LorraineO'Grady

Artist as Art Critic: An Interview with Conceptualist Lorraine O’Grady, by Theo Davis

© Sojourner: The Women’s Forum

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.

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. . . . And you were fed up with that?

. . . . One of the things about my work that is most difficult for people to warm to is that it always contains a critique of other work. It is art criticism as well as art. And since it is frequently critiqueing not just white institutions but Black art, that means I have a hard time in my career.

Any examples?

The Bunting Institute had a show called A Range of Views: Four Bunting Artists. I put in a [diptych] from 1991 called The Clearing [showing a white male and a black female in two different aspects of their love-making. In one panel,] the male figure is wearing chain mail because I feel that this relationship is the death of courtly love. I used to call it just The Clearing, but [after the show I realized I had to clarify the title, make it even more in-your-face, so] now it’s called The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me.

What interested you in courtly love, which defines “desirable” women as “ladylike,” weak, and defenseless?

It’s not that I’m interested in courtly love! But the last vestige of courtly love was “the cult of true womanhood”—[which was] the reigning theory of femininity for the nineteenth century. [In other words, it] was the cult of sexuality—of equating “desirable” and “feminine” women to weakness—reigning during the time of slavery. And the Black woman, because she was strong and because she worked, could never be considered a “true woman.” Black women also could not be considered true women because they survived their rapes; a “real woman” would have committed suicide. At any rate, I put that work in the show, and people at the opening basically shied away from me. Nobody would comment on it.

Were they disturbed and didn’t know what to say?

That was certainly part of it. I did find that several people told me that they were disturbed by the images. The other people were able to place their disturbance with the content under the rubric of disturbance with the form, because it was employing a Surrealist vocabulary which for some people feels very dated. . . but this piece is also a critique of Surrealism [which romanticized sexuality]. Also, this work names the white male, which is very difficult. Feminist work of the ‘70s didn’t name the white male. I would say that the difficulty that Blacks and women have with this work is that it is naming the white male and it is exposing and making so vulnerable the Black female body.

        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. What I’m trying to say in that piece 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....

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Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity

© Lorraine O'Grady 1992, 1994

This first-ever article of cultural criticism on the black female body was to prove germinal and continues to be widely referenced in scholarly and other works. Occasionally controversial, it has been frequently anthologized, most recently in Amelia Jones, ed, The Feminism and Cultural Reader, Routledge.

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The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West's metaphoric construction of "woman." White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be. Even in an allegedly postmodern era, the not-white woman as well as the not-white man are symbolically and even theoretically excluded from sexual difference. Their function continues to be, by their chiaroscuro, to cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief.

A kaleidoscope of not-white females, Asian, Native American, Latina, and African, have played distinct parts in the West's theater of sexual hierarchy. But it is the African female who, by virtue of color and feature and the extreme metaphors of enslavement, is at the outermost reaches of "otherness." Thus she subsumes all the roles of the not-white body.

The smiling, bare-breasted African maid, pictured so often in Victorian travel books and National Geographic magazine, got something more than a change of climate and scenery when she came here.

Sylvia Arden Boone, in her book Radiance from the Waters (1986), on the physical and metaphysical aspects of Mende feminine beauty, says of contemporary Mende: "Mende girls go topless in the village and farmhouse. Even in urban areas, girls are bare-breasted in the house: schoolgirls take off their dresses when they come home, and boarding students are most comfortable around the dormitories wearing only a wrapped skirt."

What happened to the girl who was abducted from her village, then shipped here in chains? What happened to her descendents? Male-fantasy images on rap videos to the contrary, as a swimmer, in communal showers at public pools around the country, I have witnessed black girls and women of all classes showering and shampooing with their bathing suits on, while beside them their white sisters stand unabashedly stripped. Perhaps the progeny of that African maiden feel they must still protect themselves from the centuries-long assault that characterizes them, in the words of the New York Times ad placed by a group of African American women to protest the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, as "immoral, insatiable, perverse; the initiators in all sexual contacts—abusive or otherwise."

Perhaps they have internalized and are cooperating with the West's construction of not-white women as not-to-be-seen. How could they/we not be affected by that lingering structure of invisibility, enacted in the myriad codicils of daily life and still enforced by the images of both popular and high culture? How not get the message of what Judith Wilson calls "the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture," of whom Laura, the professional model that Edouard Manet used for Olympia's maid, is in an odd way only the most famous example? Forget "tonal contrast." We know what she is meant for: she is Jezebel and Mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one. When we're through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt. And best of all, she is not a real person, only a robotic servant who is not permitted to make us feel guilty, to accuse us as does the slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). After she escapes from the room where she was imprisoned by a father and son, that outraged woman says: "You couldn't think up what them two done to me." Olympia's maid, like all the other "peripheral Negroes," is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery.

To repeat: castrata and whore, not madonna and whore. Laura's place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West's construct of the female body, for the "femininity" of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight. Thus only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. The not-white body has been made opaque by a blank stare, misperceived in the nether regions of TV.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the imagery of white female artists, including that of the feminist avant-garde, should surround the not-white female body with its own brand of erasure. Much work has been done by black feminist cultural critics (Hazel Carby and bell hooks come immediately to mind) that examines two successive white women's movements, built on the successes of two black revolutions, which clearly shows white women's inability to surrender white skin privilege even to form basic alliances. But more than politics is at stake. A major structure o psychic definition would appear threatened were white women to acknowledge and embrace the sexuality of their not-white "others." How else explain the treatment by that women's movement icon, Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (1973-78) of Sojourner Truth, the lone black guest at the table? When thirty-six of thirty-nine places are set with versions of Chicago's famous "vagina" and recognizable slits have been given to such sex bombs as Queen Elizabeth I, Emily Dickinson, and Susan B. Anthony, what is one to think when Truth, the mother of four, receives the only plate inscribed with a face? Certainly Hortense Spillers is justified in stating that "the excision of the genitalia here is a symbolic castration. By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place."

And yet Michele Wallace is right to say, even as she laments further instances of the disempowerment of not-white women in her essay on Privilege (1990), Yvonne Rainer's latest film, that the left-feminist avant-garde, "in foregrounding a political discourse on art and culture," has fostered a climate that makes it "hypothetically possible to publicly review and interrogate that very history of exclusion and racism."

What alternative is there really—in creating a world sensitive to difference, a world where margins can become centers—to a cooperative effort between white women and women and men of color? But cooperation is predicated on sensitivity to differences among ourselves. As Nancy Hartsock has said, "We need to dissolve the false 'we' into its true multiplicity." We must be willing to hear each other and to call each other by our "true-true name."

To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves. For some of us this will not be easy. So long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look. Nevertheless, we can't theorize in a void, we must have evidence. And we—I speak only for black women here—have barely begun to articulate our life experience. The heroic recuperative effort by our fiction and nonfiction writers sometimes feel stuck at the moment before the Emancipation Proclamation. It is slow and it is painful. For at the end of every path we take, we find a body that is always already colonized. A body that has been raped, maimed, murdered—that is what we must give a healthy present....

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On being the presence that signals an absence

© Lorraine O'Grady 1993

Written for the unpublished, photocopied catalogue of Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, curated by Ellen Cantor and presented by David Zwirner Gallery and Simon Watson/The Contemporary, NYC, the essay examines O’Grady’s inclusion in the show and responses to her diptych The Clearing.

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"I don't like it," he says. "That's not the way sex is supposed to be."

He points at "Love in Black and White," the right panel of a photo-diptych I call The Clearing.

But it is, I think. And it has been, often, for 500 years. I follow his finger and look at the white chevalier in tattered chainmail with a skull instead of a head. The knight's hand proprietarily grasps the breast of an almost jet-black nude woman whose eyes look out beyond the frame and reflect centuries of knowing blankness and boredom.

"It doesn't feel like that to me," he says. This southern white curator is not going to take my diptych for his show. But his presence in my studio is proof of how far he and we have come.

Then he asks, "Are the two panels Before and After?"

He catches me off-guard, and my response is oddly diffident. Now I look at "Green Love," the left panel, the one he's said he likes. A nude white male and black female are floating on air, coupling ecstatically above the trees. Below them, on the grass, two mixed-raced children are playing tag while a gun, camouflaged on the lover's discarded clothes, silently threatens the scene.

"No," I say. "They're Both/And."

The curator gazes at me with an uncomprehending expression. Uncertainty is making me feel stupid. I know that when he leaves I will be able to construct an explanation. This is what I get for wanting images to take me someplace I cannot arrive with words. And yet the wordsmith in me wants to be defeated.

. . . . When I am asked to be on a College Art Association panel on the nude, I accept. It scarcely bothers me that it will be another of those "fly in the buttermilk" situations. I am hoping that, in some way I can't yet foresee, my presence, my divergence from the panel's premises, will not just add to, but alter the debate's basic nature.

Another sign. I ask other artists and critics if they know of black women with bodies of work on the nude (I need more slides for my talk) and am taken aback. The only name I come up with is that of my friend Sandra Payne. Now I have to research in earnest.

As I work on "Olympia's Maid," my paper for the panel, I learn that during the two centuries of black fine art dating back to before 1960, the nude, Western art's favored category, was avoided even by male black artists, with Eldzier Cortor's Sea Island series of the 1940s a rule-proving exception. Since then, there have been individual pieces and a few series, but no oeuvres; and female black artists are vastly underrepresented. . .

In the '90s, I think, surely things have changed. When I learn that a young white woman artist named Ellen Cantor is curating a show called Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, I want to know if her research will have results different from mine.

"There isn't much fine art, but there is video and film, most of it by younger black lesbians," she says and adds more issues to my list of answer-questions. . . .

I have not learned anything to make me stop being concerned and curious about the status of the black female body. It seems as beleaguered today as it has ever been. After a recent remark in Women's Wear Daily that haute couture shows had begun to look like 125th Street, the black woman has almost disappeared from the fashion runway. And on rap videos, the few girl rappers are still heavily outnumbered by the girls shaking their booties, who are abused equally by the gangsta lyrics and the camera.

I have been writing this [catalogue essay] before Coming to Power opens. My diptych The Clearing is down at the gallery, the only piece by a black fine artist, and I am nervous. How will it work, I wonder? It is hardly a "representative" piece: its oblique historic references are simply to one way sex can be. But I am hoping the show's context will stretch the definitions of nudity and sex in more than one direction, nudge them past the way sex is supposed to be.

At the opening, only "Green Love," the left panel with the nude white male and black female coupling above the trees, is on the wall. The right panel, "Love in Black and White," the one with the white male in tatty chainmail and the black female looking bored as her breast is grabbed, is returned to me. There just wasn't room for it with so many pieces in the show, Cantor explains. At least she doesn't say, "That's not the way sex is supposed to be."

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Lorraine O'Grady. Interview by Laura Cottingham. Nov 5, 1995

© Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc. 1996

Laura Cottingham, 1995

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.

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This is my good friend Laura Cottingham. We've been having conversations like this for some time now.

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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. . . . .

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A West Indian Yankee in Queen Nefertiti’s Court

by CALVIN REID. 1993

Article in New Observations #97: COLOR. September/October 1993, pp. 5-9. Special issue, edited by Adrian Piper.

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. . . . After 1988 [O’Grady’s] interests have shifted [from performance] to creating fixed images within the gallery space. She has spoken of her performances as a heightened form of writing, a form that enables her to combine the linear narrative of the story with the ability to simultaneously present successive layers of fact and symbol. “Performance is the way I write most effectively,” she said in an unpublished interview with Tony Whitfield in 1983, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire is actually a didactic essay written in space, while the form of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline approximates that of a book — a family photo album, interlaced with personal reminiscence and ritual.”

        The new work, photomontages dating from 1990, was displayed in 1991 at New York City’s INTAR Gallery. Despite her careful documentation of [the earlier] performances she has expressed some dismay at the transience aligned to physical performance — the inability of her audiences to savor, contemplate and engage the issues in a work that is suddenly here and just as quickly gone. These photo works represent another effort to “write” in an unconventional mode and the manipulation of composition and culturally charged imagery used to spur an interpretive response informed by O’Grady’s pervasive sense of cause, effect and social dilemma.

        Once again O’Grady uses the pictorial works to inspect her own life while dissecting that around her. In these works, using a model and photographer for technical applications, O’Grady’s interest focuses often on the Black female body, highlighting its general absence from the contemporary visual discourse and arranging it in compositions of striking visuality, relocating her critical vantage point from real acts in real space to a postmodernist location as a creator and manipulator of images capable of mass projection.

        In the 1991 work, The Fir Palm, a tellingly fictional “hybrid” stalk of vegetation — palm tree trunk topped with the bristled branches of the Northern Fir tree — appears to spring from the landscape of a close-up crop of the model’s loamy black body. Planted exactly in the navel, this absurd combination of geographical and arboreal opposites extends upwards towards a sky streaked with clouds. O’Grady’s West Indian background, symbolized by the trunk of an island palm tree, is visually married to an equally dear geographically resonant emblem of Yankee New England. Strangely captivating and mildly comic, the image manages to evoke the sublime contradictions that contribute to the artist’s sense of identity as well as what she sees as her cultural legacy as a Black artist and intellectual. Her refreshingly unconventional symbolism unites the apparently contradictory elements of her life and development. She presents her life — middle-class Black female and an intellectual to boot — as representative of a new wing to the African-American cultural diaspora; as a bonafide extension of traditional representations of Black culture as a southern American phenomena or as an urban extension of that tradition. Her work opens black tradition to a broad range of Black experience, chipping away at the tendency of Black folks as well as White folks to narrow Black experience.

        In Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers, a kaleidoscopic stream of warships spouts upward and outward from the pubic area of another close-in profile shot of the Black female body. This image, rife with connotations of destructive progeny and latent female power, contrasts with other works chronicling interracial sexuality, death and domination, once again as strikingly enigmatic as they are culturally interrogative.

        In The Clearing, 1991, (the work is composed of two individually titled and framed panels), she presents the perennially startling image of interracial lovemaking within a visual discourse on the nature of sexual relationships between Black women and White men. The effect of this work is a complex parade of imagery calculated in its attempt to visualize the female contemplation of interracial coupling; its precedents, its contradictions and to some extent its inevitability. In the panel on the left, subtitled Green Love, hovering in the sky above a lush park setting, a white man settles between the legs of his Black mate in an image of sexual partner and tenderness; while below, in a clearing, children play, running around a forgotten pile of clothing. The panel on the right, Love in Black and White, presents a White man covered in medieval chain mail, seducing a Black woman. A death’s head obscures the man’s features while his hand rests on the naked, impassive woman beneath. The image captures an image of white men, sheathed in social armor; protected and preying on a relationship of unequal power with the inherent potential for blatant sexual exploitation.

        In Gaze 1,2,3,4, a series of portraits present two images of the four individuals pictured, two Black men and women, their torsos bare. A smaller image of each model, whose expressions are responses to cues from the artist, is placed over  (or seemingly within) a larger image of the same individual. This simple but effective image presents two faces to the world; the inner and outer view, the physical and the metaphysical. The works attempt to locate the existential core of their subjects, stripped of defenses, presumptions and psychic bric-a-brac. The models stare directly at the viewer, locking their photographically portrayed sensibilities into the viewer’s.

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Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art

by Kymberly N. Pinder. 2000

An article on work by artists responding to racial hybridity that features a discussion of O’Grady’s diptych, The Clearing. Published in Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Art and Culture 53, Winter 2000-01.

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For when we swallow Tiger Woods, the yellow-black-red-white man, we swallow something much more significant than Jordan or Charles Barkley. We swallow hope in the American experiment, in the pell-mell jumbling of genes. We swallow the belief that the face of the future is not necessarily a bitter or bewildered face, that it might even, one day, be something like Tiger Wood’s face: handsome and smiling and ready to kick all comers’ asses.

The hope in ‘the yellow-black-red-white man’, reflected in the Tigermania that swept the US in the mid-1990s, is indicative of the racial crossroads at which the US, as a nation, finds itself at the close of the twentieth century. . . . Where are we as a nation regarding race when Woods can consider himself ‘Cablinasian’ while some southern states are still officially ending their ‘one-drop’ rules and [taking] laws against mixed marriages off the books? How can we address the concerns of those who see Affirmative Action as all but dead?

        Some contemporary artists in the US have been struggling with these issues during the 1980s and 1990s. Lorraine O’Grady is one of them. She originally titled her photomontage diptych The Clearing in 1991, however, later, she lengthened the title to The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N and Me to clarify the historical and personal relevance of the work. The left half of the piece presents the relationship between the black woman and white man as loving while the right as malevolent. The skeletal face of the man and the gun in the pile of clothing provide elements of violence and death. Yet O’Grady says, ‘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.’ The complex relationship between exploitation and defiance for such ‘women of color’ as La Malinche and Sally Hemings has become a trope of American hybridity and assimilation.

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[Figures] such as Malinche and Pocahontas have also gained political significance as they are seen to offer hopeful moments of cross-cultural co-operation in our racially divided pasts. For example, the 1995 Disney film about the latter presents the saga as a love story in which Pocahontas risks her own life to save that of John Smith. This narrative, based upon Smith’s account and revised for a young audience, excludes Matoaka’s (Pocahontas’s real name) later kidnapping an forced conversion. Many applauded Disney’s politically correct inclusion of Native American history into its repertoire, however, the effects of the distortion of ‘Distory’ on our children’s understanding of national history and race relations are questionable. The scale of this type of nationalistic desire for harmony, past and present, through these icons, is summed up in the words of Woods’s father, Earl:

 

Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. . .  Because he’s qualified through his ethnicity to accomplish miracles. He’s a bridge between East and West. There is no limit because he has the guidance. . .  He is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations.

 

O’Grady’s photomontage parallels the relationships of La Malinche and Sally Hemings. La Malinche’s facility at languages made her translator for the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortez; then she gave birth to a racial bridge, their son, the original mestizo. La Malinche’s other name was La Lengua, the language, and the transformation from ’race traitor’,  La Malinche is a slur in some Mexican dialects, to the status of the great communicator an reconciler, as she has been recently reclaimed, namely by feminists, is a leitmotif in the biographies of such historical figures. No matter her intentions, La Lengua brought together Europeans and Indians; Hemings united, inside and outside of herself, Africans and Europeans; and Woods, the ‘yellow-red-black-white man’ brings together all of the ‘primary races’ in one body. As his mother Tida says, ‘Tiger has Thai, African, Chinese, American Indian and European blood; he can hold everyone together; he is the Universal Child.’....

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Black Female Spectatorship and the Dilemma of Tokenism

by Michele Wallace. 1994

An article in dialogue with O’Grady’s “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity.” In Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue, Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan, eds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. pp 88-101.


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. . . . In this regard, I would like to pose a further question: what if the black female subject is constructed much like the white female subject? Or what if the similarities between the psychoanalytic construction of the black female subject and that of the white female subject are greater than the dissimilarities? Moreover, if you accept the thesis that  psychoanalytic film criticism proposes of a closed Eurocentric circuit in Hollywood cinema in which a white male-dominated “gaze” is on one end an the white female “image” is on the other end, what happens to the so-called black female subject? Does she even exist? And if she does, how does she come into existence?

        Helpful to me in thinking about the problems suggested here has been the writing of black female conceptual artist and theorist Lorraine O’Grady in “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” and in her unpublished “Postscript,” and the writing of black feminist art historian Judith Wilson in “Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of Pornography and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-U.S. Art.” In looking at the status of the black female nude in art history, which is handled very differently from the white female nude, O’Grady insists that the only constant in Euro-American theoretical analysis has been “the black body’s location at the extreme,” whereas Wilson remarks on how black fine artists have also avoided the black female nude because of its negative associations, perhaps with the sexual exploitation of slavery.

        O’Grady, who says her goal is to “deal with what Gayatri Spivak has called the ‘winning back of the position of the questioning subject’” is thus prompted to suggest that “the black female’s body needed less to be rescued from the masculine gaze than it had to be sprung from an historic script surrounding her with signification while at the same time, and not paradoxically, erasing her completely.” While I think that O’Grady is onto something here when she suggests that the issue for black women is one of establishing subjectivity, I haven’t always been able to see the notion of a black female subject as separate from the notion of a white female subject. Would this mean, after all, that there were Asian, Indian, and African female subjects as well? Is subjectivity really divided by race, nationality, ethnicity? I don’t think so. I’m not saying that subjectivity isn’t divided. I think it probably is divided in some manner, but I’m not sure that it can therefore be viewed as historically and materially specific, and that it divides easily by ethnicity, nationality, or any other constructed or natural rubric. Certainly, “spectatorship” as it is constructed by the dominant discourse does not.

        On the other hand, things like class allegiances and identity, sexuality, and experience seem to make a profound difference in how the female subject is constituted visually and how those images circulate. Even more significant here is O’Grady’s suggestion that the status of the white female “image,” or the objectification of the white female body, is part of the circuit of subjectivity for women. In other words, although the white male “gaze” (or the gaze of the dominant culture) objectifies and, therefore, dehumanizes the white woman, in fact, that objectification also implicitly verifies the crucial role white women play in the process of or circuit of spectatorship. In other words, the process of objectification also inadvertently humanizes as well a built-in advantage that is then denied to women of color in general, but to the despised (or desired) black woman in particular.

        So the problem of white female subjectivity is one of reversing the terms somehow, or reversing the connection or the hierarchy between male and female, whereas in the case of the black female body, or the body of the other, the connection is to a third, much less explored level in the hierarchy, the sphere of the abject, which includes, as Sander Gilman and Michel Foucault have pointed out, the pathological.

        As such, reversal is no cure and cannot take place. Black female subjectivity remains unimaginable in the realm of the symbolic. O’Grady’s approach as an artist seems to be to attempt to upgrade the status of the black female nude, or at least to get us to think about how and why the black female nude is devalued. Can you imagine Louise Beavers in a sexy dress in Imitation of Life? And yet Bessie Smith played just such a role in Saint Louis Blues, not to mention in life.

        Lately, I have been working on my mother Faith Ringgold’s series of story quilts. The French Collection, in which she illustrates the adventures of a protagonist named Willa Marie, born in 1903, who goes to Paris to become an artist and who alternates working as an artist’s model with her own painting (true of many female artists). In the process, the subsequent images toy with this circuit of subjectivity that O’Grady proposes as so crucial, for Willa Marie is configures as both subject and object by the text and the images.

        In a multicultural context, the response of many is to historicize the question of subjectivity (which I believe is crucial as well) and, in the process, dispense with the synchronic explanations of psychoanalytic complexity and abstraction. But, then, how do we account for the play of the unconscious in black cultural production and in the everyday lives of black people? The play of the unconscious roughly refers to the highly ambivalent relation of plans to practice, and stated intentions to unconscious motivations, in African American cultural and social life.

        I ask the question about the unconscious precisely because of the problem of interpreting the sexual and gender politics of recent mainstream black cinema. Clearly, the construction of spectatorship in Malcolm X cannot be wholly explained by relying on empirical data. We can guess that the construction of gender and sexuality in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X has more to do with Lee’s own issues around gender as well as cinematic traditions in the specularization of women’s bodies, and black women’s bodies, in Hollywood cinema than it has to do with Malcolm X’s life. . . . 

        Meanwhile, Daughters of the Dust, a film by independent black filmmaker Julie Dash, attempts to provide a corrective to the boyz. The film deliberately sets out to tackle the problem of upgrading the black female image and gets bogged down in excessive visuality. Yet again, something crucial has to be occurring on the level of “the hypothetical point of address of the film as a discourse.” After all, if it makes no difference how a film deploys its black bodies, why have they been so relentlessly excluded in the past?....

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gawker.com, OOPS: The Only Black Model in Italian 'Vogue'? Actually A Maid

By Choire, 9:20 AM on Mon Oct 22 2007

Serendipitous post on absence of black models in fashion magazines, plus comments section — one of which quotes O’Grady’s “Olympia’s Maid” — show the article’s concerns remain alive and well today.

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While American Vogue came up with exactly zero black women in fashion editorial in their October issue, at least Italian Vogue did better in September—they had one! Just one. Except turns out she wasn't a model, as the New York Times assumed.

[from “Corrections,” New York Times]

    “An article last Sunday about the fashion industry's reticence to use black models referred incorrectly to a black woman in a maid's outfit pictured in the September issue of Italian Vogue. She was, in fact, a maid at the hotel where the pictures were taken, and was included, the Vogue photographer said, because of her attractiveness and her ability to underscore the pictures' theme of a stereotypical rich white woman who hires ethnic servants; the black woman was not a model dressed as a maid.”

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COMMENTS                 Show: most popular

art_fiend
1:52 PM on Mon Oct 29 2007

okay, this is AMAZING! i am so glad someone at gawker reads the nytimes "corrections" to point out such supreme ironies. i'm taking a grad seminar on performance art and just read this fascinating essay by lorraine o'grady called "olympia's maid" about "the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of european and european-american aristocratic portraiture" as exemplified by the black maid in edouard manet's famous painting of "olympia" (in which the black maid's body represents the negative opposite of the idealized white lady's body -- google it!) and basically italian vogue just demonstrates that the world of fashion has not progressed very far in its concept of race relations since 1865! pathetic!!
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puffiehuff
2:56 PM on Mon Oct 22 2007

"...because of her attractiveness and her ability to underscore the pictures' theme of a stereotypical rich white woman who hires ethnic servants..."

Tell us "more" about this "ability" please.

Or didja just mean: "We have no black models because there is a world-wide shortage, thankfully we found some size 0 girl on maid wages to stand in the shot. She was glad to rest her weary elbows"? Coz that's what I read into it.
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Koreanish
1:56 PM on Mon Oct 22 2007

The decline in black models occurred at the same time as the rise of America's Next Top Model.

Did Tyra ruin it for everyone?
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DorothyMantooth
12:27 PM on Mon Oct 22 2007

When did "reticence" become synonymous with "reluctance"?
And am I the only one irked by this?

. . . .
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collegecallgirl
11:03 AM on Mon Oct 22 2007

Weirdly my maid is actually Iman.
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AndIAmTellingYou
10:43 AM on Mon Oct 22 2007

The cleaning lady gets into Vogue, too? Quite an illustrious career for Gwen Ifill.

(All jokes aside, see Gwen's NYT editorial).
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the supergoddess
9:55 AM on Mon Oct 22 2007

and they say it's impossible to find good help these days.
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meerkat
9:45 AM on Mon Oct 22 2007

Next month Vogue travels to exotic East Harlem, where the most stylish crack whores and homeless amputees will compete to be props.

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LORRAINE O’GRADY: Critical Interventions

Judith Wilson, 1991

Judith Wilson, 1991

Catalogue essay written for O’Grady’s first gallery solo exhibition, “Lorraine O’Grady,” INTAR Gallery, 420 W 42nd Street, New York City, January 21 – February 22, 1991.

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. . . . Current Investigations:
New Strategies of “High Cultural Warfare”


Artists should be terrorists, not masseurs.
                         — Hanif Kureishi


    The present exhibition extends the shift from performance to photographic installations already demonstrated by Sisters. Yet, as should be apparent from my description of the latter work’s thematic content, for all her new spareness of form, O’Grady has not surrendered an inch of cultural ground. Like many artists at this time of fundamentalist attacks on freedom of expression and last ditch efforts by a moribund elite to reimpose cultural mandarinism, she sees that she has no choice but to either maintain her embattled stance or lose all hope of creative enfranchisement.

    In posing the questions “What should we do? What is there time for?” at the outset in the present show, however, she means to stress the necessity of doing everything — using every type of tool and technique at our command, refusing the intellectual and political stranglehold of single agendas and strategies, rejecting the aesthetic sterility of monocultural codes of value. Thus, in the rooms she has created here, she aims to underscore the diversity of her own past endeavors and present inclinations.

    For example, while the works in the room labeled “Cultural Criticism” (illus. 2) tend to be blatantly inflammatory, the bulk of her work is less directly confrontational. But, given the effects of racism, sexism and class conflict on both the individual psyche and collective attitudes and behavior, there can be little wonder that the work in the rooms “Autobiography” (illus. 3, 10) and “Reclaiming the Black Woman” (illus 1, 4) frequently has political undertones. Similarly, “Work In And/Or For the Community” (illus. 5, 6, 7, 8) conveys O’Grady’s ambivalence about the very term “community” and her preference for shuttling to and fro between notions of a general African-American community and a specific art community, both of which, at times, claim her attention with equal force.

    Finally, there is what O’Grady has labeled “the Modernism / Postmodernism cusp” at which she locates her art. What’s modernist about her work is its heavy investment in individual subjectivity, while its postmodernist character arises from her conception of that “subject (especially, the Black subject)” as “culturally fractured.” Like the incessant jockeying of geological plates that produces both gradual changes of topography and sudden eruptions, the unresolved contest of old and new attitudes toward subjectivity to which she alludes is a sign of mental vitality, evidence that the artist’s thought remains fluid, transitional.

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Lorraine O’Grady’s “Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity”

by Thomas Feucht-Haviar. 2005

This first-ever article of cultural criticism on the black female body was to prove germinal and continues to be widely referenced in scholarly and other works. Occasionally controversial, it has been frequently anthologized, most recently in Amelia Jones, ed, The Feminism and Cultural Reader, Routledge.

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        The female body in the West is not a unitary sign. Rather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, non-white or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West's metaphoric construction of "woman." White is what woman is; not-white (and the stereotypes not-white gathers in) is what she had better not be. Even in an allegedly postmodern era, the not-white woman as well as the not-white man are symbolically and even theoretically excluded from sexual difference. Their function continues to be, by their chiaroscuro, to cast the difference of white men and white women into sharper relief.

        A kaleidoscope of not-white females, Asian, Native American, Latina, and African, have played distinct parts in the West's theater of sexual hierarchy. But it is the African female who, by virtue of color and feature and the extreme metaphors of enslavement, is at the outermost reaches of "otherness." Thus she subsumes all the roles of the not-white body.

        The smiling, bare-breasted  African maid, pictured so often in Victorian travel books and National Geographic magazine, got something more than a change of climate and scenery when she came here.

        Sylvia Arden Boone, in her book Radiance from the Waters (1986), on the physical and metaphysical aspects of Mende feminine beauty, says of contemporary Mende: "Mende girls go topless in the village and farmhouse. Even in urban areas, girls are bare-breasted in the house: schoolgirls take off their dresses when they come home, and boarding students are most comfortable around the dormitories wearing only a wrapped skirt."

        What happened to the girl who was abducted from her village, then shipped here in chains? What happened to her descendents? Male-fantasy images on rap videos to the contrary, as a swimmer, in communal showers at public pools around the country, I have witnessed black girls and women of all classes showering and shampooing with their bathing suits on, while beside them their white sisters stand unabashedly stripped. Perhaps the progeny of that African maiden feel they must still protect  themselves from the centuries-long assault that characterizes them, in the words of the New York Times ad placed by a group of African American women to protest the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, as "immoral, insatiable, perverse; the initiators in all sexual contacts—abusive or otherwise."

        Perhaps they have internalized and are cooperating with the West's construction of not-white women as not-to-be-seen. How could they/we not be affected by that lingering structure of invisibility, enacted in the myriad codicils of daily life and still enforced by the images of both popular and high culture? How not get the message of what Judith Wilson calls "the legions of black servants who loom in the shadows of European and European-American aristocratic portraiture," of whom Laura, the professional model that Edouard Manet used for Olympia's maid, is in an odd way only the most famous example? Forget "tonal contrast." We know what she is meant for: she is Jezebel and Mammy, prostitute and female eunuch, the two-in-one. When we're through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt. And best of all, she is not a real person, only a robotic servant who is not permitted to make us feel guilty, to accuse us as does the slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). After she escapes from the room where she was imprisoned by a father and son, that outraged woman says: "You couldn't think up what them two done to me." Olympia's maid, like all the other "peripheral Negroes," is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery.

To repeat: castrata and whore, not madonna and whore. Laura's place is outside what can be conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised, and it is her excision that stabilizes the West's construct of the female body, for the "femininity" of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight. Thus only the white body remains as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze. The not-white body has been made opaque by a blank stare, misperceived in the nether regions of TV.

        It comes as no surprise, then, that the imagery of white female artists, including that of the feminist avant-garde, should surround the not-white female body with its own brand of erasure. Much work has been done by black feminist cultural critics (Hazel Carby and bell hooks come immediately to mind) that examines two successive white women's movements, built on the successes of two black revolutions, which clearly shows white women's inability to surrender white skin privilege even to form basic alliances. But more than politics is at stake. A major structure o psychic definition would appear threatened were white women to acknowledge and embrace the sexuality of their not-white "others." How else explain the treatment by that women's movement icon, Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (1973-78) of Sojourner Truth, the lone black guest at the table? When thirty-six of thirty-nine places are set with versions of Chicago's famous "vagina" and recognizable slits have been given to such sex bombs as Queen Elizabeth I, Emily Dickinson, and Susan B. Anthony, what is one to think when Truth, the mother of four, receives the only plate inscribed with a face? Certainly Hortense Spillers is justified in stating that "the excision of the genitalia here is a symbolic castration. By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place."

And yet Michele Wallace is right to say, even as she laments further instances of the disempowerment of not-white women in her essay on Privilege (1990), Yvonne Rainer's latest film, that the left-feminist avant-garde, "in foregrounding a political discourse on art and culture," has fostered a climate that makes it "hypothetically possible to publicly review and interrogate that very history of exclusion and racism."

        What alternative is there really—in creating a world sensitive to difference, a world where margins can become centers—to a cooperative effort between white women and women and men of color? But cooperation is predicated on sensitivity to differences among ourselves. As Nancy Hartsock has said, "We need to dissolve the false 'we' into its true multiplicity." We must be willing to hear each other and to call each other by our "true-true name."

        To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves. For some of us this will not be easy. So long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look. Nevertheless, we can't theorize in a void, we must have evidence. And we—I speak only for black women here—have barely begun to articulate our life experience. The heroic recuperative effort by our fiction and nonfiction writers sometimes feel stuck at the moment before the Emancipation Proclamation. It is slow and it is painful. For at the end of every path we take, we find a body that is always already colonized. A body that has been raped, maimed, murdered—that is what we must give a healthy present....

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