Against Argument
Teju Cole, Zürich, 2014, from the exhibition “Teju Cole: Blind Spot and Black Paper,” on view at Steven Kasher Gallery from June 15–August 11. Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York.
1
When I was a kid, I always wanted to inhabit the Wild West. It was the most exotic place. And now, I guess, I do.
2
I never had a definition of my country, or my identity. Everything has been a series of oxymorons. I grew up in Britain: savage and polite, a European island. Within that, I grew up in London: the British capital, and the pure international. But we also lived in the north London suburbs, neither countryside nor city, and I went to a private high school that was basically Jewish and Hindu, with perhaps the occasional Muslim or Sikh or very rare stray goy. We were rich but not exorbitantly rich: we were rich but intellectual. Moreover, if I was definitively Jewish, I was also definitively half Jewish. For me, this series of oxymorons represented a kind of ideal state: placelessness was my idea of a utopia.
3
At the summer party for the Serpentine Gallery in London, a couple of weeks after the Grenfell Tower fire and the terrorist attacks in London and Manchester, and about a year after the referendum to leave the European Union, when London continued to personify an anxious form of chaos, Michael Bloomberg—the chairman of the gallery—gave a speech in which he called for a minute’s silence to remember the dead of the Grenfell Tower. It made me, this moment. I felt more than faintly corrupted. I would soon be introduced to a billionaire early investor in Net-a-Porter from Latin America. Or perhaps is not the right word, or if it is the right word then it is also universal.
