Wu Tsang

Girl Talk

In light drag—a studded cloak hanging loosely over his body, his eyes and mouth adorned with makeup, poet and writer Fred Moten gesticulates joyously during Girl Talk by Wu Tsang. There are so many choices when it comes to moving-image making, especially with the all available technologies and formats, which means that one can choose a lot of different ways to communicate. “When I made Girl Talk we ended up just shooting on an iPhone,” says Tsang. “I realize now, it was because I wanted the image to fall apart, or be barely there, and also to reference intimate daily communication. 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 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”—a cousin to “mess,” perhaps—to describe the way multiple identities can exist distinctly yet inseparably from one another. Such entanglements play out in Tsang’s work, not only along the lines of race, sexuality, and gender, but also between camera, image, and sound. 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.”