Sven Christian [SC]: Hi everyone. Thanks for coming out. We’re very honoured to have Sean Metzger with us today. Sean is the Associate Professor of Critical Studies, the Vice Chair for Undergraduate Studies, and Head of the PhD Programme in Theater and Performance Studies at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, as well as the President of Performance Studies International.

Metzger works at the intersections of Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese film, performance and sexuality studies. He is currently a Framing The Global fellow with Indiana University and Indiana University Press, for which he is working on a second book, tentatively called The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalisation. Drawn from Metzger’s research into the work of Isaac Julien and William Kentridge, the focus of this discussion will look at how each artist approaches the shifting nature of ideas, cultures, and peoples across time and place. Before we begin talking about the artists and their work, I’d like to hash out some of the larger ideas about globalisation that you tackle in your book.

Sean Metzger [SM]: First I would like to say thank you to Sven for organising this event. I appreciate it very much. It’s 8 AM here so I’m a little bit out of sorts, but I will do my best to be coherent. The term ‘globalisation’ is often understood to designate a world order in which capitalism as a mode of production has assumed the organising role in social, political, and economic life.

A lot of people trace the genealogy of globalisation to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the birth of the corporations that emerged to facilitate that migration of people, goods, and money. I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to talk about globalisation with China at the centre of it; about the interconnectedness of globalisation across material and affective registers (shipping lanes and son on); and the ways that different kinds of media facilitate socially produced emotional responses across a really wide range of geographies.

A couple years ago I was doing an essay on the shooting that took place at a gay bar called Pulse in Orlando. There were a lot of people expressing their affiliation and so on online. I think that’s a demonstration of affect that indicates a kind of globalisation that is being produced: this notion that people are affiliated live, across geographies. Media for me is also a primary way to interrogate economic relations, political affiliations, and new kinds of social formations. The book is designed to look at these through the artistic genre of seascapes which emerged in the Dutch Golden Age.

The Dutch East India Company was one of the first transnational corporations to emerge in the Western world, and had an initial role in the China trade. As such we can mark one point of transnational capitalism to that moment of Dutch imperialism. In the Netherlands a lot of people took their livelihood to sea. It changed the way they engaged with work and travel in their everyday lives. For me that became an interesting way to think about how globalisation networks started to form, through these overseas exchanges.

As an art form seascapes expressed such concerns, as well as those around transnational finance, but there was no equivalent genre in Chinese art history. This is partly because in China there was no overseas colonisation. Between 1644 to 1911 the Chinese mainly focused on inland governance and trade. There has been recent work on nineteenth-century China that talks about Chinese terrestrial imperialism in places like Tibet, but there is no tradition of overseas travel like there is in the West. The seascape doesn’t emerge as a genre there. What happens, however, if you put Chinese cultural flows into the discourse of seascapes?

The book traces this phenomenon back to the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–9), all the way through to the contemporary moment, ending in South Africa with William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) and Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2009). Those pieces are meant to think differently about globalisation manifesting through different oceanic frames, not only about the Chinese Atlantic but also South Africa as a pivotal point between the Indian and Atlantic oceans.

SC: How do you think art, and in particular new media, might be equipped to tackle this complex phenomenon, as opposed to other forms of media, such as journalism?

SM: Ten Thousand Waves is based on a human-trafficking case. There were twenty-three cockle pickers working in Morecambe Bay. They were not told by their foreman that they needed to come back before dark, and they ended up being surrounded by water. All of them drowned, but they knew they were going to drown, so they placed cellphone calls to their families before they died.

Those people didn’t register in many journalistic accounts before the incident. It was only after their deaths that they rose to public prominence. I’m interested in the afterlife that media provides and the question of how we recreate their subjectivities or their personhoods with only scant records of their lives. I think art is a really useful way to think differently about human relations, about what might have been and what could be.

SC: You’ve spoken before about the Palermo Protocol, and the various points of visibility that were reached due to each individual’s status as a victim of human traffic. Could you elaborate on this?

SM: The Palermo Protocols were passed in 2000 by the United Nations to regulate human trafficking. By regulating it they also defined it. In order to obtain human traffic status—and obviously that matters because then you can seek asylum—the U.N. said that you have to demonstrate victimhood. By the same token if you’re going to be convicted under the same protocol, you have to have it shown that you were the person who dispossessed these other people of their livelihood and agency. In other words, you don’t become a person within human traffic discourse until you dispossess someone or you are dispossessed. I’m interested in that contradiction. We’re thinking about people, yet journalism discusses traffic victims only after the fact (so lives are determined by the trajectories of trafficking). After the event journalists will ask what perpetrators’ or victims’ lives were like, but the scope of the narrative has already been predetermined in some ways by the fact that we don’t consider these people until they emerge in human traffic discourse. What matters to journalists is when victims started getting trafficked and the point at which either they are released from that bondage or they die. The visibility of that person is predicated on this predetermined discourse, based on how the human traffic protocol defines them.

SC: One of the other things that you’ve mentioned, that we can talk about just now, is the way in which Ten Thousand Waves de/reconstructs these narratives, but before we do, I’d like to try locate Julien’s aesthetic development by looking at his early involvement in English and queer cinema…

SM: In the 1980s British cinema (through Channel 4 and a couple of other programmes) had started these projects to fund diverse filmmakers. Before that the British New Wave of the 1950s had a very masculinist, working-class, white sensibility. In the 80s, as part of multiculturalism, there were programmes designed to open up opportunities for folks of colour, for queer folks, for women, and Isaac Julien was a beneficiary of that kind of programming.

The work that matters most here is a short film called The Attendant (1993) which is a fantasy about a black museum attendant. The protagonist looks at various images in the museum which become animated through live action. A lot of them are reenactments of the images that become these sadomasochistic scenes. The film opened up a set of questions about race and access. It anticipated a lot of his later work in terms of museum installations and draws on some of his earlier concerns, like in Young Soul Rebels (1991), which was about how young, disaffected black youth in England go about their daily life and how they produce culture.

When the funding dried up for multicultural projects like that I think Julien was looking for new artistic and commercial opportunities. The gallery became a space that facilitated his continued filmmaking. In a gallery most people don’t sit through an entire screening so he started to do things with multiple screens, thinking through different kinds of spectatorial engagement.

I talked to him about eight years ago. By that point he had done quite a few of his other installations, which were much less overtly queer, less overtly about identity politics. They were more about issues of human migration and so on. He thought this development matured his work, and I think such a shift probably has to do with the way gays and lesbians were normalised in the 90s.

In Ten Thousand Waves the queer element is sort of out, unless you’re thinking about the way that certain screen icons produce identifications. The interest in migration and how people inhabit this capitalist world however continues.

SC: You went to see Ten Thousand Waves installed in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), before seeing it here. Could you tell us about this experience?

SM: The atrium space at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is sixty feet high. The museum has five floors, it’s quite open, and there are a lot of walkways. The screens were suspended in the atrium at different levels. You had to look directly up at some of them. Walking around you can see the various screens from different angles, but it’s a very large space, so you can never see the entire thing in one line. That’s by design. He wants you to be peripatetic, to walk around. In the MOMA exhibition you had to, because some of the screens were so high you really couldn’t see them from the floor.

Julien’s interest in the mobile spectator is taken from the immersive theatre practices. In the MOMA exhibition there is a little plaque that read something like “If you are viewing this exhibition, you consent to being a part of it.”

You were also allowed to take photographs or make videos and put them online. As a result, people inadvertently became a part of the exhibition. Through the making of different reproductions the exhibition proliferates, in the same way that the actual tragedy of the cockle pickers multiplied — the narrative, the way it was represented, its uptake in various forms of media... The recordings of those final phone calls became significant in the trials, for example, when they were trying to convict. For me that was a really interesting part of the exhibition at MOMA. However, that exhibition space is also filled with ambient noise, and you can’t really hear. The sound bounces off all the walls and all the screens. It’s a central area so people are moving through to get to other exhibition spaces.

I went to see it four times in one week and sat for several hours at a time. On one day I sat through three entire screenings. Afterwards I realised there was a whole soundtrack that was happening that I couldn’t really make out. At Zeitz MOCAA the space is so different, you can actually hear things. Another difference is that all the screens at your museum were at the same level as you. It was a different kind of immersion. Especially when the water was around you, it felt like you were almost in it.

SC: Perhaps you could talk about the content — Maggie Cheung, for example. I only discovered that she was a famous actress through research. Obviously that has implications for people who might be more familiar with her work. Then there’s the folklore and so on…

SM: Shanghai’s skyline changes all the time. There is always a new tallest building. One of my favourite scenes is when Maggie Cheung, who plays Mazu, goes up to the skyline of some of these buildings. Anyone who knows Chinese cinema knows Maggie Cheung as an actress. She had made over a hundred films. In the late 80s, early 90s, she started to become more selective about her roles; she started doing more art films. She did Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002) and several other projects. She was married to Olivier Assayas (1998–2001). He is a French director. Together they did Irma Vep (1996) and Clean (2004), so she has a kind of transnational mobility as well. She’s an interesting choice.

The other featured actress in Ten Thousand Waves is Zhao Tao, who is significant in her own right. She is mostly associated with the films of the famous documentary director Jia Zhangke. He makes work about Chinese capitalism taking over everything, so a lot of the documentaries and narrative features are about the dystopia that China is now producing. She has a large role in those projects.

Those two actresses create a context for people who know Chinese culture. They give the installations a different kind of profile. It makes you aware that the whole artwork is about image-making in some ways. I think that’s why you have so many shots of the green screen. When they are hoisting Maggie Cheung up you can see the actual labour that goes into producing a star actress. That is the image on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. So that’s one part that interests me: how one’s image gets refracted in different ways.

The folklore is something that I had to learn. There is a myth from the Fujian Province about this place called Yishan Island. The myth is about these Chinese sailors who were at sea and got lost. They were in danger of being swallowed by a storm. Mazu, the ghost-spectral figure that Maggie plays, leads them to this island for refuge. When the storm clears they come back to shore but can never again find the island. Mazu is worshipped as a travel saint that protects you. I think Julien was interested in this politics of destination, because in Ten Thousand Waves there is this idea about returning. Mazu leads the sailors back to a Chinese landscape. There are shots of picturesque mountains, gorges, and so on. It’s interesting because if you’ve been to China you know that most of the time the air is quite polluted. One wonders what they did to clean it up!

I think that folktale is one of the animating parts of the installation as a whole, as is the inclusion of a famous calligrapher, whose writing you’ve probably seen. He paints characters that drip from glass. The characters translate to ‘Ten Thousand Waves’. Here again, Julien foregrounds the labour in artistic creation — you see this person painting and then you see his assistants cleaning it up. I like the way that Julien constantly foregrounds how various labourers have to participate in this very large artistic project to make it happen. That said, if I were to critique it I would say there’s no explicit mention of how much money this project has made, who gets paid what and so on.

SC: Seeing the construction of the set behind Maggie Cheung and the assistants who clean the characters off the glass is a feature that is common to William Kentridge’s work: his use of animation, for example, to visualise the application and erasure of charcoal. Even the figures that cross the screen appear to be doing very labour intensive things. There is also a kind of ghosting in both. Watching More Sweetly Play The Dance is a bit like being a spectator in Plato’s Cave. Do you draw any parallels between these two works in your book, or are they stand alone chapters?

SM: I’m drawing parallels in so far as I view them both as assemblages. In the book they are two separate chapters because I’d never seen them exhibited together until I came to you. My visit made me rethink what I had written, because the experience of one felt like it changed the way I saw the other. They both use a lot of screens, and demand that you move around a bit. They’re both inflected by Chineseness, but quite obliquely. I talked to some people about the Kentridge exhibit and they hadn’t made any connections to the Chinese components. One example is towards the end, when Dada Masilo does her dance, carrying a rifle. It’s so iconic. That’s a scene directly lifted from The Red Detachment of Women (1964). As such I’m interested in the way that they assemble different aesthetic elements, from the contemporary through to folklore. They don’t work within a timeline. There’s a juxtaposition of all of these different images from the past to the contemporary, from the mythic and the historic.

I first saw More Sweetly Play the Dance at the EYE Museum in Amsterdam. I had just come off a boat so was already thinking about seascapes, or at least riverscapes. To me the marshy environment suggested in Kentridge’s work registers as a seascape or something close to it, a space that is in-between the terrestrial and oceanic.

Both Julien’s and Kentridge’s works are radically different in the Chinese cultures that they access and the concerns that they express. I think both have this vaguely humanist concern about how we survive in this world. But in that regard I think Kentridge is intentionally less focused. I think he had in mind a specific landscape of Johannesburg that then gets translated to something else, through the incorporation of 1960s and 1970s Chinese media, icons from Roman history, and so on, mashing them all together on the outskirts of the city.

SC: You mentioned a ‘politics of destination’ in relation to Mazu, and our desire to find a sense of home within a place. I’d like to talk more about the ghosting that happens in both of these works: how these people shift between places without necessarily finding refuge, or how the iconography used in More Sweetly Play The Dance could be viewed as a kind of stand-in for each figure’s identity. To what extent do you think that type of shadowing creates a surface for people to reconsider images?

SM: I like that formulation because I’m interested in surfaces. The screens are interesting because they give you so much information, but the spectator’s encounter is necessarily, in a productive way, quite superficial. There are no narrative cues given. You just watch and put things together for yourself. In that way I think a lot about how people place themselves, trying to figure out where they belong. In our historical moment I think that the migration of people around the world has exposed many tensions. For example, you see a lot of tension among new Chinese immigrants and local peoples across the continent of Africa, in terms of what is happening to businesses. These issues raise concerns about how people do or don’t assimilate, and the historical legacies that previous waves of immigration have left. In South Africa there are Chinese people coming through to work the gold mines. During the apartheid years when the PRC was recognised by the UN, South Africa ended up recognising Taiwan because neither country had been recognised by the international government. Those ghosts also haunt the way that we interpret how Chinese people are manifesting in places now.

In Ghostly Matters (2008) Avery Gordon wrote that ghosts are symbols, that they embody the social contradictions that have no resolution — these lingering things that you can’t quite process. That is certainly true of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The legacies of that in the United States are very clear. We still have so much anti-black violence on a everyday basis. It’s normalised now. I find it interesting in the way that it also informs how I read these exhibitions. When they’re cited in different places you think about the domestic politics of those areas as well.

SC: It’s interesting to see how the iconic currency of something like The Red Detachment of Women can shift from its historic context to end up in an artwork, viewed in South Africa as one of many figures that drift across the screen. One could easily miss it.

SM: During the Chinese Cultural Revolution — from 1966 to 1976 — Mao’s third wife Jiang Qing was put in charge of China’s cultural propoganda. She wanted all of China’s art to raise class consciousness. In order to do that they had to eliminate most of the performance work that was being done and focus on eight model operas. If you lived in China from 66 to 76 you repeatedly saw the same eight shows over and over again. The narrative of Chinese Socialist Realism is similar to that of a melodrama: you see two people going off into the sunset at the end, except they’re not going off to be with each other but to join the Communist Party.

The Red Detachment of Women is based on a historical group of people in 1931 who were an anti-Japanese resistance movement in Hainan island, off the southern coast of China. Hainan island has had a kind of excentric with greater China. Now it’s called the Chinese Hawaii. It’s a resort area. The model opera celebrates an anti-imperial action in 1931. It’s campy as well. It’s a combination of opera movements and classical ballet. Interestingly, most Western cultural products were not allowed in the cultural revolution, but because Jiang Qing liked the ballet she let it be part of the model operas.

Kentridge’s citation of that piece was, for me, quite complicated because I’m not sure what it means within the context of South Africa, except to say that there are these moments of revolutionary fervour where things are in real transition. I imagine there is a lot excitement surrounding transitional moments in post-apartheid South Africa, the feeling of something changing in the air. I think people in China also felt this for a lot of the twentieth century. Although such sentiment might have been mitigated during the civil war, there remains in twentieth-century Chinese history this possibility on the horizon. The most generous reading of the Cultural Revolution would be to say that’s what it was aiming for: this desire to create something that had never been seen before. The fact that this figure comes at the end of More Sweetly Play The Dance suggests a kind of hopefulness to me. Partly because the music is at times quite upbeat.

SC: It’s interesting that you bring the idea of hope in here. I was watching a lecture that Kentridge gave at Yale University called “Peripheral Thinking.” During the talk he draws on different moments, some personal, some historic, making associations between Johannesburg, China, France, and back again, looking at all these different moments that somehow connect.

One of his thoughts is about a photograph that David Goldblatt took in 1980 in Boksburg called Girl in her new tutu on the stoep of her parents’ house, Boksburg. As the title suggests, the picture depicts a young ballet dancer standing on the edge of her toes on a porch in this very harsh Joburg sunlight. The dancer’s expression is full of dreams and aspirations, yet Kentridge refers to the image as ‘merciless’. It reminds him of his sister growing up, and the pain that she would endure learning ballet. When Kentridge started working on Notes Towards a Model Opera, doing research on things like The Red Detachment of Women he couldn’t help making these associations. I’m interested to hear what you think such associations might say about the way that we internalise things that we’re not necessarily or directly familiar with, things that have a personal resonance, in the same way that perhaps Isaac Julien could relate on a personal level to the invisibility of many migrant labourers in the UK?

SM: Everyone has their own interpretation of an artwork based on their own life experiences. Because these are more abstracted works, they lend themselves to projections. They are literally projections after all. On some level I think they’re meant to evoke whatever associations you have. I know for Kentridge’s installation, the location is quite specific to Johannesburg. I’ve spent hardly any time there, so for me that reference doesn’t exist at all. It becomes this seascape. The same with the Julien work. Julien has a relationship with Maggie Cheung, he knows her, but I spent six months living in Shanghai, so it’s the cityscape for me that is evocative.

The interesting thing about the screen is that your own silhouette is projected onto it as you move through the exhibition space. You become part of the artwork, whether you mean to or not. You’re invited to think through what it means that your form is taking part in this spectacle. It suggests a filling out of something that will be completed later on. Both works ask the spectator to participate in the manner, but they don’t give you much help in terms of creating meaning out of such image making. Part of me likes that. I like the idea of being lost at sea.

When I was watching More Sweetly Play The Dance in your museum I noticed that people were sitting and waiting for the whole thing to be finished, whereas in the Julien, I sat there for several hours and people would come in, go through a sequence, and then leave. Depending on what they saw they would have a remarkably different experience. The scenes from Shanghai suggest this advanced industrial capitalism, whereas the scenes of Mazu flying over the Chinese landscape are totally different. The scenes of water, where you have the voiceover and the helicopter looking for the bodies, doesn’t necessarily register as a reference to the Morecambe Bay incident. People often don’t know what it is. So depending on what part of the exhibition you access, you have a very different relationship to the work.

SC: From a curatorial perspective, I found the placement of Isaac Julien between Glenn Ligon’s Runaways (1993), and Mohau Modisakeng’s work quite interesting. Again, because of their relationship to surface representations. The same with Kentrdige being placed in a gallery adjacent to El Anatsui’s Dissolving Continents. Do you have any thoughts about these works in relation to other artwork on exhibition?

SM: This was my first time through the museum as a whole and quite a few of the artists are new to me. The amount of video work in the museum surprised me. I’m interested in the curatorial intent. For me it registers the way that we live in this mediated world. Even if you’re looking at one exhibition you’re often hearing another one in the background. There’s one where you walk across a skyway into another building, and there’s a video projection on the wall?

SC: Addio del Passato by MBE Yinka Shonibare…

SM: In a phenomenological way, that installation also makes you question how you experience the world. You’re on a ledge looking at this gigantic image, but the sound also reverberates around you. I quite like that. It’s about how we see, feel, or otherwise experience things. I’ve been to a lot of museums and it’s quite difficult to achieve, because there’s so much repeated engagement with different kinds of media.

Audience: I’m interested in where physical reality meets illusion, and how one takes part in it. How do you personally interact and shape that reality in the present moment?

SM: There’s a documentary-like film about the cockle pickers by Nick Broomfield called Ghosts (2006). Nick is an ethnographic filmmaker. He went to live with migrant workers in England and then created a reconstruction of their lives. Although most of the cockle pickers were men he chose a women as the protagonist who had herself been a migrant worker. He also masqueraded as one, actually as an Afrikaner, to say that he was in England trying to get work. That piece has a narrative, in the sense that it has a resolution. At the end the women is reunited with her son. It also tells you that the cockle pickers’ bodies were not claimed by England or China. The families could not get the bodies returned to them, because they were already in debt for having to get their kin overseas. The film ends with a plea to audiences to donate money to the families who are left behind and to help reunite them with these bodies.

I’m interested in the contrast between the Julien piece and this Broomfield film. On the one hand both have similar goals — trying to recreate the subjectivity of the people who drowned — but they have very different takes on how that is possible. For Julien it is impossible to reconstruct what is lost. Instead you get impressions, surface appearances that refract life experiences mitigated by your own perspective.

With Broomfield there is a clear goal at the end. Whether or not you engage the material you’re supposed to give money. For me that’s illustrative of the difference between how reality gets taken up and what the point of it is. Both are asking you to think through what your own position is in relation to this material.

I’m half Chinese. My scholarship and my career is really based around my interactions with Chineseness, so there is an investment on my part in mining these resources, within the works themselves and how they speak to Chinese globalisation. I think that’s one part of a very complicated assemblage of things. I also feel like there’s a whole bunch of stuff in there that I don’t know well, things I see that I’m confused by or don’t know how they resonate in the South African global context. A text like Broomfield’s makes me think differently, but it doesn’t ask me to really think through questions. It poses the questions and answers them for me. I guess that’s what I would say about how I personally imagine myself immersed in a reality and how I’m implicated in the artworks themselves, because I’m also producing a narrative of globalisation that’s counter to dominant narratives of globalisation.

Audience: Could you please comment further on the representation of trauma and identity in Ten Thousand Waves?

SM: Many people talk about trauma as being non-representable. It’s traumatic because you can’t really frame it. I think Julien’s work is more explicitly relevant to trauma than Kentridge’s because it’s about an event that happened. When I first saw Ten Thousand Waves the cockle pickers were not visually represented. In this version I noticed still images of some of the people who had died. I can’t remember if that was in the MOMA version, but that could just be me being old. In my first viewing I saw analogues to these people and their experiences. That was easier for me than actually seeing the image of a dead person without any context. The latter display raised a different set of ethical questions, because I’m not sure what it means to put up a dead man’s image within an installation without explicating what that might mean.

It’s also complicated for me to write about. The question for me in my writing is what you do with that? Is it appropriate to represent them? I often talk about this with audiences when I talk about this work. Some people say, “OH, you can just list their names,” and I’m like “Ok, well that’s one kind of solution, but…” It’s something that I think about a lot because obviously if you’re writing about something like this you’re interested in the ethics — or lack of ethics — that inform the world that we live in.

It’s not a direct answer but it is a point of reflection for me, so thank you for bringing it up. I think a lot about what you do with traumatic events and with people’s lives who are now lost. Im interested in how people relate to each other in this moment, with people being exploited all the time. Literally all the time. Just by going to get groceries you’re participating in an economy where people are being exploited somewhere in the world. How you responsibly address it is another matter I think, but I like that both of those installations raise those kinds of questions.