Jordan is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Reader in Time-based Media at the Royal College of Art. Jordan received a BFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Jordan’s films have featured in international exhibitions and film festivals including the 53rd Venice Biennale, Los Angeles Animation Festival (where he won Best Film in the Experimental Film category), San Francisco Short Film Festival, Melbourne Underground Film Festival (where he won Best International Short Film), Oaxaca International Film Festival, Lone Star International Film Festival (where he won Best Short Film), Fargo International Film Festival (where he won Best Experimental Film) Kansas City International Film Festival (where he won Best Experimental Short Film) and London Short Film Festival. Jordan has received grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2006; the 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 2011 was a Visiting Fellow at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, and Artist in Residence at Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo. In 2013, Baseman was an Artist in Residence at YARAT Contemporary Art Space in Baku, Azerbaijan and in 2014 Baseman was an Artist in Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, Nebraska, and a Visiting Artist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In 2015, Baseman was Artist in Residence at Teton ArtLab, Jackson, Wyoming, and was appointed the University of Lincoln / City of Lincoln, Magna Carta 800 Artist in Residence with grants awarded from the Leverhulme Trust and Arts Council England. Jordan Baseman is represented by Matt’s Gallery London.

RedCut: First, explain how art became an important part of your life and why you decided to pursue a path of art, creativity, and continuation.

Jordan: Oh my god. None of this was planned. When I was about 11 years old, we lived in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois USA for just over a year. Even now I don’t know the full story as to why we didn’t stay there after having already moved around so much before then. We’d already lived in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan and moved around within those places. That time in Chicago was seriously traumatic for my family, my older brother was badly injured during a blizzard. We were shoveling the driveway. He was 12 and I was 10. We were using a shovel and an electric-powered snowblower. The machine itself was like a stand-up lawn mower in its design, you were standing erect while pushing it. At its base, there were a series of rotating blades that cut ice and snow with a vacuum action that sucked up the chopped ice and snow, propelled everything in an arc-shaped spray of slush wherever you directed it. Away from your own driveway. This was a big machine, powered by direct current from a really long industrial extension cord plugged into the garage. My brother and I took turns using the machine. The snow was really coming down. In the Midwest, people are prepared for the weather. Having such a machine at home may not have been that unusual in a suburban Midwestern home where in the Winter the snow can accumulate to several feet deep. My parents were home, in fact it was under their instruction that we were out in a blizzard shoveling the driveway. Or trying to. We were taking turns with the machine, trading every 10 minutes or so… This time, I had the regular snow-shovel. He was using the machine. Our logic was that I would follow him and clean up behind him. The snow was coming down so fast making it impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. When I found him, I thought he was playing or something. In fact, I kicked him, told him to get up and stop  fooling around. But then I realized that something was wrong, the machine was making a new noise, a kind of extended grrrrrrr. He wasn’t moving… I could see his scarf had been pulled in, bringing his head into contact with the rotating blades. There was blood everywhere. I hit the cutoff, ran into the house. My parents were talking to an electrician. Making plans to do something to the house. The electrician and I went back outside, he carried my brother in, laid him out in the hall. On the floor. My parents were there, and then my mom was on the phone calling the ambulance. She was very very upset, yet she spoke with clarity, urgency. When she put the phone down, she lost it a little. Very unusually my father is not really present in this narrative. He was there… That Spring, I must’ve been at some School event on a Saturday because we went to the Art Institute downtown, I would never have been there with my family. There I saw Jackson Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow. And I was completely dumbstruck, freezing in front of that picture. Thinking about it now, I think that the trauma that my brother and I went through together during that blizzard was right there in front of me (He survived a skull fracture, was laid up for months, I called him Scarface). That really hit me that painting. As an 11-year-old kid that Jackson Pollock thing scared me yet compelled me.  Jesus, I am taking forever to answer this question but it was triggering, and I hadn’t really put it into words before… One other experience: We moved back to Philadelphia when I was 12, after that Chicago thing. I was an ugly awkward, uncomfortable pre-teen. From the Midwest, now on the East Coast. A world away, culturally. Even though my parents were from the East Coast and I was born in Philadelphia, I moved with my family when I was like 3 months old. My accent, my initial learning was all from the MidWest. I was a freak to these East Coast kids. A hayseed. A hick. So when I got invited to sleep over someone’s house, it felt like a big deal. The night that I stayed at Timmy Terry’s house, his brother Bobby played Patti Smith’s Gloria. Over and over. For hours. She was speaking to me through the wall of Bobby Terry’s bedroom, speaking directly to something inside of me that I hadn’t really been aware of, recognized. I’d never heard or felt anything like this before.  Those events and countless others, because of their impact on me, have made me want to make things, to think about making things, to make art and to have that activity as the focus of my time. And continuation? I have no clue and I ask myself why all the time… but I am not done yet… 

RedCut: How do your works manifest the relationship between form, space, and moving image?

Jordan Baseman

Jordan: Each work, each project is different in every way. The focus of the research is different, the way the research comes together is different, and the visual material is (hopefully) always different. That is my aspiration. What is constant is an unpredictability, an inability to foresee a specific form, a specific structure. For me, recording/capturing is an emotional, unpredictable, organic, messy, wilfully challenging series of activities that I always wrestle with. And I see editing as the intellectual creation of narrative structure, selectively engaging with the more emotional recorded elements in order to exaggerate them, to expand them, to exploit them into something else, something manipulated to position ideas and experiences. 

RedCut: How do you examine the relationship between theory, teaching, and being an artist, and whether they have a positive impact on each other or create distance?

Jordan: For me teaching is such an exciting and open thing to do, I feel incredibly fortunate to work the way that I do work, with the people that I work with. Teaching means that I am experiencing new ideas and encountering new conversations constantly. And sometimes it is so challenging, in unexpected ways. The people that I work with are artists from all over the world and at all different levels of their relationship with making art. We exchange many ideas and aspects of ourselves within a critical environment, so it can be pretty dynamic. Theory is everywhere! I think this is good, but like everything, being balanced is the important thing to strive for… I try to think about this all as a series of conversations with a few voices. Sometimes practice is louder than theory, sometimes theory is louder than practice, it is when they are all trying too hard at once that things become problematic… On a personal level, my teaching really doesn’t have anything to do with my artmaking as such, except to keep my brain alert! For me, my description of my role in academia is: I am an artist, I work in an art school. 

RedCut: Do Faster Win More, a film that explores ambition, success and failure through the lens of Paralympic cyclist Lora Fachie OBE. Do Faster Win More has been produced as part of a partnership between Arts & Heritage and the National Paralympic Heritage Trust, which was established in July 2015 to protect and share British Paralympic heritage. The video is being shown in parallel here and on The NPHT website. Could you explain more about this film please? 

Jordan: I have never met Lora in real life. And we have only exchanged emails about her consent for the project and the finished work… I didn’t interview Lora. This was done on my behalf by the Oral Historian Dr. Rosy Hall who is recording the stories of Paralympic athletes for National Paralympic Heritage Trust as part of their fledgling archival project. I was invited by Arts and Heritage to apply for a commission to make an artwork for pre-selected organizations, National Paralympic Heritage Trust being one of them. Eventually, I was awarded the commission so that is how I got involved. My plan was to use recordings that already existed in their archives, but in all honesty the interviews were very interesting but there wasn’t anything that unexpected about them. They focused on training and repetition, financial struggles, winning – all the common things that you would expect athletes to discuss. So, I was struggling. Then I attended an online event where Lora Fachie was being interviewed by a member of staff from National Paralympic Heritage Trust. And Lora was great! Very funny, very open. The thing that attracted me to Lora was her relationship with doubt and failure which she spoke openly about. Luckily for me, Lora had not yet been interviewed for the archives, so I kind of gate-crashed their project to organize Lora’s interview with Rosy. I was able to write questions for Rosy to ask, alongside the questions that she usually asked. This was all with Lora’s consent. And the interview was great, thanks to Rosy and Lora. Lora talks about being uncertain, being scared, failing and what being an athlete means to her emotionally. You can hear her articulating her fears in a very relatable manner, which is not how we usually hear Gold Medallists speak. Once I was able to come to a good audio edit, I sent it to Lora for her blessing. This was before the visual material was really going anywhere. I did know that I wanted the work to be as accessible as possible, yet I also wanted the work visually to be abstract, layered and really moving, fluid. Lora is a cyclist. The work also had to be related to the Summer through its colors and feel as her first big event ever was the Summer Olympics. Making the work non-representational was important especially as I knew that there would be a floating orb for the British Sign Language interpreter. I didn’t want the Signer to be conventionally located, anchored to the bottom of the screen in a formal way. So, our Signer, Helen kind of floats around in her orb very slightly but she is also semi-transparent, becoming a part of the visual material around her while still retaining the potential for her signing to be read, accessed. Lora’s speech appears as large text in a pink typeface making it more accessible for neurodivergent people. Although abstract in many ways, with layers of images on top of one another, there is a lot going on visually with the text and Helen’s floating BSL orb. The audio description had to be in place prior to totally finishing the work, and before Lora could express herself and her opinions about the piece. Fortunately she is fine with it, which is amazing considering her cultural importance. She really is taking a huge risk by making herself so vulnerable, discussing failure to such a degree and then giving up control of that, allowing that discussion to become manipulated into an artwork, is a bold thing. Not an easy thing. I love Lora Fachie!

RedCut: A Different Kind of Different, an animated short film, charts the psychological impact of breast cancer. Reflecting on the initial ordeal of loss, the film reveals a journey to acceptance via the liberation of – “holy fucking crap!” – mastectomy tattoos. The 13-minute film launches in early 2021 with three free online events, each lasting 90 minutes, at 7pm on 14, 21 and 28 January. Booking is essential via kind of different.org. Funded by a Wellcome Public Engagement Grant, A Different Kind of Different will tour UK venues later in the year. Featuring a cast of hand-drawn characters, the film’s narrative follows protagonist, Alicia (voiced by an actor). Her story is based on interviews with people who have chosen to wear mastectomy tattoos, and on conversations with scientists and academics. With both candour and humour, Alicia reflects on life after breast cancer; from the hatred she feels towards her body, to her declaration that her post-chemo hair means she resembles Justin Timberlake (“are you fucking kidding me?”). She recounts the jolt of medical menopause, her rejection of breast reconstruction, followed by her encounter with mastectomy tattoos, and finally the realization of her own joyful inking. Why did you decide to make a film and project about this subject? 

Jordan: Over 10 years ago now, I read an article in the newspaper about Inga Duncan Thornell and her mastectomy tattoo. Inga was living in California then, but when I eventually met her she was living in Washington State. The article talked about Inga’s decision to not have breast reconstruction and to wear a large tattoo across her chest, camouflaging her scars and decorating her body. And what really struck me about this article was how it felt like Inga was defying convention, making different decisions than what others may have expected for her. That newspaper article was the catalyst for a long challenging project that introduced me to many amazing individuals including Inga. 

RedCut: Starting on 1 November, an ambitious 365-day audio work by Jordan Baseman marks the centenary of the 1918 influenza pandemic, known colloquially as ‘Spanish Flu’. Commissioned by Wellcome, Radio Influenza will explore and interpret how news, rumor and health information and dis-information were shared and experienced through newspaper accounts at the time. Over the course of a year, a daily audio piece will capture the everyday lived experience of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide. Listeners will be able to follow the reports through a dedicated website, podcast, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds. The 1918 influenza pandemic was one of the most significant and wide-reaching international health crises of the twentieth century. The exact origins of the flu are unknown, but the major troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples, France, has been identified as central to the outbreak. The close proximity and massive troop movements of the First World War hastened the pandemic, possibly both increasing transmission and augmenting mutation. Itr is an amazing project. Could you explain more please? 

Jordan: Fucking Radio Influenza nearly killed me! Ha ha ha. I underestimated the research a little… Especially I underestimated the emotional impact that reading thousands and thousands of accounts of trauma, suicide, homicide, and people becoming extremely very mentally and physically unwell all over the place, all over the world would have on me, personally. Researching all of that material and then synthesizing those narratives into a kind of flow of news reports from a dystopian past as seen from the future did screw me up by the end of it. In fact there were some many many many dark accounts that I had to keep out just to try to keep the thing listenable as an artwork! There was already so much trauma in the work and Radio Influenza’s role was never to be the gloomiest artwork ever made. Yet, Radio Influenza really had to convey the panic, the out of control nature of what happened, while still keeping listeners interested to hear more. The balance between not trying to depress audiences so much that they would never listen again and making something truthful was delicate, difficult to strike. Sometimes it was impossible to find that balance and the reports were just really fucking grim. For me the thing I like a lot about Radio Influenza is its ambition and its lack of physical presence. These are really important to me.  And by ambition, I mean not only to make a new work for each day of the year, but to have nearly each account contain so much detail, so much information. They average around 3 minutes each, yet they contain multiple accounts from various sources from all over the world and in great detail. So, those aspects of the work really appeal to me still. And I think that work really changed how I think about art and how I want to make art moving forward.  

RedCut: Blue Movie is Jordan Baseman’s second exhibition at Matt’s Gallery and features a 16mm film that incorporates found pornographic footage (originating from the early 1940s during Nazi occupied Belgium) with an original soundtrack based on academic enquiry and discourse. The voiceover for Blue Movie has been created from interviews with the cultural commentator Pamela Church Gibson, Reader in Cultural & Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion. In Blue Movie the main body of the found film is replaced with clear leader footage: allowing only a few seconds per edit, following the existing structure of the source material. Without censoring the original footage, the replacement material creates a charged space that is actively occupied by the soundtrack. Why is collaboration and dialogue important for you? 

Jordan: Collaboration comes in many forms and in many ways, but ultimately for me that is about relationships, connections, exchanges in different ways, with different durations, different emphasis and histories. But I think that all art is about collaboration even if that is just between audience and artwork. Collaboration and dialog are (hopefully) interchangeable in so many ways for me, they are the same. 

RedCut: How do you actualize the relationship between photo archives, history, and the integration of this material with the present time, and how does it shape the final form of your film or artwork?

Jordan: Archival material is always complicated. There are so many colliding histories already within archives so to extract material from an archive and refashion, recontextualize the material is complex, real interesting. Of course each fragment from an archive is loaded and already predetermined so to comment on that fragment through altering its location and connection to its time and then maybe even manipulating it feels exciting, dangerous, and difficult. That’s why I like using archives. There is always something to learn from, that speaks to now.  

RedCut: In the current circumstances where the power of art and cinema is in the hands of the capitalist system, how much sustainability do you think independent cinema and independent thought have?

Jordan: Oh boy. I think part of the issue now is with physical spaces and people not going out as much after the initial Covid-era. And Amazon delivers, so we don’t have to go out… Everything can be brought to us if we can afford that. We can stream anything, stay home. So I think that that’s where independent cinema and independent thought will struggle. Pre-Pandemic people would gather in certain physical spaces, however transitory or short-lived they may be, people would come together in a physical space to share experiences and connect. The internet has really come into its own since the start of the Pandemic and fragmented those physical spaces that took so long to establish. We are in a period of flux and change. And it is so expensive to make art/film… Yet, I think that physical gatherings will continue to be where we find radical activities. Gathering together, sharing, is powerful and will continue to be so.