The first time I encountered Wu Tsang’s Of Whales (2022), I was grateful for its visual reprieve. It was the end of a long, steaming-hot day of speed-walking through the Arsenale for the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, trying and failing once again to see too much art in too little time. After rounding the bend to the Gaggiandre, I stopped to catch my breath, taking pleasure in the cool respite afforded by its covered docks and the softly lapping waves. In this moment in the video’s six-hour loop, the images playing on screen were of an exploding cosmos—something my Xennial brain first interpreted as a very high-definition reworking of a late-’90s Windows screensaver that placed the otherwise frenetic pace of the biennial on pause. Its soundscape was barely audible, perhaps increasing the effect of being portaled to a time-space otherwise, both with the sea and not of it. Sited on the docks of the Gaggiandre, Of Whales was one of the strongest entries in “Milk of Dreams,” a piece that properly harnessed Venice’s maritime history and its ongoing, precarious relation to the water that surrounds (and threatens to overcome) it.
Of Whales, created on the Unity gaming platform and the second video of a trilogy that aims to queer Melville’s Moby Dick, is intimately concerned with the sea—it is a fantasy of the white sperm whale’s sensorial experience of sounding and breaching that transforms the mysterious ocean into deep space, expanding and contracting the scale of both the whale and the other marine creatures (jellyfish, schooling fish) they move alongside. Now installed at the ICA / Boston, the work is accompanied by a musical score composed by Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda and performed by Tapiwa Svovse, Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, Miao Zhao, and Ahya Simone. The score has been processed into an immersive thirty-two-channel sound installation that powerfully reverberates to nonmimetically but poetically approximate the whale’s miles-long descent and its triumphant return to the ocean’s surface. Cloistered in a windowless gallery where a massive screen overtakes the space, the video viscerally overwhelms ICA visitors with the virtual sea while unfortunately also distancing them from the actual harbor just outside; I wished it were possible to utilize the pier to house this piece as done in Venice, for something essential is lost in this dislocation.
Tsang’s first foray into making a video work without human bodies present (even digital ones), Of Whales is a logical next move in the Worcester-born artist’s ongoing considerations of relationality. The connective thread between seemingly disparate projects, from her iconic documentary Wildness (2012) to the Ligia Lewis-choreographed We hold where study (2017), is connection itself, or the tensions and possibilities of being physically, psychologically, and socially entangled with others. In even the seemingly simplest of videos (and my favorite work of hers), the iPhone-shot Girl Talk (2015), Tsang’s attention is constantly attuned to being-with-others: in this work, the poet and theorist Fred Moten dances joyfully in his light-filled backyard and allows himself to be witnessed and held by Tsang and her camera, which captures a moment both tender and opaque. Of Whales, like these earlier works, is an exploration of relation, this time of our connections with more-than-human animals and the watery realms that contain them. Inspired by both Moby Dick and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020), Tsang considers the point of view of the sperm whale itself, imagining it untethered from the commercial hunters who seek to capture and kill it. A speculative exercise in imagining otherwise, Of Whales conjures a visionary post-human oceanscape where non-extractive relations are the norm, rather than a rare exception.
But without being sited in visible proximity to Boston Harbor, where its animations of the sea can exist in dynamic relation to the real, Of Whales reveals the limitations of its digitized form and its creator’s own, actual (non)relation to the ocean. During the opening night conversation with curators Ruth Erickson and Tessa Bachi Haas on February 15, 2024, Tsang admitted her own terror of the ocean, which she was working to overcome by finally taking swimming lessons. Her vulnerable admission confirmed something that I (as a scuba diver for many years) speculated in my viewings of Of Whales in Venice and again in Boston— that, as seductive as the visual spectacle is, it was created by someone who does not know the ocean except through a fearful relation, who must transform the sea into the sky to render it majestic, rather than letting it exist on its own terms. In Wildness, Tsang was able to give voice to an inanimate object—the Silver Platter bar—because she intimately knew its rhythms, the complex dynamics and entanglements that shaped its very being. Of Whales, by contrast, is alienated from its subjects, and in that alienation, can never truly be-with the whale. The piece is thus an ambitious intellectual and technological exercise in expanding the artist’s ways of making video, but is devoid of the emotional core that gives the rest of Tsang’s oeuvre its power.
Taking Wu Tsang seriously as an artist and theorist of relation, I wonder if this feeling of disconnection or alienation from whales is actually, surreptitiously, the real point of Of Whales. If a viewer leaves with an understanding that we can never capture whales’ existence or experience, then perhaps Of Whales has done its work. We have done enough as a species to colonize and capitalize on whales: Ahab was driven mad by his desire to capture Moby Dick; environmental NGOs make the mistake of anthropo-morphizing whales and other endangered mammals to garner our sympathy and donations; documentary filmmakers, fisherfolk, tourists, and scientists track whales endlessly for their own purposes and plans. By placing the whale in the cosmos far from human reach, has Tsang (even inadvertently) shown us the only way to be in ethical relation to whales—by entreating us to stop studying, hunting, and interfering with whales at all? Perhaps this is the true reprieve the video offers—not to give us tired art-goers a moment to rest our eyes, but to give these unknowable creatures of the sea the hope of being free of us.
“Wu Tsang: Of Whales” is on view at the ICA / Boston through Aug 4, 2024.
