Jordan Baseman is based in London, UK. Baseman is a visual artist and filmmaker that has conducted projects in collaboration with public institutions. These have included residencies and commissions for: Papworth Hospital, Cambridge; The Science Museum, London; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland; Grizedale Arts, Cumbria; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska; Camden Arts Centre, London; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Book Works, London; National Sculpture Factory, Ireland; The Wellcome Trust, London; Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, to name a few. Baseman’s films have featured in international exhibitions and film festivals including: 53rd Venice Biennale, Los Angeles Animation Festival (winning Best Film in the Experimental Film category), San Francisco Short Film Festival, Melbourne Underground Film Festival (winning Best International Short Film), Oaxaca International Film Festival, Lone Star International Film Festival (winning Best Short Film), Fargo International Film Festival (winning Best Experimental Film) Kansas City International Film Festival (winning Best Experimental Short Film) and London Short Film Festival. Jordan Baseman has received grants from: Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2006; Wellcome Trust Arts Award in 2007, 2010, 2011 and 2015; Arts Council England Grants in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015; the Henry Moore Foundation in 2009, British Council in 2007 and the Leverhulme Foundation in 2015. In 2003, Baseman was the Henry Moore Sculpture Fellow at the British School at Rome and in was a Visiting Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Oxford. Baseman was Artist in Residence at Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo (2011); YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku, Azerbaijan (2013); Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska (2014); Teton ArtLab, Jackson, Wyoming (2015) and was appointed the University of Lincoln / City of Lincoln, Magna Carta 800. Baseman is represented by Matt’s Gallery London.
Victoria Perry is a Practice Director at Donald Insall Associates: Architects and Historic Building Consultants. Her Ph.D. Slavery, Sugar and the Sublime won the RIBA President’s Award for Ph.D. Research in 2010. She has spoken about her work in Britain, the USA, the Caribbean and India, and contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of Black British History. A chapter drawn from her research is included in the English Heritage book Slavery and the British Country House (2013).
Jordan Baseman, They Spent Their Money Here, 2020. Video 9:32.
In Jordan Baseman’s video They Spent their Money Here we hear the architect and historian Dr. Victoria Perry mulling over the legacies of the slave-owning class who created the English countryside. Perry suggests that our contemporary appreciation of nature has been immeasurably enriched by eighteenth and nineteenth-century ideas of the picturesque and the sublime. But, she explains, this sensibility was itself rooted in the evils of the slave trade and devastating slave labour of Britain’s colonies. Indeed, the New Forest-based ‘picturesque’ writer William Gilpin (1724–1804) had himself directly benefited from his family’s plantation business in Jamaica. The title of Baseman’s video refers to the process by which those who profited from slavery spent their vast fortunes back home, in the UK, creating a pastoral idyll in their country manors and gardens that entirely hid the brutal roots of their capital.
Visually, Baseman’s video consists of a fast-moving landscape filmed from a speeding vehicle, and blurred shots of treetops and foliage. The horizon is flipped 90 degrees, so the dividing line between sky and earth appears vertically and nearly abstract. Stylistically, these images recall avant-garde cinema classics of the 1960s (Menken, Baillie, Mekas), creating a modern tribute to nature as it is encountered by cameras, trains and cars. A choral piece can also be heard on the soundtrack, bringing us back to the English and European culture that coexisted for so long with colonial terror. Between these images, sounds and narration, there is a space to dwell on the difficulty of a past and a way of seeing that both enriches and haunts our present.