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Having tried his hand at feature length narrative with Young Soul Rebels
(1991), with The Attendant Isaac Julien returned to more experimental,
avant-garde filmmaking. As with much of Julien's work, The Attendant positions
racially motivated queer desire within a high-art context, as he follows a
closeted black gallery employee who confronts his repressed homosexual
desires.
The centrepiece of the gallery, and the film itself, is François-Auguste
Biard's 19th century work 'Slaves on the West Coast of Africa'. The painting,
which depicts black slaves at the hands of merciless white oppressors, literally
comes to life when the film's central character is aroused by the arrival of a
white man visiting the gallery. These lurid recreations of the paintings that
adorn the gallery walls are highly sexualised, and notions of slavery and black
history are reconfigured to become subversive fantasies of submission and
domination. Indeed, one scene has the attendant being whipped by his
leather-clad object of desire, only for the roles to be reversed moments later,
when the attendant is shown whipping the white man.
But while the attendant's fantasy life is one of sexual and racial
emancipation, his reality is far from it. A brief sequence set at home with his
wife reveals his closeted lifestyle, and hints at the difficulties gay black men
face in finding social acceptance. Meanwhile, his very presence in the museum
space highlights the absence of black figures in typically white art
environments, with his menial position adding another level to the film's
critique on the expected roles of black men.
Stylistically, the approach to the subject matter is self-consciously
voyeuristic. Much like the paintings that hang on the walls, stereotypical icons
of queer fetishism (leather, whips, bondage gear) are presented as images for
the spectator to enjoy. Julien's probing camera further gives the viewer the
impression of spying on the gallery's inhabitants, who are in turn spying on the
'living' paintings.
This play on spectatorship, voyeurism and the gallery environment itself
makes The Attendant one of Julien's most reflexive film works. He has
continually returned to the museum space in subsequent years, his installations
Vagabondia (2000) and Baltimore (2003) again placing black history and sexuality
within the white-dominated world of contemporary art.
Michael Blyth
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Production stills
