The story is known. In search of freedom and adventure, Ishmael goes to sea. There he ends up on board with the strange Captain Ahab, who is obsessed with the white whale Moby Dick. That doesn’t end well. Or for Ishmael, because he survives as the only crew member of the tragic ship Pequod. For many American teenagers, Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville compulsory reading in high school.
But American artist Wu Tsang didn’t read it at that age. She was convinced that a ‘great American novel’ would not be for her: ‘I thought it was a very masculine story, glorifying standard American heroism.’ Of course, that doesn’t fit with the artist who makes activist films about, for example, racism and LGBTI communities.
Still, she ventured on the book a few years ago. In a roundabout way, after attending a lecture on the Marxist writer CLR James and his interpretation of Moby Dick† What turned out? It was love at first sight: ‘The book is a world unto itself.’ In that world, Tsang discovered current topics: ‘Whaling was for human gain, the whale had to die to earn money. That is how we treat the earth. Just think of the oil industry.’
If you want to immerse yourself in this world (and watch out for the whale), you can visit the Holland Festival on Friday and Saturday. There you can see Tsang’s version of Moby Dick, an almost silent film with live music by the string orchestra Bryggen. It is a masterpiece, a wonderful magical realistic mix of film, music, sounds, performance and dance. It has become a tragic adventure and love story.
This performance was created by several people, with Tsang’s art collective Moved by the Motion as the hard core. This group also includes the acclaimed African-American philosopher and poet Fred Moten. He plays a special role in the film: as a kind of omnipotent and omniscient narrator and at the same time a survivor of the Pequod. A clever twist from Tsang to this ‘great American novel’ to allow a black man to survive as an alternative ending. This character sits deep in the sea, perhaps in the belly of a whale, and there apparently lives out of time, perhaps immortal.
This alternative form of survival, in a whale, reminded me of the installation Osedax by Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher. I saw it two years ago in the Fries Museum. Movies with underwater creatures are shown in a black wooden shack. The artists were inspired by the ‘zombie worm’ osedax, which lives on whale bones on the deep sea floor. According to Cleijne and Gallagher, the marks these worms carve on the whale bones can be regarded as a language that speaks of a distant past, the past of the many enslaved Africans who drowned in the Atlantic Ocean while crossing to the US. Unfortunately, that language can no longer be deciphered, these stories have been lost.