Conducted in Cambridge during O’Grady’s one-year residency at the Bunting Institute at Harvard, the interview may have been affected by what she’d felt as adverse treatment there of her diptych The Clearing.****. . . .How did you become interested in the form of the diptych, which you have used in your recent works Miscegenated Family Album and The Clearing?I didn’t become interested in it. I was doing it and then had to figure out why I was doing it. The process went that way. I was doing it because it was always, for me, a “both/and,” and that’s because of my background as somebody born and raised in New England with parents who are West Indian; I have always been trying not just to negotiate different points of view, but to contain different points of view. I think that this complexity of the “both/and” is something that’s lived as an everyday reality by Diaspora people, people born one place, then shipped to another who have to negotiate more than one world, and in many people’s cases now, three worlds. And so I found myself using the diptych, but I didn’t realize when I began using it how typical a form it was for bicultural people. Feminist art theoretician Lucy Lippard did a book called Mixed Blessings, in which she included about 200 artists she knew who were outside the mainstream. Kay Walkingstick, a Native American painter who teaches at Cornell and does modernistic work that is mostly in the diptych form, was talking about her use of the diptych as a way of expressing her biculturality. At the end, Lucy made a comment about how frequently she found this form among Native American and other bicultural artists. I realized that my use of it, which I thought was basically a personal expression at the time, was actually more than a personal expression—it was a cultural situation, a cultural condition.Were you very aware of that bicultural identity when you were growing up?When you’re able to see things multifacetedly and the person that you’re talking to can only see one point of view—their European, white perspective—you certainly do tend to think that you’re smarter than they are. As a kid growing up here in Boston, I went to Girls’ Latin School at a time when it was still very hard. It was very competitive, and I was at the top of the competition. So I had tremendous intellectual self-confidence, but that confidence came not just from my I.Q. or my ability to perform but from my ability to see what was happening in a more nuanced way than most of the other kids. This smart-ass version of the negotiation of two worlds is very typical of West Indian kids because they are dealing with parents who have come from another culture, and yet they are participating in a very different way than their parents in the new culture. They just have so many more things to deal with. They have to deal with being Black here, which makes you pretty smart. They have to deal with being foreign here. It’s a double issue. It’s not necessarily the most positive or the most productive wavelength to be on, but it is interesting and complex. And when you can find ways of working it out artistically, I think it can be very rich. It’s hard for me to make a complete statement of my thoughts visually without making a doubled image, or a collapsed diptych in some cases, or sometimes diptychs multiply, which was the case with Miscegenated Family Album. Miscegenated Family Album was sixteen diptychs, just enough for me to make a complete statement. The original performance it was based on, that I did in 1980, had 65 sets of doubled images projected behind me.How did that performance work?The performance was called Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, and it had voice-over narration in which I had recorded the soundtrack of myself speaking in about eleven different voices: myself at different ages, my sister at different ages, my mother and father—about eleven voices. There was a narrative story of the relationships between these two women, the ancient and the modern: their lives were very similar, and they had similar deaths. Two-thirds of the way through, the narrative on the soundtrack stops when the women die, and then I am reading a slightly adapted version of the Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ceremony when I come onstage as the priestess. The Opening of the Mouth ceremony is literally a pries impersonating the sculptor. Many great Egyptian sculptures were made as part of funerary rituals, so the [sculptures] stood in for the dead person and they became the place where the dead person’s spirit was able to reside and go back and forth in the spiritual dimension. So the ritual has the priest with an adze striking the sculpture’s mouth while saying, “I open your mouth for you, I open your two eyes for you, and you shall not die.” So I’m reading this ritual [on the soundtrack] and then I come out as the priestess, and everything that I do is wrong! There’s this voice on the soundtrack, but nothing that the priestess does has anything to do with the soundtrack, or if it does it’s all slightly skewed. There were two points: first of all, you can’t use these old rituals. There’s no way I could strike my sister’s mouth and have her come to life again. At the same time, in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, there was a lot of bad Black art based on anthropological rituals.. . . . The history of the success of Miscegenated Family Album is interesting because it doesn’t deal with the physical act that created these people, it just deals with results, and it’s very much easier to take [as opposed to a work like The Clearing which presents the act itself]. What I’m trying to say in the MFA installation is that this American family genetically was formed in the same way that this ancient Egyptian family was formed and that this is something the world will need to think about.The work also seems to be questioning the adoption of Egypt by African Americans as cultural heritage.Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline’s most primal purpose was to help me work out a difficult relationship with a sister who could no longer speak to me because she died before we could begin to solve our problems. The relationship, which goes from sibling rivalry to hero worship, is an extremely primal relationship, and in some ways the people who most relate to this are women who have had sisters. All the same, there is a critique of Egyptology and Western theories of race, and there is a critique of Western dualism, that the world is divided by opposites—for example, good/evil, black/white. But the original imagery was set in motion seven years before Martin Bernal’s book, Black Athena, came out in 1987. At the point at which the piece came out, people were upset because they thought it was narcissistic of me to compare my family with Egyptian royalty and, besides which, those Egyptians weren’t Black anyway—the usual. What’s happened is that subsequently. . . a whole climate of interpretation arose. Someone who saw my work in my studio said that, in 1980, I was the only person who could vouch for making those images before Bernal’s book and that now a whole discourse has arisen to insert them into dialogue arising from Black Athena and explain them. In essence, that’s the point at which I find The Clearing; it is out there now before the discourse has arisen.. . . .
© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.