Girl Talk
2015 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
4:00 minutes
Wu Tsang
Poet and writer Fred Moten gesticulates joyously during Girl Talk by artist Wu Tsang. Moten is dressed in light drag—a studded cloak hanging loosely over his body, his eyes and mouth adorned with makeup. Filmed in a sunlit garden, Moten whirls in slow motion to the trickle of a lion-headed water fixture and the acapella rendition of jazz standard Girl Talk by singer Josiah Wise. In the video, Moten shakes his finger with a smile as Josiah Wise intones about the “ups and downs” that gossip tracks. Cloth cuts through space, crystals gleam, and the video becomes a song of praise to deep relationality. This relationality extends to the viewer, too: the final line of the song in the video divulges: “this girl talk, talks of you.” Tsang chose to shoot Girl Talk on an iPhone because she wanted the image to both reference ubiquitous daily communications and have the capacity to “fall apart”. In slow motion or “dragged time,” the lineaments of blackness and/or transness and/or queerness are pulled forth from Tsang’s combination of sound and image. Moten has in his own work offered the term “entanglement” to describe the way multiple identities can exist distinctly, yet inseparably from one another. Such entanglements play out in Tsang’s video, not only along the lines of race, sexuality, and gender, but also between camera, image, and sound.
Wu Tsang’s work is often framed in terms of her identity as a trans woman of color. But Tsang deals in rejecting the simplistic confines of identification. For those who are culturally what Tsang refers to as “multi-multi”, simple descriptors become inefficient to describe realities which bloom in the liminal spaces between speakable meaning. Tsang’s practice is part of a body of largely collaborative work produced in the form of performances, events, installations, films, and videos. Merging these artistic forms with grassroots activism and community organizing, she maintains a fluid, unfixed practice intent on questioning the role of the artist in relationship to certain marginalized groups.
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