Isaac Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour” at MoMA, NYC
For those planning a late summer trip to NYC, we’d like to suggest staying at the perfectly located, chic 6 Columbus Central Park Hotel and stopping in at Lum Lum for a delicious Pad Thai with Seafood and their zero proof Lychee mojitos. But of course, we have another reason too. The MoMA has brought the work of renowned black British installation artist, professor, and filmmaker, Isaac Julien, to its storied galleries. The piece in question is Lessons of the Hour, a ten-channel video installation that seeks to encapsulate key attributes and moments of the life of Frederick Douglass. Ten-channel simply means that there are ten different screens on display in the gallery for the one artwork. Douglass’ heroism and contributions to abolitionism, oratory, activism, writing, editing, the arts, and politics transcends the United States of America and the Black Diaspora and must be understood instead more broadly in terms of often unparalleled contributions to the nineteenth-century transatlantic world, regardless of race, sex, or nation.
Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, Douglass escaped by impersonating a sailor with the help of his soon-to-be wife, the free black woman Anna Murray. After gaining literacy he went on to become a powerful abolitionist orator, newspaper owner, editor, and statesman. Incredibly, in a world where most enslaved people of African descent were forbidden to learn to read and write (because knowledge is power after all), Douglass went on to author three autobiographies, the first being Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). To grasp the utter improbability of such an astounding achievement for a formerly enslaved person (or anyone for that matter), one must understand that the cornerstone of Transatlantic Slavery was denying the enslaved the ability to preserve and define their own cultures and to document their lives and communities and represent themselves. By writing his life story, not once, but three times, Douglass asserted the right of enslaved people to take control of their identities and representation, to define themselves for themselves and for broader communities.
Douglass also understood the power of visual representation. Coming to manhood in the age of photography, it is no accident that he went on to become the most photographed American of the nineteenth century (not African American, American)! Indeed, Douglass recognized that the democratizing impact of photographic technology – the dramatic shift in price and cultural and physical accessibility – would allow free and enslaved black folks who had no realistic access to “high art” portraiture (think oil painting and marble busts) to walk into a photographic studio where they could, for the first time, become both sitters and patrons of their own likenesses. Why was this so important? Well, as our fearless leader has argued across multiple publications, the utter inaccessibility and exclusivity of western “high art” is what allowed elite whites to demonize black people by proliferating stereotypical imagery across multiple genres of art (think portraiture, genre studies, history paintings etc.). The end goal was of course to justify and reify the structures of slavery.
Julien’s installation demonstrates a profound knowledge of Douglass’ life and legacy. Born to an enslaved mother (who he lamented never fully knowing because of her premature death), Douglass was the product of coercive sex or rape that was ubiquitous across all sites of Transatlantic Slavery. Although he did not know his father’s identity, he came to understand that he was likely his white male enslaver (sadly an all-too-common occurrence during slavery).
When entering the exhibit, you are greeted by a black and white photograph of the handsome, unsmiling Douglass and a didactic panel. By the way, this stoic, serious look was deliberately cultivated by Douglass who understood all too well how white people harnessed misrepresentations of black males as comical, unmasculine buffoons (especially within the popular sphere of blackface minstrelsy), to deny them manhood. Next, you enter a room papered with nineteenth-century newspapers featuring relevant stories and a display case with a reproduction of one of Douglass’ treatises. The final darkened room is large with a bench against a wall (for viewers to sit on) facing the ten screens of the installation. At times, all or some of the screens are in synch giving the viewer a sense of immersion, at others, they display distinct images. The sounds too are often in and out of synch with certain projected images. At times we hear only the sounds of nature and at others dramatic music like a solo fiddle.
We encounter Douglass – portrayed by an actor with his distinctive hairstyle – in the clothes of a nineteenth-century gentleman, sometimes in interior scenes sitting for his photographic portrait, or lecturing, or exterior ones, leading a horse across a British landscapes. Why Britian? Because this was where he travelled to spread his anti-slavery message on the abolitionist lecture circuit. Douglass’ figure shifts across the different screens as he soberly studies sturdy trees. There are also scenes showing white hands handling rope and then the dangling feet of a lynched victim. Slavery is explicitly evoked again by images of cotton fields and the sounds of a whip.
Yet other images include the interior space of a nineteenth-century home, meant to be that of Douglass and his first wife, Anna. We witness Anna sewing and Julien provides close-ups of symbolic imagery in their home like the black soldiers who fought for the North in the Civil War. We also see Douglass on a train, no doubt journeying between different sites of his numerous lectures. In this way, the installation prompts us to contemplate the sacrifices made by both Anna and Frederick to facilitate his public-facing activism and the distances he traversed to accurately represent the horrors of slavery to British audiences who were inundated by pro-slavery propaganda and ignorant of what their government and monarchy were orchestrating in colonies like Jamaica.
The installation also represents the power of Douglass’ literacy with images of a black hand writing and turning the pages of a book. To understand the power of this imagery, one need only look at the plethora of historical western oil portraits which feature a rich white person either writing and/or reading, as dramatic assertions of their elite class status, education, and literacy. There is of course, no such trove of similar historical images of black people!
The film also represents Douglass in a lecture hall reciting excerpts of his lectures on photography and the famed, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? The installation concludes with contemporary drone footage of a fourth of July fireworks display in the USA interspersed with night vision images of police and protesters and parades with happy white people waving American flags. After the rendition of Douglass’ stirring lecture though, the spectacular display is rendered ironic or even distasteful since everything and everyone excluded by the American rhetoric of exceptionalism and freedom is exposed.
In our current moment when patriotism is often highjacked by the far right, when cancel culture without historical context or nuance is often weaponized by the far left, and when people of all stripes have abandoned discipline, hard work, learning, and the most basic tenants of human decency, Lessons of the Hour delivers a poignant and timely message. Catch it at the MoMA in New York City until September 28th, 2024.