In-depth interview done for the excellent Artist and Influence series produced by Camille Billops and James Hatch for their archive of African American visual and theatre arts.****This is my good friend Laura Cottingham. We've been having conversations like this for some time now.. . . .For me your recent work, like the "Miscegenated Family Album" as well as "The Clearing," deals directly with heterosexual relationships, which means black and white, especially between the black woman and the white man. Could you talk about that and how that subject and content comes to you and how you feel it's perceived?I don't know if it's been because of my own personal experience, because of the times in which I grew up, always finding myself the only black woman surrounded by a sea of white people and thus almost of necessity dating white men, but I have always understood racism not in economic terms, but in sexual terms. I don't think racism could have the kind of intensity it has if it were simply, as the Marxists say, "an economic problem." It is certainly an economic problem, precisely because it is a psychological problem, but the psychological precedes and makes the economic exploitation possible. Interracial sex, and the fear surrounding it, seems to me to be at the nexus of the country's social forces. Within the various permutations, of course, the black male/white female is the most symbolically potent. It represents the fear of the loss of power; it is a negative symbol, if you will, embodying the very structure of white fear.The white male/black female (or the female of color all over the world) on the other hand, is a positive symbol, an expression of what the power is FOR, rather than a reaction to the potential loss of power. And since it is the expression of power, I feel that is nearer the crux of the situation. If you can examine that, bring it to light and make it objectively viewable, then you can perhaps create an interesting discussion. I'm not sure that you can change the world, but at some level I believe in the psychoanalytic theory which states that problems can be made manageable through the handling of images and words. The more familiar an image becomes, the more it can be discussed, and perhaps then the more it can be psychologically manipulated in a social context.You have said before that you consider that particular context to be the most controversial in the images that you have produced so far. Do you still feel that?I read an interview in Artforum with John Waters, who said, "Black and white is the last taboo, although nobody talks about it." I think that in fact it is. And although the white male/black female is more underground as a taboo than the black male/white female, its very hidden quality makes it the most difficult to come to grips with. All I know is that I have been having some real difficulty in getting people to focus on the imagery. A few months ago when I showed "The Clearing" at the Bunting Institute at Harvard, it made people uncomfortable. One white male professor of history confessed that he found it very difficult to look at. When I asked him why, he said because it talked about how erotic domination is.For those not familiar with your work, could you please give a description of the content of that work?"The Clearing" is a diptych that I did for my INTAR show in 1991. On the left side, a white male and a black female nude are making love in the trees. The couple is very obviously happy. Below them on the ground you see a pile of discarded clothing and two mixed-race children running after a ball. On the pile of clothing is a gun silently threatening the scene. On the right side it's the same background, the same clearing of trees, only now the black woman is lying on the ground looking off into the distance with a very bored expression; the white male is now dressed in tattered chain mail, and his head has been replaced by a skull. His attitude is clearly proprietary, as he absentmindedly grasps her breast. I put him in chain mail because I felt that this relationship, and the duplicities it implied for white women, was the death of courtly love. Something that seemed to bother people was that I changed the title in order to make it more explicit. In 1991 it was called simply "The Clearing," but now it is "The Clearing, or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me." So the piece has been historicized in that way. And it isn't a "before/after" piece; it's a "both/and" piece. This couple is on the wall in the simultaneous extremes of ecstasy and exploitation. I think the piece is saying something interesting and complex about relationships. Not just about this particular relationship, but about all sexual relationships. What do I think about the subject matter? The subject matter of miscegenation and interracial sex? I certainly don't think it is an evil in itself or at all. But to the degree it is still a symbol of the "other's" exploitation culturally, sexually, and in every way, I think it's what we've got to come to grips with worldwide before we can move on. Every time I think that the subject matter is old-fashioned, I get brought up short by how contemporary it is. . . . .
© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.