creating a hypnotic and hallucinatory panoptical frieze. What is at the core of Julien’s practice is his ability to engage with the political by mediating it through the personal and, from this position, allowing fantasy its full freedom. And he also avoids the cul-de-sac of political correctness.

Richard Dyer

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