Tag: America

Postcard from Princeton

Stuart Anderson-Davis introduces his irregular column, reporting on all-American stories from across the pond

“The British shudder at the latest American vulgarity, then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.”

So said Alistair Cooke – the late doyen of British journalism, not the indefatigable opening batsman – who for nearly sixty years broadcast his Letter from America to an audience eager for news, reviews, trends and occasional gossip from the New World.

Cooke’s quip captures the complex and contradictory attitude of the British to their former colonial subjects – fluctuating from open hostility and patronising disapproval to cultural inspiration and begrudging respect, sometimes all at once.

Cooke’s weekly portrait of 20th century America did much to shape these views in Britain (and further afield), harnessing the BBC’s vast reach and his unique position of trust in an age before 24/7 news and social media gave every loudmouth a megaphone. The programme was extraordinarily successful – running for a marathon 2,869 episodes, setting broadcast records and cementing Cambridge-educated Cooke’s position as an unlikely “national treasure”. From historical events to current affairs, Letters from America didn’t patronise or preach, but provided a thoughtful, nuanced insight into American life.

But why this nostalgia for one dead journalist? Why sentimentalise a time when charismatic experts like Cooke had a popular platform to inform, rather than being dismissed as elitist and out of touch?

Well, the first reason is that the United States has never been in greater need of an interpreter like Cooke to share its stories with the rest of the world. The nation’s image has – perhaps more than ever before – become inextricably tied to the behaviour of one single individual: a ridiculous, dangerous and iconic blonde who dominates the narrative and overseas media coverage of a country of 328 million souls. When it comes to British interest in America, our focus is pretty much limited to the White House and there’s lots we’re missing out on. 

The second reason is purely selfish. This author has recently moved from London to the USA (to the college town of Princeton – hardly the embodiment of “Real America”, but there you go…) and careered headlong into American life: society, culture, fashion, politics, sport, accent confusion and more. Quite simply, there’s plenty of interesting things happening in this country and one extra expat who thinks it might be fun to write about it.

So that’s the plan for this irregular column – Postcard from Princeton – a touching homage to and/or shameless rip off from Cooke’s blueprint, depending on your perspective. The plan is to tell American stories; profile American figures (alive and dead); explore uniquely American trends; review American books and films and, well, you get the picture.

From exploring college culture (elite ‘secret societies’, admission scandals, fluid pronoun politics and much more) to the enduring curse/cult of The Kennedy’s, through to reviewing the first documentary by the Obama’s production company and sampling the flavours of live Major League Baseball, there’s plenty to inspect. Who knows, we may even stumble upon the next “vulgarity” set to take the Old Country by storm.

Jesse Ball: On Freedom

Freedom is often considered a byword for individual liberty, and nowhere more so than in the US. Perhaps it’s time for a new definition.

Image courtesy of Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress

Let us picture a room, a rather small room, but one outfitted sufficiently that people may live there. Let us say four people can live there. These people wash their clothes, cook their meals, conduct their toilet, sleep, socialise – and all of it in the space of the room. Suddenly, one day, one of the inhabitants says: “It is my right to have one quarter of the space. None of you can come into that space. In that space, I may do as I like.” He has a toilet brought in and installed, a shower, a mini-kitchen, a washer. That quadrant of the room now is piled high with things. He sits in the middle of it. Meanwhile, in the other three quadrants, the inhabitants go on with their existence. They bowed to his demand, but in truth, the overall happiness of the denizens has decreased. This is because, in permitting him to go his own way without regard for anyone, they have lost several things. They have lost one quarter of the space. They have lost the workings of consensus as to what happens in the overall (still contiguous) space. And they have lost him – a person, who, though perhaps somewhat selfish, helped them all to pass the time. The division of the space into quarters, and the taking of one quarter, is an artificial thing, and in its artifice, it injures the community as a whole.

If you were living in that space, many things that you like doing would come to an end when the partitioning occurred. The full space of the room is no longer available for momentary uses, for games, celebrations. After the washing of clothes, there might not be much room for hanging. In any case, a rude wall must now be stared at, with all its negative implications. And then worries would begin, at first on the basis of empathy: What is going on in the other quarter? Why he doesn’t he want to share life with us?These feelings might eventually turn to distrust, tribalism.

*

Freedom is thought of in many ways. As a word, it is, like any other, not just subject to use, but, in fact, is its use. It is the aggregate of its use. And so we cannot say a person is wrong to use the word freedom in one way or another simply because we disagree. There is nothing to disagree with. You can call your dog Freedom. 

We can, however, say that a particular use of freedom turns it into something vile. Or that a use of freedom is not continuous with the history of the word as we understand it. If that is true, then it is important to examine it and see how we should receive it. The advantage of cloaking the new usage of words in words that have prior sacred meaning is that it makes them unobjectionable. Why is that? It is because people do not realise they should object to what is sacred. 

In America, people love to talk about freedom. We like to talk about religious freedom, and our right to self-determination. However foolish it is, Americans are proud to have crossed the ocean, pioneered across the plains, etcetera. Why is it foolish? Because we did not do it. Furthermore, in doing it, our forefathers demolished entire cultures, eradicating them from the face of the earth. Yet we are proud of this manifest destiny, of this constant pursuit of our pleasure described as freedom.

Let us look at some specific uses of freedom.

Freedom in America has become, on the one hand – in poor America, in black America – the right to escape the prejudice of others, to escape or avoid the impossible burdens of a tortuous legal, financial, educational system – even, in some remarkable cases, to transcend, to defeat it, for a short while. We will return to this definition.

On the other hand, in the dominant America, freedom is something else, something to my mind horrific and disgusting. It is a person’s right to do as they like without reference to anyone else. 

Do we, in fact, have this right? Is this second version a meaningful definition of freedom?

I would propose that freedom is not the above. Freedom is the ability of a person to take up responsibilities to others in a community, responsibilities that are desired by others. It is the freedom to participate as an organism in the larger organism formed by interaction. The responsibilities extend not just to the members of the group, but to all other life forms on the planet. Freedom is the freedom to be a realised person in relationship with the world as a whole. 

It is not the right to separate yourself from others and behave in a fashion that injures them. You have no right to cause suffering.

Having the above definition, we now can see that the use of freedom such as it is in poor America – the right to not be endlessly and unfairly dominated so that your life is flattened into a painful degenerative prostration; the right instead to be permitted to form healthy communities, to treat others gently, to not be looking every moment over your shoulder for the supposed agents of justice – we can see that this use of freedom is legitimate because it is implied in our definition. It is a precursor to our right as an organism to form healthy relationships, our right to be responsible to others and for others.

It is this right that is ignored when a family is broken up on the slave block. It is this right that continues to be ignored in the United States, as a function of the stock market, of the prison system, of the manner of representation in government, of the rules of government, of the military-industrial complex, even of the corporate legal code, wherein a corporation is considered a person, the equivalent of a human being.

Lawmakers do not have the right to pretend that an imaginary company has the rights of a sentient being and then use those rights to push people out of their homes. Yet this happens every day. If you object to it you are ignored or, in some cases, jailed.

Americans are wrong about many things. They are human, like other humans. But being wrong about this, being wrong about freedom, and feeling somehow that freedom permits America to behave as it likes, without reference to the global situation, leads directly to a scene of eventual universal suffering. It is a juvenile definition. It is a child’s behaviour. We must act together to reject this definition of freedom.

Census, published by Granta, is out now.

This is an extract from issue 22 of Port. To buy or subscribe, click here.

Jules de Balincourt: Precision and Abstraction

Franco-American painter Jules de Balincourt ruminates on abstraction, utopia and the accessibility of art, at the opening of his latest exhibition

Another Divided Island, 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

If contemporary art is frequently found to be conceptually obscure, exasperatingly self-referential or weighed down with lofty ideals, then the vibrant works of Brooklyn-based artist Jules de Balincourt may be just the antidote. With nothing more new-age than oil on panel, he has produced paintings that project a powerful radiance from within an abstracted haze. Imposing landscapes inhabited by roaming communities, each work is arrestingly aestheticised in a way another artist might find beneath them, but De Balincourt owns it. “Art for me, it always was about beauty and seduction at a certain level, the first thing that draws you to art is to be pulled into it, seduced by it.” He hurriedly adds, “but it can’t just be sugar-coated sweetness, I need an edge or tension or… I like the idea of these paintings standing at a crossroad where it could go either way. I like to leave that suspense.”

If Queens Ruled 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

De Balincourt was born in Paris, although from the age of nine he was raised in Malibou Lake, California. He has stated in interviews that he doesn’t identify as either entirely French or American, although with France recently voting in Macron over the far-right, populist Le Pen, it is clear that his mind is very much focused on the troubled and divided times facing the United States. It is almost a year since Trump’s inauguration when I meet him at the installation of his new show, They Cast Long Shadows, at Victoria Miro in Mayfair. Perched on stools in the main gallery, we are surrounded by these new works, and he gesticulates energetically whenever he seeks a point of reference.

Troubled Eden 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

The show is an accumulation of activity from only the past few months, although this is in fact an arbitrary marker. “It’s just a continuation of what I’ve always done in some ways. There’s never a big drastic shift… I consider each show like another page in the same book.” De Balincourt is very precise about his process, if only to articulate its imprecision. Each painting is begun in abstract until, floating in the brushstrokes, “I find something to grasp onto and it eventually becomes figures.” These little populations in turn create a landscape from the floating impressionistic forms by transforming their surroundings into a coherent space. It is unplanned and instinctive, and de Balincourt eschews the use of photography or preliminary sketches. “I’m always working intuitively and unconsciously, I’m interested in my own self-discovery through making this work.”

This approach has informed the show’s installation process too, “I’m interested in the free-associative elements that come up when two completely different images are juxtaposed but I know they still somehow relate.” For all their chance origins, De Balincourt’s landscapes are highly expressive and their metaphorical power leaves them steeped in narrative potential.

Big Little Monsters 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

The island, a recurrent motif for the artist, who is also a keen surfer, has unfixed and shifting applications. In Island People the pastel pink island is an ‘Edenic comfort zone’ or a sanctuary where people freely congregate. In Divided Island, however, a gathering perches on one island and stares across a channel to another larger land mass that recedes into the distance. It speaks of islands that are insular and isolating with a resonance that is at once timeless and timely, as de Balincourt confirms – “it’s a subtle jab at Brexit”.

His work has long toyed with a tension between the utopian and dystopian, although he admits, “I think my work, when I was younger, was a little bit more direct. Now I push myself to delve more into the unconscious, the abstract, the intuitive and see what comes up.” This is inevitably influenced by real world events, which have recently loomed in the minds of many. “The real challenge under the Trump administration is how to confront the current situation at all… I don’t really know how to address it directly but I know that subconsciously I am concerned about what’s happening in America.”

Repeated Histories 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

In his recent move towards greater abstraction, de Balincourt has found avenues to address those issues. Even the most obvious work, Repeated Histories, in which a robust orange-faced man directs a small accusatory finger towards a row of black men, makes use of abstracting techniques such as repetition and distorted scale to reflect real power structures. Other works in the collection take a softer approach, and one that is distinctly undogmatic. The art is deliberately accessible, with de Balincourt entirely unconvinced by the social or political impact of art that he considers “convoluted and hyper-conceptual… completely wrapped up in a hermetically sealed corner of the art world. My work is in a weird way a resistance to that pretentiousness and elitism,” he stares intently at a canvas across the room before turning to me with a grin, “but then again, you know, I’m starting to sound like a Trump supporter.”

Cave Country, 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice

De Balincourt’s work seems simple, yet strikes to the core of a complex conversation. In these dreamy worlds, at least, the utopian defeats the dystopian and de Balincourt announces, “I wanted to be optimistic. I wanted to still give hope.” At one point he gestures towards Cave Country, a large canvas in which a deep crevasse of hot oranges and warm pink cuts into a turquoise rock to house a crowd seeking refuge. He pauses carefully before declaring, “I like to think of it as a place away from the chaos of the rest of the world.”

They Cast Long Shadows is at the Victoria Miro Gallery until 24 March 2018.

Instant Stories: Wim Wenders’s Polaroids

Clare Grafik, curator of a new exhibition of Wim Wenders’s photographs, talks to Port about the director’s creative vision, connections between art and technology, and the Polaroid aesthetic

Valley of the Gods, Utah, 1977, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

When Clare Grafik, the head of exhibitions at the Photographers’ Gallery, discovered that the Wim Wenders foundation had recently unearthed boxes of Polaroids that had been untouched for thirty years, she was immediately inspired. “If we work with an artist who is already well known, we’re interested in asking what part of their oeuvre is less familiar. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t even know what the Polaroids are like, but I want them.’”

Wim Wenders, the celebrated director of Paris, Texas (1984), is best-known as a filmmaker, though his photographs of large-scale, panoramic landscapes have also been widely exhibited. For Grafik, Wenders’s unassuming collection of Polaroids, amassed over nearly twenty years, represented a completely new direction for the artist. “He’s such a polymath, his creative vision is so versatile. It’s very unusual, I think, to be able to move between different mediums…  I think he’s genuinely carved out quite an individual voice in each.” 

On the Road to New England, 1972, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

In the intimate gallery space hosting Instant Stories: Wim Wenders’ Polaroids, over 200 photographs have been subtly framed on the walls, grouped under poetic, evocative titles: ‘Alice in Instant Wonderland’, ‘A Man Named Dashiell’, ‘Looking For America’. “For Wim, the process of collating the images moved from being a visual to quite a diaristic experience,” explains Grafik, and the chapter headings dictated the structure of the exhibition. ‘Alice’, for example, refers to Wenders’s early film, Alice in the Cities (1974), about the wanderings of a young European man in America, who becomes obsessed with photographing the strange things he sees.

Dennis Hopper, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

Shortly before filming Alice, Wenders was given a prototype of the Polaroid SX70 which would become so prominent in the film. Making the film was also Wenders’s first experience of America; he had arrived, like many Europeans, with preconceived ideas of the landscape. The exhibition section ‘Looking for America’ depicts Wenders’s outsider’s gaze, taken to an extreme as he scouted for locations. The section details his “disappointment at not finding what he had in his mind”, Grafik says. This disillusion was, however, a key part of the process. “What I enjoy about Wim is that he’s got a centre of gravity to his vision, which allows for those cracks in the iconography. He’s in no way an idealist about these things.”

By an unknown photographer, 1971, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

Wenders considered the restrictions and informality of the Polaroid – it’s limited technological abilities, and inability to take panoramic pictures – to be a breath of fresh air. “The way people treated the Polaroid wasn’t burdened with history in the same way as a medium format camera, there was no expectation that you would create great art works with it, unlike film,” Grafik explains. “The idea that Polaroid was like a toy, was really freeing for him.” 

New York Parade, 1972, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

Printed on a wall in the exhibition is an excerpt written by Wenders from Instant Stories, the book published by Thames & Hudson which accompanies the exhibition.

It was a little magic act each time – nothing more, nothing less.

I don’t think I’m romanticising when I allege

that Polaroids were the last outburst of a time

when we had certainty, not only in images.

We had nothing but confidence in things, period.

Self Portrait, 1975, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

After 1984, Wenders returned to shooting with film. The Polaroid had served its purpose. What made him decide to just stop? I wonder. Grafik pauses. “I think for Wim, there was a period when Polaroid did just what he needed it to do,” she says thoughtfully. “It provided exactly what he needed at that point, and then it just didn’t work for him any more. At some point technology moves on and continuing it would seem somehow a conceit.” 

Sydney, Courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation

Wenders may not have considered his off-the-cuff images as art at the time they were produced yet, since then, as an art form the Polaroid has been wholly legitimised. Will photography considered equally ephemeral in 2017, such as selfies on Instagram, feature in exhibitions thirty years from now? “That’s a massive question!” Grafik laughs. “It’s open as to whether the taking of imagery now functions in the same way as photographs taken in the 70s were. There’s the practical question of archiving: how these images are archived, whether they even should be. It’s hard to say what will exist thirty years from now, what visual culture will mean to us.”

Instant Stories: Wim Wenders’ Polaroids, will be showing at The Photographers’ Gallery until 11 February 2018