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. ****. . . . 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.
© 2009 Lorraine O'Grady | All rights reserved.