Title
Cutting Out the New York Times
other media 1977
Cutting Out The New York Times is a series of 26 “cut-out” or “found” newspaper poems made by O’Grady on successive Sundays, from June 5 to November 20, 1977. They were first exhibited to the public at Daniel Reich Temp. at the Chelsea Hotel, in March 2006 at the urging of curator Nick Mauss. The slideshow here contains four of the poems in their entirety.
After graduating from college in the late 50s with a major in economics, O’Grady worked for five years as a young intelligence officer for the Departments of Labor and State, first on African and then on Latin American affairs. During that period, she was forced to read 10 national and international newspapers a day and — in the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis — three complete daily transcripts in Spanish of Cuban radio stations, as well as the endless overnight classified reports from agents in the field. It was a time, she’s written, when language “collapsed” for her, “melted into a gelatinous pool.” She soon quit her job as an intelligence analyst and began a roundabout journey into art.
1977 found her at SVA in New York, where her course in “Futurist, Dada and Surrealist Literature” attracted such students as John Sex, né John McLaughlin, Keith Haring, Kembra Pfahler, Luis Stand, and others. Cutting Out The New York Times was done in a moment of combined psychological and physical trauma (she’d just had a biopsy on her right breast which proved negative) and was accidentally begun while browsing the Sunday Times to make a thank-you collage for her doctor. She’d involuntarily wondered: what if, unlike Tzara and Breton’s random newspaper poems, she forced randomness back to meaning, rescued a personal sensibility from the public language that had swamped it, might she not get — rather than Plath and Sexton’s confessional poetry which made the private public — a “counter-confessional” poetry that could make the public private again? But with the rescue act accomplished, she forgot about the cutouts until Nick Mauss’s studio visit 30 years later.
re Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977
© Lorraine O'Grady, 2006
At curator Nick Mauss’s request, O’Grady first exhibited five of the 26 cut-outs that she’d done on successive Sundays, from June 5 to November 20, 1977, in a group show nearly 30 years later —
Between the Lines, in March 2006 at Daniel Reich Temporary (The Chelsea Hotel). She wrote this binder statement about her original work method and state of mind.
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At the time, two things had happened simultaneously: I began to think that psychoanalysis might not be a bad idea; and I had to have a biopsy on my right breast. I took some books by André Breton to the hospital to help take my mind off it.
Nadja and the
Manifestos may have got mixed up with coming out of the general anaesthetic.
When the biopsy proved negative, I wanted to make a thank-you collage for my doctor. I thought it would feature the cult statue of Diana of Ephesus, the "many-breasted Artemis Ephesia." But I needed some text. . . . As I was flipping through the
Sunday Times, I saw a headline on the sports page about Julius Erving that said "The Doctor Is Operating Again." It seemed too good to waste on the collage, so I made a poem instead. But since I'd been flirting with the doctor, the poem turned into an imaginary love letter for an imaginary affair.
Then I began to wonder, what if. . . instead of Breton's random assemblages. . . I did cutouts and consciously shaped them? What would I discover about the culture and about myself? (In the place I was then, questions like "Who am I?" didn't seem so academic). And, if I reversed the process of the confessional poets everyone still read at the time. . . like Plath and Sexton who'd made the unbearably private public. . . if I pushed the cutouts further, could I get a "counter-confessional" poetry that made the public private again?
To find myself in the language of the news didn't strike me as odd. In my first job after college, I'd been an intelligence analyst, at the Department of Labor and then the Department of State. After five years of reading 10 newspapers a day in different languages, plus mountains of agents' classified reports and unedited transcripts of Cuban radio, language had melted into a gelatinous pool. It had collapsed for me. That's when I'd quit.
For six months in 1977, I made a poem a week from the
Sunday Times. Cutting out the
National Inquirer would not have interested me. This wasn't about condescending to the culture, it was about taking back from it. It was just raw material. I think the process may have worked. When he read the cutouts, my ex-husband said it had been like leafing through the
Times and coming across a photo of me accidentally. I never bought the
Sunday Times again.
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Friday, March 24, The New York Times
Art In Review
By Holland Cotter. 2006
A review of three simultaneous shows presented by the Daniel Reich Gallery, NYC, which singles out O’Grady for special mention in the third.
Hernan Bas: Dandies, Pansies & Prudes
Daniel Reich Gallery, Chelsea
537A West 23rd Street
Through April 8
Christian Holstad: Leather Beach
Daniel Reich Temporary Space
200 East 43rd Street, Manhattan Through May 1
‘Between the Lines’
Daniel Reich Gallery Temporary Space at the Chelsea Hotel
222 West 23rd Street, Room 103 (second floor), Chelsea
Through April 8
Daniel Reich's gallery was like no other when it opened in his Chelsea studio apartment in 2003. The work he showed there — small, finely wrought, but scrappy and pack-ratty — seemed ideally suited to the space. For that reason, when he moved to a standard white box on West 23rd Street, nothing quite seemed to jell for a while. But now the growing pains are over, and Mr. Reich has landed on his feet with one of the most interesting programs of any gallery in town.
More accurately, he has landed on several feet, as he is operating out of three spaces, two of them temporary. In his permanent gallery on West 23rd Street, he has new paintings by the Miami-based Hernan Bas, pictures of willowy young men filtered through screens of swipey, streaky acrylic and gouache. Some people find Mr. Bas's work slight and derivative; I do not. To me, his paintings are elements in a larger, continuous conceptual-performance piece about being gay in 21st-century America. He understands that "gay" is a larger and more interesting category than "artist," and one still embattled and historically underexplored. I value whatever he brings to that history.
I feel exactly the same about another Reich artist, Christian Holstad. His current show, "Leather Beach," installed in a former delicatessen on the corner of East 43rd Street and Third Avenue, is a zanily brilliant meditation on the urban leather culture that achieved critical mass in the pre-AIDS 1970's before fading from view. To some observers, its diminishment indicates a mainstreaming of gay self-perception. But Mr. Holstad complicates and resists such a possibility with an array of hand-stitched faux-leather gear that incorporates pompons, chains, human hair and glitter, and bonds Tim of Finland to the Cockettes. By diving deep into queer history, Mr. Holstad helps initiate a new history. In his art, "gay" gets its groove back.
Finally, at Mr. Reich's third space, a suite at the Chelsea Hotel, the artist Nick Mauss has assembled an excellent group show. It includes Ken Okiishi's shrewd homages to David Wojnarowicz and a beautiful drawing by the too-little-seen Daniel McDonald. There is a bright newcomer in Kianja Strobert, and two European artists — Tariq Alvi and Paulina Olowska — ripe for New York solos. The plum presence, though, is Lorraine O'Grady, one of the most interesting American conceptual artists around. And it makes total sense that she would fall within the unpredictably spinning Reich compass.
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The Poem Will Resemble You
by Nick Mauss, 2009
Mauss’s article for Artforum is, with Wilson’s INTAR catalogue essay, one of the most extended and authoritative pieces on O’Grady’s oeuvre to date. It was one-half of a two-article feature that also included O’Grady’s artist portfolio for
The Black and White Show.
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. . . . Even though [Mlle Bourgeoise Noire] appeared to have emerged out of nowhere, it has a long but decidedly not art-historical genesis.
O'Grady's peripatetic biography and uncommonly varied occupations leading up to her artistic debut included studying economics and Spanish literature at Wellesley and a stint at the
Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, jobs at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the State Department in Washington, an attempt at writing a novel, a successful career as a rock critic for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, and extended teaching at New York's School of Visual Arts on subjects ranging from Dada to Catullus. But it was at the end of a hospital
stay in 1977 that O'Grady began shifting from conventional aspirations as a writer to constructing poems that make spacious, looping fields of words out of phrases clipped from the
Sunday New York Times. Headlines and ad copy glued in spare, dynamic arrangements on blank sheets of paper look less like ransom notes than like Mallarmé's experimental typography. "At the time, two things had happened simultaneously," she recalls. "I began to think that psychoanalysis might not be a bad idea; and I had to have a biopsy on my right breast. I took some books by André Breton to the hospital to help take my mind off it. Nadja and the Manifestos may have got mixed up with coming out of the general anesthetic."
Transforming Faces
THE WOMAN AS ARTIST
COSMETIC LIB FOR MEN
Years Ago it Was a
LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY
An Escorted Tour
Around Chicago
Birthplace of the Skyscraper
"The poem will resemble you," Tristan Tzara warns in his step-by-step instructions for creating a Dada poem. But unlike similar experiments in making the familiar strange, O'Grady's poems make the familiar deeply personal, refusing the generation of accidental meaning and the thrill of nonsense that are the prerogative and legacy of the white male avant-garde. These poems know that to mean something is difficult enough.
Though the disunity of the poems' parts is camouflaged by the congenial tone of the newspaper from which they are cut, the cloak of language quivers against what it is being made to
say. Turning the technique in on itself, O'Grady finds herself everywhere and re-collects herself in a process meant to generate randomness. Predating by three years Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, these poems crystallize an aesthetic that demands
critique be both concussive and elegant.
The modern artist,
finding himself with
no shared
foundation, has
begun to build on
Reckless Storytelling
STAR WORDS
and
The Deluxe Almost-Everything-Included
WORK OF ART
This could be
The Permanent Rebellion
that lasts a lifetime.
Calling a Halt
To the Universe
BECAUSE LIFE DOESN'T WAIT
THE SAVAGE IS LOOSE
where we are
"Calling a Halt To the Universe"—this is what O'Grady did as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. . . .
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