Slap on some tartan and call myself Ruthie

ss

An essay on Tina Barney

A day at the museum sparks thoughts on envy, nostalgia, and getting bummed out by normal people

Whether you care to admit it or not, we all like to snoop.

Some people welcome the snoop, like the Instagram account of your favourite trad wife, or your oversharing aunt who’s yet to figure out how to make her profile private.

For others, it’s less welcomed - like my new, elderly neighbour whose groceries I keep offering to take so I can catch a glimpse inside her apartment. It’s nice, I can tell (she wears cashmere twinsets and thick-rimmed frames), but she’s yet to let me hold so much as a cabbage.

When a recent flight to Paris was delayed, I spent the hour-and-a-half wait eyeballing every person in line. I unabashedly sized them up, thirsty to figure out their life story as told by their outfits and the size of their carry-on (the smaller the suitcase = the greater the wealth, or so I deducted). This eavesdropping (and craning of my neck) went so far as to clock a name on the boarding pass of a young couple ahead. They looked glamorous, were staying at one of the most expensive hotels in Paris and had come in hot from three weeks on the Amalfi coast. Apparently.

Naturally, I Googled him.

Was he an heir to an arms empire?
Did he invent Paul Mescal’s chain?

No.

He worked a middling job in finance and had done so since college. Disappointingly, they had saved up their pennies and decided to splurge like other, “regular” people (perhaps with the help of their parents).

My bubble was burst, and I was happy to board the flight - my bulging carry-on in tow.

For Tina Barney, her career as a photographer has centered on taking photos of her wealthy friends and family. Drawing on her own connections with the New York and New England gentry (her family founded the Lehman Brothers investment bank), she captures the familial and social rituals, both staged and candid, of the American and European elite and trotters of the globe.

She wasn’t just a voyeur of these realms, she lived in them, and no doubt saw behind the smoke and mirrors of the “perfection” her subjects tried to emit.

Seeing Barney’s Family Ties exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, I’m immediately reminded of The New Yorker essay I read recently by Andre Dubus III.

In The Lows of the High Life, the author describes setting out to spend his new-found wealth on three extravagant days in New York. After his best-selling novel was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and made into an Oscar-nominated film, he’d come into the kind of money of which he’d never dreamed (I tried, unsuccessfully, to Google the exact amount, but gleaned it was enough for his bank teller to give him a wink and whisper “Good for you” as he slid back an envelope of cash).

Dubus and his family stay at the Plaza, get chauffeured around in limos, dine next to Meatloaf, and discover that “Michelin” isn’t just a chubby tire guy. But as his kids unravel in the heat; the buttery brain fog sets in from eating three meals out a day; and the stench of “rotted produce and pigeon shit” rises from the hot summer sidewalks; Dubus describes that feeling when melancholy settles in, despite your best efforts at orchestrating a magical time and being in a magical place:

“We eat quickly, and there comes the deflating feeling that for the past twenty-four hours I’ve been the master of a grand circus, but now half the tent is collapsing and some of the lions are getting out. I wave a fly from my face and pay the bill.”

The Orange Room (1996)

The Portrait (1984)

Jill & Polly in the Bathroom (1987)

The Little Sister (2003)

Bridesmaids in Pink (1995)

Extreme wealth can’t shield us from the mundanity of everyday life.

Your hair will frizz in the humidity. Conversation will dwindle at dinner. A child - or your partner – will stray from your meticulously planned itinerary on account of “they’re chafing” from the trousers they had made on your Bangkok layover and the synthetic fibers are nibbling at their thighs.

These are the fundamental truths of human existence.

The world, with all its lethargy and boredom and awkward silences, still chafes.

Taking in Barney’s photos, I grapple with these thoughts.

The colours and subjects are both so rich, I want to reverse somersault into them. I want to bathe in her saturated stills. They give me a pang of nostalgia, which is odd, because I didn’t grow up frequenting New England summer homes with women called Kitty and Barb. My bedroom wallpaper, bedspread and curtains didn’t match in Laura Ashley florals like Kim at the 2013 Met Gala (The Portrait, 1984). My family didn’t refer to our various “salles” by their colours (The Orange Room, 1996), and we didn’t have an art advisor who counselled us on the merits of Rockwell vs Rauschenberg (The Trustee & the Curator, 1992).

I admittedly relate to the kids being dressed as, what Raven Smith would describe, “Jacobean Ghosts” (with the portraits hanging in my parents’ hallway serving as living - haunting - proof). But that’s as far as it goes.

Perhaps I’m homesick for my 90s childhood, when my parents fed and dressed me and my toughest decision was what contact paper covered my school books that year. Even then, I romanticised my parents’ stories of “the past” – of their time living in the flamingo pinks of 80s L.A, until they returned home to buy their first house for two magic beans and a Tic Tac.

Or maybe the nostalgia comes from a steady childhood diet of 80s and 90s movies that live rent-free in my mind. The lilac and peach bridesmaid outfits from My Best Friend’s Wedding (Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995), the pastel pink hair salon of Steel Magnolias (Jill & Polly in the Bathroom, 1987), and the two, equally enviable worlds of Hallie and Annie in The Parent Trap (The Little Sister, 2003) – all crisp shirts and loafers and the kind of thick, glossy hair that could actually hold down a headband.

Like these movies, Barney’s Crayola colours and lush, rich tones give a sense of comfort. They exude a wealth of…wealth. They make me feel safe – even if the subjects are standing in a trophy room of antlers (The Antlers, 2001).

These were simpler, more analog times, when global warming hadn’t shortened truffle-hunting season and your private art curator didn’t bang on about their “right to disconnect”.

But wait, who’s nostalgia is this anyway? I catch myself again. This is the danger of nostalgia – one that was pointed out in the early days of M.A.G.A caps and their blinding red promises of the past. What exactly are we nostalgising? To whose version are we aspiring?

Perhaps I’m missing the point of Tina Barney’s work.

Afterall, I’m no art critic.

And with a closer look and sharp elbowing of gallery patrons out of my goddamn way, the tension in her photos is clear. Clenched fists, stiff shoulders (Tim, Phil & I, 1989), a nanny waiting in the wings to take a toddler off its parents (The Antique Shop, 2003).

Even the staged photos have an edge. A JKF Jnr-lookalike hovers over his baby in The Christening (1992), willing it to make loving eye contact with him to prove he’s no absentee father.

The Antlers (2001)

The Antique Shop (2003)

The Christening (1992)

Tim, Phil & I (1989)

The child’s mother watches on, leaning on the couch arm with one foot flexed in the air – a move I recognise instantly from my days working at the David Jones Santa photos, where your limbs hurt from standing so long but there’s nowhere you can sit (at least not involving a velveteen lap).

And this guy – well he looks like he’s never even sat on a chair before, let alone at Christmas.

The Brown Leather Chair (2003)

Still, I want to be in those photos. I want to taste those WASP-y hors d’oeuvres on stale bread bellybuttons with salmon and crème fraiche.

I want my nanny to lace my baby gums with brandy and knock me out cold while my parents get into the hard stuff and kiss their blood relatives.

I want my floors so waxed I never have to walk. I just glide, from room to room, howling out commands for “MORE DELPHINIUMS” while my butler canters, double speed, to catch me on the carpet runner.

I. Want. In.

I’m just about ready to slap on some tartan and call myself “Ruthie” when I find the back room of the exhibition. A video plays on the wall.

Barney’s stills come to life like our toys when we leave our bedrooms, or the gossip I know you’re spreading about me when I leave the brunch table.

It projects footage of awkward father-daughter balloon fights at a BBQ, of bored kids at tennis lessons fiddling with their starched pleats, and stuffy country club dinners where the chat looks, quite frankly, shit. Maybe it’s the muted colours of the film - more fuzzy and dull than the sharp and saccharine photos. But it’s only when these images of the same family functions and social events come alive that I realise how dead boring they look.
With the sheen of the glossy portraits gone, the subjects look stiff, awkward, and normal. Their 80s perms flail in the wind, revealing bald spots and sun damage. The hens high tea is seriously lacking a “lift” that can only be brought by a male stripper. And the summer camp pie-eating contest looks downright disgusting as the little terrors smear their faces into perfectly good baked goods, ruining my appetite for crumble.

One kid starts a food fight. More join in. It goes on uncomfortably long, in that way where a toddler gets a laugh at something once and repeats the schtick ad-nauseum until you can’t feign a grin at Timmy’s fake fall any longer.

I turn on my heel in disgust.

Wrap it up, Timmy.

As I walk back through the exhibition, the photos now remind me of the suffocating melancholy of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, stuck in a pastel prison of Sophia Coppola’s making. I see Tilda Swinton’s character in I Am Love, racing up her palatial staircase to pack her bag and flee her Milanese manor for a simpler life, her family watching on in horror. (I watched in horror, too, as she leaves behind half her Jil Sander wardrobe).

I’m reminded of an SNL sketch a friend sent me recently of Adam Sandler as a travel agent. In his thick, faux-Jersey accent, he warns his clients that “If you’re sad at home, you’ll be sad in Italy”. Funny, but painfully true, as all good sketches are.

We all have our own versions of this. Photos of other people’s lives into which we want to jump. It’s human nature to look back with nostalgia and rose-tint-glass the past, or to picture greener grasses - a future that could be brighter, richer, better.

So why isn’t there a colour to describe a longing for the present? Maybe this gaping hole of vocab speaks to a universality of the feeling. Lauren Elkin touches on this nerve in her novel, Scaffolding:

“There’s something strange about a moment. We can’t ever live inside of it. We just live after it. We live the moment better in trying to relive it, than in living it the first time around.”

Perhaps I’ll look back on my photos from today with nostalgia, envy, wistfulness.

Or maybe a video will emerge of me at pie-eating contest, hands tied at my back, victoriously knocking out my rivals with my laser-focused snout.

I’ll claim it’s a deepfake.

I’ll polish the trophy in secret.

However we see our past, present or future, Barney’s portraits serve as a reminder, for me at least, to beware the shallows of a stylised image, and assess the depths of someone else’s life before diving in.

Tina Barney – Family Ties – is showing at the Jeu de Paume in Paris from 27 September 2024 to 19 January 2025.

All photos courtesy of Tina Barney at tinabarney.com

ABOUT

Isabella Royce .

Screenwriting. Copywriting. Storytelling.

Paris . Melbourne . Paris . Melbourne .