The Law & Order Writer Who Moonlights as an Artist

Feature

Is René Balcer a road photographer, a documentary photographer, or a panorama photographer? All the above and extra.

It was solely two years in the past, at an exhibition of the work of Xu Bing on the Asia Society Texas in Houston, that I felt my first inkling of the breadth of René Balcer’s contribution to tradition. At that time, I used to be eager about studying the whole lot I might about Xu’s linguistic experiments, from A Book from the Sky (1987–91) to his use of what he calls “Square Word Calligraphy” in numerous installations and publications. This had confirmed tough, as a result of Bing isn’t represented by an American gallery.

Although I knew that Balcer and his spouse, Carolyn Hsu, are associates of Xu’s, and had supported main institutional exhibitions akin to Xu Bing: Tobacco Project Virginia (2011) on the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, I didn’t anticipate to see works from that mission on the Asia Society Texas, and I hadn’t recognized that Balcer had collaborated on certainly one of them. For “Backbone” (2011), a grid of stenciled phrases from model slogans Virginia enslavers used to establish their tobacco merchandise, Balcer composed a blues poem honoring the enslaved Black ladies who picked the plant by hand. 

This encounter led me to study extra about Balcer, significantly after I sat on a panel about his images this previous spring. What I found stunned me. Despite his achievements as a producer and author for Law & Order — together with a Primetime Emmy Award and a number of Edgar Awards — the throughline of Balcer’s life was direct images, I got here to appreciate. After finding out poetry and images at Concordia University in Montreal and taking a six-month seminar taught by the French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Balcer labored as a cameraman, conflict reporter, editor, scriptwriter, documentary filmmaker, and movie critic. Like Godard and different New Wave filmmakers, Balcer wrote critiques and made movies, merging commentary and creativity.