About This Artwork
The Long Road to Mazatlán2000
16 mm black-and-white and color film, sound, transferred to three-channel digital video (rear projection on screen); 18 min. loop
Gift of Donna and Howard Stone, 2007.41
Contemporary Art
Not on Display
Isaac Julien creates highly seductive works that investigate the politics of gender, identity, race, and sex in order to engage with, and often subvert, stereotypical representations. Over the course of his thirty-year career, he has shifted his focus from feature-length motion pictures to video and film installations because this format allows him to employ various techniques that help challenge the seamless, linear quality that characterizes mainstream cinema. The Long Road to Mazatlán begins with a composite image, reminiscent of CinemaScope, stretching across three screens that are placed side by side. This soon breaks apart to reveal divisions that operate either as separate parts of the same space, revealing multiple perspectives on a single setting or action, or as a composite image composed of misaligned parts. The artist has stated that the use of multiple screens allows him “to explore certain compositional ideas that are impossible with a single screen.”
The work’s title refers to Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie (1944), in which a family recalls their abandonment by a father who later sends a postcard from Mazatlán, Mexico. Julien explains: “He was going to a place of no return. So Mazatlán is a mythic space.” In responding to Williams, Julien conjures the poeticism of the American South. The artist created The Long Road to Mazatlán in collaboration with choreographer Javier De Frutos while he was in residence at ArtPace, San Antonio. In the film, two cowboys, played by De Frutos and Phillippe Riera, become entangled in an attraction that unfolds into a tale of lust, longing, and fantasy. Julien uses the settings, costumes, and props of a typical western, although the actions of his protagonists undermine the genre’s hypermasculine stereotype. “I’m very interested in seducing audiences into scenarios or tableaux that they might not usually be drawn to or interested in.” In this way, Julien’s film is informed by—and responds to—the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, whose Lonesome Cowboys (1968) explores the sexual politics of the western in a similar fashion.
Alternately linear and layered, Julien’s narrative shifts between representation and fantasy, showing the characters within a series of richly constructed tableaux inclu-ding a cattle auction, a saloon, and a swimming pool, their bodies moving in rhythmic relationship. Such vignettes often make reference to art history and popular culture. The surreal colors and interplay between characters in the pool sequence, for instance, seem to take their inspiration from David Hockney’s richly colored pool paintings, which capture the relaxed, decadently sun-soaked aspect of gay culture in late-1960s Los Angeles. The most explicit allusion is to Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976), in which Robert DeNiro’s character stands before a mirror imagining a confrontation in which he draws a gun and asks, “Are you talking to me?” Underscoring the impor-tance of the gaze, Julien reprises this moment in a motel room, with Riera asking his reflection, “Are you looking at me?”
In the film’s closing scenes, which are reminiscent of Stephan Elliot’s Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994), the men perform a jerky, deconstructed dance on opposite sides of a road. Three women dressed as showgirls appear in the center, pirouetting as they approach the camera. Julien elaborates: “For me the women symbolically represent a parting from the gender roles that ordinarily would be assigned to them. In the conventional moving-image culture, they would be dancing with the cowboys or be in a position of becoming a vessel for something else. Here they represent a stereotype or hyperbole.”