Lot Essay
'Baseman is more interested in orthodoxy than it might appear from his choice of materials: alienated parts of animals bodies, hair, clothing. He cautiously explains his work in terms of sociological accounts of groups and types, of roles and expectations. The encounter with social limits is presented, but not moralised, as an essential good (as it was in most Victorian narrative pictures). We are closer to a social world, and one with somewhat damaged sexual formatting, than to the vaunted freedom of Surrealism - the freedom to combine' (I. Hunt, Jordan Baseman, in frieze, March-April 1995).