Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O'Grady and the Art of Language 9780520384224

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SPEAKING OUT OF TURN

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PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK HAS BEEN AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE MILLARD MEISS PUBLICATION FUND OF CAA.

MM THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE BEN AND A. JESS SHENSON ENDOWMENT FUND IN VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS, ESTABLISHED BY A MAJOR GIFT FROM FRED M. LEVIN AND NANCY LIVINGSTON, THE SHENSON FOUNDATION.

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SPEAKING OUT OF TURN Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language

Stephanie Sparling Williams

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Stephanie Sparling Williams Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-38075-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38422-4 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10

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It’s not what you say, but how you say it.

my mother, zarina lee shockley-sparling

. . . a lesson I am still learning.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations / ix Acknowledgments / xiii

1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction / 1 Mark My Words / 25 “I Am Not a Performance Artist” / 61 Manifestos and Mythmaking / 99 The Diptych and “Spatial Narrative” / 127 Conclusion / 161 Notes / 173 Bibliography / 203 Index / 215

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ILLUSTRATIONS

F IG U R E S

1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Finding the one you love . . . is finding yourself,” from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010 / 27 2. André Breton, “Poem,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, 1924 / 28 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “Vivo,” from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010 / 36 4. Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (parts 1–6 of 14), 1971/1997 / 40 5. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business” (parts 2 and 3 of 11), from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010 / 46 6. Adrian Piper, Vanilla Nightmares #2, 1986 / 50 7. Adrian Piper, Vanilla Nightmares #8, 1986 / 52 8. Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire leaves the safety of home, 1980–83/2009 / 62 9. Project research: dictionary scans, 1980 / 73 10. Project lists: budget documentation, 1980 / 75 11. Lorraine O’Grady as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire with gallerist Linda Goode Bryant, 1980 / 79

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12. Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Shouts Out Her Poem, 1980–83/2009 / 85 13. Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire asks, “Won’t you help me lighten my heavy bouquet?,” 1980–83/2009 / 86 14. Exhibition flyer for The Black and White Show, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, 1983 / 93 15. Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (detail), 1978 / 110 16. Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (detail), 1978 / 113 17. Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (detail), 1978 / 114 18. Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman playing solitaire), from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 / 122 19. Lorraine O’Grady, “Told to swing an incense burner, she stirs sand instead,” from the performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, 1980–88 / 128 20. Lorraine O’Grady, “You are protected, and you shall not die,” from the performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, 1980–88 / 130 21. Lorraine O’Grady, “The voice on the tape says: ‘Mount and straddle tubs of sand, which are now touching . . . face audience,’ ” from the performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, 1980–88 / 131 22. Lorraine O’Grady, Sisters II (L: Nefertiti’s daughter Merytaten, R: Devonia’s daughter Candace), from Miscegenated Family Album, 1980/1994 / 136 23. Lorraine O’Grady, The Fir-Palm, 1991/2019 / 139 24. Lorraine O’Grady, Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers, 1991/2019 / 140 25. Lorraine O’Grady, The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years, 1991/2019 / 142 26. Lorraine O’Grady, Gaze, 1991/2019 / 144 27. Lorraine O’Grady, Dream, 1991/2019 / 145 28. Lorraine O’Grady, The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, from the series Body Is the Ground of My Experience, 1991/2019 / 147 29. Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 04 Day Sky Grey Color Study (Jeanne and Charles), in progress 1998 / 151 30. Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 07 Greensick Color Study (Lena and Charles), in progress 1998 / 152 31. Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 02 Burnt Yellow Color Text Study (Jeanne and Charles), in progress 1998 / 155 32. Lorraine O’Grady, The First and Last of the Modernists, 2010, installed at the 2010 Whitney Biennial / 157 33. Lorraine O’Grady, The First and Last of the Modernists, Diptych 3 Blue (Charles and Michael), 2010 / 158 34. Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 03, 1977/2017 / 163 35. Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 20, 1977/2017 / 165 36. Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 26, 1977/2017 / 166 x

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37. The author meets Lorraine O’Grady for the first time in Los Angeles, 2015 / 170 38. The author and Lorraine O’Grady on stage for the public program “Artist in Conversation: Lorraine O’Grady,” Smith College, 2020 / 170 PL AT E S following page 104

1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Motion Equals Progress” (part 10 of 12), from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010 2. Lorraine O’Grady, “Missing Persons,” from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Woman in White grates coconut in her kitchen with the fir-palm tree outside,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 1 of 48), 1982/2015 4. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Nantucket Memorial stands motionlessly in the stream,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 2 of 48), 1982/2015 5. Lorraine O’Grady, “A Little Girl in Pink Sash memorizes her Latin lesson,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 6 of 48), 1982/2015 6. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Debauchees ignore the Woman in Red,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 19 of 48), 1982/2015 7. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Teenager in Magenta sits alone with her headphones,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 20 of 48), 1982/2015 8. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Debauchees intersect the Woman in Red, and the rape begins,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 29 of 48), 1982/2015 9. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Artists in Yellow work on their projects as the Woman in Red struggles with the Debauchees,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 30 of 48), 1982/2015 10. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Woman in Red starts painting the stove her own color,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 33 of 48), 1982/2015 11. Lorraine O’Grady, “The Woman in Red, the Teenager in Magenta, and the Little Girl in Pink Sash wade the stream,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 46 of 48), 1982/2015 12. Lorraine O’Grady, “Star East Monuments,” from Art Is . . . (part 14 of 40), 1983/2009 13. Lorraine O’Grady, “Troupe with Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” from Art Is . . . (part 17 of 40), 1983/2009 14. Lorraine O’Grady, “Troupe Front,” from Art Is . . . (part 6 of 40), 1983/2009 15. Lorraine O’Grady, “Woman and Umbrella,” from Art Is . . . (part 15 of 40), 1983/2009 16. Lorraine O’Grady, “Girl Pointing,” from Art Is . . . (part 40 of 40), 1983/2009

ILLUSTRATIONS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

was a graduate student in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Although it is not my dissertation, my understanding of out-of-turn speech is something that developed with and has carried over from that study. My chair, Dorinne K. Kondo, and committee members, Robeson Taj Frazier, Kara Keeling, and Amelia Jones, each dedicated their time and energy to my writing, and to my development as a scholar, for which I am truly grateful. To this day, Amelia and Dorinne are my most steadfast advocates and interlocutors, and I so appreciate their collective brilliance in my corner. Also while at USC I completed an independent study with Francille Rusan Wilson and served as a teaching assistant in many of her courses. I am thankful for her mentorship, guidance, and support, which ultimately opened my path to work in the museum field. I am also indebted to Shana L. Redmond, who served as an early advisor and consummate example of unfuckwithable brilliance. Before my time in graduate school, my intellectual curiosity was sparked and nurtured by three special undergraduate professors, mentors, and now friends: Doreen E. Martinez, Reiland THIS BOOK BEGAN WHEN I

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Rabaka, and Arturo J. Aldama. They each saw something in me that I had yet to notice myself, and I am humbled by and grateful for their early confidence. Over the years I have had the gift and good fortune of a radiant community of mentors. Heartfelt thanks to Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Thelma Golden, Allison Kemmerer, Dorine Lawrence-Hughes, Asma Naeem, and Rebecca Peabody, who have each inspired my work as a scholar and a curator in uplifting and transformative ways. Their dedication to my professional development, and support of me as a whole person, is the reason I am able to continue on this journey. As students of Robin D.G. Kelley know, Robin is in a category all his own. Indeed, his genius, generosity, advocacy, compassion, and commitment are apparent in every email, phone call, meeting, and review of writing. I would have left graduate school in my second year were it not for his patient counsel. From the bottom of my heart, asante. I thank my colleagues at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum for their collective support and well wishes, which have sustained this project in the years leading up to its publication. A special thanks to John Palfrey, Flavia Vidal, Linda Carter Griffith, and my Phillips Academy colleagues, who encouraged the work through their intellectual engagement as well as research and writing support. This book would not have been possible without the dedication, care, and thoughtful editing performed by Emily Raymundo. Emily read every chapter at each phase in the writing process and provided comments and revisions as quickly as I could churn out bad drafts. She did all of this with kindness, a sense of humor, and without judgment. This is her book, too. To the magical art fairies, Clara Shaw and Tori Gernert-Dott, who in the midst of a global pandemic swooped in to support the final manuscript preparation, my gratitude is immeasurable. Similarly, my utmost appreciation belongs to my radiant curatorial colleague, fellow art historian, equestrian, and friend Emma Chubb, who read parts of the manuscript in the hours leading up to my final submission to the University of California Press. As self-doubt and general angst set in, Emma’s fresh perspective and incisive criticism allowed me to let go with confidence and peace of mind, rare emotional gems in 2020. I owe a special thanks to Lorraine O’Grady; her gallery, Alexander Gray Associates, and the Alexander Gray team, especially Page Benkowski and Alexandra Seneca; the team at the Wellesley College Archives; Nadine Little, then at University of California Press, who expressed early interest and support of the project; and Archna Patel and Lindsey Westbrook, who generously shepherded the book to publication. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose thought-provoking feedback helped me strengthen and refine the project, and to John E. Drabinski, whose generous third and final review provided the boost needed to spend the pandemic editing in isolation. xiv

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Many friends and family members sustained the research and writing in their love and care of me, even when I was at my least lovable or receptive. A special thanks to Alexandrina Agloro, Amanda Bloom, Stephanie Boyle, Laura Carlson Hasler, Emma Chubb, Christine Gee, Jamie Kaplowitz Gibbons, Danielle Hasso, Katharine and Micah Luce, Jamaal and Matthew Sebastian-Barnes, Jennifer Shook, and Natalie Zervas. Writing a book is an isolating endeavor, and thus I am especially thankful for their presence in my life. To my sister, Shelley Sparling, my father, Steven Sparling, and especially my mother, Zarina Lee Shockley-Sparling, whose words fill my mind and heart and whose example of fierce brilliance continues to guide and inspire me: love and sincere thanks. Last, my deepest gratitude is reserved for my partner in life, my husband, Corey Williams, for his extraordinary patience, unwavering support, and abiding love.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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SPEAKING OUT OF TURN An Introduction Speaking was a demand that the work made on me, and that increasing interactions with others made on me.

lorraine o’grady, 2016 1

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Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language offers the first sustained exploration of the art and practice of this feminist conceptual artist. O’Grady began her professional arts career in New York during the late 1970s, and as with so many women artists and artists of African descent working at that time, her work and practice were largely overlooked. Today, in her late eighties, she is more productive than ever and has enjoyed greater visibility as her work is being widely exhibited and enthusiastically engaged in both art media and scholarship.2 O’Grady’s impressive interdisciplinary and tremendously significant body of collages, performances, and photo-based installations is being exhibited nationally and internationally. Her writing has also received considerable attention, particularly her much-anthologized essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” which appeared first in Afterimage (1992), then in New Feminist Criticism: Art/Identity/ Action (1994), and later in Amelia Jones’s Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (2002/2010), now a feminist art historical mainstay. PEAKING OUT OF TURN:

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Finally, a collection of the artist’s writings, Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973– 2019, was published by Duke University Press in 2020. And while this new attention has generated numerous critical insights, much of her archive and praxis remains unexamined. In addition to retracing the artist’s career, Speaking Out of Turn reveals the extent to which O’Grady’s entire creative practice has been predicated on her critical engagement with language, and more specifically how the written and spoken word have shaped her impressive oeuvre. This book closely examines key bodies of work from across O’Grady’s career in critical dialogue with several important theorists of vision, language, and address: first, feminist, black feminist, and womanist theorists such as Daphne Brooks, Elin Diamond, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Amelia Jones, Lucy Lippard, and Alice Walker, who stake a critical claim to art historical legitimacy for women cultural producers by asserting the important vantage point from which they make rich contributions as “outsiders within,” performing incisive institutional critique, and troubling the white male gaze; and second, European philosophers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Bertolt Brecht, whose work informs my reading of O’Grady’s multilayered speaking (double voice) and strategies employed in relationship to her viewers (alienation effects). The book also puts O’Grady’s art and creative process into critical dialogue with several artists working in a similar manner across the late twentieth century, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Senga Nengudi, Adrian Piper, and Carrie Mae Weems. This introduction and the chapters that follow argue that O’Grady’s art offers new modes for interrogating these ideas and engaging with other contemporary practitioners, as well as rigorous approaches to theorizing performance and conceptual art more broadly. What is clear about Lorraine O’Grady’s art is that every aspect of it is entangled and interconnected. From her early literary cut-ups to her boisterous performances to the later, theoretically dense diptychs, issues of gender, race, and class are embedded and conceptually explored.3 In this book I focus specifically on the tactic of direct address, which I argue unifies O’Grady’s archive and cuts across mediums. Direct address, as a strategy deployed by visual artists, can be understood as the means by which an artwork “speaks to” or engages its viewers, with the manner of address being central to how the work’s meaning is derived. Speech and concepts of language, so fundamental to O’Grady’s work, are employed by the artist across a range of modalities such as text, aurality, and performance, and within this modus operandi, I argue, O’Grady’s brand of direct address has been fashioned and executed out of turn—or, said another way, against the grain of white Western, European art and visual culture. When discussing these concept-based ruptures in O’Grady’s brand of language-asart, the discursive systems of race and gender can be understood as the complex intersection of philosophies, regimes of representation, and systems of enforcement that work in concert to define human beings through raced and gendered subject categories. Much of the scholarship I draw on itself builds on the theories of Michel Foucault, who argued that social institutions, like the art museums where most of O’Grady’s work is 2

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exhibited, are enmeshed in social relations and are thus spaces of social control. Indeed, it is in these institutions and relational entanglements where the subjectivities of artists and viewers are formed within and through language. Furthermore, the terms “race” and “gender” are understood as discursive formations when used throughout the book.4 As the art historian Jennifer González argues, “Race discourse [and I would add gender] is the politics of representation [in museums, art, literature, popular culture, music, film, journalism, and other media] that insists on presenting people as ‘racialized’ subjects.”5 Additionally, black feminist discourse has provided the theoretical foundation for such a politics of representation and my own critical engagement with O’Grady’s work.6 Within these core concerns of gender and race are nuances that stem from the artist’s persistent use of dichotomies in service of critical and avant-garde visual expression. For example, black and white are two poles continuously interrogated across distinct projects—a tension that drives the artist’s fascination with hybridity and racial and cultural mixing, in particular. Likewise, male and female are also hefty poles between which O’Grady’s multimodal practice oscillates. Language, then, in addition to formal strategies of address, facilitates O’Grady’s theoretical approach to her praxis, and how a viewer might come to make meaning from her work. — As Speaking out of Turn examines the art of a black American woman, using her creative practice to trace the bounds of direct address as an artistic strategy, it must also acknowledge the long historical legacy of black cultural politics in the United States, making the connection between O’Grady’s contemporary performance art and historic uses of direct-address strategies toward survival and self-determination. In the 1800s, for example, abolitionist practitioners such as Henry “Box” Brown and Sojourner Truth took up direct-address strategies as both aesthetic enactments and to literally speak and exist out of turn as a critical means of liberation.7 And as discussed later in this introduction with respect to the speech acts of Maria W. Stewart, Josephine V., and Rachel Jeantel, it is imperative to explore how multimodal performance artists like O’Grady inherited these fraught, inventive histories of existing “out of turn” as a means for survival and creative being. Just as the aforementioned actors and their cultural enactments contextualize O’Grady’s disruptive approach, the artist’s direct-address concept-based work illuminates, through contemporary praxis, nuanced and undertheorized aspects of a particular creative cultural and aesthetic past. Fundamental to how I locate and name O’Grady’s process, and the ways the artist has come to engage with issues of silence and erasure, is the notion of speaking out of turn. Speaking out of turn is an idiom I have adopted and retooled in order to theorize the unique position and strategies of black women and women-identified artists of color, O’Grady in particular, as they work through complex histories of exclusion and structures of power and visibility in art industries and art historical discourse. Throughout the text, speaking out of turn is explicated and historically situated as a Introduction

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critical methodology within O’Grady’s art, and within broader histories of speech acts and performances of visibility emerging from the African diaspora. By definition, the idiom “to speak out of turn” is predicated on a preexisting order of speech. To speak out of turn means that you have spoken when it was not your turn to do so. Scholar and artist Michele Wallace’s early work recognizes the revolutionary power of speaking out of turn and argues that it is the only “tradition” available to the black female critical voice.8 Art critic and curator Lucy Lippard invokes this powerful stance in her essay about Wallace’s work, understanding “out of turn” as “outside the dizzying circle of white and male discourse.”9 I use the phrase in order to further develop and revitalize the vocabulary necessary for intervening in Western-, white-, male-centric discourses of art history and the study of visual objects, as well as for discussing the interventions O’Grady’s art makes. More broadly defined, speaking out of turn connotes speaking at the wrong time or in an undesignated place; saying something without authority; making a remark or providing information that is tactless or indiscreet; or speaking without permission. Speaking out of turn, then, is also a decolonial apparatus—a methodology of the historically silenced and oppressed—that O’Grady uses in her practice to trouble the field of vision and claim a voice in the art world.10 Broadly, art that speaks out of turn is a necessary response to the long history of silencing and erasing black artists and artists of color within Western history and culture. Using this analytic, I examine the strategies of address O’Grady adopts, and, drawing upon theories of performance, interpellation, and cultural and visual studies, provide an interdisciplinary analysis and a framework to assess works by O’Grady and her contemporaries that can be said to speak out of turn.11 Thus, I analyze throughout the ways O’Grady mobilizes direct-address strategies in the contemporary art world by speaking and existing out of turn. Arguably, the disruptive nature of unsolicited speech has an impact on art museums, altering exhibition dynamics in gallery spaces in interesting ways. Through a variety of creative media and performance technologies, O’Grady’s art reorients viewers to complex issues of class, race, and gender, and to the conceptual underpinnings in each of her bodies of work. My linguistic focus on O’Grady’s art, however, moves beyond real or imagined speech acts to examine what the artist has done or does with the platform of the contemporary art museum when she has inventively fashioned herself within the structure of visual existence. Put another way, this monograph is dedicated to exploring the semiotics embedded in O’Grady’s work as she has stepped into the field of vision and claimed a voice. Naturally, I am concerned with what this voice sounds like, but more prominently throughout, I ask what this voice looks like. If speaking out of turn can be understood in the Sandovalian sense as a methodology of oppressed or marginalized individuals and communities, I argue that direct address is part of speaking out of turn’s technological repertoire in the art of O’Grady and others.12 Direct address is a technology necessary for generating dissident and coalitional cosmopolitics, and for revealing the rhetorical structures by which languages of 4

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aesthetic supremacy are uttered, rationalized, and ruptured.13 Black women, feminists, and women-identified artists of color have taken up this strategy, just as literary and theater practitioners have in the past, in order to move spectators politically, to reveal structures of power and technologies of vision, and, in other cases, to complicate, disrupt, deceive, mislead, or redirect viewers through their visual constructions. This line of inquiry points us directly toward the process-based operations of O’Grady’s creative practice, in which the linguistic strategy of direct address features prominently. Significantly, direct address emerges most visibly in the history of US art during the late 1970s and the 1980s with the rise of new expressive manifestations of the feminist movement: appropriation, assemblage, mixed-media performance, and aesthetic labor as institutional critique.14 During this time, contemporary art experienced a sizable shift away from discourses of modernism toward a focus on those producing on the margins of the art world.15 The strategy of direct address within visual art can be understood as inheriting the concerns and techniques of literature and theater, as artists across media have used this method in order to intervene in audience engagement through visual and performance modalities of disruption and interference. Largely conceptual in form and loosely associated with institutional and cultural critique and the dematerialization of the art object, direct-address tactics center the experience of spectators, often with the goal of moving them socially and politically.16 O’Grady entered the art world at the height of this conversation, and during a turbulent moment in the 1970s and 1980s, when white feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cindy Sherman, and a limited number of nonwhite women artists, such as Ana Mendieta and Adrian Piper, were given space to show their work in larger, more traditional art museum spaces.17 The arrival of these practitioners marked the emergence of language around direct address, used to describe their work in a dizzying variety of contexts. Indeed, Kruger recognized direct address as a viable tactic regardless of medium specificity, which is reflected in the mutability of the strategy across her practice as well as discourses surrounding her art.18 Due to the nebulous uses and loose associations of direct address by a wide array of artists, the particular rhetorics of direct address as a sophisticated deployment of language within the visual arts have never before been distilled within the US art historical context with any great specificity. Thus, using O’Grady’s dynamic practice, Speaking out of Turn also locates and pins down several coordinates of direct address as an important artistic modality—one that is mapped through a variety of expressive sites that O’Grady herself operates in, such as text-based work, performance, and video. ON METHOD

Speaking Out of Turn mobilizes a variety of methodological resources from art history, anthropology, gender studies, critical race studies, and philosophy to examine how language operates within O’Grady’s art. Sites of engagement range from more traditional Introduction

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spaces such as museum exhibitions, talks and lectures, and the artist’s archive housed at Wellesley College to lesser-studied spaces such as lengthy email exchanges, gallery openings, invited dinners, late-night drinks, and daylong interviews that start over breakfast. And while throughout the book I rarely bring into sharp focus any one site, each contributed to my immersive approach to O’Grady’s work and thus informs the questions guiding the entire project: How do Lorraine O’Grady’s artworks speak, and whom do they speak to? And what are the conceptual underpinnings of O’Grady’s multimodal visual projects—as art, as archival document, as a malleable medium connected to the artist’s own position within the art world, and against art historical discourse? My first encounter with O’Grady’s work was in the context of curator Bennett Simpson’s 2012 exhibition Blues for Smoke at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I was captivated, and admittedly disturbed, by one of the artist’s diptych photomontages from the series Body Is the Ground of My Experience (1991/2019, see fig. 28). On the right, a little boy and girl play ball in a clearing, with a heap of clothes and a handgun strewn across the grass nearby. In the air hovering over the tree line, a naked couple embraces, a white man atop a black woman, apparently penetrating her. In the frame on the left, the black woman lies in the now-empty clearing; her eyes gaze overhead, unfocused, as she is fondled by the white man, now in a torn chain mail bodysuit, his head replaced by a human skull. Titled The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, the work left me conflicted. I was immediately interpellated by the mixed-race couple, a pairing resembling my own parents. However, the bizarre context and title were disorienting. The historical figures O’Grady summons with her framing are Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States; Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved to him; sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortez; and an enslaved Indigenous Nahua woman known as La Malinche, who played a key role in Cortez’s defeat of the Aztecs. “N. and Me,” the last attribution, is presumably coded to protect the identity of the artist’s past spouse, lover, or friend to whom she draws the powerful comparison. I went searching for more, determined to understand what it all meant, and in the process formed a unique relationship with O’Grady herself, which laid the foundations for this book. Trained as an interdisciplinary cultural theorist, I initially approached O’Grady’s work from a place of ethnographic phenomenology, exploring through participant observation and embodied theorizing how and why the work spoke to me specifically: a light-skinned black woman of means entrenched in elite academic environs. It became clear during the research process, as I began to shift into more art historical and formal modes of writing, that when analyzing O’Grady’s use of language and the alienating effect it often produces, I would be unable to extract myself from any substantive reading of the artist’s work. As Christina Sharpe elucidates of fellow black and African American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s “autobiographical example,” it is an approach that is “not about navel gazing”; rather, autobiography and autoethnography are necessary modes when looking “at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a 6

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window into social and historical processes, as an example of them.”19 Beyond certain positionalities I share with O’Grady herself, when discussing strategies of address, this monograph makes an intentional shift away from theories of universal viewership and instead invests in interdisciplinary and situated ways of knowing and understanding contemporary art. Indeed, a strong parallel exists between ethnographic and phenomenological methodologies and artistic strategies of address, as the meaning of any given artwork that might be understood as “calling out” from the walls stems from the material conditions of the piece and its effects (intended or otherwise) on its viewer. I took seriously a commitment, then, to multi-sited ethnography as an inner subjective relationship between myself and O’Grady, her work, the archive, and the space of the museum.20 By reflecting on my role in the research process, my own racialized and gendered body in relationship to both the history of art and the space of the fine art museum, alongside O’Grady’s black conceptual praxis, this manuscript is uniquely situated to make a critical intervention in the ways O’Grady’s work is studied and understood.21 The Canadian poet Dionne Brand provides a stunning articulation of one’s ties to and relationship within an archival praxis: One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door. How do I know this? Only by self-observation, only by looking. Only by feeling. Only by being a part, sitting in the room with history.22

Motivating this shift away from more traditional approaches to art historical writing is a desire to demystify the processes of academic research, particularly in the realm of art and culture, which is an inherently subjective endeavor. Furthermore, locating my own positionality as a researcher—sitting in a room (read: art gallery) with history— and naming my relationship to artists and objects of study, is a dissociative act against the historically exclusive project of art historical canon formation, and the damaging debates surrounding field-engrained notions of adjudicating quality, purity, authenticity, and beauty. My own methodological shift perhaps mirrors and advances a steady change taking place in the art world, which until recently has historically moved at a glacial pace. In the early 2000s, specifically, recuperative impulses increased among scholars and curators, many motivated by the swift emergence and cooptation of multicultural discourse.23 When O’Grady was invited to participate in the influential 2007 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, the artist experienced an important shift in her practice toward the archive as a means of self-conscious resuscitation of her own forgotten art practice.24 At this time, the internet made rendering oneself visible a much easier endeavor than it had been in earlier decades, and O’Grady’s deployment of the Introduction

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World Wide Web provides an interesting model, and point of study, for born-digital archives as well as online creative practices more broadly. In an interview with Brooklyn Rail’s Jarrett Earnest, the artist described how she engineered her own comeback: I did it [created an archive] because I thought I’d disappeared in many people’s minds— Connie Butler being one exception. Connie had been at WAC (Women’s Action Coalition) as a young woman, and I was one of the very few women of color who were active in that group. When she later curated the exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) and put me in it, I knew it would be important, I felt I had to be ready. That’s when I put the website up; I wanted to make it possible for anyone that was interested to become more engaged. Everything had disappeared from public view, it was all just sitting in the drawers of my file cabinets. I realized that for any of it to be understood I had to include everything: the images, the texts—it had to be a mini-archive. It’s designed to shape my work for the public and be a teaching tool. But it’s also meant as a staging for serious research, a start for access to my physical archives at Wellesley. I deliberately built the site to emphasize the connections between text and image—I didn’t want people to just look at the pictures. You can’t even get to the images without going through text; every link lands you back into text. During my [2015–16] exhibit at the Carpenter Center, I met with art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s PhD seminar. I think I shocked the grad students when I said, “I would not be here now were it not for my website.” But you know, to have just appeared in WACK! with Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s gown, I would have been a one-hit wonder. Having the website up with my other artwork and my writings available would make it more possible for me to be recuperated by a new generation of artists, writers, and curators.25

O’Grady makes clear here the centrality of text in the viewing of her artwork, and her desire to control viewer engagement with the work through textual mediation both in the gallery and online. Until recently, the artist’s website was the only place one could go to view a large portion of O’Grady’s life’s work, and O’Grady herself attributes her reemergence to this didactic strategy of creating easy access and legibility for contemporary interlocutors. My own relationship to the artist’s work indeed continued online following my viewing at Blues for Smoke. When I located O’Grady’s web archive, then still being developed, I read every text and image the artist had purposefully placed, like breadcrumbs, to lead the reader-viewer into her process, hinting at the personal depth and conceptual heft that lie beyond the surface of Body Is the Ground of My Experience and other works. By the time I met the artist in person in 2015 (see fig. 37), I had already decided to dedicate a significant portion of my dissertation to her practice, including performances like Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83) and Art Is . . . (1983); my project involved examining a cohort of artists’ work in order to understand and interpret

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direct-address art presented in US art museums and galleries. When I met her, she was delivering a talk titled “Both/And,” a fitting attribution that would later be used as the title of her 2021 Brooklyn Museum retrospective. In the lecture, O’Grady outlined her nearly forty-year practice, making connections between her experiences as a black woman artist, her conceptual practice, and her use of the diptych as a mode for theorizing two distinct images or ideas in space and time. “Both/and” connotes both inside and outside of the art world, both black and white, both historical and contemporary, both the right and left sides of O’Grady’s diptych pairings, and other such tensions that manifest throughout her oeuvre.26 I reached out to O’Grady and, much to my surprise, she responded in kind. In the years since, we have enjoyed regular correspondence, which has been central to the research and development of this book, from dissertation case studies to the analysis found here.27 Parallel to my profound gratitude to O’Grady, as a black feminist art historian and theorist, I am also indebted to the black feminist literary scholars and cultural historians whose groundbreaking approaches to locating and naming the sedimented ramifications of interlocking systems of oppression, particularly from the perspectives of black women, have deeply informed my own approach to O’Grady’s language-centered visual art practice. Aligned with the project of black feminist theorizing, this monograph takes seriously the artworks and creative modalities of black women, particularly those of O’Grady, which have historically been overlooked or excluded from white mainstream feminist and contemporary art discourses. As a graduate student, I was drawn to O’Grady’s work for reasons I could not then explain. Since encountering the artist’s self-reflexive archive and engaging in deep conversation with O’Grady herself, I have found that I am drawn to the work because of the way it speaks to and interrogates an aspect of the black American experience often left undealt with, brushed aside as more urgent dilemmas take (necessary) precedence. O’Grady’s experience of black affluence, the appearance of social and cultural thriving, and light-skinned privilege resonates with my own. In fact, several of the artists I have written about, including Delphine Diallo, Coco Fusco, and Adrian Piper, also directly and indirectly take up these intersections as they mobilize their own “lightly melanated” black female bodies within their work. For me, also a highly educated light-skinned black woman of means, O’Grady’s art, along with Piper’s, has opened up intriguing possibilities in constructive self-reflexive knowledge production and theorizing. THE VOICE, AND OTHER RADICAL SPEECH ACTS [The] Black woman, silent, almost invisible, in America, has been speaking for three hundred years in pantomime or at best in a borrowed voice.

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A stunning woman in her mid-eighties appears against a black screen. She smiles pleasantly and glances off camera. Electronic music begins to play, and the woman’s bare shoulders bob, her delicate body sways to the beat. As the introduction segues into lyrics, the woman parts her lips to sing, but it is not her voice that touches listeners’ ears; instead, it’s the voice of British-born visual artist, singer, and composer Anohni, formerly known as Antony, of the band Antony and the Johnsons. And while Anohni has her own unique history of speaking and existing out of turn, the woman who appears in the video and claims another’s voice as her own is feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, who for the entirety of the three-minute video lip-synchs to Anohni’s song “Marrow,” from the singer-composer’s biting and beautiful 2016 album Hopelessness. The sound is distorted, and the lyrics chillingly allegorize the planet Earth as a woman’s cancer-riddled body. The woman is exploited through capitalism and abused by a culture desensitized to its own violence. The resounding refrain—“We are, we are all Americans now”—packs a powerful indictment of the US-led misuse and destruction of the planet’s resources, and subsequent denial of the environmental ramifications of this historical abuse. In a statement on the video, Anohni wrote, “Capitalism cares only for wealth extraction, from the earth and from its people. We are slaughtering the future. Only a wartime effort can save us now. Stand with the Water protectors in North Dakota. There is only one prayer left: save the earth.”29 The singer-composer references then-current efforts by Indigenous groups to thwart the development of an oil pipeline that would cut through Native lands and pollute local water sources, one of the most contentious environmental crises at the time of the song’s release. In fact, the entire album addresses a myriad of disasters, each highlighting the human and environmental tolls that come with the current trajectory of rapidly Westernizing civilizations. The music videos that accompany these doomsday dirges utilize predominantly steady shots of a single celebrity as they lip-synch to the disconcerting lyrics. Other such arrangements include actress Susan Cianciolo in the video for the album’s namesake track, “Hopelessness,” Broadway musician Storm Lever in the video for “Crisis,” and a haunting appearance by supermodel and actress Naomi Campbell, who, through streaming tears, mouths the words to Anohni’s “Drone Bomb Me.” In “Marrow,” O’Grady’s cheery expression quickly dissolves into disillusionment; we see anguish set into the artist’s face while lip-synching the words “Suck the oil out of her face / Burn her hair, boil her skin.” O’Grady’s lip-synching performance is average, at best, which is largely why the collaboration is so mesmerizing. Throughout the video, the artist struggles to keep up with Anohni’s sinuous runs and often overdramatizes the lyrics. Full synchronization remains just out of reach. Despite this, what makes the enactment so entrancing and powerful is the embodied presence of O’Grady herself, and what she has come to symbolize through her practice of claiming physical space by deploying her voice in radical and disruptive ways in the art world. O’Grady remixed the words of variously authored texts culled from the New York Times in Cutting Out the New York Times (1977); invaded 10

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white-walled galleries as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and New York’s Central Park in her performance Rivers, First Draft (1982); infiltrated Harlem’s African American Day Parade for Art Is . . .; and now mimes the words of another artist, her body mobilized as a hypervisible stand-in for the age, and yet timelessness, of the planet. Certainly, the power in the artist’s dynamic presence is what is captured and bodied forth in both the video and the performance still that activates this book’s cover. O’Grady’s body in this instance becomes a rich textual metaphor for her own distinct language-driven practice. For O’Grady, speech is central, even when the artist appears to be rendered silent, voiceless, a vessel for someone else’s voice and lyrics. In “Marrow,” O’Grady’s bright red lips move, and yet her voice is evinced by another’s. Is it O’Grady who appropriates the words and sounds of Anohni to communicate something new, or is it the other way around? This dialogic collaboration, in ways similar to O’Grady’s other projects, such as Cutting Out the New York Times or Miscegenated Family Album (1994), makes it difficult to pin down what is being appropriated and whose voice is ultimately present. The trick O’Grady performs is not one of impersonation but of implication. Her less-than-perfect lip-synchronization is a subtle yet profound exercise in ontological polyvocality. What O’Grady’s appearance in “Marrow,” as well as the rest of her work presented throughout the book, makes clear is that the voice is a powerful medium through which artists in all fields cultivate and define their practice. Indeed, Anohni recognizes her own authority and participation by using her voice in disruptive ways in Hopelessness: “People that know my music tend to rely on my voice as a source of comfort. . . . This album was me not only making a series of indictments of our world, but also dealing with my own complicity as a participant in this prevailing consumer culture we’re all enmeshed in.”30 And while language is not dependent on the voice, as we will see in O’Grady’s work, the voice becomes one of language’s most powerful implements, especially when it is presumed to be the “wrong” instrument, or one that is not yours to use, or one you are using in the “wrong” manner. In this way, direct address and speaking out of turn are tactics that have historically made visible the workings of power within the art world and beyond.31 Here, taking my lead from scholars Daphne Brooks, Kobena Mercer, Uri McMillan, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tavia Nyong’o, and artists Coco Fusco, Lyle Ashton Harris, Iké Udé, and Carrie Mae Weems, I draw upon much longer and uneven developments in black global performance cultures to locate and name strategies of address specific to diverse artists across the diaspora. The analytic hook for this monograph, “speaking out of turn,” both gestures toward the disruptive power and potential for the artistic category of direct address (and other radical speech acts) and takes seriously the question of why particular artists have not been given space to speak or to exist in the art world in the first place. In acknowledging these historic power dynamics, O’Grady, along with many of her contemporaries, have taken up direct-address strategies in order to tap the participatory potential for artworks to enter into dynamic spectator relations Introduction

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as extensions of artists’ own material and ideological subjectivities. These artists’ voices carry, so to speak, despite the absence or presence of their physical bodies. Bertolt Brecht used direct address, among other strategies—commonly referred to as “breaking the fourth wall”—to expose technologies of production to his audiences, and to expose the unjust social power relationships embedded in particular narrative structures. I read direct-address art as a similar kind of disruption and understand O’Grady’s art as often making the familiar space of the art museum and the process of viewing art strange and highly politicized. Even though there is no prescribed formula for creating contemporary art, there are tacit expectations of art spectatorship—a set of socialized behaviors and cues one practices when making one’s way around and through a given art space. This set of expectations and spectator performances, alongside theories such as Brecht’s, inform my analysis of O’Grady’s language-centered practice. I argue throughout that O’Grady’s at times confrontational artworks have the potential to disrupt the power matrices that define the colonial rhetorics of Western fine art spaces.32 Inspired by her multimodal practices, I also draw on a set of theoretical apparatuses for decoding direct-address art’s effects, or potential effects, on spectators. These tools emerge from an interdisciplinary black feminist, historical, and cultural studies standpoint that examines a broad range of speech acts as a way to contextualize and more richly theorize O’Grady’s approach. My autoethnographic research and use of the term “speaking out of turn” is site specific within art museum and galleries, with a critical lens fixed on the power structures that shape such spaces. Speaking out of turn, however, is not only an artistic methodology that occurs exclusively in art spaces. Rather, it is an act with historically risky and life-threatening ramifications for black people, especially in the United States—a reality O’Grady references before turning it into a call for action in her Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performances. Yet even a solicitation to speak does not guarantee that one will be able to speak uninterrupted, or that one will not be actively silenced in the process of said solicited speech. A timeless and often overlooked example is that of Maria W. Stewart, who more than 180 years ago became the first American woman of any race to speak to a mixed public of men and women, both black and white.33 Stewart, also well known as the first African American woman to give regular public lectures, spoke on topics that ranged from abolition to women’s rights to religion. On February 27, 1833, she addressed the Boston chapter of the African Masonic Lodge, a men’s fraternal organization. Her now-infamous series of claims that men lacked “ambition and requisite courage” to pursue women’s rights and the complete abolition of slavery caused predictable uproar from the audience and abruptly ended her public speaking career.34 The uproar suggests that, while invited, her speech was out of turn and out of place. Thus, Stewart had to be silenced. This moment in the nineteenth century, which witnessed other abolitionist enactments such as Frederick Douglass’s now widely acclaimed 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” point to what Chela Sandoval names 12

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the “paradoxical successes of the West’s imperial project,” which “meant becoming subject to the speech of the colonized other; this expanding access to other ‘third’ world language-scapes functioned to make ever more obvious the historically constructed limits by which Western thought, psychology, and culture were bounded.”35 In fact, Stewart’s out-of-turn speech, as well as the subjection of white abolitionists to Douglass’s thorough tongue-lashing, can be understood as a momentary rupture, a deconstructionist breakdown of Western thought. The solicitation of marginalized language-scapes, and their halting or re-directional tendencies, can be followed through one of the West’s most integral structures, the court of law. In US courtrooms, women—particularly nonwhite women—are often asked to speak or provide testimony, only to be disrupted. Legal scholarship has demonstrated its concern with the voice and out-of-turn speech, particularly from underrepresented and underserved communities, including women. In one such example, “Speaking Out of Turn: The Story of Josephine V.,” legal scholar Anthony Alfieri recounts the story of Josephine V., a Hispanic woman then twenty-seven years old from an impoverished community in the South Bronx, who had a legal dispute with the local Income Maintenance center in June 1986 over an application to add her newborn daughter to her public assistance budget. Alfieri highlights the implications of Josephine V.’s persistent out-of-turn speech acts at the center and in the courtroom: the young mother “testified regarding the protracted struggle to add her infant daughter to the household budget, and the testimony included a detailed description of the numerous bureaucratic obstacles impeding that addition.” At the end of her testimony, Mrs. V. was interrupted by the administrative law judge while summarizing the nature of her petition for reimbursement to cover her out-of-pocket expenses. The judge discounted her right to such reimbursement and began a line of skeptical questioning, to which Mrs. V. demanded, “Can I speak?” “Apparently surprised by her outburst, the ALJ withheld his questioning, permitting Mrs. V. to speak without intrusion.” As Alfieri illuminates, the story of Josephine V. shows that the poverty lawyer’s ethic of suppression may be challenged by the client’s ethic of vocal resistance. In fact, “her act of speaking out reveals the upheaval produced by the ethic of resistance.” Whereas “in this upheaval, traditional lawyer and client roles are displaced.”36 As her case also demonstrates, there is a public tension regarding the vocal suppression of particular bodies in US courtrooms, and the resistance to such suppression may occur in fits, bursts, and starts. In these moments, those who have been vocally suppressed in the face of the law may find occasion to speak out of turn. Another, more recent intersection of the law and what sound studies scholar Jennifer Lynn Stoever has termed “the sonic color line” occurred during the 2013 State of Florida v. George Zimmerman trial, during the testimony of Rachel Jeantel.37 Jeantel was the close friend of murdered teen Trayvon Martin and was on the phone with him during his attack in 2012. During the trial, a would-be twenty-minute testimony turned into a grueling three-day interrogation by both the prosecutor and the defense Introduction

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attorney, who interrupted, dissected, discredited, and condescended to Jeantel’s accounts, which were delivered in African American Vernacular English. Jeantel, who was not offered a translator and refused to code switch, was silenced and shamed for both her out-of-turn presence and the quality of her speech. Allowed to utter only fragmented words, thoughts, and sentences, Jeantel’s testimony was in turn chopped, restated, misstated, and mistranslated.38 Significantly, the teen was repeatedly interrupted by her interrogators. From this formulation and maintenance of a turn to speak, which encompasses the ways in which one is permitted to speak, these examples reveal that historically, it is always the white heterosexual male’s turn to speak. And while these incidents of speaking out of turn did not occur within the white walls of an art museum, they mark an important legacy in the silencing of people of color, and women in particular, in US public institutions. Maria V. Stewart’s, Josephine V’s., and Rachel Jeantel’s speech acts were performances both hypervisual and extra-sonic in nature, and in many ways they set a precedent for future, and reveal the historicity of past, iterations. Fred Moten has identified these precarious sonic performances against persistently disruptive systemic violence as a kind of straining.39 These and similar acts make up the “agentive efforts at bodily self-determination and liberation,” as Uri McMillan puts it, which often “sought to rebuke” across sociocultural contexts “the spectacularity of black suffering.”40 Along with Moten, I am interested in what happens when the phonic materiality of such exertions (in public spaces, in courtrooms, in art galleries) appears in or is considered through visual art objects. To invoke Saidiya Hartman through Moten, I am drawn to the conjunction of race, gender, “and the irreducible sounds of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection.”41 In the chapters that follow, I examine the legacy of violent and hypervisual performances of address in the art of Lorraine O’Grady, specifically through moments in which addresses or utterances are made densely meaningful in fine art spaces through the specters of race and gender in the visual realm. Often, the visual realm and its registers are summoned to address the sonic. For example, to map a field of inquiry as a particular sonic landscape draws from language historically utilized for analyzing a particular scene as something that is seen and designated based on this sight—it is a label that relies on the ways space and scenic variation tend to be visualized, and thus organized.42 My work on O’Grady attempts the opposite—to recognize the analytic richness the sonic provides, and to utilize O’Grady’s speech and voice specifically to assess her visual art, which often does not incorporate actual sound at the site of exhibition.43 African American and African diasporic literary traditions understand speech and performance as grounded in oral and storytelling traditions, and this understanding also informs my analysis. The dialogic method, for literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., makes apparent “the creative tropes of African American literature, for what makes the language ‘literary’ in this tradition are the formal moves and devices that ‘signify 14

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upon’ the text of blackness in the dominant discourse of American national literature.”44 Mae G. Henderson in Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing (2014) provides a brief genealogy of speech acts as they emerge in the development of a modern African American literary tradition. This formative moment, she underlines, “suggests an alignment between contemporary sonic literacies and subjectivities and prior theoretical models and paradigms grounded in colloquial language, speech, voice, orality, storytelling, and singing.” Henderson expands on these paradigmatic traditions of African American writing. The association of African American writing with a “culture and tradition that has invoked the vernacular trope of the ‘talking book’ and generated critical tropes such as the ‘speakerly text’ and the ‘talking text’ further signals a continuity between the oral and the written forms of black American expressivity.”45 Even when O’Grady is not actually speaking—the artist admits that she is “prolix”—she perhaps inadvertently follows these genre-bending traditions in her practice of “writing in space,” connecting the communicative impulse of writing with the spatial imperative of the visual. Henderson highlights other tropes—ranging from the “call and response” of Robert Stepto to Gates’s “signifyin’,” Houston Baker’s “bluesman,” Geneva Smitherman’s “talkin’ and testifyin’,” bell hooks’s “talking back,” Cheryl Wall’s “worrying the line,” and her own “speaking in tongues.” These literary traditions affirm the power of voice and phonic articulation in the African American literary tradition.46 Most importantly, the critical emphasis of these African American literary scholars reveals the liberatory compulsion involved in the deployment of voice in contexts in which black people have historically been subjected to violent vocal suppression, often coupled with equally violent visual distortion and erasure.47 In an enactment that predated O’Grady’s academic intervention in “Olympia’s Maid,” Audre Lorde delivered a paper addressing this very vocal suppression and erasure in the literary field. Titled “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” and presented in 1977 at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference, Lorde’s paper challenged her white colleagues’ refusal to give voice to black women writers in their courses. In addition to theories of language and address and histories of institutionalized vocal suppression, a close attention to literature on phenomenology has proven useful in discussing the structures of experience and consciousness in art museums and through the artworks themselves. If phenomenology can be understood as a turn toward objects, then my work on O’Grady reconceives this movement using the art object, specifically those that can be said to speak or invoke vocality.48 For both Judith Butler and Louis Althusser, turning is crucial to subject formation.49 So, then, what does it mean when a work of art causes one to “turn”—to oscillate between visual culture and visual/spatial/social contexts? Reading German philosopher Martin Heidegger through Ahmed, both theorized a subject’s turning within space and the process of familiarity as a kind of orientation. For Ahmed, “The concept of ‘orientation’ allows us then to rethink the phenomenality Introduction

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of space—that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance,” and for Heidegger, “Orientation is not about differentiating between the sides of the body, which allow us to know which way to turn, but about the familiarity of the world: ‘I necessarily orient myself both in and from my being already alongside a world which is “familiar.” ’ ”50 Or as Butler challenges: Though phenomenology sometimes appears to assume the existence of a choosing and constituting agent prior to language (who poses as the sole source of its constituting acts), there is also a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution that takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.51

I reframe these complex spectator relationships throughout the book, but most importantly in the conclusion, where I discuss in greater depth my relationship to the artist and my inclination toward the art she and others are producing. In work that can be understood as speaking out of turn, the call-and-response nature of its formal arrangement demands a phenomenological reading, as do the provocative forms of criticality the work propels through direct address and institutional critique. Specifically, the reading that is called for is one that theorizes a spectator’s embodied engagement with the critically “speaking” object, an exchange enmeshed in historical and ideological subject-object positions and expectations. Thus, in addition to offering an occasion to rethink and retool linguistic theories of out-of-turn speech and address, O’Grady’s language-driven practice phenomenologically situates spectators at the interstices between subject and objet d’art, as Butler suggests. THE 1980s AND TODAY: FEMINISMS, ARCHIVES, AND (RE)CONCEPTUAL ART I spent all of the 1980s and the 1990s feeling, “God, will it never end? Will they never stop taking up all the room, stop speaking for themselves as though speaking for everyone?”

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The 1980s, for many people, was a time of acute political enervation and sociocultural nihilism. Following in the wake of the tremendous efforts toward civil rights and feminist organizing in the 1960s and 1970s, the decade between 1979 and 1990 heralded a conservative backlash to social and policy victories hard fought and won. Using the ruse of restoring “family values,” Republican Ronald Reagan was elected US president (twice) in the decade that would become known for the long-term effects of his destructive financial policies: the so-called war on drugs, which led to the profiling, policing, and mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of black Americans, particularly men; the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic, which ravaged entire communities

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without government acknowledgment or intervention; the rolling back of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982; and the endless struggle to protect Roe v. Wade. Many artists working in the 1980s operated in the dense shadow of pervasive mass media imagery steadily emerging with the technological rise of broadcast television and network programming. Black artists and artists of color, in particular, also continuously brushed up against the failure of mainstream art institutions and galleries to desegregate following the various struggles for inclusion of the previous decades. Artists, including O’Grady, produced work out of deep and often intimate experiences as feminist, civil rights, and AIDS activists, bringing to bear on art venues across the country much of the dialogue involving the institutional underpinning of gender, race, and class justice. Curator and scholar Helen Molesworth notes, “These two powerful social forces—movements for social justice and the rise of television—converged and matured in the art of the 1980s.” For many art historians, the 1980s represented the last period of cohesion within the historical canon of US-based art. Molesworth observes that “much of the art of the 1980s was involved in a shared project of expanding our understanding of identity and subjectivity, exploring the possibility of politics in a mediated public sphere, and offering increasingly nuanced and complicated versions of history and memory.”53 To quote Molesworth in the catalogue essay from her landmark exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s (2012): For many 1980s artists, making art was itself propelled by the desire to participate, in a transformative way, in the culture at large. This shared aspiration may be what prompted curator Ann Goldstein to refer to the 1980s as the “last movement,” the last time artists, however seemingly disparate their respective bodies of work may have appeared, nonetheless held in common a set of hopes and assumptions about the role of art in the public sphere.54

For O’Grady, participation as a method and a medium was particularly resonant. In much of her early work, including Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, The Black and White Show (1983), and Art Is . . ., the artist engaged directly and publicly in the conceptual process, issuing calls for participation among other artists and spectators. Furthermore, her experiences in the 1980s both in and adjacent to feminist arts organizing inspired O’Grady to draft her now widely read and anthologized essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992), one of the first articles of cultural criticism on the black female body.55 Significantly, the essay was first delivered on an academic panel on the nude in feminist art at the College Art Association’s annual convening. Asserting black female subjectivity in the arts, a field overwhelmingly comprised of white scholars and critics, was an act out of turn. Further, her paper rebuked the singularity of her presence as it critiqued the limiting and racist aesthetic paradox of black femininity in the visual field vis-à-vis white femininity in Western culture and society. Several years later, in another moment roiled with cultural contradictions, the artist

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would publish an essay examining the writing of Flannery O’Connor under her Guerilla Girl pseudonym, Alma Thomas. O’Grady calls this essay one of her most important works; its inclusion on her website in 2008 ultimately led to her quiet exposure as a member of the highly secretive radical feminist arts action collective.56 In fact, anonymity and feminism in particular were questions O’Grady wrestled with in many contexts, including the ways in which artists with feminist orientations were being defined and discussed. To quote the artist’s full response to Brooklyn Rail interviewer Jarrett Earnest’s question: “Given the depth of your meditations on history, how have you noticed the narrative of feminist performance art evolve—how has it been constructed?”: Well, you know, there were a lot of people doing feminist performance. . . . Black women, Chicanas, women around the globe. To many, much of the early history of feminist performance art—as well as of the feminist movement itself—seemed constructed to foreground the concerns of white, middle-class women. At the time, white women dominated the movement, which seemed driven by two goals: the right to a career outside the home and the right to sexual freedom. But while those goals were valid for them and no doubt benefited other women, they were not universal. If you asked what those goals might mean to black women who’d never had the right not to work, never had the right not to be considered sexual objects, you could see the goals might need calibrating. That same calibration was also required for the art that was made or that needed to be made. . . . But feminism is a plural noun, and we need all the feminisms and feminist scholarship we can get.57

O’Grady does her own recalibration in “Olympia’s Maid,” where she highlights in art historical terms the hypervisible and yet invisible nature of black female subjectivity— concerns around sexuality and labor that no doubt shaped her own approaches to art making and her involvement in feminist organizing at the time. The latter half of the 1980s was a busy time for O’Grady. In 1988 the artist created her first wall piece, a quadriptych tentatively titled Sisters, which would later evolve into Miscegenated Family Album. That same year, she made the decision to perform Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1980–88), the performance from which these gallery installations emerged, for the last time.58 As she recalls: “While looking with a desultory glance over my shoulder, I couldn’t believe what I saw happening. Adrian Piper, after the imposing retrospective at Geno Rodriguez’s Alternative Museum, and David Hammons, after a great show at Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo’s Exit Art, were being recuperated!” Her jubilation was short-lived, O’Grady recalls. The art world, in step with multicultural society at large, was remedying exclusion in ways that strategically left the status quo intact—“fostering a few successful careers . . . but staying in control of the narrative.”59 The decade ended with O’Grady in Brookline, Massachusetts, caring for her ailing mother and increasingly impatient with the slow pace of change in the art world. And while she returned to the art world with her work’s inclu18

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sion in Art as a Verb (1988), curated by Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore—the artist would only begin to experience the waves of change herself in 2007, with her inclusion in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, curated by Connie Butler. Before that, however, O’Grady created a series of surrealistic photomontages titled BodyGround, or Body Is the Ground of My Experience, upon her return to New York; Miscegenated Family Album was realized and exhibited at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum in 1994; and in the mid- to late 1990s, O’Grady began her Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good (1998), explorations into the famed twenty-year common-law marriage between French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, whom O’Grady deeply admired, and Jeanne Duval, a Haitian-born immigrant, with whom the artist found personal and familial resonances. These investigations, funded by a Bunting Institute Fellowship in Visual Art at Radcliffe College / Harvard University in 1995–96, would inform later work commissioned for the Whitney Biennial, The First and Last of the Modernists (2010). O’Grady’s practice then went underground for a period of eight years, between 1999 and 2007. By 2008, the slow shift from margin to center was seemingly catalyzed by the art world’s embrace of multiculturalism, as institutions around the world took up the work of women and artists of color to demonstrate their new inclusivity and to acknowledge past conditions that had supported these artists’ exclusion.60 The same selective and totalizing forces of inclusion O’Grady had critiqued in the 1980s had developed in sophistication with the neoliberal turn to free-market and profit-based inclusion spurred by the paradoxical success of artists practicing institutional critique.61 However, O’Grady and others have rightly questioned the schizophrenia of the contemporary recuperation of pre-2000s art made at the margins. That is, works of art made by women and artists of color were often wholeheartedly embraced in one-off group shows, but then rejected in terms of accession into the permanent collections of those same institutions. “Will the arrival of the real postmodernism bring a moment when we are all finally just an other of someone else’s other?” the artist has pondered. “I can’t imagine how long that will take. I mean, for me the 1980s took forever to end.”62 While many things have shifted since the 1980s, the last ten years, more so than the last several decades, have seen uncanny resonances with the turbulent period in which much of O’Grady’s work was conceived. The hypermilitarization of the police and the persistent killing of black Americans follow in the historical trajectory of shifting and discriminating drug policies during the 1980s “war on drugs.” Indeed, the forty-fifth president of the United States, like Reagan, emerged from various gigs in show business and has used popular media technologies (television in the 1980s, and Twitter today) to communicate with his political base using divisive and distorted rhetoric. Historic victories against voter suppression, equal rights and protections for gay and transgender citizens, and more accessible health care have been persistently undermined in the current moment, as they were in the 1980s, and the denial of climate Introduction

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science and the coronavirus today strangely echoes the sweeping denial of the deadly effects of HIV/AIDS. This moment, then, is also uniquely suited to a sustained consideration of O’Grady’s work, which was produced out of the particular social, cultural, and political atmosphere of the 1980s, and is being taken up again in this eerily congruent environment. It is a time when the artist herself is gaining more critical attention, while also revisiting and revising past work and publishing her own writings in advance of her important 2021 retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. CHAPTER OUTLINE

This introduction has outlined some of the central modes that frame and inform my considerations of Lorraine O’Grady’s work as nothing less than a mastery of language: words, speech acts, manifestos, mythmaking, and, in the artist’s own formulation, writing in space. In her own words on her transition from writer and linguist to performance artist: I haven’t stopped writing or thinking literarily; but for now, performance is the way I write most effectively. To me, 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. And, to overextend the metaphor, there is a sense in which The Dual Soul [1978–79] is a duo of short stories, Rivers, First Draft is a folktale, and Indivisible Landscapes [unrealized] an epic poem.63

Taking the artist at her word, I have also intentionally emphasized my own position as an O’Grady scholar, who arrived at O’Grady’s work through the interdisciplinary entanglements of American Studies, having been driven by my own desire to express something—perhaps out of turn—about O’Grady, her modus operandi, and the institutions in which we both (scholar-curator and artist) make our work. Each of the chapters considers projects by O’Grady that make strategic use of language and various means of address. In order to contend with and theorize O’Grady’s relationship to language and her deployment of diverse forms of address, I examine the artist’s bodies of work alongside the art of other artists working through similar modalities, as well as important theoretical contributions from the late twentieth century. Using a single piece, as in chapters 1 and 2, or a cluster of related projects, as in chapters 3 and 4, each chapter situates O’Grady’s complex artworks within the moment of their production; in the early 2000s, when the work received a first wave of critical attention; and again in this current moment, in the midst of much critical acclaim and an important retrospective. Chapter 1 begins with Cutting Out the New York Times, O’Grady’s first project as a visual artist, and explores the important role text plays in her artistic practice, both in the opportunities and the limitations that come from exploiting the English written word, and in the interpretive framework her work stimulates in viewers. I argue that 20

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the artist’s textual amalgamations are rooted in her earlier career as a translator and intelligence analyst, and I use this portion of the manuscript to examine O’Grady’s use of text in one of her earliest bodies of work. Through a critical engagement with important linguistic and cultural theorists, such as Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, US poet and social critic James Baldwin, and US feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, this chapter situates O’Grady’s text-based artworks within discourses of address in literary, critical race, and gender theory in the twentieth century. Moreover, chapter 1 locates the use of text within O’Grady’s practice as a distinctive directaddress mechanism inspired by Dadaist and Surrealist poetic forms that issues a call for spectators through the process of reading. This conversation establishes the centrality of language to O’Grady’s work by proposing a reading of Cutting Out the New York Times that takes seriously the artist’s references to Dadaism and Surrealism while extending the study beyond O’Grady’s own terms to include other theoretical perspectives. These perspectives demand an examination of O’Grady’s series as part of a narrative and material arc that includes the work of artist Adrian Piper in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a thread that scaffolds renewed interest in Cutting Out the New York Times in the early 2000s. Whereas chapter 1 explores O’Grady’s use of the written word, chapter 2 homes in on the artist’s tactical use of voice and bodily presence in her most iconic and bestknown work to date, the extravagant and rogue performances of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a persona with an elaborate backstory that harks back to French Guiana in the 1950s, despite having been first performed in New York in 1980. O’Grady’s beautiful, poised, highly intelligent invented character (whose name translates from French as Miss Black Middle Class) won her illustrious crown in an international pageant in Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. O’Grady conceived and brought her persona to life in a moment when both her physical appearance and her bold pronouncements were as alien and strange in the fine art world as they were off-putting to the audiences who encountered them. Chapter 2 traces this pioneering series of performances, from the first invasive gallery appearance in 1980, to her 1983 curatorial work in The Black and White Show in New York’s East Village, to her highly anticipated future returns. Through the conceptualization of such a character, and with each public performance, O’Grady drew from the history and conditions of social, political, and cultural alienation within the contemporary art world in order to speak and to exist out of turn. Continuing the project of locating O’Grady’s multimodal and intertextual visual art among the intellectual work of key artists and thinkers of her time, chapter 3 pays formal attention to two important bodies of work made by the artist between 1980 and 1983, one of O’Grady’s most productive performance periods. Rivers, First Draft and Art Is . . . are brought into critical dialogue with important works by Senga Nengudi, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Adrian Piper, all centered on notions of cultural mythologies and creative manifestos, themes O’Grady has explored since her early days as a writer. In these performances, the artist’s use of language moved away from a dependence on text-based Introduction

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typescripts, or even the spoken word, to exploit the linguistic and theoretical possibilities of “the archive” and “the body” as repositories of cultural histories and values. In 1982 and 1983, O’Grady developed two large-scale public performances, one in New York’s Central Park and the other in the midst of Harlem’s annual African American Day Parade, two prominent and historically significant sites in the city. Rivers, First Draft constructed a mythical narrative, while Art Is . . . presented a creative manifesto that drew attention to the art world itself, mobilizing a last burst of conceptual energy in the wake of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s three-year reign—the artist’s last staged act as her unwieldy persona. Both Rivers, First Draft and Art Is . . . were only performed once, yet through photo documentation they live on in numerous exhibition contexts. Chapter 3 offers one of the first sustained readings of this period in O’Grady’s performance practice. Chapter 4 follows O’Grady into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, examining language and the artist’s transition in creative modes from performance gallery installation in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and Miscegenated Family Album to the later works Body Is the Ground of My Experience, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, and The First and Last of the Modernists. This chapter locates the artist’s spatially attuned and textually oriented visual practice as one that both aligns with several key practices of her time and breaks away in crucially innovative ways through her use of the diptych form. Unlike her unsolicited appearance as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was commissioned by Linda Goode Bryant of Just Above Midtown gallery and commemorated the artist’s deceased older sister, Devonia Evangeline. Using a comparative approach, O’Grady examined troubled sisters throughout history, such as the Egyptian queen Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnedjmet. This experimental performance became the conceptual basis for her later photo installation Miscegenated Family Album, where sixteen Cibachrome diptychs compared the artist’s sister, Nefertiti, and their respective families. The chapter expounds upon performances of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, which in many ways served as a formal bridge between O’Grady’s early experiments in “spatialized narrative,” and, later, more refined uses of the diptych. By charting this evolution, a shift catalyzed by O’Grady’s return to the art world following a brief hiatus in the late 1980s, chapter 4 narrativizes and theorizes two distinct moments in the artist’s practice with a particular focus on her deployment of the diptych. The artist has spent significant time theorizing her audience as one “to come,” relying on Martin Heidegger’s notion of “preservers” as encompassing those who come to see and know a particular work of art. In the early 1980s, O’Grady revealed in a letter to artist and designer Tony Whitfield that she took Heidegger’s idea of “preserving the work, as knowing” to mean that it’s a matter of who understands the work, who needs the work in order to be themselves. Right now, my goal is to discover and create the true audience, and something tells me that, for a black performance artist of my ilk, this will take a many-sided approach. Because 22

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I sense that the true audience may be coming, not here now, I try to document my work as carefully as I can. It may seem odd for a performance artist to be concerned with the preservation of the work. But despite my devotion to the fluidity of performance, its privatistic and ephemeral aspects have never interested me much.64

Today, at age eighty-six, O’Grady is as prolific as she was in the 1980s and 1990s, producing projects that continue to invigorate the theoretical and political import of language. In recent years she has expanded her practice to include significant national and international collaborations, including an important project with artist Adam Pendleton titled Lorraine O’Grady: A Portrait (2012), a video work that documents and disrupts O’Grady’s telling of her career as an artist.65 Reflecting on my own arrival at O’Grady’s work, my relationship with the artist, and my process as a researcher, the conclusion brings the conversation on O’Grady’s use of language full circle by examining the artist’s recent body of work Cutting Out CONYT (2017), which revisits her original 1977 cut-paper poetry series. As the book evidences, O’Grady’s commitment to the written word has less to do with a particular time period or political moment than a sustained, career-long investigation into the complex uses of language in processes of self- and world-making, the potential of those interstices born of transformational creative praxis, and text-based art and performance in particular. I conclude by revisiting, with the artist, two of her landmark works, including Cutting Out the New York Times, and critically reflecting on the effects of the previous forty years on her current projects. Indeed, O’Grady’s life and personal trajectory also certainly merit close study—for example, many are unaware that the artist worked for the US government and as a rock music critic, or that she once operated her own translation services business. This monograph, however, intentionally focuses almost exclusively on the artworks, bringing in pertinent biographical information only as context for understanding them. It is my intent that by the end, readers will possess a deeper understanding of O’Grady’s practice, the artist’s unique relationship to language, and the place of distinction in contemporary art discourse to which she belongs. Certainly, O’Grady’s distinguishing position as an upper- to middle-class black woman of bicultural West Indian heritage, and its effects on the art she has produced, is carefully interrogated throughout. However, many intimate biographical details, including a comprehensive personal timeline, have been omitted from this study. It is my hope that other historians and biographers will follow in the critical work of narrating O’Grady’s fascinating history, one that comprises more than thirty years of teaching in art schools across the country, including at the University of California at Irvine and the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she led a course on the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud for twenty years. What emerges from this laser focus on the work is a recuperation that does not merely return O’Grady to the period in which her avant-garde art so particularly Introduction

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emerged. Rather, it chronicles an artist and a practice as they shape-shifted across time and context, and in conversation with O’Grady herself as she, too, imagines her earlier projects anew in the current moment. Speaking Out of Turn presents an amalgamation of art and text, speech and silence, theory and practice, then and now, each of which defines—and is defined by—the strategies O’Grady mobilizes to produce a cutting-edge and perspicacious, and wonderfully unruly, art of language.

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1 MARK MY WORDS

Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly.

patricia hill collins, on intellectual activism, 2013 1 “Finding one’s voice,” “naming oneself,” reclaiming, reconstructing, and “stealing” the language are therefore essential activities and metaphors for feminist work and feminist theory.

wendy k. kolkata and frances bartkowski, “lexicon of the debates: language,” 2010 2

A

in economics and Spanish literature from Wellesley College in 1956, Lorraine O’Grady worked as an intelligence analyst on African and then Latin American affairs for the US Departments of Labor and State in Washington, DC.3 She was tasked with reading ten national and international newspapers each day, and in the period leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, this hefty workload expanded to include three complete daily transcripts in Spanish of Cuban radio stations, as well as voluminous classified reports sent in from agents in the field. Working in this frenzied way for five years made language start to “collapse” for O’Grady, to melt into “a gelatinous pool,” as she put it.4 She eventually quit her intelligence analyst job and began her roundabout and self-guided journey into art, which included a year abroad (likely 1964) attempting to write a novel.5 Upon her return, she attended graduate school at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1965 to 1967, studying fiction. While there, she FTER EARNING A DEGREE

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translated a novel by her instructor, the Chilean author José Donoso, which was ultimately published by Alfred A. Knopf. Her journey also involved a move into the commercial sector as a translator and several gigs as a music critic for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Despite this impressive résumé, “poet,” “visual artist,” and “satirist” were designations still absent among O’Grady’s many talents and career experiences—until 1977, that is, when she carefully composed twenty-six visually compelling cut-paper poems that expressed the full range of her humor, wit, and whimsy in a time overwhelmed by social, political, and personal change. The experimental poems’ titles offered metacommentary, as in “Conversations with Fata Morgana,” “Salad Days,” “The Right Face for the Right Job,” “Motion Equals Progress” (plate 1), and “The 99 Critical Shots in Pool.” That last is a twelve-panel cut-up poem comprised of forty-eight excerpt-laden panels. Amusingly, it reads like an advice column and rhetorical probe, with stanzas folding into one another, resembling a step-by-step instructional manual:

Fall in love free | in every room at the same time.

Start your own bar | with

A NEW VISIONARY IN | the Boudoir | New Elements in | The Simplified Art of Ordering Wine

Taste | Ideas From Moving Water | Build Yourself a | Home That Fits

Gloom Over | A Doomful Daughter | A Short, Unhappy Motor Trip

WANT | The Effects of Ice on | Moorish Delight

look for | A Colloquy of Contrasts | Sacrificing Song for Speech | WHILE Capturing the PHOENIX

and remember that | Terror Rides | Out of The Ethnic Trap

SO | Why Does | Living High in the Sky | Feel So Bad?

Sweet Nothings | MAKE | a male client | Edgy

Can the Bell Be Tolling for | The G.N.P. Gap | ?

In this winding piece and throughout the collection, O’Grady deploys language to shrewdly interrogate the moment of the poem’s inception in personal, socioeconomic, and political terms. When read in the present day, the writer-artist’s visual poetry directly addresses readers through this very language—in O’Grady’s strategic use of words, questions, and prompts. In fact, all but three works in the larger series utilize some form of direct address, and several explicitly call attention to the act of speaking. O’Grady’s avant-garde poetry is, for contemporary readers, as incisive as it is comical, as melancholic as it is cathartic. The poem titled “Finding the one you love . . . is finding yourself” contains a direct second-person address in every stanza (fig. 1): Come out, come out, wherever you are. There’s a place you may never have seen right around the corner. 26

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figure 1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Finding the one you love . . . is finding yourself,” from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010. Toner ink on adhesive paper, 8 ½ × 11 in. (21.6 × 27.9 cm). © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

Are nervous habits | holding you back? Relax. You can’t be replaced by a machine. DRACULA IS ready when you are

Formally, all twenty-six poems comprise black newspaper print of various typefaces and sizes dappling a white page. The time is the late 1970s, and the black print is from the well-known and widely read Sunday edition of the New York Times. Individually, these poetic cut-paper constellations are text-based artworks varying in length, made up of words and phrases cut from the newsprint, each stanza pasted on a separate sheet of white paper. Together, the 192 pages of cut-paper poetry represent the twenty-six weeks O’Grady spent mining the Sunday paper for text characters and phrases. The longest poem, “What Have We Done? Where Are We Going?,” spans eighteen sheets of paper, and the shortest, “Vivo,” only three. The project emerged out of a desire to create a thank-you card for O’Grady’s doctor. The artist, who was teaching a class on Dada and Surrealism at the School of Visual Arts in New York, had taken André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924, fig. 2), texts that contain examples of newspaper poetry, with her to the hospital to read while awaiting a biopsy procedure to determine whether she had cancer. Several weeks later, after the tests returned negative, O’Grady was reading the Sunday New York Times and came across the line “The Doctor Is Operating Again,” which led, along with Breton, to the idea of creating a satirical gift for her own doctor. Her cut-up poetry became a speculative mode through which to explore an imagined love for her doctor, on whom she had a secret crush: When the biopsy proved negative, I wanted to make a 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 flipped 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.6

MARK MY WORDS

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figure 2 André Breton, “Poem,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 41–43. © University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

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That poem, “Coins of the Rebellion,” was made from clippings from the May 29, 1977, edition, and would become the first in the series O’Grady titled Cutting Out the New York Times (hereafter CONYT). During a time of heightened physical and emotional trauma, the artist turned to the New York Times to enliven a fantasy encounter, chronicle her experiences, and investigate a possible future as an artist. By the time she presented the doctor with the Dada-inspired card, O’Grady had made the decision to keep going with the project, continuing in the personal vein in which she had started. The parameters she set for herself were straightforward. On Sundays from May 29 to November 20, 1977, O’Grady would: make one poem a week, no matter her physical or emotional situation, and regardless of what the newspaper contained; use only one issue per week—the Sunday paper—and the ads were fair game; make a single extraction per page and not return to pages once they had been cut; and finally, “find” a poem after the cuttings were, in the artist’s words, “smooshed about (on the floor, never on the table),” rather than looking for a poem as she cut.7 O’Grady recalls cutting three to four times as many lines as were needed for each weekly poem; the unused clippings were discarded. On a few occasions, more than one poem was created in a single week. For example, two poems were created on July 17 (“Salad Days” and “Where Are All Those Ex-Giants Now”) and on October 30 (“Finding the one you love . . . is finding yourself” and “Vivo”).8 This meticulous exercise, and the collection of poetry it produced, are the subjects of this chapter. O’Grady is often quoted mentioning her late-in-life arrival to the art scene; she began creating art when she was in her early forties. But close examination of her work, particularly the remarkable collection of cut-paper poems in the discussion to follow, indicates that her arrival was a timely one. While seemingly disparate in scope, each of her early pursuits demonstrated a fundamental preoccupation with language— written and spoken—and the poetic possibilities of the sonic and the visual. CONYT, the earliest body of work in O’Grady’s oeuvre, evidences how her obsession with language and her investment in the amalgamation of literary and avant-garde art forms helped form her unique artistic vision. Her feeling that the project was a failure—a feeling so encumbering as to completely undermine even her memory of the poetry— led her to bury CONYT for almost three decades. It was not until the early 2000s that the series resurfaced, during a studio visit with curator Nick Mauss. Mauss had brought along a piece by famed New York Dadaist Charles Henri Ford: a framed newspaper poem from the 1930s. O’Grady recalls responding to Mauss’s enthusiasm about Ford’s work: “Oh, you like that? I have something I can show you.”9 And just like that, a week and thirty years after O’Grady had tucked it away, CONYT reemerged, and five of the poems were selected to be exhibited to the public for the first time in Mauss’s group show Between the Lines, organized for Daniel Reich’s gallery at the Chelsea Hotel, New York, in 2006. The show received an exceptional review from New York Times art writer Holland Cotter, who commended Mauss for assembling an “excellent group show.” Also featured were Ken Okiishi, Daniel McDonald, Kianja MARK MY WORDS

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Strobert, Tariq Alvi, and Paulina Olowska, but “the plum presence,” according to Cotter, was “Lorraine O’Grady, one of the most interesting American conceptual artists around.”10 O’Grady revisited the work again for a 2012 lecture titled “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” delivered at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and since then, the series has been exhibited in a number of contexts, both as piecemeal inclusions in group shows and twice in its entirety: at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, in 2010 and at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain, in 2016.11 Today, in a moment when O’Grady’s practice is experiencing unprecedented visibility, an in-depth study of her first body of work—the bridge between her careers as an analyst, a translator, and a writer and her career as an artist—seems urgent and necessary. Through a critical engagement with linguistic and cultural theorists such as Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, US feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, and US poet and social critic James Baldwin, with a particular attention to histories of collage, this chapter locates and theorizes O’Grady’s CONYT vis-à-vis twentieth-century intellectual thought and contextualizes the work in its moment of production. This focused reading also requires an examination of CONYT as part of the material and narrative arc of the late 1980s and early 1990s, a thread that includes the work of Adrian Piper and foregrounds the renewed interest in O’Grady’s series in the early 2000s. The chapter closes with a look at the reemergence of CONYT during a period defined by novel and contested understandings of black art, and how those debates framed the reception of O’Grady’s 1970s text-based project for new audiences. By situating CONYT in these particular historical, artistic, and scholarly contexts, I argue that the artist’s relationship to language and critical theory, and lack of more traditional studio training, drove her unique intervention into the art world. Moreover, it is imperative that the art historical narrative surrounding O’Grady’s art is informed by the cultural moment in which the work was created, including the charged race and gender politics in the United States at the time, which indisputably spilled over into the New York art world in which O’Grady was beginning to operate. O’Grady’s work and biography, like those of many other black women artists working in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reveal the intellectual isolation she felt when producing her creative work. When O’Grady discusses this moment, she readily cites influences such as Dadaist and Surrealist literature, but her experiences as a black woman operating in New York, and the influence of those experiences on her output, are detached and compartmentalized. Adrian Piper and Howardena Pindell, both New York–based artists during the time of O’Grady’s entry into the art world, have also addressed in their writing the challenges of producing work while operating with a feeling of both segregation and tokenism. Despite this isolation, O’Grady’s intellectual and artistic impulses arose in proximity to other scholars’ and artists’ work through mutual but distinct connections to a particular set of conditions. Both CONYT and O’Grady’s later works can and should be historically grounded in the rich intellectual and creative lineage of black feminist discourse, and simultaneously in the modern 30

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artistic movement—at the obtuse and deeply fraught intersections of what it means to produce both black feminist thought and avant-garde artworks. Congruous with her Dada-inspired approach to literary form, O’Grady’s practice must also be contextualized within deeply interconnected traditions of postwar collage, and, as International Collage Center founder Pavel Zoubok notes, “the longstanding relationship between Collage and poetry.”12 O’Grady’s cut-paper poems in the late 1970s, and in their reiteration in 2018 (which I will address in the in book’s conclusion), assert a rich formal language that advances the artist’s critical theorizing astride poetry and fine art forms. Appropriation, layering, fragmentation, and hybridity, as Zoubok observes, are all fundamental concepts that articulate the field of collage. In particular, the French découpé or cut-up technique, in which a literary text is fragmented and then reordered to create a new text, traces back to the Dadaists in the 1920s, but it experienced tremendous popularity in the 1950s and 1960s. Using the tools of the innovators she was teaching, O’Grady made weekly attempts to conquer randomness through structure and poetic narrative, rather than surrender to irrationality. For her, the undoing and restructuring of text became an important mode of reclamation and self-actualization in a moment of chaos and marginalization. In the early 1950s, the Dada poet Tristan Tzara neatly captured the expressive possibilities latent in collage while discussing Kurt Schwitters’s groundbreaking legacy: “In speaking of Schwitters, it is difficult to separate his literary activity from his pictorial, the sculptor from the agitator.”13 The same can be said of O’Grady’s oeuvre, a case made throughout this book. In CONYT in particular, it is both impossible and unproductive to disentangle the linguaphile from the artist, the work of art from the literary text. In fact, as Dada and Surrealist principles evidence, the very significance of such hybrid objects (and performances) is inextricably linked to each component form’s power to mean. One eight-panel collage, “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name,” which includes a title page, exemplifies both O’Grady’s inspiration by Breton and others and the expansive engagements that connected her to other artists working from the 1970s through the 2000s, when the art world “rediscovered” CONYT. The elaborate and expressive poem incorporates self-reflection, keen cultural criticism, and moments of outward address that (I would argue) reflect the artist’s raced, gendered, and classed standpoint. The following analysis establishes the centrality of language to O’Grady’s burgeoning creative practice by taking seriously the artist’s references to Dadaism and Surrealism while extending beyond O’Grady’s own terms. O’Grady assembled the cut-paper poem on September 18, 1977, and the first panel gave rise to the title. The haunting seven-word assertion I HEARD MY SISTER SPEAK MY NAME MARK MY WORDS

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is stacked and center justified, the text printed in a Greek-inspired font and sharing the page only with that day’s calendrical reference. Where her Dada and Surrealist muses surrendered to randomness and absurdity in their layered text and decoupage forms, O’Grady’s dense poetry in collected cutouts waxes on family, struggle, success, rivalry, self-doubt, love, distraction, melancholia, aging, hope, death, and renewal. The opening panel is pointed and specific. Speech is central in the artist’s orientation to both the sister referenced and the poem that follows: I heard / my sister / speak my / name. It is a powerful statement that is left largely unresolved in the text that follows, but its inclusion as a whole preexisting clipping, the title of a novel published that same year by author Thomas Savage, invites spectators to dive deeper, to surmise meaning, and to question the answers the poem alludes to but does not provide. The second panel is densely filled with text cuttings and less straightforward in presentation and intonation, as eight distinct excerpts are laid out across the vertical page. The passages seemingly fall from the top left corner of the white sheet, cascading visually and rhythmically down the page, a strategy popular among the authors and artists taught in O’Grady’s SVA course. READY TO BE EXPLORED

the Rapids



ARE ALWAYS JUST OFF THE



BEATEN PATH, BUT RIGHT



IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING.

How do you measure

Victory on a Spartan Platform,



Golden Harvests



In the Desert



Gloom on Wall Street

Upon first reading, the words refuse to mean one thing over another, straining against O’Grady’s otherwise loose and abstract chronicling of her own experience throughout the series—her own acts of rebellion, fantasies for the future, and critiques of family, culture, and the life she finds herself leading. The artist brings word clippings together on the page using her own poetic structure as an exercise in sense making—making sense—transporting spectators along through the act of reading. The visual effects of the entire series, which are evident across the panels of “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name,” can be characterized by the formal technique of a single, unjagged, straight cut for each text clipping, the incorporation of a wide array of fonts and sizes, each panel’s white background, and the alternating horizontal and diagonal orientation of each typescript inclusion. O’Grady’s mined words were meant to be read, and with little concerted effort. None are struck through, or presented 32

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upside down or vertically. And while the number of clippings per panel shifts across this poem and others, the formal schema remains consistent. As she does throughout the series, out of what she understood as arbitrary and dissociative, O’Grady constructed a visual work in a mode that is conceptual and autobiographical. Panel five prophesizes a revival and return following a period of distraction and diversion: “SWEPT AWAY / On the Prowl for Love / Actresses Stage A Comeback.” The first two stanzas seem to reference past romantic relationships and the various places they took her—the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the club-hopping, concert-going circuit of a rock and roll band, for example—while the third is a prophetic determination to claim a future that is self-determined. The last three panels of “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name” expand and end the poem’s melancholy arrangement: Here Come

the Brilliant Days of Autumn

Old Energy in New Bottles

Sounding New Alarms

The poem was produced in mid-September, in the waning days of summer, just three days before O’Grady’s forty-third birthday.

When Age



Counts

A Deliberate Start   Builds to a Climactic Bacchanal The weather

is better



in the fall.

The final panel returns the poetic gaze by including a final address:

discover



the center and rediscover yourself



SUMMER IS BEING HELD OVER



UNTIL THE



SUN DIES

Similar to the experimental collage artists of the early twentieth century, O’Grady struggled to engage the social, political, and, importantly, personal furor of the civil MARK MY WORDS

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rights movement and into the Black Power period.14 And while the artist saw her cutpaper couplets as a way to force order out of chaos, she was likewise quick to exploit collage’s distinctive strategies of fragmentation, amalgamation, inversion, and disjunction.15 Indeed, not unlike the disillusion experienced by postwar US artists in the age of the atomic bomb and tumultuous social relations, CONYT represents a moment in O’Grady’s life and career catalyzed by professional disenchantment and personal anxiety. Following models advanced by California Beat poets, several poems in the series embrace moments of nihilism and, as seen in “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name,” critique consumer optimism. However, unlike the message-driven, cathartic Beat poetry, O’Grady’s process claimed a hypervisual platform of public discourse in service of personal articulation. The artist drew on specific visual and literary histories in a self-conscious way. Thus, in addition to engaging with the Surrealists she overtly referenced, it is imperative to place her work in critical dialogue with other innovative black thinkers, specifically her black feminist scholarly and artistic contemporaries. BLACK WOMEN ARTISTS AND BLACK FEMINIST THEORIZING

In the fine art world, in the years prior to CONYT, explorations involving cutting apart and reorganizing language were congruent with the activist impulse to disturb the existing state of affairs and produce alternative narratives. The eschewing of more traditional approaches to form and accepted uses of media was a strategy that had been embraced by black women since the early twentieth century, and by white feminist artists since the late 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s, artists explored less popular forms such as ephemeral sculpture, performance, film, and text-based works “in part, to bypass patriarchal histories associated with established media such as monumental sculpture and painting,” according to Katie Vida, who curated the show Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories through a Feminist Lens, presented at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, Connecticut, in 2016.16 In the years surrounding O’Grady’s New York Times experiments, several hallmark black feminist texts were published, including Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider (1984) and Patricia Hill Collins’s early writings on black feminist thought.17 Both Lorde, a poet and feminist writer, and Collins, a Harvard-trained sociologist, interrogated the intersectional complexities of what it means to be what O’Grady often terms “both/and”: for Lorde, a sister and an outsider, or for Collins, an outsider within specific social locations. Collins was forcefully extrapolating the conceptual grounds for theorizing black feminist thought, an intervention for which she would later become famous. According to Collins, black women, as outsiders within their varying social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, generate a distinctive standpoint by creating important projects of self-definition, untangling interlocking systems of oppression, and producing and preserving African American women’s culture and history. This standpoint is specific and necessary for shifting existing sociological paradigms, and Collins 34

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argued that greater stock should be put in black women’s abilities to produce their own personal, cultural, and intellectual biographies. O’Grady’s CONYT theorizes a similar standpoint, using text to carve out her unique perspective as a black woman of particular training and background, using one of the country’s most widely read news publications, the New York Times. The shortest composition in O’Grady’s body of newspaper poems, “Vivo,” evidences the artist’s interest in the formal aesthetic of randomness while also drawing upon her personal experience to construct a piece that gestures, in its language and repetition, to her time as an intelligence analyst (fig. 3). Made up of three panels, including the title frame, “Vivo” appropriates the central tagline of an advertising spread printed in the October 20, 1977, Sunday New York Times. The Latin term in vivo refers to that which occurs within a living or natural setting. In Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, vivo roughly translates to “alive” or “I live.” O’Grady cuts and pastes this one word, published in repetition in its original context, seven times across the first two panels. The final panel is made up of individual letters cut and arranged to form the stanzas: I Live I do Live I am Living

I THINK

The lines are reminiscent of the conjugation exercises that often accompany verb memorization in the four languages mentioned above—languages familiar to the artist. These stanzas seem to address the need for translation in the two panels preceding. The first three lines make affirmative statements about the ontological present of the artist: “I live,” “I do live,” and “I am living.” They also represent a literal conjugation of the three forms of presentness contained in the singular Latin and Latinderived first-person verb form vivo. The final line, however, undermines this ontological certainty and the tone of the exercise by introducing ambiguity and doubt—“I think.” Isolated in O’Grady’s composition, it is a double entendre. Is it a statement of fact, carrying forward the poem’s ontological tone without question, such that “I live / I think” is a poetic play on Cartesian logic (I think, therefore, I am)? Or does this stanza perform a relapse, by destabilizing what came before? Given O’Grady’s previous career as a Spanish-English translator, and the circumstances under which CONYT first emerged, it is fitting to juxtapose the tenor of “Vivo” with the artist’s unique standpoint. While O’Grady searched for structure amid her evolving relationship to language, pursuing self-discovery and meaning simultaneously with a radical midlife career shift from translator and analyst to visual artist, she mobilized the cut-paper poetry, and “Vivo” in particular, as an orienting device, a visual meditation on her ontological and intellectual state as a multilingual black woman MARK MY WORDS

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figure 3 Lorraine O’Grady, “Vivo,” from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010. Toner ink on adhesive paper, 84 × 20 in. (213.4 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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in a period characterized by its social and political tumultuousness following the civil rights movement.18 O’Grady herself has described what Collins aptly terms “outsider within” status both in her relationship to Dadaist and Surrealist literatures, and in the alienating and disorienting experience of reading countless periodicals during her time as an intelligence analyst, and later the New York Times. In her now widely celebrated essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992), O’Grady articulates a congruent experience as a black woman artist whose claims to subjectivity are always complicated vis-à-vis the dual position of the black female body both in close proximity, and in opposition, to whiteness.19 Furthermore, in considering CONYT, Collins’s black feminist thought and standpoint theories make clear that “it is impossible to separate the structure and thematic content of thought from the historical and material conditions shaping the lives of its producers.”20 Thus, the structure and the form of O’Grady’s early cut-paper collages reflect the material conditions of their making. The artist’s black female subjectivity occasioned the examination of disparate sites of knowledge production concurrently astride the margins of two avant-garde literary movements, a renowned periodical, and across several languages. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Combahee River Collective released their first public statement also in 1977. In the group’s own words: We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting together since 1974. . . . As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.21

O’Grady would not become familiar with the Combahee River Collective or their black feminist organizing principles until her inclusion in the Brooklyn Museum’s landmark 2017 exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985. However, Collins, O’Grady, the Combahee River Collective, and many others constitute a lineage of black women, most of whom did not know one another in the moment of their initial interventions but were responding to the same critical issues and later found important connections through exhibitions and scholarship. Like Collins and the Combahee River Collective, O’Grady connected the materiality of “living” with the specificity of “thinking.” It is precisely this both/and, this insider-outsider positionality, that O’Grady’s language-invested works speak to so explicitly. Yet the artist did not recognize the potential in situated knowledge as a compelling point of entry when she began her creative work. That revelation came after reading the womanist prose of Alice Walker in her 1983 collection of essays In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and the work of US novelist and essayist Flannery O’Connor: I’ve found that if you are attentive, sometimes there are hints of interconnections that, if you follow them, can unconsciously help you get to where you need to go. . . . But I don’t MARK MY WORDS

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know that I appreciated her [Flannery O’Connor] as a minority philosopher until I read an article about her by Alice Walker in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor” (1975), which alerted me to O’Connor’s collection of essays Mystery and Manners. I was struck by how much Mystery and Manners applied wholesale to those of us who are representing our own experience, and the experience of others, from a point of view that is distinctly different than the majority’s. Flannery wrote brilliantly and definitively of the responsibilities and opportunities of that position. I think I underlined every word in that book.22

Through a critical engagement with the language and the cultural theories of these two women, O’Grady found a way to meaningfully articulate herself in her work, which inevitably led to the self-reflexive depth evident in many of her later projects. Similar to O’Grady’s own attentiveness to Walker and O’Connor, an attentiveness to CONYT as both prose and visual art rewards viewers with the same understanding as to the connections between what is seen on the page and what one can know about the artist, and how both of those dimensions shape how the work’s meaning is produced. Other artists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s likewise interrogated news and popular media outlets. For instance US conceptual artist Sarah Charlesworth made work also in 1977 that appropriated the International Herald Tribune, whose parent newspaper networks were the New York Times and the Washington Post. In an approach that exposed the subtle ways news pictures perpetuate ideas and power, Charlesworth separated word from image, removing all text but the masthead and leaving the images intact. What distinguishes O’Grady’s work from that of other artists who engaged in cutting out periodicals in the 1970s was O’Grady’s close study of white male knowledge— more precisely, the intellectual and cultural production of such knowledge—and her subversion of its logic by appropriating, literally, bits and pieces in order to craft her own poetic standpoint. In many ways, CONYT is a self-reflexive investigation into the artist’s own relationship to the Eurocentric and masculinist epistemologies embedded in her elite and fairly classical education and early career, which immersed her in very particular discourses and uses of language. After the project was complete, the artist sent Xeroxed copies out for review: After I finished them, I sent a copy to my ex-husband . . . to see if he thought they were as good as I did. He said, “It was like opening the Times and seeing the inside of your head.”23

In a note to printmaker and gallerist René Schmitt, the artist wrote: I call my newspaper poems “counter-confessional poetry” since I wasn’t confessing my thoughts and experiences, I was trying to find them. I was using the tools of the Dadas [sic] and Surrealists that I was teaching, but unlike them, I wasn’t surrendering to the random, I was trying to conquer it.

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I felt the world and the language I was living in were already so random and irrational, they could drive one insane. My newspaper poems were an attempt to reshape that irrational language to make it emotionally rational. Essentially, I was trying to make the public language of the New York Times private again.24

O’Grady’s was invoking “counter-confessional” in opposition to the so-called confessional poetry of twentieth-century poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.25 The latter was a poetic movement initiated in the 1950s and characterized by its attention to extreme moments in an individual’s life, the poem itself becoming the cathartic response. Confessional poetry is also closely associated with white women’s literary practice and arose alongside first wave feminism. This is a key differentiator in O’Grady’s visual poetry; a response in and of itself is not what this project was about. The artist’s “counter-confessional” mode responded to and critiqued not only white male knowledge but also white women’s literature and the mode of resistance it typified. Thus, a black feminist standpoint, as conceived by Collins and creatively enacted by O’Grady, generated something other than a white feminist response—indeed, a much more complex relation to institutions of white patriarchal knowledge. Rather than to make the language of individual suffering public and available, O’Grady pillaged the New York Times in search of ways to make the publication itself personally and emotionally relevant to her, a black woman grappling with the implications of language and deeply invested in the possibilities of its translation. Art historian and contemporary art scholar Kobena Mercer asserts that “identities are constructed in language and representation,” an interesting proposition given O’Grady’s relationship to Western language traditions and art history’s record of absenting women and black, Indigenous, and other persons of color from its representational canon.26 O’Grady’s nonfigurative text-based visual work both challenges and crystallizes this conundrum by mining a hypervisible source of language and representation in order to make herself discernible as a black woman artist-linguist. O’Grady’s visual poetry does not explicitly address race or gender; it is crucial, however, that her deconstructive process be located and named both within the tradition of black feminist theorizing and within the pioneering compulsions of conceptual art in the 1970s and 1980s, because historically these discourses have remained segregated, rendering black women’s artistic contributions undertheorized at best, and invisible at worst.27 Six years earlier, in the summer of 1971, a twenty-two-year-old Adrian Piper had stood in a dark room in front of a large floor mirror, held a small Brownie camera to her bare flesh, and snapped a series of hazy self-portraits. These images, now recognized as some of the very first nude self-portraits by an African American woman, were to become known and later exhibited as Food for the Spirit (fig. 4).28 In the series, Piper captured her body in various stages of undress as part of an intensive meditation on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). The self-portraits represent a critical moment in Piper’s experimental self-theorizing of Kant’s text—as I have argued MARK MY WORDS

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figure 4 Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit (parts 1–6 of 14), 1971, reprinted 1997. Gelatin silver prints, each 14 ½ × 14 ¾ in. (36.8 × 37.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Family of Man Fund. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation, Berlin.

elsewhere, she was doing theory in her body through the act of capturing her reflected image.29 Her process involved recording herself reading selections of Kant’s text, and stopping periodically to take a photograph. The artist also practiced fasting and yoga as part of this work, taking fervent notes on both the reading and her experience. Language—written, spoken, and visual—became the mechanism through which Piper registered her own presence in the instant of her experimental performance. Any thoughtful interpretation of this work requires reading Food for the Spirit, as John Parish Bowles articulates, as “Piper’s critical engagement with the discursive figure of her silence,” a similar task to the one O’Grady undertook while approaching the Sunday New York Times.30 While O’Grady’s approach was to methodically search and then suture together a poetic existence for herself from the newspaper, Piper excavated one of the most influential texts in the history of philosophy in an attempt to find herself represented within its premises on metaphysics and the limits of human knowledge. Piper is both invisible, as a subject of metaphysics, and hypervisible within her recorded images, giving “new form to the repressed figure of black women’s sexuality.” Through the repetitive occurrence of her denuded body, but also through “the privacy Piper maintains about” the series, Food for the Spirit “reveals and reiterates certain societal expectations of discretion and respectability.”31 40

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Piper’s self-staged presence broke the silence and invisibility that the art world expected of the black female body during both the moments when the images were captured and the occasions they were exhibited, starting in the late 1990s. Similar to O’Grady’s experience, Piper’s practice was often viewed as “out of turn,” relegated to the margins of discourses of minimalism and conceptualism. Also, like O’Grady’s cut-paper poems, Piper’s visual-vocal meditations on Kant’s text were deeply personal and selfreflexive. Both artists were serving as their own audience and critic at their respective works’ inception: O’Grady never intended for CONYT to be publicly exhibited, and Piper refers to Food for the Spirit as a “private loft performance.”32 When Food for the Spirit is publicly exhibited, Piper’s self-staged presence is directly mediated—reiterated—by the viewer as the latter maneuvers around to evade the glare of lights on gallery glass and see Piper more clearly through her own reflection. The viewer is implicated in Piper’s silence breaking. Significantly, Food for the Spirit, like CONYT, does not offer answers to the questions it intentionally poses of Kant, and neither work answers whatever questions it (perhaps unintentionally) poses of the museum—another knowledge-making institution historically built on the exclusion of certain bodies and perspectives. Instead, Food for the Spirit takes up space—the artist’s body visually claims both the space of the museum and Kantian rationality in the form of a question, one that is distilled in Bowles’s analysis of the work: If, in 1971, cultural norms silenced any black woman who made a claim to universality, then Piper performed a critical reiteration of the conventions of metaphysical philosophy by claiming the ability to inhabit the transcendence Kant’s text promises. This is precisely the form [Judith] Butler has since imaged a feminist, queer, or “post-colonialist” critique of rationality must take. By acknowledging norms of gender, race, and metaphysical philosophy, Piper simultaneously lays claim to universality while critiquing and historicizing its traditionally imperfect application.33

Ultimately, both O’Grady and Piper, through avant-garde practices of cut-paper collage, abstract poetry, and performance, interrogate the immense institutions of white male claims to universality and the limitations of language. O’Grady’s intervention is also significant in its rejection of figurative semiotics, grounding her black female subjectivity in conceptual poetry mined against the textual grain of white masculinist media discourses. DOUBLE-VOICE

Despite the lack of attention CONYT has received, revisiting this serial poetry in the present provides a timely reminder that contemporary art’s creative legacy traces back to many early practices of artists working at the margins, particularly women. Yet we cannot continue to overlook in exhibitions, scholarship, and collections the dynamic practices of O’Grady and others, and their foundational contributions to histories and MARK MY WORDS

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theories of address in both the visual and language arts. O’Grady’s theorizations of address emerged from her unique standpoint as a highly educated black woman, born and raised in New England in a middle- to upper-class neighborhood—a socioeconomic and cultural situation the artist herself may not have fully realized or embraced at the time of the work’s conception. In the years since, however, O’Grady has made several critiques of the art world’s lack of multifaceted expressions born of diverse black experiences. Her 1980s performances, in particular, interrogated the conditional space granted to a singular black creative voice, one with particular ties to limiting and stereotypical markers of black experience, such as poverty and lack of education or formal training, a position explored in chapter 2. What CONYT offered the artist in the late 1970s was a unique process-based literary modality for exploring her own unique standpoint and experiences, and the resultant poetic forms permit O’Grady and scholars of her work to theorize the limits of language in this context. In CONYT, O’Grady’s voice, while unique, is not hers alone. Rather, the cut-paper format of her conceptual poetry lends itself to many simultaneous dialogues, opening the artist up to possible interruptions. To borrow Mikhail Bakhtin’s didactic schema, the poem addresses the addressee—the spectator in this case—and also the “object of the utterance” insofar as the spectator is called into being both as “judge and witness,” and therefore as the work’s “ally or enemy.”34 In each of O’Grady’s poems there is a double address, to the spectator and to the referent. The spectator’s position, while seemingly straightforward, is oriented as both the one with whom O’Grady converses and a bystander to another dialogue entirely. Indeed, central to the spectator’s experience of poems like “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name,” for example, in its “I/my” schema, is that through these shifting signifiers meaning is transformed depending on who is speaking and who is reading. A newspaper, after all, is meant to be read. And yet modes of address in standard journalism are consolidated through the singular authority of a specific author. O’Grady’s poems disrupt this centralization of authority, destabilizing what it means to be an author, a poet, and an artist, all within one frame. Amplifying Michel Foucault’s influential musings in “What Is an Author?” (1977), O’Grady’s cutpaper poems produce another occasion to evaluate the relationship between an author (or authors) and a text, particularly “the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it.”35 The double address within O’Grady’s work reveals spectators’ dual roles and responsibilities as both judge and witness. In the same moment that O’Grady was producing CONYT and performing incisive critiques on the cultural politics of the fine art world, US writer and social critic James Baldwin was leveling his own sobering criticisms at Hollywood’s film industry. In his 1976 collection of essays The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin employed the more widely used term “doublethink” to describe the phenomenon of one text, film, or persona holding contradictory opinions, views, and/or beliefs simultaneously. Often those affected by or deploying doublethink in their beliefs or cultural practices are unaware of these contradictions, and in several of O’Grady’s poems, such tensions between the 42

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artist and the authors of the cut-paper phrases, as well as the phrases themselves, become apparent. For Mercer, Bakhtin’s mode of analysis, and here I add Baldwin’s, “lends itself well to the notion of ‘double consciousness’ that W. E. B. Du Bois put forward in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to define diaspora subjectivity as being both inside and outside of the symbolic order of 20th century modernity.”36 Aligned with and expounding Du Bois’s conception, in his essays, Baldwin interrogates the paradoxical straining between the complex lived realities of black people in the United States and the processed movie-screen images constructed by white cinematographers. Central to his argument is the way the Hollywood film industry, through neatly manufactured fictions, evades racial “truth-telling”—ultimately, part of a larger “American self-evasion, which,” as Baldwin scathes, “is all this country has for history.”37 In many ways, Baldwin’s and O’Grady’s distinct but coextensive work during this period points to how the function of popular cultural forms is precisely to obscure the devious grammars in which race (and gender) “speak” on the page and on the screen. The Devil Finds Work and CONYT offer two very different cryptographies, born of critical spectatorship and readership, for decoding the hysterical-ness, irrationality, and mindlessness of each text’s internal contradictions. Moreover, as O’Grady deployed her cut-paper methodology to disrupt the cultural logics of the New York Times, Baldwin discussed the processes by which black actors “shatter” the racial facades of movies, such as Sydney Poitier in the 1958 film The Defiant Ones. This occurs, according to Baldwin, when black screen actors disrupt the mythic surfaces of filmic texts through their subversive performances while working amid an antagonistic system of cinematic production: “What the black actor has managed to give are moments—indelible moments, created, miraculously beyond the confines of the script: hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin tale, and with enough force, if unleashed, to shatter the tale to fragments.”38 O’Grady’s work belongs to a legacy of performance, language, and textual promiscuity that includes the very embodied textual criticisms and filmic disruptions Baldwin meticulously outlines. Bakhtin, meanwhile, suggests that poets, along with speakers in quotidian scenarios of everyday life, are consistently working within the emotional range and political position of their listeners (or readers). He offers a useful vocabulary for analyzing both written and verbal speech acts, and his notion of “double-voicing” is particularly valuable for reading CONYT alongside Baldwin’s “doublethink.” “Single-voiced discourse,” as defined by Bakhtin, is the direct relation between language and the people, objects, and events to which language refers.39 “As this type of direct, unmediated, ‘fully signifying’ discourse is directed towards its referential object, it constitutes, in Bakhtin’s view . . . the ultimate semantic authority within the limits of a given context.”40 On the other hand, a discourse based on the double-voiced “is directed both towards the referential object of speech as in ordinary discourse, and towards another’s discourse, towards someone else’s speech.”41 Bakhtin’s double-voice is borrowed from polyphony in music discourse; the term directly translates as “multiple voices.” MARK MY WORDS

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When considered alongside O’Grady’s language-steeped work and Baldwin’s use of doublethink, this theory amplifies the potential for text-based art to directly address its viewers, while also complicating the written or cut-paper collaged word’s very ability to fully signify. Thus, tension resonates between the cultural hegemony of the New York Times and O’Grady’s voice as a black woman artist. In the case of CONYT, O’Grady wields her own voice against and through the cut-paper words and phrases appropriated from the New York Times. It is an act out of turn, a poetics against the textual grain of the news publication, an unwieldy collaboration that invites the hegemonic structure to take up space even as it is deconstructed by the artist. Bakhtin’s conception of polyphony is instructive, then, for analyzing CONYT and other text-based works that utilize appropriated images and texts from primary sources. In line with double-voicing and theories of polyphony, O’Grady’s New York Times poetry contains many voices, which are then cut and sutured together by one artist’s voice. The practice of polyphony through double-voicing is “both a unique linguistic construct and a valuable interpretative tool for scholars and practitioners to comprehend the way in which speakers routinely engage with each other.”42 As an interpretive tool, theories and practices of polyphony, such as double-voicing, open up channels for each cut-paper word or phrase in O’Grady’s visual poems to represent its own narrative and aesthetic perspective within the poem. The artist does not place her own voice uniformly between the narrative structure of each stanza and the spectator. Rather, individual chunks of text, in their varied typefaces, colors, and sizes, capture the viewer and subvert their process of viewing. It is no coincidence that Mercer, too, “drawing attention to semiotic qualities of ambivalence, equivocation and intertextuality,” identifies Bakhtin’s notion of double-voicing as “pertinent to African American art history and to the study of the cultural formation of the modern black diaspora.” In fact, Mercer offers a rich formal and theoretical reading of artists Bettye Saar, Robert Colescott, and David Hammons using the analytic tools offered by the Russian philosopher. Specifically, Mercer attends to the ways Saar, Colescott, and Hammons deploy the dialogic mode in their engagement with “the text of blackness” and its various visual semiotic codes. Mercer demonstrates this through Saar’s appropriation of the caricature of Aunt Jemima in her 1972 assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which he argues is placed in an intertextual suite of visual and literary material that introduces a syncretic worldview—one that questions, much like O’Grady in her later work, the either/or dualities of black identity in American national culture. In this work in particular, Saar wields the language of the stereotype to coproduce an alternative textual engagement with notions of blackness.43 Appropriating text rather than image, multiple authorial voices rather than O’Grady’s alone, constitutes the stanzas of CONYT. The artist devised a process by which the poems were (more or less) spontaneous, each word and phrase selected for its individual meaning and appeal to the artist in the moment of searching and cutting. A separate approach entirely was employed to construct each frame, the building 44

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blocks of each multi-page poem. Ultimately, O’Grady dissected disparate textual voices and then crafted them together in a way that produced, as the artist puts it, a new order and a new logic. At the same time, her use of double-voice reveals “the ways in which power relations are constructed between speakers according to the interplay of social categories such as gender, age, ethnicity, profession and status,” even as she deconstructed and reordered the selected words and phrases.44 That is, as O’Grady mined the New York Times in search of herself (a black middle-class woman) and in search of order in a language she found irrational, she was confronted with a mainstream newsprint culture that consistently rendered her body and experiences invisible. Informed by and armed with her deeply personal experiences, unique expertise, and standpoint, O’Grady forced poetic rationality out of this irrational text; the piece demonstrates both the interplay of social categories and a subversion of those categories through double-voicing. Take for example an excerpt from “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business” (fig. 5). Instead of a uniform and cohesive text held together by the artist’s totalizing voice in a single typeface and tone, this poem curates a plurality of insights—multiple chains of original thought that are cut and strung together. When Films ‘Quote’ Other Films —The Moral Is Implicit Silence Is Silver White and Black and THE SOUND THAT SHOOK HOLLYWOOD The Crisis Deepens in Theatrical Détente

Each element presumably represents its own New York Times title, tagline, article, or advertising—its own context. The spectator is confronted by both the single cut-paper poem presented by O’Grady and a word collage that holds distinct each original text’s individual reality. Heteroglossia, introduced in Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1975) as “another’s speech in another’s language,” is the process by which language serves two (or more) speakers, each bringing her own context to bear.45 The poems individually and as a body of work appear as dialogic interactions of distinct ideologies and perspectives, emerging from the possibilities allotted in the original publications. In some compositions, the cut-paper fragments still speak for themselves, revealing their original contexts—and sometimes even speaking against the seeming intention of the artist. The diptych above containing “When Films ‘Quote’ Other Films” and “White and Black” demonstrates a poetic manifestation of Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia. Not only MARK MY WORDS

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figure 5 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business” (parts 2 and 3 of 11), from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010. Toner ink on adhesive paper, 11 × 86 ⁷∕₈ in. (27.9 × 220 cm) overall. Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

was O’Grady well practiced at suturing together “another’s speech in another’s language,” but the topmost headline in the right frame is also about a textual relationship between films, a discourse that emerges despite what O’Grady’s intentions may have been. Similarly, on the right-hand side, “THE SOUND THAT SHOOK HOLLYWOOD” commands such attention with its capital lettering and bold and boxy font that spectators may have to muster some effort to pull their eyes over the whole of the work and read all the clippings together. As both poem and art object, these lines occupy much of the visual field, speaking as much for themselves as they do for the artist. While O’Grady consciously deploys this cacophony, she does so to produce a new order, as the poem transforms the public journalistic form into a private literary one. Despite this intention, heteroglossia works against the artist in many of the poems—a tension O’Grady has acknowledged and sought to rectify in later iterations of the project. This is also observable in the poem “Missing Persons” (plate 2). In the fourth panel, a chunk of text, three lines long and overwhelming in size, nearly fills the white space of the page. Indeed, the corners of the cutout section reach deep into the corners of the white sheet to which it has been adhered, ending only a centimeter or less from the edges. The text claims so much space that the reader almost misses another, much smaller cutout piece directly above it—the only other words on the panel: “get your gloves on” in a rounded, bold font. Directly below, the large excerpt seems to shout from the white panel and certainly from the poem as a whole: 46

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Make up for all the weekends you can’t remember with one you’ll never forget.

The text is also bold, and despite the overall aesthetic balance that O’Grady maintains throughout, this text panel in particular pulls the reader away from the cadence of her double-voiced poetry to claim visual and perhaps vocal space for itself. Nearer the lefthand side of the piece, which is presumably to be read left to right, these nonsensical words are printed in black on manila newsprint; they are offset by heavy dark black text at the far right and one thin line of white text set on a jet-black background. Despite the darker letters to the far right, the reader’s eyes are repeatedly drawn back to the left, to the overpowering “Make up for all the weekends,” such that these words start to take on their own meaning, apart from O’Grady’s use of them within the whole. The phrase produces a feedback loop that will never satisfy—the reader will never know how to “make up for” the time the presumed advertising makes mention of. The artist’s poem leaves no instructions; rather, it carries on in its pastiche-like fashion. In this moment, upon viewing these seemingly arbitrary words, the process of reading is ruptured, stalled in the visual and sonic overbearance of a text that makes promises—promises the poem itself does not keep. Heteroglossia, in this instance, has the potential to visually destabilize both the artistic impetus behind the visual poems and the process of viewing them. The black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde, in her 1979 essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” cautions, as the title suggests, fellow cultural producers and critics against a pursuit of justice and social and political agency that is reliant on the very tools used to discriminate and marginalize women and BIPOC cultural producers.46 Nonetheless, despite the unwieldy linguistic tools O’Grady mobilizes in her creative efforts toward order and logic, the artist stakes a claim through her method of appropriation, tethering her unique artistic standpoint and poetic sensibilities to the Sunday New York Times. And while it is important to examine formal ruptures in any artistic medium, what makes O’Grady’s use of language such a crucially important methodology to locate art historically is her persistence despite the noise; the artist continues in her work, speaking over these disruptions. In reading O’Grady’s text alongside Bakhtin’s dialogism and Baldwin’s critiques of doublethink in the US film industry, there is a recognizable multiplicity of remnant perspectives (and voices) embedded in CONYT as a work of its time. Those fragmented perspectives both alter and inform readings of the work, from encounters with individual poems to explorations of the collection in its entirety. This, again, is consistent with Bakhtin’s theory of multi-voice or the double-voiced. The principle itself serves as a referent of CONYT’s aesthetic archive—that is, the newspaper publication, the literary tradition of poetry, the medium of collage, and the space of the contemporary art gallery. Within this archive, each cut-paper word or phrase is its own entity, delineated MARK MY WORDS

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by gaps (the white space of the blank page) as well as the hard lines and angles orchestrated by the artist. However, each piece is constructed and authored by O’Grady, and as part of this construction, interacts with surrounding bits and fragments. The aesthetic arc of each visual poem does not unfold logically but rather interacts to produce meaning for the reader. Each time the visual poems are read, the dialogic CONYT engages with and is informed by other works (namely the New York Times Sunday newspaper) and voices (its authors and advertisements). O’Grady, perhaps unwittingly, draws on the history and past use of the New York Times, as the meanings associated with each cutout word, phrase, or cluster often carry over. Whether conscious or not, all text is organized and constructed in response to and in relationship with other possible statements in the newspaper, and in anticipation of future ones. And while O’Grady deploys polyphony through her New York Times cut poetry as a strategy of orientation, “Missing Persons,” in particular, reveals the limitations of such a strategy, as polyphony works against O’Grady’s artistic voice and the dominant language resurfaces even when it is being appropriated and redirected. CONYT is an address that is affective and ethico-political rather than linguistic, and to paraphrase Bakhtin, as the work appropriates and travels, O’Grady exploits the semiotic elements of each Sunday paper, embracing and moving away from, critiquing and legitimizing, the preestablished intonations of the Times itself.47 The minimalist form of the cut-paper poems, their grammatical order, and the collective statements that emerge are separated from any utterances or speech acts. These works are, thus, “technical signs,” in Bakhtin’s phrasing, that advance potential signification. The artist’s voice is deployed on the side of articulated language—the articulation (or voice) not captured in the phonetic abstraction of language is always formed “on the threshold of the verbal and the non-verbal, the said and the non-said,” and it is through this that language addresses itself to the viewer.48 As they experience the work, either as individual poems or collectively, viewers are confronted with layered voices—voices that shape and inform one another to produce complex chains of meaning quite literally fashioned out of turn, out of sync and against the textual grain of their original source material. At the same time, the poems are dialogical, resisting closure or unambiguous expression. This occurred even as they were cut and pasted together by O’Grady to produce an alternative rationale, a new orientation. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of theories of language. Two famous essays by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967) and “From Work to Text” (1971), argued that a work’s meaning is not reliant on authorial intention but rather on the individual point of active reception. Though primarily invested in literature, Barthes’s insights align in many ways with contemporary art practice during this time, as bodies of work underscored the position of the viewer in the work’s completion. Through

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poems like “Missing Persons,” one can begin to see that both O’Grady’s role and the position of the viewer are fundamentally reoriented at the site of the poem’s exhibition, as neither party in the chain of signification can monopolize the poem’s power to mean. O’Grady attempted to marshal the text, the language of the dominant culture, to speak her own position, a marginalized position. Yet the text in several of her poems resists. This resistance does not, however, mark the project as a failure. Indeed, the artist beats the New York publication at its own game of signification. Rather, what O’Grady’s process and work make apparent is that, to reference Lorde once more, the tools used to dismantle and disorient systems of power, including and perhaps especially language, can never be fully relied upon. Forty years later, O’Grady would reconsider CONYT, this time in order to mobilize the newspaper clippings toward a new poetic end; she now deemed her early newspaper poems a failure “as poems, but an extraordinary success as a process.”49 Arguably, the original methodology offered O’Grady a way of exploring the potential of her own unique position, while the resultant poems helped to theorize the limits of language. NIGHTMARES IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Adrian Piper also tested the potential and limits of both subjectivity and language in her multimodal practice during the 1970s and 1980s, yet the artist shares more with O’Grady than conceptual and embodied approaches to art making. Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares (1986–90) shares an inspirational starting point with CONYT: the New York Times itself. Nine years after O’Grady had put aside her cut-paper poetry, Piper took up the publication toward her own subversive ends, expressed through heavy black charcoal mark making across hand-selected news and advertisement spreads. In one of Piper’s altered newspaper works, a dark black woman sketched in charcoal lounges over the newspaper print on the left side of a New York Times spread from June 20, 1986 (fig. 6). She is nude and seemingly relaxed, with legs splayed and arms resting over her bald head. A column of type advances up from the bottom of the page, stopping in between her open legs. Yet her open and available figure lolls across articles that, in stark contrast, mention the apartheid regime and resulting increase in civil unrest in South Africa. Her right leg hangs down onto the right side of the newspaper, toes tickling the face of another charcoal being, whose large oval face houses wide and vacant eyes devoid of irises or pupils. Above this large empty face are the red all-capital words “SOLUTION—SOLUTION—THE BLA K SPACE.” These words refer back to the opposite page, where the woman reclines. One article in particular discusses the official censorship happening in South Africa, where newspapers are publishing blank spaces where certain articles or images were to be printed, but that the South African government had found objectionable and had demanded to be removed. The blank space in the red “BLA K” is suggestive—it could directly

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figure 6 Adrian Piper, Vanilla Nightmares #2, 1986. Charcoal and oil crayon on newspaper, 22 × 28 in. (55.8 × 71.1 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Fisher Endowment. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation, Berlin.

correlate to the article it refers to, the “BLANK SPACE” of censorship, or, as the literal shape of the space in the text suggests, the viewer might also read “BLACK SPACE.” This “black space,” as insinuated by the haunting of the “C,” might refer to the figures themselves, black-space-taking beings trespassing in the notably white space of the New York Times. Given the title—Vanilla Nightmares #2—perhaps the “black space” that haunts “blank space” is what “vanilla nightmares” are made of, what they are all about. Art writer and curator Lucy Lippard describes the spaces and the charcoal beings that inhabit Piper’s work as “at once haunting and threatening, the stuff of nightmares for those in power.”50 O’Grady and Piper were critiquing the purported objectivity and cultural stakes of the New York Times using appropriated text and images to speak back, to force the Times to be read differently. Yet their approaches differed significantly. O’Grady went to the Times to locate herself, and, finding irrationality, decided to produce rationality through her cut-paper poems. Piper selected the Times as her point of reference

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“because,” as she states, “that is the newspaper I read, because it is generally high quality and comprehensive reportage; because of its graphic sophistication, and because of its commitment to authoritative coverage of ‘all the news that’s fit to print.’ ”51 Also distinctive about the artworks themselves is their use of space. The ubiquity of the blank space in O’Grady’s collages becomes all the more prominent when compared to the way Piper fills the page in her Vanilla Nightmares series. Piper’s illuminated manuscripts are charcoal and red crayon thickly applied over New York Times advertisements for high-end stores and luxury products as well as articles specifically about race relations in the late 1980s. According to Piper, “The manuscripts are chosen for their racially loaded content, their graphic imagery, their subliminal connotations, and the objective declarative voice in which they purport to speak.” The artist’s drawings are of dark and ghostly figures, often described as phantoms, which haunt the now-yellowed newsprint. These specters are etched larger than their white counterparts in the advertisements and have vacant expressions and crude facial features. These eerie “vanilla nightmares” are the “subauthoritarian news that’s not fit to print.”52 By targeting racist defense mechanisms—as Piper’s object and installation works often do—the artist authored a different kind of news: That’s the news about the deep fears, anxieties, and fantasies about blacks that lurk beneath the surface of rational concept formation and language in racist consciousness: about blacks as supernaturally strong or sexually potent; as feral, lascivious, wanton invaders. . . . The drawings bring these stereotypical nightmares to the surface of the page and of consciousness, cut them down to size, and depict them in explicit detail.53

One of Piper’s most-discussed “nightmares” engages with the taboo of interracial sex and desire. In Vanilla Nightmares #8 (1986, fig. 7), Piper appropriates a Bloomingdale’s ad for the Christian Dior perfume Poison, applying dense charcoal lines to frame the ad’s white model with five demonic figures. Below the large heading text, “POISON,” the ad copy reads, “the silent potion exclusively ours for you.” This sensuous language is mirrored in the model’s pose: head tilted, eyes delicately shut, bare arm extended high in a languorous swoon. Piper surrounds this perfume model with five dark, bald, presumably male figures, all with elongated incisors, mouths agape, and eyes cavernous and white. One of them lowers its mouth to the model’s neck in a bite that may be the cause of her ecstatic abandon. The central figure is perhaps the most striking, as it leans its head back in response to the woman’s heady essence, eyes seeming to roll back in its head so that only uncanny white cavities remain. The figure softly caresses the thin delicate white arm, which starkly contrasts with the demon’s thin black fingers. Across its tilted head reads another signifier of the perfume, the name “POISON.”

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figure 7 Adrian Piper, Vanilla Nightmares #8, 1986. Charcoal on newspaper, 22 × 13 ¾ in. (55.8 × 34.9 cm). Collection of Richard Sandor, Chicago. © Adrian Piper Research Archive (APRA) Foundation, Berlin.

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The ad’s text punctuates Piper’s charcoal additions like poetry atop the biting figure’s head: Hinting of eternity A thousand and one journeys Mysterious encounter defying description Watch for the enchantress Poison has arrived.

This conversive engagement with the text simultaneously presents both the woman, echoing the ad’s intent, and the black figures as poison(ous) via the forehead stamp of the central figure and the feral desire apparent all around. This text-image amalgamation of danger, mystery, and fantasy that Piper revives using the Bloomingdale’s ad is not a new communion. Instead, we are pointed back to her title Vanilla Nightmares, which resituates this fear of the black sexual predator as one of white (vanilla) imagining. In Piper’s creative restaging of the ad’s text, the spectator is perhaps uncertain (if only momentarily) who or what the real demon is.54 So what role, then, does text play in Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares, and what role does Vanilla Nightmares play in the history of text-based works during the 1970s and 1980s? Is it mere coincidence that O’Grady, in 1977, and Piper, in the mid-1980s, both turned to text, arriving at the same newspaper seeking revision and reprisal? Piper’s thickly etched red and black text is sparse throughout the series, and yet the art is decidedly text-based. Piper forces her viewers to read the newspaper through her ghostly figures, their bodies determining what can and should be read. The black figures dwell on each manuscript, literally and figuratively illuminating both the news “fit to print,” and that which is unfit—the fear of blackness, and of “BLACK SPACE,” which the figures suggest undergirds “the news” as a cultural institution. The relation between CONYT and Vanilla Nightmares also emerges through Piper’s periodic use of German idioms, which potentially disrupts the process of reading the work entirely and performs a different kind of work altogether.55 A dizzying array of international contexts and voices emerges both through O’Grady’s multilingual background as a translator and through the ways in which Spanish, French, and German seep into the work of these two black women working in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s. In Piper’s and O’Grady’s work, we can see multiple uses of polyphony, each issuing from or elaborating the theorization of black womanhood through conceptual text-based art. POST-BLACK ART

Following the completion of the poems, and as she began producing other work, O’Grady discovered that becoming a black artist in the late 1970s and 1980s was a desperate and isolating endeavor despite the conceptual depth and formal ingenuity of the work she was producing. Reflecting back on that time in 2012, she mused: MARK MY WORDS

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I often say that I was “post-black” before I was “black.” For a long time, I felt that I had escaped the limitations imposed by blackness. In those days, in the years well before 1968, living in my insular worlds of elite education and government employment, in a seeming meritocracy, I didn’t feel I had difficulty being noticed or being taken seriously. Then in 1977, when I was still post-black and experiencing the kind of personal crisis that now seems routine, I did a series of newspaper poems. But not like the Dadas [sic] and Surrealists—the former draft dodgers from World War I whom I’d been teaching—had done.56

Possibly because of the lack of critical or cultural attention to the project, O’Grady abandoned CONYT for her guerilla performances in the early 1980s, and she did not return to the Dadaist-inspired visual poems until 2006. Yet the date and mode of her return to CONYT was not arbitrary; rather, it marked a turning point in the art world’s relation to black art and black identity and occasioned an opportunity for O’Grady to return to her earlier theorization in an utterly new context. Just five years prior to the poems’ exhibition, Thelma Golden, then a curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and artist Glenn Ligon had boldly coined the term “post-black” in concert with the Studio Museum’s 2001 exhibition Freestyle.57 The show included twenty-eight emerging artists of African descent, and Golden bestowed the “post-black” designation on their work specifically because, in her words, the artists themselves were “adamant about not being labeled as ‘black’ artists, though their work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notion of blackness.” In her estimation, “Post-black was the new black.”58 “Post-black” as an artistic category and movement was highly controversial. In many ways the exhibition and its new language catalyzed a political turning point for artists, galleries, and museums alike, who felt forced to wrestle with the parameters of blackness as a visually expressive form in complex, and often divisive, ways. On the one hand, the gesture to release artists of color from race-based signifiers was a liberating one, especially for those whose work was not directly representational, or might not be deemed politically relevant to narrowly conceived understandings of black life or experience. And the rapid rise of multiculturalism and its equally swift cooptation by neoliberal capitalism was affording many artists of color opportunities to show their work and be recognized for the first time.59 Yet these opportunities were most often in ethnicity- or race-specific temporary exhibitions that rarely resulted in sustained engagement or accession opportunities. The dilemma persists today, although the terms of engagement have shifted, as notions of “post-black” have been critically retheorized by writers and scholars, for instance Touré’s book Who’s Afraid of PostBlackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now (2011) and Derek Conrad Murray’s Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights (2016). Conrad Murray also reminds visual art scholars of the central importance of language, particularly when evaluating Golden’s powerful, albeit brief, comments about her exhibition and the post-black moment. In fact, it was Golden and Ligon’s shared 54

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love of language, particularly its bizarre uses, that led them to the term, which is actually short for “post-black art.” In her earlier catalogue essay “My Brother,” written for her now widely celebrated 1994 exhibition Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, Golden reflects: “As a child born in the mid-1960s, I imagine I hold a certain degree of nostalgia for the passion and energy that created the nationalist/aesthetic dogma of the 1970s Black Arts Movement—which allowed me to thrive in the words and actions of late 1980s multiculturalism.”60 Post-black did not simply represent a generational and aesthetic shift for Golden, “but rather a divergent set of values that were cognizant of the Black Arts Movement’s political limitations.”61 To quote Conrad Murray at length: The black in post-black is more than an umbrella term signifying the African-American experience, but is actually a more pointed reference to a particular regime of representation: specifically, the history of images depicting black men in the throes of collective resistance. The visual culture of normative blackness has been defined through the representation of black men as the defiant leaders of their beleaguered communities. We see this exemplified in images of the Black Panthers, clad in leather jackets and berets, as they stand in militant opposition to racial oppression—or in iconic photographs of 1960s era race-men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bayard Rustin, as they bravely protest bigotry in the American South.62

For Golden and Ligon, the term “post-black art,” signaling a shift away from the limiting aesthetic expectations of the Black Arts Movement and the representational expectations of past decades, was a significant intervention, and important to make on the occasion of the exhibition Freestyle. Later, in 2011, Touré would define postblackness as a resistance to the confining definitions and prescribed notions of an authentic black American experience, dedicating his book to “everyone who was ever made to feel ‘not black enough.’ ”63 Therefore, to engage in the divisive identity policing Touré warns against, which was reignited following Golden’s essay, is to sell blackness short, limiting the possibilities of black artists producing work in innumerable styles and out of unique life experiences. In the early 2000s, the artists in Freestyle were responding to the experience of artists like O’Grady, who, in the three decades preceding, struggled to break out of the segregating forces of the fine art world writ large. By distinguishing themselves as “post-black” practitioners, they drew attention to the very ways in which their identity as black artists overdetermined and excluded their work from contexts outside the narrow frameworks and rhetoric of identity politics that had been subsumed, at the time, into neoliberal multiculturalism. Thus, the early 2000s was an interesting moment for curator Nick Mauss to visit O’Grady’s New York studio. And notwithstanding the glowing review by Cotter in 2006 and her personal reasons for creating the poems in 1977, once the poems were finally exhibited, the work was thrust into the MARK MY WORDS

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rhetoric of that moment and caught within what O’Grady has described as the odd phenomenon of being “post-black before I was black.”64 That is, due to the color-blind era in which they were displayed, the poems were reclaimed and discussed in ways that ignored O’Grady’s conceptual process and erased the issues of race (and gender) that inspired her strategic shift away from the methods and content of her white female and male counterparts. At the same time, as quoted above, O’Grady has also recognized a moment in her experience where she too understood her labor outside the bounds of her identity, prior to the language of post-blackness and its application to her work. Early education and career experience led O’Grady to produce work she understood as being “about universal stuff, the meaning of life and art and all that.”65 She quickly and consciously moved away from this early position in 1979 after experiencing Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, a performance by Jewish American artist Eleanor Antin at 80 Langton Street, an alternative space in San Francisco. In this piece, the artist performed a black ballerina character named Eleanora Antinova, who came with an elaborate backstory set in Paris, and the performance made O’Grady question her own family’s migration history, an experience she recounted in an interview with art critic and curator Laura Cottingham: I watched this performance in which Antin takes on the persona of a black ballerina in the early ’20s who has somehow ended up in a Diaghilev-type company. It was good, but it was completely out of sync with what I imagined a black woman in the early ’20s thinking and feeling. Watching it, the problem I had was that, as I was looking at Eleanor Antin in blackface with a tutu, I kept thinking of my mother: what she was like as a young woman in the early ’20s and what would have happened to her had she gone to audition for Diaghilev. Antin didn’t have the answers, and neither did I, but the show I was seeing in my head was more interesting than the one Anti was presenting. I thought, “I can speak for this black ballerina better than she can. It’s time to speak for my own black self.”66

From that moment on, she decided that she had to speak for herself, moving away from universal terms and words borrowed from a newspaper. In fact, a year after her experience in San Francisco came the decisive moment when she shifted away from what she understands today as a post-black mentality: In 1980 I volunteered at Just Above Midtown, the black avant-garde gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant that had lost its space on Fifty-Seventh Street and now had to create a new space in Tribeca. I became a sort of in-house gallery PR agent. One day, I called the New Yorker and spoke to the editor of “Goings On About Town.” I wanted her to list the gallery’s opening show, with pieces by David Hammons and others. JAM had never had a listing there, of course, nor had any of the other black galleries. I told her that the name of the show was Outlaw Aesthetics. When I heard her reply, my blood froze. “Oh, they always put titles on shows there, don’t they.” That was the moment I was transformed from post-black into black.67 56

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This retrospective framing, however, does not, for me, alter the depth and importance of Cutting Out the New York Times. The unique circumstances from which O’Grady constructed each poem, along with the complex (and sometimes contradictory) ways she has spoken of the project, illuminate how seemingly “universal” forms exclude early and avant-garde black feminist theorizing across the mediums of visual art and poetry. Before she was fully recognized as a black woman artist, a recognition still hard fought for and hard won by many of O’Grady’s contemporaries, O’Grady’s visual poetry was subsumed in discourses of post-blackness in 2006, and often divorced from its important early context. Recounting the exhibition’s reception, and in a tone of both frustration and jest, O’Grady has declared in several contexts that CONYT was her “last work as a post-black artist.”68 Furthermore, it was the seeming lack of identity politics, or recognizable themes of race or gender constitution, that most likely led to “post-black” assessments of her work in 2006. Yet if we are to take O’Grady’s ex-husband at his word and approach the works as an intimate look into the artist’s head, what then does this 1977 text-scrambled view inside do when it is hung on the walls of contemporary art spaces today? Collins and others answer this question with clarity: the import of black feminist theorizing, crucially through the mediums of art and language, is to produce specificity, a plurality of expressive possibility born out of one’s experience of being both black and woman. Taken together, both O’Grady’s 1977 goals for the project and the ways CONYT lives on today provide a fascinating case study in the contemporary practices of an artist working at the margins of her respective creative fields, and how the very products of an artist’s creative and theoretical labors are rendered anew in distinct cultural moments, toward radically different ends. O’Grady’s own return to her materials—the edited volume of her essays published by Duke University Press in 2020, this book, and the myriad recent exhibition and catalogue appearances—marks a third moment in the history of CONYT’s reception and highlights yet a different political context. Since the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Freestyle exhibition, and Golden and Ligon’s introduction of the “post-black” concept, a new generation of artists have investigated past theoretical lineages of expression to yet again reconsider notions of blackness. Blackness, in this art historical context, has been codified as both form and medium, while at the same time, artists across all disciplines have continued the work of complicating ideas of blackness, translating its fluidity into a multitude of aesthetic sensibilities and theoretical possibilities. Interestingly, some might argue that the aim of CONYT, specifically the impulse to find one’s thoughts and experience as a black woman within the overwhelmingly white literary space of the New York Times, was a futile exercise to begin with. Yet O’Grady was not the only artist during this time, or even today, nearly forty years later, who searched for self and meaning as embedded in Western and masculinist discourse. Consider for example emerging contemporary concept-based multimedia practitioner Adam Pendleton, who coined the term “Black Dada,” a theoretical intervention that MARK MY WORDS

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guides his own art-making practice.69 The artist’s theory, and the idea for his Black Dada Reader (2019), stemmed from a 2010 residency at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he began exploring conceptions of blackness alongside institutional critique by Xeroxing a hodgepodge selection of texts pulled from various sources, including Zurich Dadaist Hugo Ball, Black Power icon Stokely Carmichael, and Afro­ futurist jazz and performance pioneer Sun Ra, into an epic thirteen-page poem. The culmination of his research efforts lived thereafter in a spiral-bound journal in his studio, and it would later be referred to by the artist as “a collage in book format.” It is included in Pendleton’s Black Dada Reader, along with writing from abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, experimental writing by Gertrude Stein, and new essays from performance scholar and curator Adrienne Edwards, Drawing Center executive director Laura Hoptman, artist Susan Thompson, writer and critic Tom McDonough, and MoMA PS1 curator of performance turned executive artistic director Jenny Schlenzka.70 Like O’Grady’s and Piper’s early works, the artist-produced and intimately bound book was not originally intended for wide distribution; rather, as Pendleton explains, “It was really meant for me to refer to in the space of the studio while I was working on different projects.”71 However, also like CONYT, it took on a life of its own once others discovered Pendleton’s abstract and yet distinctly referential process during visits to his studio. The artist explains in the reader that Black Dada is about “radical juxtapositions,” and what is “black” about the theory and the work has less to do with what Pendleton’s work, or any given artist’s work, looks like. Rather, the blackness of Black Dada emerges in the ways voices are brought together to disrupt common-sense logics and established histories of abstract and conceptual art—in other words, in outof-turn speech acts, and through art that makes demands of its audiences. One might argue that, finally, in this third moment in the reception of O’Grady’s work, the art world now has a set of critical tools most apt for interpreting her process, which includes a complicated relationship to language and white European knowledge production as well as the newspaper poems themselves. Undoubtedly Pendleton was inspired by O’Grady’s pioneering work, and his collage in book form attends to the historical gaps of this creative lineage by juxtaposing the writings of black artists, critics, and cultural theorists with writings by those of European descent. Cutting Out the New York Times preceded Pendleton’s Black Dada project by forty years, with O’Grady’s own formula for juxtaposition, an identity-inspired manifesto doing the similarly imperative work of exposing logical ruptures in the canon of white knowledge production so they might be rearranged to produce something entirely new. Analogous to CONYT and O’Grady’s other bodies of work, discussed in the chapters that follow, Pendleton’s Black Dada approach forces connections between classic European texts—in this case Dadaist texts—that responded to the upheaval, violence, and trauma of World War I and the writing of Black Arts Movement luminaries such as Amiri Baraka, who were themselves reacting to the violence of US racism and political turmoil in the 1960s. Today, Pendleton and other black artists also respond, con58

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sciously or not, to the violence and trauma that currently affects black and brown lived experience in the form of relentless hypervisible police violence, escalating mass incarceration, political disenfranchisement, and the hate-filled, racist, sexist, and xenophobic policies and rhetoric of the United States’ forty-fifth president, Donald Trump. O’Grady, Piper, Pendleton, and so many others continue to evince the impossibility of art—even minimalist, conceptual, abstract forms—made in a vacuum.

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2 “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

The reasons I go on with Performance are two: first, because I’m stuck with it. It’s the only art form I feel capable of both mastering and expanding aesthetically. And second, because I believe it is an acceptable political option.

lorraine o’grady, 1981 1 The main reason my art is “political” is probably that anger is my most productive emotion.

lorraine o’grady, 1981 2 I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST. . . . If pressed to describe what I do, I’d say that I am writing in space.

lorraine o’grady, 1983 3

I

N THE SUMMER OF 1980 , Lorraine O’Grady staged what would

become a series of guerilla invasions of New York art spaces as the now-notorious Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black MiddleClass) (fig. 8). The first time this persona appeared was at Just Above Midtown, a black multidisciplinary avant-garde art space, during the artist’s very first public performance. Dressed in an extravagant debutante-style gown and cape covered in 180 pairs of white gloves, O’Grady shouted at her predominantly black audience as she ceremoniously whipped herself with a cat-o’-nine-tails spiked with white chrysanthemums.

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figure 8 Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire leaves the safety of home, 1980–83/2009. Silver gelatin fiber print, 9 ¼ × 7 in. (23.5 × 17.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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THAT’S ENOUGH! . . . No more boot-licking . . . No more ass-kissing . . . No more buttering-up . . . No more pos . . . turing of super-ass . . . imilates . . . BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!4

Throughout her practice, but especially in performances as the character Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (who, following the artist’s lead, I will call MBN in this chapter for efficiency), O’Grady’s deployment of direct-address speech has highlighted the opportunities and limitations of critical spectatorship, which necessarily encompasses both the position of her audience members (those who bear witness) and the self-reflexive observations of the artist herself.5 During each iteration of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady’s strange and disruptive performance produced a rupture in the logics of the New York gallery scene as her adorned black body and her speech acts forced attendees to deal with the spectacle of both. Business as usual could not continue, so spectators necessarily had to recalibrate their expectations of the occasion, as they were forced to shift from passive opening attendees to active performance participants. In the last twenty years, this strategy, and the artist performance more broadly, have become such staples in discourses of contemporary art that their history and conceptual framework have achieved an aura of verisimilitude—they are unquestioned, left uninterrogated.6 Yet while studying O’Grady’s work, especially when analyzing her solo performances as MBN, I have found it necessary to reconceptualize the seemingly universally available strategy of direct address, and the history and articulation of the artist performance, when these physical enactments are reliant on the very problem of silence, erasure, and censorship that motivates and informs them. As the book continues, along with O’Grady, to rebuke the power structures undergirding the systemic exclusion of black artists across art and performance discourse, it is haunted as much as guided by performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o’s incisive query: “If black people have historically been reduced to [their] bodies—bought, sold, displayed, purchased and used as chattel—what does it mean for an art form to take that former commodity as its medium? Is it an act of reclaiming? Healing? Theft?”7 And are there risks? This chapter traces O’Grady’s pioneering Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performances from 1980 to 1983, meticulously attending to the work’s density, while arguing that the artist’s direct-address deployment of an alien body and alienation function to theorize longer, more robust histories of out-of-turn enactments within the modern and contemporary art museum.8 O’Grady channeled her own evolving approach to alienation and multifaceted identity politics into a dynamic series of multimodal performances, and in doing so produced alternative ways of understanding direct-address performances of this kind and the myriad social and political ideologies her work both “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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tapped into and worked against.9 O’Grady capitalized on performance art’s capacity for unruliness, articulating heterogeneous ideologies usually silenced and rendered invisible within the art museum. As artist and scholar Adrian Piper reflects in her own writings, marginality may be “more of a blessing than a curse, as alienation, too, has its uses.”10 Thus, the historical silencing of black women and women-identified artists of color, and the exclusion of their art from art institutions, itself presents a productive origin point for thinking about performance through O’Grady’s practice. Alienation is an important intervention to mobilize for the very reason that to exist and speak out of turn is to strategically use one’s voice and presence in ways that rupture expectations of the status quo. An alien body, then, as deployed by O’Grady, disrupts the material-semiotic coding of human and aesthetic reality, which is produced by historically specific objects, aesthetic tastes, conditions, and apparatuses of viewing human subjects. Props such as O’Grady’s white-glove dress, sash, diadem, white gloves, and cat-o’-nine-tails become the mechanisms through which the artist stages and subverts her own alienating presence as subject-object and artist-performer-art. I will argue that MBN’s alienating effects, produced through a mélange of props and out-of-turn speech acts and utilizing strategies of direct address, make apparent how black women’s bodies—historically strange and overdetermined in Western art contexts—through avatar production can disrupt historic and systemic erasure across these spaces of visibility and value.11 From the 1950s through the 1980s, the popular understanding of extraterrestrials inevitably involved slime, green skin, bulging eyes, flying objects, and the fierce technological unknown—visual semiotics that cohered in the popular imaginary as a proxy for Cold War tensions.12 Similarly, much of O’Grady’s spectacular existence as MBN was predicated on the artist’s uncanny utilization of objects, spaces, and performance narratives to signal her alien presence. Furthermore, O’Grady wielded her own body through a dynamic and complex persona, or as cultural historian Uri McMillan terms it, an avatar.13 The centrality of the artist’s body is often emphasized within performance art, and most certainly in the surrounding discourse facilitated by curators, historians, critics, and other scholars.14 The bodies of black women and women of color, however, have largely been alienated from both the space and the history of the contemporary art museum, even though neither has been entirely absent from Western museum and exhibition display.15 Finally, O’Grady’s hybrid practice and multimodal performance posits an alien connection between the mediums and genres from which her mélange of modalities originates, highlighting the immense potential these modes represent for theorizing audience reception and spectator engagement. Inspired and propelled by historical enactments of liberation and self-determination, O’Grady’s conceptual performances of radical (out-of-turn) presence suggest that it is through alien bodies, effects, and mixed-media acts that direct-address art achieves a different kind of political agency for black women who speak out of turn in and against the contemporary art museum.16 Through MBN, O’Grady invoked the specter 64

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of the black middle class to critique both mainstream Western art milieus and the few black artists who have managed to gain access to that mainstream. In the 1980s, the significance of the white debutante gown and gloves would not have been lost on O’Grady’s audiences. Such coverings worked alongside the artist’s rebellious tone and dialogue to argue that while fine art museums and galleries may have begun the token selection and exhibition of a few nonwhite artists, the art they did allow entrance remained too safe and largely directed at white audiences. The artist recalls: In 1980 when I first did MBN, the situation for black avant-garde art was unbelievably static. For most people, the concept of black avant-garde art was an oxymoron. Here was a place where you ran up against the baldest confusions and denials about black class—not just on the part of whites but of blacks too. Avant-garde art is made by and for a middleclass (and more occasionally, an upper class); it’s a product of visual training and refined intellectualization. So how could blacks fit into the equation?17

For O’Grady, black art in the 1980s did not tap into the impressive range of black expression born out of diverse histories of oppression and struggle—histories that included education, resources, access, and a black middle- and upper-class experience. The artist describes a moment when identity categories and definitions were less fluid, and all blacks were presumed to be poor and undereducated. Those who did not adhere to these ascriptions were considered inauthentic. The most troubling part, for O’Grady, “was how confused black artists themselves were. . . . You had this weird spectacle of middle-class adult artists trying to pass as street kids.”18 Thus, for MBN, art needed to take more risks; it had to disrupt the rubric for what constituted acceptable art produced by black artists for their diverse audiences (and for themselves).19 Audience reception studies, specifically in the fine arts, has historically relied on medium and medium specificity in building its analyses.20 With the emergence of large-scale installation, performance-based, and site-specific works in the 1960s and 1970s, theories of reception saw a dramatic shift, and in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s feminist theorists began building on the critical vocabulary and theories of early theater in order to craft their own conceptions of experience within the fine arts.21 In the early 2000s, another wave of phenomenological, installation, and performancebased reception studies texts were published, adding yet another set of tools with which to contemplate the strategies artists deploy in relationship to their spectators.22 Given that she had not experienced a more traditional art education, with its built-in feedback and opportunities for development, O’Grady found audience response critical to the development of her early performance practice. In the late 1990s, when reflecting back on her own reception, O’Grady noted mixed support from within the black art community in particular. While the artist’s closest friends, as well as a few colleagues she admired, thought the work was worthwhile, many thought it “too harsh”—criticism the artist received in person. “Most people hated the idea of “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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the costume, the way it focused on class issues,” she recalled, demonstrating the limits of such performances even among experimental and cutting-edge artist peers.23 O’Grady’s performances as MBN, which employed collage, fashion design, assemblage, creative writing, mail art, and modalities of embodied disruption, came just before the second wave of reception studies, which developed new tools for understanding the effects of art experiences on spectators and for interpreting reception as a process. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire should not merely be lumped under the umbrella of performance art without being more specific. To do so risks undermining the very ways black artists, and women in particular, drew from myriad experiences and nontraditional ways of creating art to engage their audiences in the multicultural art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Rather, I will explore how O’Grady took up alienation and direct address as modes of speaking and existing out of turn in order to claim a liminal space and an audience for her work in the midst of its active silencing and erasure. The risks O’Grady took in this invasion extended beyond the actual performance to include the objects she constructed and then smuggled into the galleries. Two of the most notable are her chrysanthemum-studded cat-o’-nine-tails and her now-iconic white-glove ball gown. The chrysanthemum has a wide range of cultural meanings and a rich symbolism far too vast to enumerate here in detail. Suffice to say it is associated with death in several countries in Europe and also represents (at times) lamentation and grief in China, Japan, and Korea. In other countries, such as the United States and Australia, the flower is culturally significant in the fall, and on Mother’s Day in Australia, which in the Southern Hemisphere comes in autumn. It has been taken up as the official flower by several cities and various fraternal organizations.24 Any one of these symbolic meanings may find unique purchase in the artist’s wielding of the white flower; for instance the East Asian connotations of lamentation and general anguish were evoked in MBN’s ritual self-flagellation and her vocal condemnation of black artists. These props and their use in O’Grady’s enactments engaged with both feminist conceptualism and multiculturalism, two key movements in performance art praxis in the 1980s, as well as a particular thematic and methodological approach to art making.25 Significantly, O’Grady employed her own body as art process and artwork through avant-garde performance in order to enter spaces and conversations from which her body (and her art) were historically excluded. This was a central strategy of feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s, who challenged medium-specific boundaries and explored the potency of “art as idea.” At the same time, this dynamic wielding of body and props allows for a more complex understanding of how performance during this time period created, managed, and theorized social alienations in various art historical contexts. Throughout much of her early performance work, O’Grady made a strong critique of multiculturalism, even before the phenomenon had codified into cultural theory and practice.26 That is, both the presence of black artists in the fine art world and the material cultural contexts of the moment presented a challenge for O’Grady, one that her 66

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work simultaneously embraced and critiqued. Indeed, when discussing the black avantgarde in the 1980s, O’Grady observes: “Whatever hole black avant-garde (middle-class) art had fallen into, it was still there. And it would stay there until the season of 1988–89, when just as arbitrarily it would emerge, brought to light by the needs of the white art world.”27 The class quagmire O’Grady elucidated in both Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and her writings was directly tied to economic histories of the 1980s that variously enabled or disabled a black middle-class identity from emerging into public visibility. The oversaturated and overdetermined conversation on Ronald Reagan’s disastrous “war on drugs” is one example. Furthermore, due to Reagan’s economic policies, the country experienced the worst recession since the Great Depression—businesses closed and families lost their homes—deepening the gap between working-class and affluent black Americans. The rise of new right-wing conservativism in the wake of 1960s and 1970s political and cultural shifts also split the black upper and middle classes along the lines of historically fraught notions of morality and respectability politics, whereby upwardly mobile black Americans acted politically against the interests of larger black workingclass populations presumed to be morally and socially wayward, and meriting the aggressive uptick in policing and punishment.28 The political life and social roles of women had also been dramatically shifting in the two decades prior to MBN’s first appearance. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act banned race and sex discrimination, and in the early 1970s, women were afforded the right to legal abortion by the Supreme Court, spurring artists like Sophie Calle, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles to produce work out of their evolving collective identities. Prominent feminist art critic Lucy Lippard defined women’s new creative endeavors in this moment as a revolutionary strategy and way of life more than an aesthetic or stylistic phenomenon.29 However, these shifts rapidly became tethered to 1980s trends of multiculturalism, whereby gender and race difference erratically became the strategic currency within neoliberal capitalism’s expanding cultural markets.30 Often excluded from histories of second wave feminist organizing, black women, women of color, and Third World feminists in the 1970s and 1980s also responded to larger societal shifts with creative and scholarly work of their own. These scholars, activists, and artists related to second wave white feminism in their struggle for equal rights in the home and workplace, but black and women of color feminists were distinct in their intersectional approach to women’s issues, particularly when it came to race and sexuality.31 Groups such as the Combahee River Collective and the Third World Feminist Alliance aimed at ending sexism as well as racism, capitalism, homophobia, and imperialism. Moreover, Third World feminists critiqued Western feminism’s exclusion of women globally affected by the violent and patriarchal forces of colonialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, these women were using their position on the margins of white feminist discourse to speak out against broader social and cultural issues in which gender and sexuality were invariably intertwined. “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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“SAFE ART”: RACE, CLASS, AND THE BIRTH OF MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE

In the spring of 1980, O’Grady attended, along with much of New York’s alternative arts scene, the greatly anticipated exhibition Afro-American Abstraction. The show was staged at the Institute for Art and Urban Resource (better known as PS1), a highly visible, noncollecting contemporary arts institution, and while the exhibition itself was too tokenistic and “safe” for O’Grady’s taste, the artist recalls being captivated by those in attendance at the large opening party.32 The individuals, whom O’Grady identified as black and bourgeois, were as diverse as they were spectacular to behold, according to the artist: What I remember was how beautiful they were and the way they were dressed. While I could see that, in origin, they were mostly bourgeois, they didn’t at all dress with those referents, with looks dictated by labels or misguided propriety. They had independent images of themselves; instead of following fashion-fascist magazines, they reflected their own aesthetic ideas. One man was dressed in white from head to foot, while some women were got up with wildly bright fabrics and feathers and eccentric makeup even though it was a late winter Sunday afternoon. I’d never seen anything like it before, whole rooms full of black people ignoring the dictates of class and their peers. I think that I was responding to their intelligence and independence even more than to their attractiveness. For the first time, I felt socially NOT ALONE.33

The history of the black middle class in the United States is multifaceted. An early origin traces back to mass enslavement, with the education and advancement of a select number of those who were enslaved. In some rare cases, this included business and land ownership, and education up to the collegiate level and advanced apprenticeships that allowed for the limited flourishing of a number of black individuals in the early nineteenth century. These individuals and their families were (at times) able to build upon this early access, continuing these legacies of education and accomplishment after abolition and well into the twentieth century.34 Another history of the black bourgeois is rooted in the early twentieth century, at the chasm between two leading thinkers on the advancement of the African descended: W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.35 Another, more recent branch of the black bourgeois formed in the midst of racist policies in the 1930s and 1940s that led to redlining and the creation of the suburbs. The socioeconomic gap between migrating blacks from the South and urban whites became even starker as black home buyers were blocked from securing loans. During this time, it was largely middle- and upper-class blacks who were able to secure and maintain property, gain access to more desirable neighborhoods and schools, and thus build intergenerational wealth among a select few. In O’Grady’s case and others, immigration from one national context to another was how black families transferred and maintained wealth. These individuals, mirroring segregated white society, established social clubs and charitable organizations, sponsored cultural events, and invested in business, com68

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munity, and the arts.36 Driven by common values of education, acceptable social and familial unions, property ownership, and community influence, the black bourgeois, while often self-important, were rarely represented in popular culture or social discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries outside those specific to the black community. Despite resources and whatever status money, education, and connections could buy, the black middle and upper classes were largely invisible in mainstream US culture and society. Thus, the histories of the growth and consolidation of the black bourgeois are complex and varied. While wealthy blacks have always been patrons of the arts, historically their experiences rarely registered as a worthy standpoint from which to produce creative work when mainstream audiences largely expected to see either visual culture that bespoke of struggle and self-determination, as with folk art, or art that was familiar, nonconfrontational, and palatable—as O’Grady’s critique of the PS1 show highlighted. This reality also speaks to the artist’s feeling of isolation during this time and her selfconscious concern with narrowly conceived black creative authenticity. Despite the steady emergence of multicultural orientations across the art world, the token work being highlighted in mainstream galleries was largely homogenous. Moreover, the steady pervasiveness of respectability politics in culture produced by black Americans acted as another barrier for artists. Indeed, it was not until 1971 that Adrian Piper produced one of the first nude photographic self-portraits made by a black woman, decades after her white counterparts had done so. Likewise, black avant-garde expression, even that which had been inspired by modern European predecessors, went largely unacknowledged by the mainstream art world. Though the art in the PS1 exhibition was a disappointment for O’Grady, the attending crowd provided bolder creative inspiration. At the time, O’Grady lamented that even the “lynch fragments” of artist Mel Edwards, installed in the PS1 space, felt “inoffensive and without risk.”37 The big exception for the artist (and a favorite for many others) were installations by David Hammons—first encountered in the Afro-American Abstraction show, and later at Just Above Midtown’s Outlaw Aesthetics exhibition.38 Hammons’s room-size installation Victory over Sin transformed the gallery environment into a metaphor for sexual longing (the sin) and consummation (the victory). Covering the walls were hundreds of lint-emitting stenciled kidney shapes, and on the floor, dozens of precarious metal reeds, balls of lint seemingly emerging from their stems. Shortly after viewing Afro-American Abstraction, O’Grady was inspired to respond. — On the evening of June 5, 1980, the twenty-fifth anniversary of a fictitious international beauty pageant held in Cayenne, French Guiana (the birthplace of the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire project’s muse, the poet and scholar Léon-Gontran Damas, who is discussed in greater depth later in the chapter), O’Grady executed a carefully choreographed appearance as the pageant’s winner. This persona appeared at an opening reception at “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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Just Above Midtown, which had recently inaugurated its new space in Tribeca, New York. “Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire 1955” (her title as stated on her sash) of Boston wore an intricately beaded crown of looping design, complete with two parallel rows of white rhinestones atop a band of shiny pearls. The cast of O’Grady’s initial performance consisted of two roles: the poised debutante (played by O’Grady) and the Master of Ceremonies (played by Dr. Edward B. Allen, a dentist from Stamford, Connecticut, and O’Grady’s brother-in-law). The latter was outfitted in a tuxedo jacket borrowed from actor Bert Parks, with whom he played tennis, and who hosted the annual Miss America telecast from 1955 to 1979. There were other parts to play as well, listed in O’Grady’s performance script as “PHOTOGRAPHERS, VIDEO CAMERAMEN, DISCO BAND, and GUESTS” of the opening; the audience, unbeknownst to them, were to play the part of the court and subjects in attendance at MBN’s Silver Jubilee.39 Promptly at nine o’clock in the evening, MBN and her Master of Ceremonies arrived. According to the artist’s script, they faced difficulties entering Just Above Midtown, but after imperious commands issued by MBN, they were admitted. In order to enter the gallery space, they passed through a “tight pink maze” designed by artist David Hammons, which featured “three saltfish hanging from hooks.” As noted in the script, the emergence of the beauty contestant and her company was met with “oohs and aahs on all sides for Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s gown.”40 After entering the lively space, MBN mingled with the opening attendees, a crowd she later identified as her “subjects,” handing out white chrysanthemums from her strangely fashioned bouquet. Once all the flowers were distributed, the beauty queen revealed a knotted cat-o’-ninetails and began beating herself with the prop. When she finished, she bellowed her poem and then exited in haste. Weeks before this strange address—indeed, several months before the work had even been conceived—O’Grady had approached African American gallerist Linda Goode Bryant, founder of Just Above Midtown, about volunteering. Goode Bryant put her to work on the writing and logistics for an upcoming show, Outlaw Aesthetics, which would feature the abstract, installation, and sculptural work of the predominantly black artists the gallery represented. As the exhibition was about to open, the idea for her own contribution came to O’Grady as she walked, in a “dream state,” as she describes it, through Manhattan’s Union Square Park. It had only been a month or so since she had experienced Afro-American Abstraction. She had been disappointed with the show but could not put her finger on what was missing and had pushed those thoughts aside to focus on the Just Above Midtown project, in which many of the same artists would appear. Having a keen interest in dreams, lucid or otherwise, O’Grady paid close attention when a vision came over her in the park and she felt herself covered in white gloves. Aha, this is what was wrong with Afro-American Abstraction: it was “art with white gloves on.”41 It was too safe, and it pandered to PS1’s predominantly white audiences. In the days after this premonition, ideas for the remaining props solidified, and the entire performance was complete within three weeks. The elaborate narrative emerged 70

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from O’Grady’s own experience as a well-educated black middle-class woman from a respected Boston family trying to make sense of her complex relationship to histories of representation and the ever-vibrant and political New York art scene. The artist had been out from under her family’s direct influence since 1956, the year she graduated from Wellesley, the prestigious liberal arts college for women. She left Boston that year, never to return (as a resident) again, and went to Washington, DC. She used this moment of migration to mark the beginning of her creative persona’s chronicle: 1955, the year MLB was crowned in the small-town pageant in French Guiana, was O’Grady’s initially projected graduation year from Wellesley; while she ultimately graduated with the class of 1956, she attended many functions with her 1955 cohort. Thus it was during MBN’s Silver Jubilee, marking twenty-five years since her title win, that O’Grady also would have observed her twenty-fifth Wellesley College reunion. She missed the reunion—a chance to rub shoulders with her culturally elite and intellectually refined sisters—choosing instead to shout at New York gallery patrons in a tacky white dress. Indeed, the performance itself flaunted and subverted the very familial and black middle-class cultural values the artist had grown up with, and at times still held dear. The elaborate beauty pageant narrative suggests the performance was also about being crowned the perfect example of the black social elite—a designation O’Grady’s rebellious background would certainly call into question, and a ploy that ultimately strengthens the work’s conceit. Indeed, having been removed from that selectively mediated and highly performed world for twenty-five years, the artist was better able to explore its complexity. Her garish dress, offensive props, and out-of-turn speech were all enacted in protest of the class logics in which she had been raised. When asked, “Why did MBN have to speak?” by then Duke University PhD candidate Courtney Baker in a 1998 email exchange, O’Grady responded: It’s not simplistic, of course, and it’s not something that I’ve really thought about before. MBN was crazy, wasn’t she? crazy and uncool. At the same time, and not contradictorily, she was avant and ultra-hip. . . . Being crazy never stopped anyone from doing good work.42

The artist went on to recount experiences during her childhood where she honed her skills in speaking out of turn in the presence of her parents, whose conversations she would interrupt, making constant attempts at attention and inclusion. O’Grady described the irreversible effects of being continuously ignored, her outbursts often met with physical consequences. And yet, the artist says she never stopped but rather “kept on insisting on being heard, which would result in terminal anger being directed my way.”43 This habit of demanding a say, speaking out of turn, continued into life beyond her family: Wellesley and, later, the workplace. Her vocal interventions, however, evolved to include new strategies: “I mouthed off and then ran away, I wouldn’t wait for the “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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anger to come at me. By the time I entered the art world, I’d already done so much running away—from careers, from family, from relationships—I knew that if I shouted now, I would have to stand still.”44 Thus, MBN enlivened the repressive journey of perpetually confronting a social world that persistently communicated to O’Grady that her presence was exceptional, that she should feel lucky to be where she was, and that she should therefore remain silent. The performance also problematized a rejection of a rejection. That is, rather than casting off her class privilege, O’Grady produced a commentary on how black artists working at the time were expected to perform in order to be recognized as legitimate. MBN made plain through the gown, the gloves, and the public act of beating herself how black artists in particular internalized external views of their bodies and their work. Even though O’Grady has been careful since to distinguish these early performances as first drafts, at the time, she knew her actions would have continued implications. Like ripples in an already turbulent art world, however, she was not exactly sure how the piece would follow her. THE GROUNDWORK

In advance of this momentous occasion, the artist spent several weeks preparing her experimental gallery intervention. Research was conducted on the cat-o’-nine-tails, the disciplinary apparatus whose blows are likened to the scratches of a cat, and which was used for flogging (fig. 9).45 White gloves were collected from thrift stores from the seacoast to Harlem; O’Grady would ride her bike around the boroughs gathering all the white gloves she could find. It was important to her that the gloves had been worn, specifically by people who had believed in them as cultural currency, objects of taste and refinement.46 In the early 1980s, one could still obtain such dated artifacts from the 1930s and 1940s, formerly the precious possessions of people committed to their symbolism. The white gloves sewn to MBN’s dress were worn during a period when people deeply believed in the propriety that such items afforded. White gowns and gloves emerge out of specific historical (and often exclusive) cultural contexts, which are fascinating to consider and to complicate through the artist’s use of both as containers for and signifiers on MBN’s black feminine body. The white gloves O’Grady collected and then fashioned into a white debutante gown have their own unique social and cultural history of containment. They were worn both as a practical clothing item and as an accessory that denoted status, one imbued with social custom and cultural meaning. The white gloves covering (quite literally) MBN’s ornate costume would have been associated with bourgeois fashion, specifically seen as a symbol of a “true lady,” elegance, and luxury—that is, of social class and bourgeois values. Sunburned or otherwise weathered and unprotected hands were associated with the working class and thus antithetical to feminine beauty.47 Thus, this loaded symbol created tension when encountered on women of color, and black women in particular, who were rarely afforded opportunities to forgo either manual or domestic 72

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figure 9 Project research: dictionary scans, 1980. MSS-003, box 10, folder 1, Lorraine O’Grady Papers, Wellesley College Archives, Massachusetts.

labor. Moreover, when they were able to don such an accessory, these women were rarely recognized as “ladies” by mainstream culture, or allowed the same claim to feminine elegance as their white counterparts.48 Part of O’Grady’s contention was the fact that black women of leisure did and do exist. In fact, the artist describes herself as having been raised in a community of doctors and lawyers, and with immense class privilege. She had learned, however, that society at large was unwilling to come to terms with the possible existence of the black middle class, either as part of the black experience or as constitutive of a unique black identity, not reducible to individuals simply “acting” white. Significantly, despite the artist’s prolonged ritual act of procuring and assembling these cultural relics, she never included on MBN’s outfit her own pair of white gloves, symbols of her upbringing and familial expectations.49 But that is not to say that they would never be included in her persona’s trajectory. Three years later, as part of the 1983 conceptual performance Art Is . . . (discussed in chapter 3), she wore them pinned to the chest of her white T-shirt, finally acknowledging her own participation in the very culture she sought to unpack. O’Grady’s initial reluctance reveals the political and personal enormity of the performance—a realization that would come later for the artist as she began planning Art Is . . . . MBN’s gallery invasions and out-of-turn commentary were predicated on the artist’s unconventional appropriation of the symbolic trimming of the white glove. Her mobilization of the white glove produced a multilevel critique—a critique born out of the alien-but-not-alone-ness she experienced at the Afro-American Abstraction opening. When she arrived at Just Above Midtown, O’Grady did not yet know that she would soon challenge the seemingly alien body of the black middle-class lady—a figure who “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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dons white gloves. Second, the artist subverted middle- and upper-class values of elegance, grace, and women who are seen but not heard. She did both of these things through performances of excess. O’Grady would later come to know the attending crowd of bourgeois black art world participants as close colleagues and friends, even as MBN would respond to the ways their art and their personal styles (and the ways they existed in the world) seemed to be at odds: “It was hard not to see how repressed most of it [the art] was, how much on its best behavior.”50 MBN’s excessive and out-of-turn performances disturbed the very organization of the black artistic elite and drew attention to these conflicts within the black art scene in general—a scene that, according to O’Grady, was still enmeshed in a kind of respectability politics that strove to eliminate rather than produce discomfort in the process of defining and performing personal styles and producing art.51 Like the white gown and gloves O’Grady used to bring the experiences of the black middle class into sharp focus, the weighty symbol of the cat-o’-nine-tails also carried into the performance its own complex history. With conflicting origin stories that span ancient Egypt, medieval Europe, and seventeenth-century Britain, the knottedcord flogging implement came to notoriety for its use in public physical punishment of sailors in the British Navy, but it was also used in the British Army and throughout the British colonies. The device was likely named for both its number of knotted cords (nine) and its corporeal effects (which were often likened to being clawed by a cat). Without a formal court-martial, a ship’s captain could order up to twenty-four whips of the cat-o’-nine-tails to be administered on an offender’s bare back.52 These whips were also used during the transatlantic slave trade to control and punish African captives on board colony-bound ships. O’Grady’s script and performance captioning, along with her ceremonious self-scourging, made the reference to the whip’s use on enslaved Africans, on ships and across the colonies, unmistakable.53 In fact, the artist summoned the full history and implication of such a weapon as a form of critique against her black artist peers, signaling the lasting and renewed effects of such historical violence and control on their contemporary creative practices. “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!”

The cat-o’-nine-tails construction varied across time and location, producing varied torturous effects. MBN’s was made from sail rope from a seaport store, undoubtedly a nod to the device’s nautical history, and studded with the dense white chrysanthemums. In the performance, the sought-after reckoning was conceptual and symbolic, and the artist’s process for selecting, sourcing, and fabricating materials supported this notion. Detailed budgets outlined O’Grady’s expenses for the gloves, shoes, stockings, dress, crown, cord, and banner used to complete MBN’S elaborate regalia that would hang on her frame for the duration of each performance and, later, in stunning condition on a mannequin in several gallery exhibitions (fig. 10). The 74

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figure 10 Project lists: budget documentation, 1980. MSS-003, box 10, folder 1, Lorraine O’Grady Papers, Wellesley College Archives, Massachusetts.

assorted white gloves were mined from thrift and consignment boutiques for about a dollar apiece, and other materials such as thread, needles, chiffon, hairpins, and ribbon were also accounted for. The artist deemed the underlying white shift dress, made out of a polyester crepe that clung to the body, a “cheesy kitschy number.”54 She delighted in its spaghetti straps and lacings up the front, which would surely have offended her family’s sensibilities concerning style and propriety. Attaching the gloves to the bodice of the secondhand dress proved more difficult than the artist had imagined. She reserved the short cotton gloves for the gown itself and the longer leather opera gloves for the accompanying cape. Everything needed to be pinned first. The entire process took three weeks. O’Grady recalls that she handstitched the 360 individual gloves according to her own vision for their overlaps, yet she also recalls having paid $112 to have at least some of the component parts basted onto the dress by others (this is corroborated by one of the documents in the archive, see fig. 10). Using a basic sewing kit from the “five and dime store”—a thimble, a package of needles, and thread—she painstakingly joined each glove into the interpretive covering that came to her in her vision in the park. When she got to the leather gloves, she did not realize she needed special hooks and needles to work with the thicker “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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material and just persisted with the cheap sewing kit. By the end, O’Grady recalls that her hands had swelled to double in size.55 The artist was no seamstress, to be sure, but in advance of her persona’s first appearance, O’Grady had sewed a politics of subversion into each stitch of MBN’s gown, which has since become a metaphor of respectability politics undone. The labor of sewing itself, with its distinct history and complex relationship to gendered modes of creation, is also deeply embedded in the sociocultural, economic, and political fabric of the private and public production landscape. While in most early US contexts, sewing was considered an essential part of women’s socialization and “home training,” as middle- and upper-class blacks in the mid-twentieth-century devoted ever more of their energies toward advancements in business and education, black women began to intentionally cast off the more tactile and domestic work associated with mass enslavement, black subjugation, and lower-class labor.56 Despite these shifts in attitude and the ability of wealthy black families to begin outsourcing the tasks of mending and clothes making, sewing has always been highly technical and skilled labor predominantly done by women in the home, and when families could afford it, women had their (and their families’) garments outsourced to other women, household laborers, or professional seamstresses. All of this is to say, O’Grady’s relationship to sewing was complex, and her lack of skills was indicative of her upbringing and the various sociocultural environments she traversed. The act of sewing was for her thus yet another departure from the class expectations in which she was socialized, as well as a departure from her Wellesley (and, later, government and art world) peers. O’Grady co-opted the visual semiotics of comportment and gentility, partly through labor that, were it not specialized, would be relegated to the margins of class. Since these were the politics to which she had previously been connected, there was a lot of humor in the work as well. Hilarity ensued as the artist tacked sophisticated gloves on the laceup, spaghetti-strap, thrift-shop dress using her cheap thimble and clumsy hands. This too is an alien existence O’Grady describes and enacts, one that many black communities vigorously deny exists, or dismiss for lack of “authenticity,” and which haunted and animated MBN. O’Grady “dragged up” this black social, cultural, and economic subjectivity, as well as its own contradictions. MBN performed a kind of Brechtian drag via the spectacle of the debutante ball—a coming-of-age ritual practiced across the black middle and upper classes—where Brechtian “drag calls attention to the act of impersonation and foregrounds its status as imitation.”57 O’Grady’s work in drag made visible the ritual sites of the debutante ball and of the fine art museum as a pair of complex (alien) institutions for black women. What was revealed in Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as imitation, then, was the ritual of the debutante ball as a coming-of -age event, the invisible pageantry of the black middle and upper classes in the United States, and the “too safe” art made by black artists being exhibited in mainstream New York contexts in the early 1980s. O’Grady reminded black artists in the upper echelons of the fine art world that they were not from “the streets” but rather 76

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from circles of privilege and opportunity that must also be interrogated through art that takes risks. In dressing up as a caricature of a black middle-class woman and invading art galleries, O’Grady played a self-reflexive role that exemplified the very risks she felt were possible from that subject position. The imitation—or reenactment—of black middle-class privilege revealed the foreign figure of the black body in contemporary art display at the time, while also making visible yet another complex and alien existence of a “Miss Black Middle Class.” RISKY BUSINESS: THE PERFORMANCE SCRIPT AS CRITICAL HOMAGE

Risk-taking was a vital ingredient throughout the preparations for Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. The script itself was no more than three and a half pages. On the third page, however, the artist made an important gesture that perhaps was lost on her audiences and surely has been excluded from the exhibition context of the work itself since—a gesture toward her poetic muse, Léon-Gontran Damas. According to the script, MBN was crowned in Cayenne, French Guiana, which as previously noted was also the birthplace of the poet and politician. Damas, alongside Paulette and Jane Nardal, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, is credited as one of the early founders of Négritude, the 1930s literary and cultural arts movement developed by francophone intellectuals of the African diaspora. The movement renounced colonialism and made a case for the importance of a pan-African racial identity among the constellations of African-descended people around the world.58 O’Grady is an insatiable bibliophile and lifelong student, so it comes as no surprise that the artist, at some point along her trajectory, encountered the work of Damas, who, like herself, was invested in the act and process of translation. For Damas, translation would inform international black reciprocity, which resonated with O’Grady’s own career as a translator as well as the context of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, where the artist translated and transmuted black bourgeois experience and values for an audience largely implicated in the silence and erasure of both. The congruencies between the French Guianese poet and the emerging African American artist, which go beyond shared Caribbean heritage and a love of translation, are uncanny. Understanding these connections opens up more complex readings of O’Grady’s performance series itself, specifically in how privilege, black and embodied, is translated across time, national contexts, and experiences through distinct cultural texts. Damas’s presence in the narrative was a central influence in the beauty queen’s delivery, creating an instructive template from which to examine the artist’s accusations of the black US artists and intellectuals present at the Just Above Midtown opening, as well as her own selfdealings in the process of producing the performance. A poet and scholar raised in an early-twentieth-century French-Caribbean middleclass multiracial family, Damas is renowned for forceful and challenging late poems like “Hoquet” (Hiccups, 1937), “Trève” (Enough, 1937), and “Black Label” (1956), “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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which rebelled against his early socialization within elite social contexts.59 Like O’Grady decades later, he felt pressure from early educators and family to accept European (French) culture and customs. This pressure would develop in Damas an aversion toward his socialization, which would emerge in his poetry. Written in the poet’s forties, the age O’Grady would enter the art world and begin to voice her own frustrations, compositions like “Black Label” explore themes of alienation, loss, and racial discrimination.60 O’Grady and Damas, both light-skinned émigré poets, may have been divided by time and space, yet Mlle Bourgeoise Noire produced and highlighted their conceptual and experiential intimacy. The poem “Trève,” for instance, appears to serve as the blueprint for MBN’s shouted poem. The brief mention in the script is a directive: “Tonight [MBN] will speak through [Damas]. Of course, she will make her own additions.”61 In this poem and others such as “Hoquet,” Damas laments his bourgeois upbringing and the pressures he felt to assimilate to white culture and distance himself from that associated with blackness. Like Damas, O’Grady is skilled in manipulating language to achieve complex and at times conflicting affects; and also like Damas, O’Grady uses her own upbringing to point to the complicated ways notions of blackness manifest in close proximity to class dynamics and colonial histories.62 The tribute begins with Damas’s birthplace and ends with MBN shouting out her own adaptation of Damas’s writing, a poem about blackness (itself an homage to the poet), directed at the black artists present, then quickly exiting, as the script concludes, “leaving the court to think what it will.” — Only one photographic image was taken of MBN as she clamored through the Just Above Midtown galleries during the June opening of Outlaw Aesthetics: a SoHo Weekly press image showing MBN aggressively gesturing at another artist’s piece. The weekly news bulletin reviewed the show and mentioned the performance. When O’Grady saw the review, she realized the importance of documenting her performances. With a photographer friend a few days later, she attempted to re-create her appearance at Just Above Midtown, capturing half a dozen moments of what she admits was a restaging failure. One of them, however, is a rare image of MBN handing a white flower to gallerist Linda Goode Bryant (fig. 11). The young gallerist accepts. MBN’s back is to the camera, displaying her long cape of white leather opera gloves. In conversations about this moment, O’Grady describes the debt she feels toward Goode Bryant for the latter’s response to her experimental performance. “This is the best thing I’ve ever seen,” O’Grady remembers Goode Bryant telling her after the show’s opening, which gave the artist the validation she needed to continue the work.63 O’Grady had always respected the gallerist’s sharp eye, brilliant mind, and avantgarde sensibilities, so it was especially flattering when the visionary asked O’Grady if she would represent the gallery in an October performance showcase that same year. Because of this, O’Grady feels she owes her art career to Goode Bryant’s 78

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figure 11 Lorraine O’Grady as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire with gallerist Linda Goode Bryant, 1980. MSS-003, box 10, folder 5, Lorraine O’Grady Papers, Wellesley College Archives, Massachusetts.

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belief in her and the work, which is why the handful of restaged images are so important: they are themselves an archival trace of how performance is not merely a temporary singularity but a history of relations.64 In her very first Just Above Midtown appearance, MBN issued a call to black artists, making their presence fundamental to her mode of address. In later conversations about these performances, O’Grady expressed disappointment regarding the reception of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, feeling that her avant-garde style of address, as well as her use of language and props, was lost on or underappreciated by those who encountered the disruptive pageant queen. Notwithstanding the lack of critical attention from her 1980s audiences, the artist’s dynamic use of props is often overlooked even in the midst of the recent resurgence of the work in conversations and exhibitions. Specifically, O’Grady’s white gloves, elaborate crown, sash, and whip were accoutrements essential to the execution of the performance, especially given their alien appearance and alienating context. The tools O’Grady used, as well as the spaces in which she staged her elaborate body of work, signify on histories and conceptions of containment, censorship, comportment, and control. In order to speak out of turn, O’Grady donned a white dress and wielded an ancient whip. She made strange the site of the gallery, her own body (as an artist), and the practice of viewing art, specifically performance art. This estrangement “sutur[es] together hybrid and sometimes profane cultural materials to rewrite categories of selfrepresentation,” to quote literary and performance studies scholar Daphne Brooks.65 Furthermore, O’Grady experimented with ways to express the dissonant historical relationship between bodies of color and the dominant culture that sought to relegate them to the margins and/or put them on display, and plotted ways to draw attention to and subvert that dissonance. In the photos of O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire reenactment, we can see glimpses of pleasure and experimental play. Pleasure and play are rarely discussed when dealing with the fraught history and practices of subjugation and exclusion that emerge in O’Grady’s work. Moreover, pleasure and play were particularly alien in the context of New York’s multicultural tokenizing of black artists who were working within accepted modes of expression. Furthermore, the reenactment with Goode Bryant revealed the complicated and liminal space between the persona and the artist herself. One wonders if MBN was ever far from O’Grady herself and vice versa—if O’Grady was ever truly able to suspend the performance. Performance work is, as performance artist Tracey Rose reminds us, “incredibly exhausting . . . because you don’t walk away from it. I mean, how can you walk away from your body? The art was in the process, the entire thing was a performance, and the entire thing was the work of art.”66 Rose suggests that not only the fatigue but also the residual effects left on the performer’s body are inescapable for performance artists. This complex notion of pleasure through agentive laboring, the willful exertion of the body, and the public exhibition of flogging oneself with a cat-o’-nine-tails is 80

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possible in performance art through the process of alienation, in making visible the conditions through which black bodies and bodies of color within museum and gallery spaces have historically been made spectacular—hypervisible and yet silenced. Said another way, O’Grady strategically employed an alien other, manufacturing her own alienation in order to produce an occasion for her body to be seen and engaged anew. Indeed, a fraught and risky move. TO TRY AND FAIL AT BECOMING ART

In manifesting the counter-normative tactics of speaking and existing out of turn, O’Grady returned to the gruesome historical memory of marginalized “others” moving through cage, ship, exhibition, zoo, and fair as curiosities, precisely to make evident the ghostly remnants of this very history and these violent practices in museums today. Concurrently, O’Grady’s performances were based on her critical observations of the functions of the avant-garde and the fine art museum, including her own exclusion from both—a radical practice that could be included in feminist scholar and activist bell hooks’s conception of oppositional gazing, which is predicated on the black female spectator.67 hooks coined the term “oppositional gaze” to account for the oppositional and reflexive ways of looking practiced by black cultural producers, particularly in film. hooks draws upon the violent dynamics of slavery whereby slave owners would punish the enslaved simply for looking at them—a disciplinary act that demonstrated both the power of an oppositional gaze and a historically situated awareness developed around the threat posed by black looks. And while aligned with the subversive possibilities in returning the gaze, in addition to laying out the terms for an oppositional gazing informed by black critical subjectivity, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) hooks also rebukes the prevalence of white feminism in feminist film theory. It is a critique that continues the work of James Baldwin and Patricia Hill Collins described in chapter 1, which recognizes the distinctive labor of black cultural producers within the visual field as necessary heterogeneous positions from which to dismantle white supremacist claims to universalism in language and embodied practice. In many ways, O’Grady in Mlle Bourgeoise Noire answered the Brechtian call for artists and actors to adapt socially critical strategies in performance in order to generate alienation effects and to provoke audiences in ways that force a reexamination of history and their role in its production and perpetuation. The artist’s work, however, performed the ethically slippery labor of “defamiliarizing [her] own bod[y] by way of performance in order to yield alternative racial and gender epistemologies” that were then presumably lost on her audiences.68 “By using performance tactics to signify on the social, cultural, and ideological machinery that circumscribes African Americans” and individuals of color more broadly, O’Grady certainly intervened in the spectacular and systemic representational abjection of black peoples, and women in particular, in the space of the art museum, which is traditionally positioned as a space of neutrality.69 Despite the unspoken connections between MBN and her audiences, or the “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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artist’s dissatisfaction with the critical response to her public actions, the performance and the artist’s ongoing interpretation did not fail. Rather, what O’Grady does provide in the performance archive is a detailed and articulate account of the emergence of a black artist through her unique experiences as a member of the black bourgeois, and therein lies its intervention and conceptual heft. When asked about her need to create an alternative persona, the artist points to the irony of the hyperbourgeois black woman, a silent figure, a compliant individual in both art and society at large; she was compelled to make radical demands of her. To that end, the artist felt she “needed someone to blame” this disruptive behavior on, an entity to scapegoat the trespass of decorum, the audacity of it all. “I didn’t do it,” O’Grady could then insist. “She did it.”70 Mlle Bourgeoise Noire invoked anti-realist forms of performance and cultural expression to call attention to the hegemonic categories that structure both black bourgeois culture and contemporary art discourse. The clumsy reenactment following her first performance offers us now the opportunity to read Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s satirical set of conditions in the context of Brecht’s “social gest.”71 Carrying the dual meaning of both the physical gestures and the attitude (“gest”) of an artist or performer, Brecht’s gestus technique is a mechanism by which “an attitude or single aspect of an attitude” is made evident, or is “expressible in words or actions.”72 When it comes to the dynamic work of O’Grady, specifically her disruptive and disorienting performances as MBN, I offer a reading of gestus as an embodiment of attitude and a particular subject position, which signals the impetuses and transactions underpinning a performative exchange between artist and objects, or artist and spectators. Additionally, the narration of the MBN character by O’Grady, and the epic nature of her performance, carries another embodied meaning of the gestus. That is, meaning was made through this technique as artist became object and object/artist were displayed for spectators. MBN set out (and perhaps failed) to liberate spectatorial perspectives and subvert oppression by way of resisting a complete character transformation or historical authenticity.73 This is supported by her costume design choices, fictitious histories, and gathered artifacts. O’Grady held difference in suspension by resisting complete transformation into this fictitious being, despite her need for a scapegoat. Perhaps her performances of social gest (or a series of social gests) did not quite accomplish the work of rupturing the social scene, yet they did powerfully convey to spectators the disjuncture between expectations of refined black womanhood and the artist’s body performing social critique. Indeed, speaking out of turn can be just as productive when it fails. These failures occur for a variety of reasons, however, and pointedly reveal the possibilities and limitations of alien bodies and alienation in museum and gallery contexts. The unsettling iconography of the black body being beaten and on display, despite that body’s adornment, remains an urtext of alienation in US history and transatlantic visual culture. Daphne Brooks articulates it this way: “Hegemonic hermeneutics, specifically those of conquest, colonialism, global imperialism, and later, anthropology, eugen82

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ics, and natural history consistently render caged and exploited bodies as ‘infinitely deconstructable “othered” [and alien] matter.’ ”74 Yet there are ways to read for the critical viability of O’Grady’s use of her own materiality within narratives in which she is both subject and object. That is, despite the slippery nature of the performance, it is important to read the artist’s body within and against the textual grain of art historical exclusion and narratives of colonialism and oppression.75 O’Grady put her figure to work for her own aesthetic and political uses, imaging her body as a way to, as Brooks puts it, “set up a constructive dialogue between poststructuralist and humanist views of identity.”76 In each iteration, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire relied on the very problem of violent silence, erasure, and even historical death that motivated and informed O’Grady’s physical enactments as well as how and why they took place in art museums and galleries. This, of course, is all part of the labor black women and women-identified artists of color (in particular) perform in the process of becoming art. Inspired by historical enactments of liberation and self-determination, conceptual art performances of radical (out-of-turn) presence, such as O’Grady’s, achieve a different kind of political agency for black women and women of color speaking out of turn in and against the contemporary art museum by utilizing alien bodies, effects, and multimodal acts. Rather than being seen as inherently negative occupational hazards, alien existence and alienation are read as generative sites for creative existence and survival. In fact, projection into objecthood through the process of becoming art is a vital strategy that O’Grady exploited in her subversive deconstruction of both notions of the avant-garde and US performance genealogies.77 O’Grady’s practice, as it was developing through Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, challenged the marginalization of black women and women-identified artists of color and their artistic interventions. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire also rebuked and recalibrated art-world understandings of feminist art, and the disavowal of nonwhite artists as participating in the history and production of the avant-garde. The art world historiography of performance art and the art of performance, usually limited to a white and male-dominated canon, must thus be rewritten. It must come to terms with the alien avantgarde. In the early 1980s, O’Grady and Goode Bryant were doing this work of writing and rewriting, as both were deeply interested and invested in the processes by which black avant-garde art was produced, and how artists and their practices might thrive even within the segregating forces of the art world. MBN would go on to appear at the New Museum, New York, in September 1981. However, notwithstanding the labors of O’Grady and Goode Bryant and the robust talents of Just Above Midtown artists such as Howardena Pindell, Maren Hassinger, Fred Wilson, Randy Williams, Al Loving, Houston Conwill, Senga Nengudi, and David Hammons, none of their innovative and Herculean creative efforts would be recognized in ARTnews’s eleven-page feature in its November issue, “New Faces in Alternative Spaces.” Instead, the pages were “chock-full of photos and discussions of PS1, Franklin Furnace, Artists Space, the Kitchen, the New Museum,” and other white-run spaces featuring predominantly white artists in the surrounding alternative art mecca of Tribeca.78 “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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Despite Goode Bryant’s tireless efforts to help found the Downtown Consortium of Alternative Spaces—as well as her organizing and hosting of the Dialogues (1980) exhibition, for which O’Grady’s Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1980–88, discussed in chapter 4) was created—not even a passing mention was given to Just Above Midtown, a bitter blow to black labor and creativity. O’Grady describes this erasure as the “hole” that “black avant-garde (middle-class) art had fallen into” and would remain in until 1988– 89, “when just as arbitrarily it would emerge,” brought to light to serve the needs of a white art world and the market capital afforded by the rise of multiculturalism.79 MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE EVOLVES

Despite the dearth of attention paid to black-run galleries in the era of trendy alternative spaces, and the art world’s lack of interest in the experimental performances of black women artists, O’Grady continued her Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performances until 1983. In the months following her October performance of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, MBN made numerous disruptive—and some invited—cameos in several New York art venues, including a pedagogical piece later referred to by the artist as “Gaunt Gloves,” which discussed how the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance fit into the program at Just Above Midtown. This in-character talk was done for an invited audience of potential donors and others interested in supporting Just Above Midtown. However, none of MBN’s appearances were quite like the invasion staged in September 1981 at the New Museum’s opening for the exhibition Persona (fig. 12). The show featured nine artists using personas in their artwork, an arrangement MBN called “The Nine White Personae Show.” O’Grady was invited to give outreach lectures to schoolage children, presumably in character, as part of the show’s public programming, to which she replied, “Let’s talk after the opening.”80 On the night of the opening, MBN introduced into the space of the New Museum a fresh poetic pronouncement: WAIT wait in your alternate/alternate spaces spitted on fish hooks of hope be polite wait to be discovered be proud be independent tongues cauterized at openings no one attends stay in your place after all, art is only for art’s sake THAT’S ENOUGH don’t you know sleeping beauty needs more than a kiss to awake now is the time for an INVASION!81

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figure 12 Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Shouts Out Her Poem, 1980–83/2009. Silver gelatin fiber print, 9 ¾ × 7 ½ in. (24.8 × 19.1 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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figure 13 Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire asks, “Won’t you help me lighten my heavy bouquet?,” 1980–83/2009. Silver gelatin fiber print, 6 ⁵∕₈ × 9 ⁷∕₈ in. (16.8 × 25.1 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

The variation on her original poem was not the only thing that had evolved in the narrative arc of the performance. An additional role was written into the script: that of O’Grady’s documentary photographer, Coreen Simpson. In O’Grady’s New Museum performance of her dynamic art persona, her bold entrance and aggressive poetic pronouncement left her audiences with much to think about. In fact, the audience itself played an integral role in the spectacle of the performance as a whole, lightening MBN’s load by accepting white chrysanthemums from her bouquet (as the Just Above Midtown audience had) and bearing witness to her public whipping and poem delivery (fig. 13). While the performance itself experienced several iterations in its sojourn from gallery space to gallery space, what remained fixed is how both the media and later exhibitions of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire represented the performance: through a singular image caught by Simpson of MBN standing center-frame, with neck strained, eyes bulging, and mouth agape in what appears to be a grotesque wail. Some print venues might include one or two additional images of the artist whipping herself with the chrysanthemum-studded cat-o’-nine-tails. Yet there exist dozens of images captured by Simpson and other New York photographers, the overwhelming majority of which depict both O’Grady and her audience members smiling and amused. O’Grady scans the 86

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room and waves to her admirers like a pageant queen. They smile back. This captured amusement is significant because it exemplifies a representational mythos in a long history of avant-garde institutional critique. That is, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s archive reveals that disruptive performances may actually delight rather than incite negativity from the institutions and/or individuals for which they are intended. Despite the audience’s seeming delight, however, the New Museum did rescind O’Grady’s invitation to work with schoolchildren after the opening. There are few long-form critical readings of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and until now they have mostly characterized O’Grady’s performance as aggressive, haughty, and disruptive—a mythic manifestation of audience responses to the unexpected appearance of a black woman making public demands. In an unpublished email exchange with then Duke University doctoral student Courtney Baker that took place in the fall of 1998, the artist makes a similar observation: The myth [of MBN] will never be what I intended, but it will be something else that’s real. Between the performance and its fruition in myth, though, there’s been another moment with which I haven’t been entirely thrilled. That’s the period she’s spent as an empty signifier, in which her existence was captured and conveyed by means of a single, iconic photo—you know the one I mean, the one of her shouting that was reprinted everywhere. In that image, I think the critique was reduced to one of class, and the subtleties of the critique of the art world got lost (the poems were seldom quoted).82

Despite the artist’s comments in 1998, this particular interpretive thread, at various moments, has been supported by O’Grady herself and a multitude of exhibition contexts emphasizing the performance’s combative and intrusive tone. Popular interpretations of the work alienate the work itself, obscuring the possibility of complex and diverse reactions from the crowd. While many white mainstream audiences may have been shocked and irritated, the black middle-class subjects to which her enactment was actually directed reacted with humor, awe, delight, and anxiety. The broad range of complex reactions to MBN’s disturbance pushes against popular interpretations of the work, allowing the performance to exceed the bounds of the artist’s intentions, and perhaps expectations, imaging the breadth of what was experienced in MBN’s strange presence.83 Art historian and cultural theorist Nicole Fleetwood has termed too much and too many performances by black women as enactments of “excess flesh,” where artists and cultural producers take up the “problem” of blackness in the field of vision to draw attention to their own exclusions and erasures.84 Within the artistic traditions of black women, deploying hypervisibility as constitutive of black femaleness has become a strategic enactment of certain black-women-identified cultural producers, including O’Grady. Fleetwood argues that the black female body is so widely studied as to become an “excessive body” in scholarship, artistic production, and larger cultural debates “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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around race, gender, and representation. Excess flesh enactments, then, work through spectacular performances and the presentation of one’s self-image within the visual field. Excess flesh attends to the ways in which black female corporeality is rendered as surplus, over the top, and too much to handle, which is useful for understanding the implications of O’Grady’s multimodal performance as MBN. Like Fleetwood, I am interested in “what happens when the black female subject identifies with the aberrant image of black womanhood offered through dominant visual culture,” and what occurs when black-women-identified artists take up dominant representations in order to “construct new modes of operation.”85 This disjunctive tension between the temporal experiences of alienation, amusement, and/or delight during the actual performance, and the way a performance is later rendered for publication—and ultimately the archive—is clear in O’Grady’s work. Alienation, then, unlike other possible experiences of the work (amusement, delight, shock, or horror), becomes dispersed and unavailable in the performance archive due to its slippery temporality, and the limited traces such experiences leave in or on the bodies of spectators. At stake in the various reactions to O’Grady’s work is the problem of the visible (and audible) black female body, “or more precisely, that the black female body always presents a problem within a field of vision structured by racialized and gendered markings.”86 These markings delineate not only an alien body but also how the actions of alien bodies are always seen as invasive and out of turn. A TURN TO OTHERS: LETTERS FROM MBN, THE BLACK AND WHITE SHOW

Parallel to the absenting of diverse audience responses to MBN—reactions that are visible through the photographic record—another noteworthy aspect of the performance has previously remained undiscussed, yet through the archive it is made visible. Even O’Grady herself, in her various artist statements, performance summaries, and article contributions, has neglected to mention that as part of her elaborate persona’s invasions, the debutante also infiltrated the US Postal Service by sending typewritten questionnaires to a number of black artists active at the time. Deep in the artist’s papers is a typewritten document titled “ADVANCED BLACK ARTISTS,” which contains a list of thirty-six artists working across the country, complete with addresses and several phone numbers. Along with this list is a letter typed and signed by MBN herself, engaging these artists directly: MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE is about to strike again. This time between the covers (of a book). But before she takes off her white gloves and throws down the whip that made plantations move, she would like to ask you, as a black artist she admires, the following intimate but intriguing questions. Please feel free to get angry, but don’t feel free to not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, unless you want MLLE BOURGEOISE NOIRE to lay her whip on you! She needs to know what you and other black artists really think and feel.87 88

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This introduction is forceful yet playful, full of both sexual innuendo and a spirit of genuine inquiry. It is followed by six questions, ranging from queries about audience and reception to the artists’ “art historical goals” and the future of both an “advanced black art” and the community that would make it. O’Grady sent the questionnaire on June 22, 1982, and her reluctance to share this aspect of the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance series may relate to the responses she did receive, or to the letters that went unanswered. Or it may be due to the fact that, perhaps owing to the minimal responses, the book she mentions MBN authoring never came to fruition. Significantly, this component of O’Grady’s project, more than any other, hints at the failure the artist has said to have felt following the three-year performance run. The letters were largely met with silence rather than engagement, mirroring the responses of the artist’s physical audiences and the New York art world more broadly. As with O’Grady’s attempts to gain attention and recognition from mainstream art presses for Just Above Midtown, O’Grady sought validation of her own process from her chosen peers. The letter portion of the performance, perhaps more painfully and more plainly, reveals the stakes of the artist’s praxis and the degree to which other “advanced black artists” were willing (or not) to engage in O’Grady’s work. The handful of letters she did receive, mostly from women artists, were generous, and also telling. Raymond Grist, Sandra Payne, Howardena Pindell, and Bettye Saar responded thoughtfully and sometimes at length to O’Grady’s probe. A brief handwritten note came from California mixed-media assemblage artist Saar, who promised a phone call. Painter Grist sent a collegial handwritten memo and included with it two pages of typed reflection, numbered according to MBN’s questionnaire. Grist wrote that black people were the predominant collectors of art made by black artists; when asked about his ideal audience, however, the artist replied, “society as a whole,” elaborating that he saw no reason why his work could not be received by “anyone and everyone.” Prophetically, Grist expressed hope that if “proper actions” were taken then and in the future, black art would be recognized “as the unique cultural (and social) experience that it is.”88 Due credit for both Grist and O’Grady would eventually come with the contemporary moment’s growing attention to art by black artists made in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Payne and Pindell both drafted long handwritten responses. Payne, writing from “the beach at Montauk,” was less optimistic than Grist, stating her doubts “that visual art will ever become a living, breathing component of everyday black life” during her lifetime. She did, however, offer suggestions for cultivating black community engagement in the visual arts, soliciting artists, curators, and administrators in the task of outreach. Specifically, Payne recognized the significance of middle- and upperclass blacks with “disposable time and income” becoming aware of the work being made by black creatives, as a means of building long-term connoisseurship. Additionally, the artist asserted that “real change won’t happen until the number of black ‘art students’ increase” at every level (undergraduate and graduate) and throughout “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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the country, signaling that fine art is an accepted and valued collegiate pursuit in black communities.89 These markers of progress bring full circle Payne’s all-encompassing vision for exposure to and participation in art, in all its forms, throughout black life. Payne also addressed the tokenism within New York’s commercial galleries, and the discrimination she felt as a black woman even just frequenting these spaces. Her solution: “The white art world establishment must begin to more clearly understand that individual black artists are American artists—period. They must begin to see us as contemporaries, friends, colleagues of those artists already in their stables” (her emphasis). Payne closes her letter with a response to O’Grady’s final question: “Do you ever fantasize a different advanced black art than there is? What would it be? How do you fantasize the black art community that would produce it?” Payne responded, “Different is not necessarily better and neither is similar. I can only hope that there are more artists around to bug everybody.” This disruptive and transformation-oriented sentiment was clearly shared by O’Grady. New York–based artist Janet Henry provided the shortest response, penned on the back of the original letter and mailed in a borrowed envelope from a Drug Control Systems company with postage paid herself, rather than what was provided by O’Grady—a curious effort even in the event that Henry had lost the original materials. Her letter read: Lorraine You’re asking a lot and frankly more of the questions concern topics I could give two shits about. Sorry but I can’t do this. Sincerely, Janet90

Pindell sent a single sheet of lined paper, where she quickly scrawled answers to the first three questions—they fill the page without salutation, suggesting there had been other pages, although no other pages are in the envelope in O’Grady’s archives.91 All told, it seems that six of the thirty-six letters sent were responded to formally. And yet despite this clear lack of engagement, this aspect of the performance is significant in that the typewritten letters interpellated her desired audience (black artists) most directly. MBN’s tone is impishly stern, playful in its sexual intimation, as she crowdsources responses to her work that she did not receive during the live performances. Or perhaps O’Grady was simply soliciting feedback in a more systematic way; it is hard to be sure. Regardless of intent, the letter format of MBN’s unsolicited address makes apparent yet another intimate connection O’Grady maintained with language, the written word in particular. Her correspondence—both welcome and irritating— signaled to her audience through the historically significant mode of call and response, and the critically important act of reading.

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Three years after MBN’s first invasive gallery performance, and a year following her mail correspondence, O’Grady shifted her focus away from out-of-turn enactments and toward the realm of critical space making. In 1983, during the exile of the black avantgarde, and probably fueled by the wholesale exclusion of its most profound producers, the unruly alter ego tried again. According to the artist herself, “it was another shout that disappeared without being heard.”92 Her persona was the same, and the venue was her first conceptual exhibition at the black-run Kenkeleba House on East Second Street in New York. She called on twenty-six other artists, thirteen black and thirteen white. Rather than expressing her ideas and critiques through boisterous and disruptive speech acts, in The Black and White Show, open from April 22 to May 22, 1983, MBN now appealed to the New York art audience’s reason. The message was clear: black artists are as talented as their white counterparts and their work should be shown in dynamic and integrated contexts—a sharp critique of the schematic logics of Afro-American Abstraction (1980) at PS1 a few years earlier. O’Grady’s multimodal approach shifted away from performance in this instance; nevertheless, the artist still saw curatorial work as encompassing a set of invasive tactics. Similar to MBN’s original performance at Just Above Midtown, The Black and White Show was also planned and executed in just three short weeks, as the opportunity fell to O’Grady in the form of a sudden opening in the nonprofit gallery’s schedule. The ambitious debutante went to work again, this time soliciting artists to fill the large gallery space, which had previously been a grand Polish wedding palace. O’Grady first called Keith Haring, who had audited her Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism course at the School of Visual Arts. Jean-Michel Basquiat was second; there was some back and forth between the two artists, but after promising two new canvases for the show, Basquiat pulled out, citing commitments to dealer Bruno Bischofberger. Despite his name being listed in the final program, Basquiat did not display any work in the show. Notwithstanding tight budgets for both the state-supported gallery operations and the artists themselves, MBN put together quite the event, one that ultimately remained true to her linguistic interests and sensibilities. In a 2009 article she published for Artforum about the show, O’Grady described being pleased “that even across so many styles, the images gave off language.”93 That same year, in conversation with her Artforum editor, O’Grady addressed the editor’s question: “Was race on the wall?” To which she replied: It’s difficult to remember how I responded at the time. But in assembling the portfolio, which is essentially a new piece, I was struck by both the differences and similarities. In some cases, the conceptual vocabularies obviously differed—with black artists, jazz was more operative, with white artists, the languages of film and dream—while literature and theory were more evenly divided. But I was surprised to see how many artists shared an underlying anxiety, even a dread. The Nancy Spero sketch was untitled at the time, but it’s appropriate that it later became “El Salvador.” These were Reagan years, and

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alienating. . . . Imagine sending Marines in to an island with less than 100,000 people. New York may have been easier for artists to survive in then than now, but it was a poorer and more unpleasant place to live.94

As the curator of this conceptual collaboration, O’Grady’s fierce persona set particular restrictions on the work artists could contribute. Not only were the artists racially identified as either black or white but the works themselves were constrained to the same binary palette. “Achromaticity,” according to O’Grady, “would heighten similarities and flatten differences.” It would also be the first exhibit the artist had seen “in the still virtually segregated art world with enough black presence to create dialogue.” It was important for O’Grady that the race of the artist not be apparent on the labels, though she did wonder if it would show up anyway.95 The impressive range of painting, sculpture, installation, text murals, and conceptual work all fell within MBN’s strict stipulations, which meant that several artists offered atypical pieces for the show. This included conceptual artist Adrian Piper, whose original text-based  submission—a flyer designed for a series of performances titled “Funk Lessons”—was conceived in black and gold but converted to black and white for the presentation. However, despite the impressive artistic lineup, before the exhibition opened The Black and White Show flyer was obsolete (fig. 14). Basquiat had dropped out, and his last-minute replacements—Juan Cash, a young black American abstract painter, and Richard Hambleton, a notorious white Canadian graffiti artist—were missing.96 US painter Leon Golub opined that The Black and White Show was better than that year’s Whitney Biennial; despite its rigor, however, the exhibition would not get reviewed by the art establishment press and received only a three-line notice in the local newspaper the East Village Eye.97 At its close, MBN’s appeal to reason and sensibility seemed to have failed; the New York “art world’s complexion was the same.” Notably, however, white US artist John Fekner’s Toxic Junkie, a text-based mural painted on the street-facing wall outside the gallery, became the “signature image of the burgeoning East Village art scene.”98 At the time, the street outside the gallery functioned as an open-air drug market, and had MBN not commissioned the piece especially for the show, Fekner’s work and later iconic commentary would never have been realized.99 In fact, at the time, Fekner’s piece was the only one in the show to receive any critical attention, which included a mention in Art in America. Yet so disjointed was the citation from the context in which the work was produced that O’Grady was compelled to write to Art in America editor Elizabeth C. Baker. “I would like to set the record straight,” the artist began: TOXIC JUNKIE, which you use as a lead photo for your report on the East Village (Summer 1984), did not appear miraculously and spontaneously on East 2nd Street between Avenues B and C. It was specifically requested by me from John Fekner for “The Black and

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figure 14 Exhibition flyer for The Black and White Show, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, 1983. MSS-003, box 12, folder 9, Lorraine O’Grady Papers, Wellesley College Archives, Massachusetts.

White Show,” which I curated at Kenkeleba Gallery on that block in April 1983. The mural was created in time for the show’s opening, and even its colors were stipulated by me. My intention in commissioning it was to expand the political content of the show (black and white work by black and white artists) through connecting the art inside the gallery with what was happening outside on the street—at the time, East 2nd between B and C was still the biggest drug block in Lower Manhattan.100

O’Grady’s two-page letter outlined the magazine’s failure to acknowledge and review a major exhibition, its discriminatory exclusion of nonprofit gallery spaces, and the demonstrably racist omission of contributions made by black curators and blackowned galleries in its report on the East Village art scene. Furthermore, O’Grady commented on the shocking ways the magazine was rewriting history “in the service of trendiness.” Her letter foreshadowed Adrian Piper’s own, now well-known letters to art critic Donald Kuspit in 1987 in advance of his essay “Adrian Piper: Self-Healing through Meta-Art” published in Art Criticism.101 Women artists in the 1980s, and black women in particular, were constantly “setting the record straight,” providing narrative correctives to lazy and false art histories being written around them and their work. It was during this season of O’Grady’s praxis that letter writing became integral to MBN’s performance repertoire.

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The prolix debutante would go on to pen another lengthy letter, this time to the black bohemian couple Joe Overstreet and Corrine Jennings, who ran Kenkeleba House, in the aftermath of what had proved to be a conflict-ridden installation of The Black and White Show.102 The challenge came down to curatorial authority. MBN (read: O’Grady) maintained a specific vision and exhibition methodology, which Overstreet had struggled to embrace. She opened the letter: Dear Joe, This might come as a shock to you, but I still do like and respect you very much. I just haven’t been communicating with you because I haven’t been able to find a way. That’s why I’m writing this letter.103

O’Grady goes on to admit her own flaws, including lack of experience and strong will. In addition to what comes close to an apology for how the relationship unraveled, the artist expresses several grievances with Overstreet’s management style, particularly around the hanging of the exhibition; Overstreet had maintained a strict policy that he, as the owner, would hang all shows. The second concern O’Grady brings up relates to ownership of the show itself. It seems that both Jennings and Overstreet struggled to relinquish control to guest curators, cultivating an environment in which, despite her solo efforts to organize the exhibition while Overstreet was out of town, O’Grady’s authorship of The Black and White Show was contested. Finally, O’Grady takes issue with the gallerist’s tone toward the artists in the exhibition and his unprofessional communications in front of colleagues. O’Grady follows up her criticisms in the letter with potential solutions, beseeching Overstreet to learn from their difficult interactions. She ends with introspection and several concessions: It’s funny. The more I’ve typed on this letter, the more clearly I can see that you and I have the same problem. We’re both fighting with people all the time because even though we’re both strong personalities, we haven’t defined our professional goals sharply enough to relax in them and let other people be.   You’re right about my not being a curator. The Black and White Show was really a Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance. And I’m certainly not a gallery director. I’d rather earn a living mindlessly as a word processor and save my creativity for the work I have to do. Besides I’m not the motherly type. I’m as self-centered, immature, and crazy as any other artist, and then some. And I thank you for the opportunity to find out all of this. I know what I have to do now: as I said before, take a vacation, cool out, and go back to the studio.   I hope you take this letter in the spirit in which it was written—just an expression of regret and an attempt at explanation. All the best, Lorraine 94

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The day after O’Grady sent the letter to Overstreet, she penned a letter to friend and professional acquaintance Gylbert Coker. Excerpts of the artist’s powerful, melancholy words: Dear Gylbert, [. . .] I’ve definitely decided to take at least a year off from the art world. I have no commitments for next season and am not going to make any. The parade float is a fly in the ointment. If I could give it up, I would. I’m going to slapdash it and let the chips fall where they may.   [. . .] I wanted [The Black and White Show] to be great and ran roughshod over people. Too much exposure too soon. Time to take time out, regroup, and get my priorities straight. And hopefully come back with the strength in the work, not in me.   This isn’t goodbye. I’ll be around, except for when I’m travelling. Let’s keep in touch, and good luck with your Pippin. Thanks for everything, including coming down to the Black and White Show.104

As with her collaged poetry (chapter 1), these letters demonstrate how O’Grady’s positionality—her personality—continued to affect her relationships to her own artistic process and to other people. As a scholar of her work, I find these letters fascinating as they confirm, along with time spent in conversation with the artist, many of my own musings on O’Grady’s early approaches to her work, and how her distinct personal and professional orientations to the art world shaped her practice. Perhaps I also find the letters interesting because they resonate personally. O’Grady went in hot, intense, passionate, and, as she herself reflects, without a grasp of her professional goals or trajectory. By 1983, the “so what” had yet to be answered, so the artist ultimately did a lot of spinning. The length of the letters (several typewritten pages) and their tone also reveal an artist—a black woman—who perpetually feels the need to explain herself. O’Grady is still like this today. There is always something else to say or explain about any given moment or artwork. During an interview, I might ask how much a given work cost to produce, a seemingly simple and straightforward inquiry. Rather than address how her work was funded, however, O’Grady will provide stream-of-consciousness commentary on what was going on at the time, perhaps artists she was associating with, while explaining the work conceptually. Over the course of many days mining the subtexts and reading between the lines of these lengthy and wandering conversations, I have concluded that O’Grady has a hard time letting go of her work, of letting things be what they are in the world without her voice—an understandable proclivity given the historical silence and erasure of that very voice. O’Grady seems to have a genuine curiosity about how others experience her art, however, and ultimately their experiences elicit more explanation. Central to O’Grady’s language-driven praxis is that she, the artist, has the last word. “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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Clearly I am drawn to O’Grady and her work, and this tendency reverberates with me as a scholar who happened upon the academy, as O’Grady happened upon the art world, while following a very different trajectory. Like the artist, I too am a black woman who enjoys immense privilege. Or perhaps what O’Grady and I share is a human condition. Often I too find myself explaining, then apologizing; not being selfconscious; saying loudly and doing boldly. Undoubtedly it is a position from which anxiety around one’s work and identity festers. In this 1980s moment, O’Grady maintained a “my way or the highway” perspective and approach, and as revealed in her correspondence, it finally broke down. Alas, for O’Grady, for myself, for many of us—it usually does. O’Grady came late to the party, asked big questions, and made work that emerged from her own experiences as a middle-class black woman. She did the most. These letters reveal how she struggled as a new artist to find her purpose and her method, how agonizing that process was, and how her positionality as a black woman continued to affect how she related to and narrated her work as a failure. The artist left the art world disappointed with her reception—how things turned out when she made art. When she returned, she turned inward. Her work would become more self-conscious and doubly invested in grappling with internal struggles, producing her own theoretical standpoint from which to interpret her life and praxis. Indeed, O’Grady’s step away from the art world was temporary, and when she reemerged she would leave MBN behind, shifting her practice back to a mode of address that was more self-reflexive and internally directed. The artist would later describe The Black and White Show as “another shout that disappeared without being heard”—an interesting sonic visualization of the creative labor that followed and extended MBN.105 For O’Grady to say that “the shout(s)” of MBN were rendered ineffective underscores the possibilities and limitations of direct-address performance as artistic practice, as well as speaking out of turn as a way of existing within the art world. By describing The Black and White Show as an extension of her shoutperformance and shout-poetry, O’Grady observes that this shouting ultimately was disappeared, drowned in the silence (or perhaps in the chaos of others’ shouting). It is an observation she countered in 1998 in her interview with Courtney Baker, fifteen years after the initial “unhearing,” when her unruly persona was taken up and given new life (for better or worse). Indeed, something was heard, and continues to be heard. And perhaps the better question is not the existence or occurrence of this hearing but rather what resonated, and what was heard in such a boisterous performance that continues to reverberate today? AFTERLIVES, JUNE 2018

Not long after O’Grady penned the letter to Gylbert, she brought a “slapdash” parade float—a “fly in the ointment,” and her final performance before her short hiatus—to Harlem, New York. It would be the last time MBN conceptualized and enacted an 96

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intervention in the New York art scene, and it came in the turbulent wake of The Black and White Show. In an event deemed an immediate success by the artist, O’Grady’s Art Is . . . was a multimodal, multi-participant performance piece that debuted in the 1983 African American Day Parade in Harlem, New York.106 The performance event, discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, was a continuation of O’Grady’s probing critique of the boundaries of avant-garde creative production from the unique position of her MBN persona. On the phone with me, O’Grady discussed the afterlife of the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance series and her deviant persona’s many future returns. O’Grady is eighty-six and has no interest in retiring from the work of being a conceptual artist in a moment of peak recognition. She is finally receiving her due, and it has been understandably overwhelming for the artist—but also for me, as a scholar of her work. Every few weeks I receive an email from O’Grady outlining her latest appearances on panels, lectures, and at openings, a list only outdone by the flood of exhibitions featuring her work, both group and solo. Admittedly, it is a difficult-to-maintain pace. Fingers fly across the phone, laptop, and iPad keyboards, wherever I may be when she drops a line. I try to catch her most profound statements in each distinct moment of this renaissance. “I’m still with you in the 1980s,” I said her to one day. I will never keep up unless she slows down, I tell her. She laughs; we both know she won’t. Until very recently, and perhaps still on most days, O’Grady regards her performative enactments as the persona MBN from 1980 to 1983 as a failure. It was not until the complex debutante’s 1983 incognito swan song as part of the conceptual parade float and performance Art Is . . . that the artist felt she had made a successful intervention. However, pushing back against O’Grady’s assessment, I argue that there is indeed productivity in the aggressive pursuit of an idea and in the process of its failure. There are always risks and ramifications when performances miss their audiences, or when audiences simply turn away.107 As visual culture studies scholars Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright argue, “Meanings are created in part when, where, and by whom images are consumed, and not only when, where and by whom they are produced.”108 For theater scholar Judith Sebesta, performances, specifically feminist performances, are about “the play of subversion versus fulfillment, of safety versus risk, of efficacy versus inefficacy, among audience members.”109 Thus, with O’Grady’s direct-address art, those who are being addressed are equally a part of the construction of the piece and its critical afterlife, including those of us who study and write about her work. It is another one of our late-night phone calls; O’Grady is as generous as she is prolix. I am ten pages deep in my notes about people she spoke with, books she was reading, errant thoughts about feminism, and answers to questions I never asked when she lets slip that MBN is to return in 2020. I feel like I have just heard someone tell me to prepare for the second coming of Christ. I make the note and plan to be ready. The book will be finished and I will be waiting. “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

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When speaking out of turn and/or implementing direct-address strategies, those who have historically sought to claim or take up space and produce visibility (or an occasion to be heard) often depend on a response from their audiences. Speaking out of turn is a powerful mode, but one that often elicits an angry or confused response, which can have serious (and often violent) repercussions. Or, as with the laterdiscussed piece by O’Grady, Art Is . . ., the spectator’s participatory response is in fact the art itself (an alien avant-garde performance).110 In yet other cases, while the interpellative nature of the direct-address creative work is inherent in its form, the art is not dependent on an immediate or participatory audience response per se. Despite the presumed failings of the audience to “get it” and then respond accordingly, I contend that this gap between artist, spectator, and work of art (the performance) remains productive.111 O’Grady’s performances challenge the way we think about alienation effects and their function in performance works, especially when such performances are dependent on spectator responses. These strategies and effects are essential to the work, and their effectiveness should not be determined based on an expected or desired response from spectators alone. Rather, these out-of-turn enactments should be read through their radical ontological functions. That is, a particular enactment is able to fundamentally shape-shift categories of viewership, while at the same time its circulation as art reveals the conditions of the work’s existence as art in the space of contemporary museums. Described another way, consider theorist Donna Haraway’s discussion of these optical epistemologies as processes of “diffraction” rather than merely reflections of a particular artist’s or work’s standpoint: “Diffraction patterns record the history of interactions, interference, reinforcement, difference. . . . Unlike reflections, diffractions do not displace the same elsewhere, in more or less distorted form. . . . Rather, diffraction is a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness.”112 The effort of these multimodal performances to interpellate spectators within the materialsemiotic discourses of each performance relies partly on the optics of diffraction and, as I have suggested throughout, visual modes of address that are unexpected and possibly invasive (out of turn). Haraway elsewhere notes that this diffraction “is not a reflection; it’s a record of passage.”113 Simply because, for instance, the audience (or New York art critics) did not respond in the way O’Grady had envisioned does not mean the alienating history of a black cultural elite and the existence of black avantgarde artistic expression were not diffracted through the act of spectatorship—the moment of witnessing the spectacle of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. When performance artists speak and exist out of turn within the art museum, this record is the imprint the art leaves on the bodies and psyches of the people and the spaces encountered.

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3 MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

For me, art is part of a project of finding equilibrium, of becoming whole.

lorraine o’grady, 1994 1 In 1980, when I first began performing, I was a purist—or perhaps I was simply naive. My performance ideal at that time was “hit-and-run,” the guerilla-like disruption of an event-in-progress, an electric jolt that would bring a strong response, positive or negative. But whether I was doing Mlle Bourgeoise Noire at a downtown opening or Art Is . . . before a million people in Harlem’s Afro-American Day parade, as the initiator, I was free: I did not have an “audience” to please. lorraine o’grady, 1997 2

I’d like to see the lost stories recuperated: stories to use, to amuse. . . . But sometimes you have to tell your own stories, not just to understand yourself but to understand the world, to find the space between their stories and yours, to learn what’s really going on. lorraine o’grady, 2012 3

O

N A WEDNESDAY IN MID-AUGUST 1982 ,

in the seldomvisited Loch section of northern Central Park, New York, a fair-skinned black woman in a loose red dress, her straight hair pinned back with combs, enters a chaotic streamside scene from the top of a hill. She follows a group of three bizarrely clothed individuals in wild outfits of yellow, orange, and bright red, all gyrating to New Wave music as they descend the gentle slope. The Woman in Red falls behind as the group of 99

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dancers reaches the bottom of the hill, but she catches up, joining in their impassioned movements across the bark-and-leaf-covered path, over tree roots, and through thick undergrowth. Despite her presence among them, the dancers, who are white, ignore the Woman in Red, rejecting her attempts at inclusion. Momentarily defeated, she walks a short distance toward a tall gray door, which stands without frame, hinges, or structure. Behind the isolated door, two black men in bright yellow T-shirts and black pants are hard at work, one deeply engaged with a stack of papers, the other with a long white tree branch. The Woman in Red enters, only to be rejected again, this time by the black men, and forced back to the other side of the gray door. This sequence of events is an excerpt from Lorraine O’Grady’s performance Rivers, First Draft, alternatively The Woman in Red, created for the series “Art Across the Park,” curated by Horace Brockington, Gylbert Coker, and Jennifer Manfredi in New York’s Central Park. Described by the artist as a “collage in space,” seventeen performers of all ages, including artists Fred Wilson and George Mingo, simultaneously played parts written by O’Grady on both sides of the stream. After trekking the entire park in search of an appropriate location for the performance, the artist and curators had settled on the Loch, a nook O’Grady has described as “wild and frighteningly unkempt, like something out of literature, not the city. . . . It was perfect for the piece I needed to create.”4 The autobiographical narrative follows a woman on her journey to become an artist, her past and present unfolding simultaneously and in close proximity. Actions were witnessed by a small invited audience, most of them associated with Just Above Midtown gallery, and a few pedestrians, including a young Puerto Rican man on his way to the pool where he worked as a lifeguard. Following the performance, this man shared with O’Grady that viewing the piece “was like walking into one of his dreams,” which pleased her.5 O’Grady’s dreamlike experience symbolically represented the merging of and conflicts between her two distinct heritages—Caribbean and New Englander—and the transformation of the artist herself from a young girl, to a teenager, and finally into an adult woman. Similar to earlier projects like Cutting Out the New York Times (1977, discussed in chapter 1), Rivers, First Draft was inspired by and departed from Surrealism, Dada, and Italian Futurism—practices that consistently incorporated the chaotic and the random, especially in the genre of performance. Rather than a random assortment of consecutive performances, however, Rivers, First Draft was a series of events that, while seemingly unrelated, coalesced into a metaphorical autobiographical dreamscape. Indeed, the Woman in Red (played by O’Grady) and her turbulent journey through the Loch represented the artist’s own disorienting coming of age and her complex relationship to blackness (as an identity category), the art world, and her own developing conceptual praxis. This chapter analyzes Rivers, First Draft alongside another significant performance by O’Grady, Art Is . . . (1983), produced in very close succession. The acts of myth and manifesto making are central to O’Grady’s strategic deployment of her own subjectivity within her work, and they are in many ways epitomized in these early performances. By narrativizing an origin story (Rivers, First Draft), 100

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laying political claims to unrecognized creative sensibilities (Art Is . . . ), and enacting ritualized reconciliation (Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, first presented in 1980 and the subject of chapter 4), O’Grady exploited language’s power to mean through embodied enactments in space, tethered to a specific moment in time. In Rivers, First Draft and Art Is . . ., the artist staged two distinct public declarations— manifestos—about the art world and her place within it. Both projects offered reflection and critique on what constitutes a work of art and who can be an artist. Furthermore, the public nature of O’Grady’s performance art has persistently challenged the spatiotemporal logics of art world inclusion, particularly through narrative. Indeed, the act of storytelling is central to the project of mythology, another mode through which O’Grady has refined her use of disruptive and interventionist tactics. To recap: In 1980, after several years of incubation, O’Grady had not yet produced any work aside from a series of newspaper poems she called Cutting Out the New York Times, and she felt she was ready to take her journey outward. Catalyzed by the 1980 PS1 exhibition Afro-American Abstraction, which she found too cautious, she discovered Linda Goode Bryant’s avant-garde space Just Above Midtown and asked to work as a volunteer. It was in this moment that the artist would generate her first performance work, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83, covered in chapter 2), and invade museums and galleries throughout the city, shouting poems and ritualistically whipping herself. In the midst of her three-year run of tirades, O’Grady took her performance practice further. O’Grady titled the work Rivers, First Draft because at the time she understood the project as a work in progress, the first part of a future three-part masterwork called Indivisible Landscapes: Rivers, Caves, Deserts, which was never fully realized. When reflecting in 2013 about the “first draft” and a possible future return to the piece, O’Grady pointed to the critical role her gallery community played in the work’s conception and production, describing Goode Bryant’s alternative space for the black avant-garde art vis-à-vis the exclusionary and at times hostile mainstream New York art world: “The making of Rivers and what it uncovered was one of the most important moments of my artistic and personal life and could not have happened without Just Above Midtown (JAM), a nurturing space when others would not have us,” an “esprit formed in exclusion.”6 Artists who found themselves at Just Above Midtown formed integral networks of critical feedback and creative support, and most of those involved in the staging and witnessing of the intensely personal autobiographic script embedded in Rivers, First Draft were artists and interlocutors affiliated with the alternative arts space.7 O’Grady has also discussed the performance as her most revolutionary work, an assessment that aligns with my own, as Rivers, First Draft depicts the mundane experiences of a black woman becoming an artist and the process of reconciling past and present selves, a claim to humanity against the popular and hypervisible imaginary of black women as only ever oppressed or all-powerful. The tediousness, the relatability, of Rivers, First Draft is in fact its most radical intervention.8 MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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In 1982, the narratives on either side of the water must have competed for viewers’ attention—as they do today in the sequential still images in the performance archive. What remains of Rivers, First Draft is the fifteen-page script the artist wrote and revised up until the day of the actual performance, and forty-eight color photographs that hint at the trancelike, stream-of-consciousness quality of the work, a spectacle O’Grady likened to a “three-ring circus”: The installation [Rivers, First Draft] . . . is silent on the wall or on pages in a catalogue, titles newly added. Imagine my voice reading a text which bears on it only tangentially. Of course, you will not be able to follow the installation and the text simultaneously. But whether you wander in and out of the installation and the text in alternation, or attend to them sequentially, it’s OK. Cognitive dissonance can be overcome when you slow down and repeat.9

In order to see the performance today, viewers must move along a gallery wall featuring an often-abridged set of images, typically twenty-four of them, sequentially arranged to symbolically represent a “crossroad.” This was the case in 2017 when the work was installed in Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley’s Brooklyn Museum exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985. Even in its abridged form, the performance centers on seven parables or vignettes with the Woman in Red weaving in and out of each, either symbolically through flashback or physically through the literal movement of her body through the space of the Loch. Integral to O’Grady’s language-centered process is the recuperation and dialogical reflection she performs on her own work in the present moment. In fact, this tension between the 1980s and the early 2000s and 2010s contours much of her contemporary viewer’s experience, as they encounter the photo documentation of past performances and the supplemental framing of these pieces as primary-source documents produced at the time of the work’s development, as well as more recent reconceptualizations long after the fact. Serving, again, as a repository of the artist’s and others’ ideas regarding each project, including Rivers, First Draft, O’Grady’s website acts as an essential entry point into the work’s development, critical reception, and reexamination, the last of which O’Grady undertook both in the 1980s, following her first performance in the form of an iterative proposal, and again in 2013 and 2015, as she prepared for various lectures and public appearances related to exhibitions of the work. By presenting the one-time, site-specific performance in varied exhibition contexts as well as within the realm of the digital, O’Grady recalibrates Rivers, First Draft’s potential to mean across distinct moments in time. This recursive, multilayered, self-conscious framing of the performance—one of the first performances not discussed as a failure by the artist— aids contemporary viewers in their understanding of the import and complexity of O’Grady’s oeuvre as a whole by narrativizing the critical junctions at which her conceptual praxis developed over time as one of both myth and manifesto making. 102

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To my knowledge, this chapter performs the first sustained scholarly look at Rivers, First Draft, using the performance to formally link critical moments across O’Grady’s creative trajectory with the strategies of address and out-of-turn presence the artist utilized in the early 1980s. By moving from Rivers, First Draft to Art Is . . ., I argue that the artist, through dynamic and self-reflexive storytelling, moved from ontological reconciliation between her younger selves and present-day O’Grady (the Woman in Red, mythmaking), to outward-facing participatory public commentary on art world exclusion of black creative genius (manifesto). Rivers, First Draft was accompanied by a meticulous performance script. In it, O’Grady included many elaborate cues about what was to be said or read by each actor, and outlined their precise and simultaneous movements. The document can stand as its own hybrid literary form, which is why reading it while studying the performance itself largely overdetermines what can be understood from the images on their own— the sole experience of spectators in a museum context. Indeed, one could find the script by mining the artist’s website, and yet even there the writing is separated from the visuals and larger context. In what follows, I remain faithful to what is visually accessible in the installation of Rivers, First Draft, a work I have now studied in several exhibition contexts. I use my endnotes throughout the remainder of the chapter to offer commentary regarding the performance script and what can be seen within the curated images that make up the work in the contemporary moment. Another related note: in O’Grady’s original script, the action unfolds in a castle. Certainly, this is unclear from the performance stills, which capture O’Grady’s team in the lush surrounds of Central Park. Nonetheless, this detail provides an opportunity to consider the work anew, and alongside documented artistic vision and intent. “ART ACROSS THE PARK”

The installation of Rivers, First Draft opens with a still of the Woman in White, a thin black woman wearing a white linen halter dress and white sandals, sitting in the center of the Loch at a white table, which is covered by a white cloth (plate 3). She has bright red lipstick, red fingernail polish, and large round white earrings. Her hair is wrapped in a white scarf, and she sits on a white stool atop a pile of shredded coconut that spills out from under the table and down the stoop on which the table is perched, presumably the accumulated result of the labor she performs from her seat: meticulously shredding the white coconut meat. This bright white scene in which the black woman exists is quite literally framed for the viewer, both in the performance and in the photographic archive, by a white wooden frame in the crude shape of a house, resting on rocks in front of the table and behind a thin, green, wooden fir-palm, a hybrid of a New England fir tree and a West Indian palm, a metaphor that returns in later works. The artificial tree is propped unceremoniously on the margins of the picture. The parable of the Woman in White personifies the artist’s relationship to her Caribbean heritage, specifically through the figure of O’Grady’s mother, who according to MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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the artist did not want her.10 Post–World War I was a period of West Indian migration to the continental United States, and many immigrants settled in Brooklyn and Boston. O’Grady’s parents both emigrated from Jamaica in the 1920s and met “in Boston at the tea table during a cricket match in which one of [the artist’s] uncles was bowling.”11 O’Grady, who was eleven years younger than her older sister, was born when her mother was thirty-seven, mature for expectant mothers in the early twentieth century. The opening and closing vignettes reflect the artist’s childhood feelings of isolation and unhappiness at her mother’s expressed disappointment over her arrival. The Woman in White, in both instances, is framed by a scene full of cultural meaning, and yet she remains impassive, inaccessible. The visual semiotics of the pile of shredded coconut, the green wooden fir-palm, and the neat white ensemble hold the symbolic weight of colonialism, the exploitation of labor, religious purity, migration, and propriety (the woman is exceptionally well-dressed), themes O’Grady has returned to often in her work. The woman also signifies a perfectionism the artist observed in her own family, a relaxed and determined drive to appear perfect within the strange new world in which the West Indian transplants found themselves. This is the first layer in the artist’s collage, the first vignette, and for the remaining duration, the Woman in White alternates between faithful shredding and then eating from the pile of white coconut. She performs these actions unaffected by the chaos that surrounds her in the other vignettes. In fact, performance images capture her looking dispassionately away from the Woman in Red as the latter moves in and out of her vicinity. In many ways, the Woman in White personifies the artist’s ambivalence toward her heritage and her contentious relationships with much of her family.12 The second narrative excerpt is visually much simpler. A white man in jeans and galoshes stands ankle-deep in a stream at the base of a waterfall (plate 4). The rushing water pours down over rocks overhead and splashes into the stream below. The man is protected by a long gray raincoat and gray sou’wester; the coat drapes over a gray boat that hangs from his shoulders, encapsulating his upper body. Painted on the boat’s starboard side are the words “The Nantucket,” and in the opening scene, the man (referred to in the script as the Nantucket Memorial) stands warily in the water, eyes closed, resting his head on gray-gloved hands propped on a long wooden walking stick.13 Like a granite statue, he is meant to blend in with the park environment. While he stands frozen here in his opening appearance, his climactic role will involve guiding the Woman in Red and her younger selves to the other side of the stream in the final vignette. This guiding role gestures to the seminal and enduring effects of coming of age in New England as a black middle- to upper-class woman, and the directorial force of white patriarchal culture and values. While the Nantucket Memorial stands unmoving in the stream, he serves as an omnipresent, albeit inactive, force within the artist’s early life. Importantly, this image of white culture and values, only the second in the curated sequence, ultimately presents an antagonistic frame for the entire performance: between an inattentive “black 104

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plate 1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Motion Equals Progress” (part 10 of 12), from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010. Toner ink on adhesive paper, 28 × 240 in. (71.1 × 609.6 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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 plate 2 Lorraine O’Grady, “Missing Persons,” from the series Cutting Out the New York Times, 1977/2010. Toner ink on adhesive paper, 11 × 102³/₈ in. (27.9 × 260.1 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

 plate 3 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Woman in White grates coconut in her kitchen with the fir-palm tree outside,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 1 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 4 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Nantucket Memorial stands motionlessly in the stream,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 2 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 5 Lorraine O’Grady, “A Little Girl in Pink Sash memorizes her Latin lesson,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 6 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 6 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Debauchees ignore the Woman in Red,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 19 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © plate 5 Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 7 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Teenager in Magenta sits alone with her headphones,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 20 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 8 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Debauchees intersect the Woman in Red, and the rape begins,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 29 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 9 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Artists in Yellow work on their projects as the Woman in Red struggles with the Debauchees,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 30 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 10 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Woman in Red starts painting the stove her own color,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 33 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 11 Lorraine O’Grady, “The Woman in Red, the Teenager in Magenta, and the Little Girl in Pink Sash wade the stream,” from Rivers, First Draft (part 46 of 48), 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slide, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 2 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 12 Lorraine O’Grady, “Star East Monuments,” from Art Is . . . (part 14 of 40), 1983/2009. Chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 13 Lorraine O’Grady, “Troupe with Mlle Bourgeoise Noire,” from Art Is . . . (part 17 of 40), 1983/2009. Chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 14 Lorraine O’Grady, “Troupe Front,” from Art Is . . . (part 6 of 40), 1983/2009. Chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 15 Lorraine O’Grady, “Woman and Umbrella,” from Art Is . . . (part 15 of 40), 1983/2009. Chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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plate 16 Lorraine O’Grady, “Girl Pointing,” from Art Is . . . (part 40 of 40), 1983/2009. Chromogenic print, 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

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mother,” the artist’s Caribbean heritage, and a silent but heroic “white father,” her New England upbringing. Ultimately, it is the white patriarch who guides the three versions of the artist to reconciliation, a queer (as in strange) finale to a mythology laden with the artist’s attempts at finding love and familial, social, and professional acceptance. The third vignette introduces viewers to two individuals in distinct colors of indigo and fuchsia, critically analyzing “who’s who and what’s what in the art world,” all while wearing motorcycle goggles and speaking through megaphones.14 They are identified in the performance interpretation as the Two Art Snobs, and throughout the performance, they banter about the New York art scene, with occasional stops and starts to listen to what is going on around them. Their presence symbolizes O’Grady’s entrance into and navigation of the New York art world in the late 1970s, a move the artist has described as a process of ridding herself of the traditional and elitist education she experienced as a child and young adult.15 O’Grady moved to New York as the girlfriend of a rock music executive in the aftermath of a folding second marriage, and soon she began writing rock criticism and feature reviews for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Despite her lifelong rebellion against her elitist upbringing, the artist enjoyed, for a time, the luxuries that proximity to rock celebrity afforded her: private jets, walk-up apartments in Chelsea, chauffeured cars.16 Indeed, this time of lavish parties and mind-numbing movement is captured by the flamboyantly dressed dancers in the vignette in which the Woman in Red descends the hill and enters the Loch. O’Grady would soon tire of this lifestyle, becoming bored with the people she was meeting and frustrated not to be making any money of her own. Her life took a dramatic shift when a friend having a personal crisis, a teacher at the School of Visual Arts, needed her to take over one of his first-year English courses. O’Grady leapt at the opportunity as a “way out of this crazy world where [she] was a forty-year-old rock groupie,” and she landed more squarely on the road to becoming an artist.17 Not captured in Rivers, First Draft, however, is the dislocation O’Grady elsewhere says she felt upon her arrival to the “bombed-out factory” in the middle of the city that was SVA, having only ever experienced her sprawling Wellesley College campus.18 Drawn to the energy and bright students, O’Grady began learning everything she could to fit in, and Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (1973) was the first book she picked up. After reading the annotated chronology of conceptual art and all its subcategories, cover to cover, O’Grady admits to feeling like she could produce similar work, if not better. “You see, I was always having those ideas, but I didn’t know what to do with them. I didn’t know they could be art, and until then, I hadn’t been in a position, in an intellectual milieu to discover it.” After that, the artist said, her inner struggle “became focused: to discover what [her] art was, where it came from.”19 Expounding upon her rebellion against the cultural elitism of both the art world and her own upbringing and exploring the journey that brought her to making conceptual work, she took her budding praxis to a wild and overgrown section of Central Park. MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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In the next several photographic frames of Rivers, First Draft—vignettes 4, 5, and 6—viewers are introduced, via flashback, to three symbolic accounts of the artist as the Teenager in Magenta, the Little Girl in Pink Sash, and the Woman in Red. These parables are distinct and yet interconnected: the teenager stands depressed on the bank of the stream, while the little girl reads into a megaphone from a text in Latin. A Young [black] Man in Green enters the frame of the little girl reading; hands stuffed into the pockets of his dark trousers, he seems to be watching her. However, it is the Teenager in Magenta with whom he makes contact on top of a rock just above the waterfall. As the title of the photograph suggests, “their flirtation begins.” Similar to the Woman in White, the Little Girl in Pink Sash is surrounded by complex iconography (plate 5). She wears a frilly white dress with a bright pink sash, clear jelly sandals, and white ankle socks—an outfit befitting a young girl from a family of means. O’Grady herself graduated from Girls’ Latin School in Boston, where she was required to study six years of Latin and three in ancient history.20 The little girl’s thick, curly hair is tied back into two low ponytails with a single simple barrette holding each side smooth— a polished and then-acceptable style for black girls with otherwise voluminous hair. In addition to the megaphone she holds close to her mouth and the Latin text from which she reads, the Little Girl in Pink Sash sits with a nylon Harvard sack pack filled with books and a strange white mask made from a white sou’wester and white cardboard cut in the shape of a Greek helmet.21 The headpiece rests eerily on the rock, unused. As the performance script suggests, “she looks dressed for a party,” yet “she is actually about to do her homework.” The Latin words she recites are an early signifier of O’Grady’s relationship to language, and the attention she was encouraged to devote to her studies. It is at this moment in the performance when in-gallery audiences are introduced to the Black Artists in Yellow at work in their studio behind the stand-alone gray door. And in the distance, in the top right corner of the frame, flamboyant dancers descend the hill. In the work’s transcripts and captioning, the dancers represent the Debauchees, and together with the two Black Artists in Yellow and Two Art Snobs symbolize O’Grady’s turbulent entry into the art world. The Young Man in Green and the Teenager in Magenta make love on a rock nearby while the Woman in Red is fully introduced to viewers for the first time. The frenzied script unfolds as the Young Man in Green leaves the Teenager in Magenta, the Woman in White eats coconut, the Nantucket Memorial presumably loiters in the stream nearby, the Debauchees dance, the Art Snobs continue and discontinue their bickering, and the Woman in Red is captured in motion amid the colorful dancers (plate 6). All actions taking place at this point in the performance simultaneously open and close the narrative for both sets of viewers—those in the park in 1982 and those later viewing the installation, as one is forced to oscillate visually between the competing enactments, returning again, as recommended by O’Grady, to attend to one’s cognitive dissonance. The mutual stories unfold a common narrative thread of isolation, introspection, sought inclusion, and rejection, yet they vary in effect (plate 7). The Debauchees, for 106

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example, are part of a truly disturbing parable. Halfway through the performance, directly following the Woman in Red’s expulsion from the studio of the Black Artists in Yellow, they reappear, this time to intersect the Woman in Red, and, according to the caption—“the rape begins.” It is unclear from the performance stills if the artist and actors enact an actual physical assault on the Woman in Red, or if the dance-like movements represent perhaps more theoretical intentions (plate 8). What is apparent, however, is the abrupt rupture in the myth for contemporary viewers following the performance trajectory via stills. Until the rape and struggle with the Debauchees, the Woman in Red has maintained a largely conflict-free existence, one visually characterized by consent, at least at the physical level. While persistent rejection is central to O’Grady’s narrative arc, the Woman in Red inserts herself in three contexts in all— the rock groupie social scene, the black masculine enclave, and the New York art world—without actual confrontation. Even in the simultaneously occurring union between the Young Man in Green and the Teenager in Magenta, though their scene ultimately ends in rejection, their actions within the performance are seen as consensual. So, what then is the viewer to make of this assertive use of language and the violence it conjures? While the Debauchees’ proximity suggests a violation of space, just beyond the gray door, the Black Artists in Yellow continue at their work while the Woman in Red “struggles with the Debauchees,” a metaphor, perhaps, for O’Grady’s transitory moment between creative worlds and what the artist felt was lost in the process while others remained silent and unmoved (plate 9).22 At last, the Woman in Red breaks away from the Debauchees, descending to the stream, where the audience notices a solitary white box for the first time (plate 10). Like the other performance accoutrements, the two-tiered box structure is made of impermanent material; its face is covered with white paper, taped roughly around the edges. The image caption identifies it as a stove. The Woman in Red picks up a can of spray paint, crouches down on her knees, and begins to cover the front of the white box with a red mist. In the background of each documentary frame of this vignette stands the gray-suited Nantucket Memorial, camouflaged and just beyond focus, still in the stream and still resting, ever present. The woman’s gaze is focused, determined, as she makes her red mark. The Woman in White works impassively nearby, and the Teenager in Magenta lies in a fetal position across the stream as the Woman in Red begins to cook using the now bright-red oven. It is another moment of rebellious creation, witnessed neither by the emblematic mother nor by the teenage self, but importantly enacted in symbolic, if not close, proximity to both. The next scene marks another turn. The Woman in Red thumbs through the pages of “an accordion-folded album of photos” while lounging on a metal platform balanced precariously on the edge of the stream. A Nude Swimmer emerges from the water, slinking onto the metal platform to fondle the Woman in Red, while the Teenager in Magenta is still curled on her rock in the distance and the Little Girl in Pink Sash continues reciting her lines, just visible at the top of the frame.23 The concurrent MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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narrative forces viewers to make sense of what is happening in each moment in the context of everything that is happening across the Loch; the artist’s creation myth unfolds in fullness, a simultaneity and multiplicity, rather than in a linear space-time progression. In the thirty-ninth documentary frame, “The Art Snobs comment for the last time,” their voices are no longer an ever-present din in the artist’s psyche, nor in the consciousness of those present in the Loch.24 The next eight frames present the conclusion of Rivers, First Draft, the moment when four of the seven vignettes collide and are reconciled. The Nantucket Memorial moves for the first time and approaches the Woman in Red. The Woman in Red is still laid out on the metal platform. She ignores him, engrossed in her album, but he insists with outstretched hand that she accompany him to the other side of the stream. Once across, the Woman in Red meets the Teenager in Magenta and the Little Girl in Pink Sash, and they help each other cross the rocky stream bank. Holding hands, they enter the water. The Nantucket Memorial has appeared ahead of them, and with arms looped around one another for support, the trio wade the stream until they reach its end at a tiny path and a tunnel bridge (plate 11). The second-to-last frame in the series captures the three versions of the artist at the end of the path, ontologically reconciled, huddled closely together, about to enter the tunnel and continue beyond view. The forty-eighth frame of the photo narrative, and presumably the end of the performance, focuses in on the Woman in White one last time, who is snacking on coconut and gazing off in the opposite direction, unperturbed. She is still sitting stiffly at her white table, framed by the large house-shaped frame—an ambivalent end to the turbulent journey. Despite the various activities of the Woman in Red—her struggle to locate and name an identity for herself across the various stages of her development, her experiences of rejection and growth as an artist, her violent or tender confrontations with other characters—the Woman in White (the maternal proxy) remains unaffected and aloof. This aloofness is a prophetic fable, a talisman, that O’Grady herself seemed to carry forward throughout her practice, her outward-reaching reconciliatory efforts consistently met with silence, or, worse, ambivalence. Rivers, First Draft, like the public performances produced by Adrian Piper in New York in the early 1970s and by Senga Nengudi in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, produces conceptual chronicles of the artist’s being and becoming, and her transcendence of both the creative body of the artist as work of art, as well as the spectator as participant.25 For O’Grady, “Doing Rivers in the context of JAM [Just Above Midtown] was a unique art-making moment, one when the enabling audience—the audience which allows the work to come into existence and to which the work speaks—and the audience that consumes the work were one and the same.”26 As O’Grady braided the mythological performance-scape together using her own experiences, and indeed her own body, as artistic media and material, fellow performers and the intimate group in attendance necessarily bore witness to the ontological and avant-garde process of an artist transcending autobiographical narrative in fits and bursts (“collage in space”), a 108

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working through of what performance, subjectivity, and storytelling mean together in a public space and yet away from public view. For O’Grady, “performance’s advantage over fiction was its ability to combine linear storytelling with nonlinear visuals.” The artist had the ability to “make narratives in space as well as in time,” an advantage for the story she felt compelled to tell.27 Years later, when the photographic remnants of this layered enactment were exhibited on white gallery walls, new elements of silence and alienation would come to characterize the work, and the project of reconciliation would be foisted upon present-day gallery spectators. O’Grady’s conceptual chronicles of being and becoming and ritualistic enactments of reconciliation were made possible by the visual rhetoric of the performing bodies in Rivers, First Draft and the didactic deployment of the artist’s “collage in space” modality. Tracey Warr puts it this way: Artists making performative work have sought to demonstrate that the represented body has a language and that this language of the body, like other semantic systems, is unstable. Compared to verbal language or visual symbolism, the “parts of speech” of corporeal language are relatively imprecise. The body as a language is at once inflexible and too flexible. . . . Use of the body is often ritualized in an effort to contextualize and more precisely fix its meaning.28

Like many of O’Grady’s early works, Rivers, First Draft has been taken up anew in this contemporary moment and engaged through its documentary stills within larger exhibition contexts. Not only does the original event more firmly establish O’Grady’s invasive site-specific approach to embodied work at its time of enactment but also Rivers, First Draft, enshrined in the pervasive white-walled galleries of the twenty-first century, stages its own quiet invasion anew, as it so often exemplifies a black woman’s practice simultaneously out of sync with and on the margins of the New York art world then, and yet at the center of that very same environ today. This performance marks an important moment in O’Grady’s early experimentations in conceptual art making—an exploration in form during a moment rich with congruent creative impulses that spanned the East and West Coasts. FREEWAY FETS

Four years prior to O’Grady’s Central Park project, Los Angeles–based artist Senga Nengudi took up public space to stage her own collaborative performance of ontological reconciliation in the devastating wake of the 1965 Watts rebellion, a six-day uprising against economic oppression and racist policing in black neighborhoods across Los Angeles County. Nengudi was not alone in her collaborative impulse nor in her occupation of the streets of downtown LA; other artists, including Maren Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara McCullough, and Noah Purifoy, were also a central part of myriad creative undertakings there between 1965 and 1990. Taking an alternative MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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figure 15 Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (detail), 1978. Eleven chromogenic prints, each 13 × 18 in. (33 × 45.7 cm). Edition of 5 + 1 AP. © Senga Nengudi / Courtesy the artist, Lévy Gorvy, Thomas Erben Gallery, and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Quaku/Roderick Young.

approach to O’Grady’s inclusion-by-invasion, Nengudi’s work with Purifoy at the Watts Tower Center impressed upon her the significance of “breaking through the white cube and connecting with the rest of humanity.”29 This resulted in Nengudi’s first major public installation and performance, Freeway Fets and Ceremony for Freeway Fets (fig. 15), respectively, which in the words of feminist art historian Amelia Jones combined “a range of elements from Yoruba mythology to Japanese Kabuki theater to jazz” and took place in 1978, ritualizing the rubble-strewn wasteland of a downtown freeway overpass on Pico Boulevard near the Los Angeles Convention Center, not far from the communities most affected by the uprising.30 “For Purifoy and other Wattsbased artists who collected multiple tons of rubble from the razed neighborhood, the riots politicized their form of junk assemblage sculpture and ma[de] it necessary to consider how the Watts Riots functioned as an aesthetic event.”31 In Freeway Fets, Nengudi continued her signature use of discarded pantyhose, which come with their own fraught gendered history, filling them to the brim with dirt and sand into bulbous shapes that she then stretched, twisted, knotted, and dangled from the columns supporting the freeway underpass. As art historian Rebecca Peabody has observed, “In Nengudi’s performance Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978), sculpture, performance, ritual, and collaboration work together to imbue space with multiple cultural significations” that are “meant to 110

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renew an urban area through ritual movement.”32 Despite the project’s cultural and formal richness, however, little can be gleaned about the installation or performance associated with Freeway Fets, even though documentary images taken by Roderick “Quaku” Young have been included in a number of important exhibitions over the years, including the Hammer Museum’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960– 1980 (2011) and the Brooklyn Museum’s more recent We Wanted a Revolution, which also exhibited Rivers, First Draft (this has arguably been the most prominent showing of the latter in recent years). In an interview with Amelia Jones, Nengudi expressed regret about the lack of visual evidence of performances like Ceremony for Freeway Fets: The one thing I am sorry about is that we did not document more of our art activities and performances. It was about the process. One of us would get an idea and hurriedly gather everyone together to execute it. Filmmaker Barbara McCullough was our “go to” film and photo documentarian. However, sometimes there was no time or no one to photograph or film something as it was happening. Other times nobody even had money to buy the film to put in the camera. And forget coverage by white media.33

It is a regret and a critique that O’Grady echoed years later, after having missed the opportunity to more fully account visually for the actions of MBN, and having also been ignored by the larger, predominantly white, New York art world. Although only a few documentary images exist for Ceremony for Freeway Fets, the installation was captured in McCullough’s video Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1980), “part of a larger project aimed at uncovering the meaning of ritual in the lives of artists.”34 Also akin to O’Grady, Nengudi was interested in the potential of ritual practice in performance work, mediated in situ and through refashioned and repurposed objects. Sponsored by Brockman Gallery, the performance brought together a loose collective of Studio Z musicians and artists, including Nengudi, Hassinger, Jenkins, McCullough, Houston Conwill, David Hammons, and Franklin Parker, for Freeway Fets and its supplementary enactment as a way to activate the space of the freeway through reconciliatory ritual using Nengudi’s own fetish objects. In fact, the language of fetish is closely associated with Nengudi’s work more broadly, and it seems that in the artist’s own use, particularly its reference in the work’s title, Nengudi follows its classical definition: a human-made object imbued by an individual or group with supernatural powers. The idea of the fetish carries additional theoretical baggage, however, and Nengudi’s work provides an opportunity to complicate its association with the writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The fetish in these theorists’ work indicates a particular relational schema between human and object, an often-taboo dynamic. Both theorists bestow attributions to objects in their unique purviews that are most closely, and perhaps more accurately, associated with human beings. In Freud’s work, the concept of the fetish acts as a stand-in for a suitable sex object, as he investigates how MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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objects are desired and consumed. Marx, for his part, addresses fetishism in the context of the exchange value of commodities within economic relations of production.35 Both are interesting grounds to consider Nengudi’s stocking-filled objects, their critical mass, and finally their enactment in both plein air installation and performance ritual. In the late 1970s, while pregnant, Nengudi landed on the idea for these protruding organ-like pantyhose objects, and they have since come to subtly signify pregnancy, sex, and genitalia, abstracted into fetishes that she eerily strings across white-walled gallery spaces. And while these objects, these freeway fets, still exist in various documentary contexts, the accompanying Ceremony lives on, similar to O’Grady’s performance of Rivers, First Draft, only in a handful of images and through oral and exhibition storytelling. As with Rivers, First Draft, Ceremony for Freeway Fets was performed just once, in this case in front of a small invited crowd underneath the freeway overpass where Nengudi’s work hung from the large concrete pillars that suspended the road high above Pico Boulevard. The installation’s bulb-like and multicolored tubed shapes hung in clusters from the very top of the underpass pillars, the dangling strands catching the Southern California breeze as cars passed above and below. Nengudi had to rent a lift to mount her nylon pieces. The result: swaying objects, resembling both male and female genitals, creating a threshold high above motorists and pedestrians. Reminiscent of popular 1960s and 1970s beaded door curtains, which are likewise psychedelically colored and undulating, Nengudi’s distended objects marked the freeway as a crossing, as infrastructure cuts across the urban landscape, carrying cars safely above the fray of the dilapidated spaces of South Central and Downtown Los Angeles. Both installation and pillars offered a moment of transition between one spatial realm and the next. Marked by the protruding fetishes, the talismanic objects ushered in the shift, like the Nantucket Memorial in O’Grady’s own public evolution. The performance itself then was a ceremony to activate the expressive power of the objects themselves, similar to many African cultural rites. Nengudi designed an inspired ritual to highlight the relationship between her fetish objects and the feminine and masculine energies “danced” by her friends and artist collaborators. With little preparation or rehearsal, artists David Hammons and Maren Hassinger performed the roles of the male and female spirits, while Nengudi played the amalgamating essence between them. Nengudi handmade their masks and headdresses from discarded pantyhose, mirroring the objects in the adjacent installation (fig. 16). Troubled by black men’s patriarchal domination and lack of respect for black women in the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Nengudi pushed to reconcile these energies through ritual, and with the help of her imbued objects (fig. 17). Thus, the artist’s assembled objects, and her practices of assemblage more broadly during this period, “became an index of collective experience and trauma, but one geared toward the local and suggestive of the functionality of African fetishes: to heal, create understanding, or promote group identification through objects.”36 Nick Stillman, in his writing on Freeway Fets, channels the work of historian Molefi Kete Asante 112

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figure 16 Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (detail), 1978. Eleven chromogenic prints, each 13 × 18 in. (33 × 45.7 cm). Edition of 5 + 1 AP. © Senga Nengudi / Courtesy the artist, Lévy Gorvy, Thomas Erben Gallery, and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Quaku/Roderick Young.

on the significance of social relationships in African American ritual and myth: “This is clearly the case in Ceremony for Freeway Fets, which Nengudi envisioned as a unity ritual to fuse forces that in her eyes were engaged in undermining one another. Asante emphasizes the untenable position of isolation for an oppressed class or a tribe in crisis; true freedom, he asserts, needs to be won communally.”37 Nengudi, in an urban context with the Studio Z collective, and O’Grady, in a wild and overgrown park section with Just Above Midtown gallery, both engaged in this battle for reconciliation. Years following Nengudi’s intervention, O’Grady would explore myth and ritual as a spring of spiritual renewal in much of her work, including Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline. By the end of World War II, artists of European descent were pushing the boundaries of their bodies as objects through performances of endurance, torture, sexual violence, mutilation, ritual abjection, and death. And by the early 1950s, white women began exploring their denuded bodies as objets d’art, exploiting their own gaze in renderings of the female form. Significantly, artists of African descent opted for altogether different representational strategies, as the position from which one might theatricalize subjugation, torture, and death is a privileged one. To offer the body up for mutilation, or, in the case of white women artists, for exposure, is an altogether familiar historic and present reality of the black female body, which is always already subjected MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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figure 17 Senga Nengudi, Ceremony for Freeway Fets (detail), 1978. Eleven chromogenic prints, each 13 × 18 in. (33 × 45.7 cm). Edition of 5 + 1 AP. © Senga Nengudi / Courtesy the artist, Lévy Gorvy, Thomas Erben Gallery, and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Quaku/Roderick Young.

to violence and vulnerable to premature death.38 Indeed, O’Grady marks this reality in her widely read essay “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992).39 Thus, O’Grady and Nengudi eschewed the processes and politics of their white predecessors and counterparts; rather than exploiting the limits of the black body, a historic exercise serving as the cornerstone of modern civilization, these artists wielded the black body in the service of introspection and care, radical self-reflexivity and resolution. Ceremony for Freeway Fets and Rivers, First Draft activated public space in ways that privileged the critical vantage of black women in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Both experimental, singular enactments performed rituals of ontological reconciliation. Unlike many of their artistic predecessors of the early twentieth century, like the Dadaists and Surrealists, who used irreverent performance tactics incorporating the body and art objects in order to challenge traditional representation in art, O’Grady and Nengudi strategically deployed bodies and objects in order to do the work of communication and communion. That is, O’Grady and Nengudi performed a critical working through of distinct perspectives and experiences (male/female, childhood/youth/ adulthood) using mixed media in space and time. O’Grady and Nengudi’s early use of public space speaks to the exclusion of black avant-garde practitioners from the institutional spaces inhabited by their white 114

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counterparts, and to the limited ability of these spaces to hold the critical and conceptual heft of black avant-garde projects. Though entirely different public spaces, the freeway underpass and an overgrown crevice of Central Park provided Nengudi and O’Grady with important (and urgently relevant) environments through which to articulate particular black experiences. The proximity to South Central Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising provided fertile ground on which to enliven a conversation on black male and female relations amid sociopolitical upheaval, and the remoteness of the Loch offered contemplative surroundings in which a middle- to upper-class black woman might come to terms with her cultural upbringing and tribulation-filled path to the art world. And finally, the collective labor that surrounded both artists’ performance processes cut against the mythos of the singular, isolated creative genius as the sole producer of noteworthy artistic expression. Ceremony for Freeway Fets and Rivers, First Draft came into existence amid the creative collaboration of Nengudi’s Studio Z and O’Grady’s Just Above Midtown communities, whose collective members served as coconspirators, participants, and witnesses. PROXIMATE LABOR: A PERFORMANCE DECLARATION

A year after her Central Park event, and on what O’Grady remembers as one of the hottest days of summer, the artist, sharing a city block with malt liquor brand Colt 45 for almost four hours, joined an overwhelming sea of floats and marching bands as they waited on a side street in Harlem to get en route for the 1983 African American Day Parade, an annual tradition in the northern Manhattan neighborhood.40 O’Grady, with collaborators Richard DeGussi and George Mingo, had built a massive nine-byfifteen-foot antique-style gold frame mounted on a gold-skirted flatbed trailer, hooked up to a bright blue pickup truck. The fifteen young dancers and actors O’Grady had hired, all strangers, hung out and bonded until they entered the parade around one o’clock in the afternoon, the hottest part of the day, starting what would be a five-hour trek up Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard to the end of the parade route. In her own writing on the performance, O’Grady reflected: “I’ve never had a more exhilarating and completely undigested experience in my life.”41 She describes the sporadic rhythm of their parade march as long stalls for ten to fifteen minutes followed by periods of sprinting to catch up, a durational performance exercise in endurance temporally rendered in the middle of the crowded urban space. O’Grady gave this mixed-modality experience the title Art Is . . . after the bold black text provocation emblazoned on the float’s side (plate 12). O’Grady’s Art Is . . . was a mixed-media, mixed-modality, multi-participant performance piece and, I will argue here, a spatialized manifesto. The public art project was a continuation of O’Grady’s probing critique of the boundaries of the avant-garde, and it was funded by a grant she received from the New York State Council on the Arts. Despite being granted a public award, the artist refused to advertise her performance, wanting the event “to be a pure gesture . . . in the style of [Marcel] Duchamp,” an artist MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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O’Grady had been teaching for several years at the School of Visual Arts.42 The result of her labor and covert operations was a conceptual piece she deemed an immediate success. Significantly, during Art Is . . ., O’Grady, who understood her actions as those of performance alter ego Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (MBN), pinned her personal pair of white gloves to the chest of the white T-shirt she wore for the event (plate 13). She had been unwilling to pin them to the white-glove gown she wore during her original Mlle Bourgeoise Noire gallery performances in 1980, but now she finally donned them as accessories three years later during this final effort as the brazen debutante. O’Grady’s brand of performative alienation, on display in both performances, is exemplary of direct address as a modality for breaking into the field of vision and claiming a voice through invasion. Ultimately, Art Is . . . was a treatise made flesh as the artist and her collaborators danced in the streets of Harlem: both a manifesto and a radical invocation of black genius amid the repeated denials of a persistently racist art world, and in response to the failure she felt about Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (plate 14). In the cases of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, Rivers, First Draft, and Art Is . . ., O’Grady’s mixed-media performance practices staged immense creative labor and expertise, which was necessarily mobilized across a wide range of expressive techniques in order to, as I have argued elsewhere, speak and exist out of turn.43 Directly following Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s appearance in the early 1980s, O’Grady developed the public performance Art Is . . . in order to address an acquaintance’s assertion that “avant-garde [art] doesn’t have anything to do with black people.” Her dynamic response positioned avant-garde artistic sensibilities at the center of blackness in New York—a parade celebrating black people with thousands in attendance—and, arguably, in the nation’s artistic core. The artist described the performance as risky and “the Harlem marchingband parade [as] alien territory” for evidencing such an argument.44 Thus, Art Is . . . was a performance piece about art itself and the question of what qualifies as art, rather than about confronting the art world (as in her previous work). In the artist’s words: “I wanted to give the people on 7th Avenue an experience of advanced black art, and since I couldn’t mount actual artworks, because a float has a maximum of oneand-a-half to three minutes viewing time, I had to aim, instead, for the art experience.”45 Here, the act of speaking out of turn was redirected, as O’Grady moved away from the strategy of alien invasion taken up by Mlle Bourgeoise Noire to an unexpected but heartily embraced parade-crashing visual art (plate 15). The parade float as avant-garde artistic expression was also a risky maneuver, and one that would have vastly different implications in Harlem today.46 The idea came from O’Grady’s experience of attending parades throughout her childhood in major metropolitan cities—a West Indian cultural mainstay. Intent on proving wrong the woman who disassociated blackness with the avant-garde, and wanting to exhibit notions of high art and the experimental nature of the avant-garde to as many black people at one time as possible, the parade became a space of radical possibility and exposure. After scrapping an initial plan to bring art to the Harlem parade-goers by 116

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staging a small gallery show atop the float’s platform, O’Grady settled on her final, more participatory format, where spectators were directly implicated in the work’s production. The only instruction the artist provided was the meaning-laden Mad Lib “Art is . . .,” painted on the side of the gold trailer skirt. O’Grady was not from Harlem and was unfamiliar with the neighborhood. But she had intentionally avoided the more familiar environment of Brooklyn’s West Indian Day parade because she felt that avant-garde artistic expression could not successfully contend with the traditions and aesthetics of Carnival.47 Unable to anticipate the reception of her concept, O’Grady admits that not knowing what to expect of the Harlem parade or audience members may have contributed to the work’s success— success largely being read through the engagement of the parade-goers: “Frame me! Frame me! Make me art,” many exclaimed. In one image, a young female parade-goer with a close-cut Afro and wearing a blue dress extends her arm, and her index finger points directly at the camera through a frame held by one of O’Grady’s hired dancers (plate 16). Her face is alight; smiling broadly, she returns the gaze, flipping the conceptual framing of her body and her neighborhood back on the photographer and wouldbe viewers of the documentary image. Like many artists of color, O’Grady had found only sporadic opportunity to exhibit her work within the architectural confines of traditional art museums, and she thus embraced the unique format of the African American Day Parade’s use of public outdoor space. This outdoor environment, en route through a predominantly black community steeped in its own rich history and impressive cultural legacy, represented a political and communal arena in which to recoup a collective history of elision and to imagine that history’s revision. Within this public space, the lines between the hired performers and the spectators were blurred, “making the performances—like Suzanne Lacy’s Whisper, the Waves, the Wind—more congruent with modern-day notions of ‘ritual.’ ”48 O’Grady’s float also obscured the lines between art and life (black life in particular), integrating performers, artist, and spectators and achieving what the performance art historian Lucy Lippard identifies as the fundamental notion of feminist art: exchange.49 Indeed, Art Is . . . was also O’Grady’s second performance to make apparent a politics of pleasure amid institutional critique. The enthusiastic participatory reception came as a welcome surprise, including the engagement of her hired collaborators: I advertised in the back pages of some dailies or weeklies. . . . I think they were called Stage Door and Billboard. They had ads for actresses and dancers. . . . I got a mix of people, of dancers and actors. They were beautiful and they were up for it—really, really up for it. You can see how the people on the parade route liked being in photographs, and you can see how these performers liked framing them. . . . It was wonderful, just wonderful.50 MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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Reminiscent of radical street theater of the late 1960s and 1970s, Art Is . . . in many ways functioned as a democratization of art, a move that eschewed the alienation of the performers and O’Grady herself from the parade spectators and participants. This traditional division is well managed by the art world at large through the division of labor and consumption, which results in an “art world” and an “art industry,” as art and artists’ bodily performances become a commodity for sale to an exclusive (and frequently anonymous) audience.51 Often, communities of color are excluded from these transactions, and their labor (specifically, labor within these institutions) is extracted—removed from the context of producing and managing the very spaces from which they are alienated.52 Art Is . . . rejected this alienation, instead making the labor of black artists and the consumption of the art by black spectators visible, concurrent, and interdependent. During the parade, O’Grady stopped to solicit the contact information of anyone taking pictures; she reached out in the days following to gather images documenting her part in the event. She received dozens of prints in addition to the ones taken by the two photographers she had hired. A quarter of a century later, relying once again on performance documentation, O’Grady would coalesce the photos into a cohesive set for both website and potential gallery installation. A selection from the hundreds of images taken during the performance have been included in many noteworthy exhibitions, including Helen Molesworth’s This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, in 2012, and more recently in We Wanted a Revolution. Art Is . . ., along with its performers and participants, staged a counter-narrative to the art world’s narrowly conceived, strictly policed definition of the avant-garde and revised the notion of blackness as always already outside of or the antithesis of the avant-garde’s radical existence and creative sensibilities. Art Is . . . highlighted this outside by placing black and brown bodies inside the frame—frames intentionally wrought in gold, symbolizing the accoutrements of art’s historical legitimacy. An observation made by one of the parade’s participants—“That’s right, that’s what art is. We’re the art!”—became a pointed mission statement, as coproduced black existence within the frame became the material evidence of genius.53 These alien geniuses, like preestablished avant-garde artists, are said to exist on the fringes, tapping into a range of underexplored possibilities for radical substance, textuality, and existence—that is, for black survival. In 2020, O’Grady’s radical gilded proclamation was taken up anew in the weeks following the US presidential election when the Biden-Harris campaign, with the full endorsement of O’Grady and her gallery, released a video announcing their victory over the Trump-Pence incumbents.54 The two-minute video, set to Ray Charles’s rendition of “America the Beautiful,” opens with an aerial view over a white country church, the drone footage cutting to other panning views: a city skyline, small agribusinesses, industrial farming operations, middle-class homes in remote and suburban locales. Viewers are then introduced to an elderly white man leading a scruffy black horse to pasture and carrying a large gold frame. In quick successive cuts, Americans of all ages, genders, and races are featured—a swimmer, a boxer, fisher people, a 118

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fieldworker, a photographer, a shop owner, and a hairstylist—all touting gold frames of various sizes and ornamentation. The pandemic moment is wholly discernible, as most individuals wear protective masks and/or remain distanced from others. Despite the face coverings, however, their weary determination and grit is unmistakable. A kid attends school on a laptop; essential workers go about their essential tasks; differently abled bodies live full and joyous lives; gender-nonconforming folks’ relationships are validated. Viewers are offered both a reality and a dream. Like the actors, models, and dancers in the streets of Harlem in the early 1980s, a biker, surfer, and a nurse use their frames to capture the people around them—their work, home, and city—and the quotidian activities that evidence the simple pleasures of living in the United States. At a time when the national divide appears insurmountable, the video strategically cuts between a hospital, an Indian reservation, a farm, an urban center, and a suburb, reviving and reapplying the mid- to late twentieth-century assertion of O’Grady’s day that “Black Is Beautiful.” The video ends with a young black woman standing over one of the muchcontested yellow street murals reading “Black Lives Matter,” a visual icon that proliferated across US cities in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. It is a powerful moment of acknowledgment, one that highlights and reconciles the tension between the romantic image of the elder white man at the video’s opening and the violent inheritance of systemic white supremacy on which the United States was founded. The video’s cast of characters, the expansive environments, and the somber yet hopeful tone send a clear and perhaps equally radical message as O’Grady’s Art Is . . . from nearly forty years prior. The people, landscapes, and built environment are aweinspiring in their complexity, diversity, and resilience—America is indeed beautiful. By appropriating O’Grady’s conceptual semiotic of the golden frame, the campaign video gives the American people the “fine art treatment,” handling its subjects with deep appreciation that borders on aesthetic reverence. As the young black woman fades at the end of the video, she is replaced with a final slogan: “A Country for All Americans”

“Country” is quickly replaced by “Future,” which dissolves into the final text: “A President for All Americans.” Just as O’Grady made an incisive critique of the New York art world, the Biden campaign used the same golden symbols and everyday people to level a sharp indictment at the divisive, inflammatory, and polarizing rhetoric and actions of then president Donald Trump. — O’Grady’s Rivers, First Draft and Art Is . . . exist within a larger history of socially oriented work and feminist conceptual performances in public spaces, specifically in MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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their focus on labor proximate to the art world and institutional critique. But these performances also carve out a unique space for themselves in the use of embodied and multilayered out-of-turn speech, the conceptual claims to practices of avant-gardism, and the embedded processes of ontological reconciliation. In both projects, O’Grady offered a critique and provided the corrective. Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the early 1970s and Andrea Fraser in the late 1980s also challenged the very structures that made their conceptual art-making possible by examining how knowledge is produced around (and through) fine art objects, and through radical performances of out-of-turn labor. In 1973, equipped with a mop, buckets of water, and other cleaning supplies, Ukeles washed the pavement and stairs leading up to the entrance of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Images of the performance capture her sopping sudsy water across the pristine concrete pathway leading to the museum’s Gothic Revival building, constructed in 1844 and one of five connected structures housing the various galleries. Later the same day, Ukeles moved her performance, Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance—Outside and Inside, to the museum’s interior. Switching her mop for a handful of baby diapers, she proceeded to scrub the marble floors on hands and knees, cleaning footprints left by visitors as they passed. Ukeles worked for eight hours, making the labor of maintaining the institution, traditionally carried out by undercompensated custodians after hours (and thus invisible), hypervisible and inescapable. She was in the way—her body and actions out of turn, out of sync, with the museum’s typical daily operations and visitor experiences. Years later, O’Grady would insert her own body and wield her own set of props, both within institutions (crown and whip) and out in the streets (golden frames), to stage a set of analogous feminist critiques of black creative labor and value proximate to legitimized fine art spaces. In her “Maintenance Art Manifesto” (1969), which was prompted by the birth of her first child in 1968, Ukeles highlighted a dangerous farsightedness in the history of avant-garde artistic production and its surrounding culture: “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”55 Troubled by the value placed on her labor as a conceptual artist while her labor as a mother was ignored, Ukeles drafted her manifesto in what she has called “a quiet rage.” Driven by gendered exclusion, as O’Grady was driven by marginalization due to race as well as gender, Ukeles recounts the moment she found out she was pregnant. She was an MFA student at Pratt Institute, and a male professor broadcast to her entire sculpture class that a career as a professional artist would no longer be feasible for her. “I learned that [Jackson] Pollock, Marcel [Duchamp], and Mark [Rothko] didn’t change diapers. . . . I fell into a crisis. I didn’t want to be two separate people—the maintenance worker and the free artist—living in one body.”56 In her manifesto and subsequent performance acts, Ukeles rendered this division illegible: “Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up

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to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.”57 Similar refusals are found in O’Grady’s work: a refusal to split herself along lines of race and class in performances such as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and later, a refusal to compartmentalize her avant-garde sensibilities, black life, and creative ways of being in Art Is . . . Both practices enliven a feminist creative orientation, driving feminist manifesto(s) and perhaps even the feminist aesthetics Lippard ruminated on in her seminal collection From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (1976).58 This creative impulse has been sustained through performance art’s capacity to redirect focus within traditional art environments. Artist Andrea Fraser has rendered the production of knowledge and the proximity of labor to the fine arts apparent through an approach that mirrors O’Grady’s compulsion toward avatar production and invasion. In February 1989, Fraser delivered five performances, originally conceived as part of a lecture series organized by the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, as a docent named Jane Castleton to visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to the artist, “Jane Castleton is neither a character nor an individual. She is an object, a site determined by a function. As a docent, she is the museum’s representation, and her function is, quite simply, to tell visitors what the museum wants—that is, to tell them what they can give to satisfy the museum.”59 Staged later for a video recording in the same space, still disguised as the gray-suited Castleton, Fraser led a tour without a formal audience that would come to be known and subsequently exhibited in multiple contexts as Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989). Parodying the style and flow of a docent-led gallery tour, Fraser mixes traditional information about the museum’s architecture and history with passionate ruminations on social and political ideas. Some of the more out-of-turn elements occur when the artist offers commentary on the museum’s store, coatroom, drinking fountains, and toilets. Gesturing dramatically toward an exit sign, Fraser states, “This picture is a brilliant example of a brilliant school.” Beyond institutional critique, what O’Grady’s work offers in relationship to Ukeles’s early “maintenance art” and Fraser’s later guide parody is the use of her body to problematize and dismantle the parameters of the socialized norms surrounding subjectivity itself. In both Rivers, First Draft and Art Is . . ., she disrupted notions of blackness and black creative production as a limited set of accepted signifiers of identity. She did this in her assertion of a black middle-class existence characterized  by education, hybridization, and perpetual (mis)identification and rejection. This embodied disruption is a strategy other black women artists like Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, and Carrie Mae Weems have likewise utilized across their respective mediums, taking advantage of their own bodies as signifying systems through which to explore the self and its relationship to larger conceptions of being, and particularly against essentializing subject positions, or “the Cartesian subject.”60

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figure 18 Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Woman playing solitaire), from Kitchen Table Series, 1990. Gelatin silver print, 27 ¼ × 27 ¼ in. (69.2 × 69.2 cm). © Carrie Mae Weems / Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

CREATIVE LABOR: OVERTIME AND DOUBLE DUTY

A woman in a glossy frock, her skin dark mahogany, plays cards and smokes a cigarette alone at her kitchen table. Her posture is self-assured, her gaze focused. The blackand-white image holds stillness, a composure now closely associated with its maker, the photographer Carrie Mae Weems. This self-staged portrait is the last in her Kitchen Table Series (1990, fig. 18), which comprises twenty images, all of which include the artist. Yet Weems does not regard these images as self-portraits. Rather, the woman in the photographs is “a character,” she says, a protagonist. “I use my body as a stand-in, but I never think of it as being about me. Rather the character helps to reveal something that is more complicated about the lives of women.”61 In wielding her body as a surrogate for “all self-possessed women,” and in “controlling the 122

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narrative as both the subject and photographer,” Weems creates her own visual manifestos about blackness, womanhood, and the physical and emotional labor both positions entail.62 In this well-known series, Weems captures a black modern woman as she moves through life’s experiences of love, loss, motherhood, community engagement, and solitude. Her iconic self-staged portraits capture creative labor as it bleeds into other forms of domestic labor. Weems reclaims the kitchen table as the site where the frenzy and banality of everyday life meets the artist’s studio—the intermediary space where a black woman might work overtime and astride the lens.63 The position of existing “astride the lens” is, at its core, distinguished by labor—the dual labor the artist’s body performs once it has been split, or as it moves, across the chasms of creative expression. O’Grady, as well, exists astride the lens of labor as she performs her creative subjectivity as author and text, artist and object, performer and enactment. In the works discussed in this chapter, this is O’Grady’s and Weems’s practice par excellence. Astride the lens as a methodology is about experimenting with and expressing the multiple subjectivities of women artists, but it is also about the physical (and creative) labor of the artworks’ production. If labor takes place on either side of an artist’s selected medium, each side is essential for both the theoretical scaffolding of existing astride the lens and the distinct methods deployed in the acts of portrait sitting and photography, or of performance and documentation. The skills and logistics involved in shape-shifting one’s body and in self-display are quite demanding. The labor of standing still, posing the limbs, holding positions, and creating angles for light and shadow to move across the body requires extreme focus, patience, strength, and vision. Artists like O’Grady and Weems shape their bodies—they pose—by negotiating space in often dialogical ways, sometimes holding props and performing cultural debates in, on, and around their bodies—and against historical representations of black and brown women. As a model (or performing body) in Kitchen Table Series, Weems spectacularly wields her black and feminine body, physically and emotionally shape-shifting in front of her audiences as she dines with her lover, cries, does her makeup, and reads with her children, all at her kitchen table. The series concludes with four striking images of the artist alone. Her steady gaze confronts us, the viewer; the portraits come to life with words and gaze, making the invisible visible. On the other side of the camera, Weems’s practice and profession of photography is a different form of labor. Creative in its own way, the bulk of today’s photographic labor takes place on a computer, after the images have been staged and captured using the technology of the camera. That said, the process of capturing the image in the pre-digital era was equally taxing, as camera bodies range in size and weight, and lighting and backdrops likewise required management. Either way, hours are spent, whether hunched over chemical trays in darkrooms or with eyes glued to the computer monitor, in advance of any final object. Darkroom manipulation and Photoshop editing both require a significant amount of MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

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skilled labor—at the very least, a mastery of light. Moreover, self-staged portrait artists, including Weems, cut, crop, and suture images of their own bodies—model and portrait-sitter bodies—with their darkroom-hovering and light-wielding bodies. Together, this body and all of its laboring accomplish a visual proclamation, an embodied theorization of positionality and subjectivity, a mythic being (to borrow Adrian Piper’s term) and creative manifesto. O’Grady, like Weems, manages the multidimensional labor of scriptwriting, directing, acting, and choreography in order to write into her performance spaces her own positionality, one just as alien and invisible. In addition to the production of a mythic being in Rivers, First Draft and a creative manifesto in Art Is . . ., which are at once self-reflexive and outwardly directed, O’Grady derives her own performance rhetorics through two distinct spatiotemporal frameworks for out-of-turn presence. The artist asserted her presence through the acts of storytelling and public declaration, interventions she doubly amplified through the forms themselves—two site-specific, never-repeated appearances at the edge of the best-known public park in the nation and embedded in an annual parade in the creative capital of Harlem, USA. RITUAL AND ONTOLOGICAL RECONCILIATION

Like Weems’s portraits in the Kitchen Table Series, O’Grady’s ritual performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1980), discussed in the next chapter, does not exist on its own. Where lengthy vignettes are framed and exhibited alongside Weems’s photographs, didactic titles accompany O’Grady’s self-reflexive performance images, both projects framed by a specific textual context. In Weems’s case, Kitchen Table Series was inspired by the writings of Laura Mulvey, particularly “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), “which addressed the lack of nonobjectified representations of women in film and other cultural expressions.” The Kitchen Table Series, like Weems’s other series Family Pictures and Stories (1981–82), offered a response to Mulvey’s work—portraits of an often disregarded subject, “in this case, a modern black woman, ‘the other of the other.’ ”64 The significance of the accompanying text lies in its turbulent yet quotidian narrative, one of love, loss of love, motherhood, community engagement, and solitude: She’d been pickin em up and layin em down, moving to the next town for a while, needing a rest, some moss under her feet, plus a solid man who enjoyed a good fight with a brave woman. She needed a man who didn’t mind her bodacious manner, varied talents, hard laughter, multiple opinions, and her hopes were getting slender.65

The poetic words are thrown into relief by the interrogation-style light hovering over the kitchen table, suggesting that each scene must be examined and cross-examined carefully. Similar to the portrait pairings of family members and individuals in the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti’s family in O’Grady’s Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, Weems’s Kitchen Table Series centers black- and woman-identified textual bodies for 124

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the audience—viewers enter into the dynamic multimedium portraits of both O’Grady’s hybrid sisters and Weems’s character stand-in. The experience of reading text and imaged bodies alongside each other is punctuated by the labor taking place on and around the stage at Just Above Midtown, and later at Weems’s kitchen table— places the artists capture as sites of torment and sanctuary, conflict and reconciliation, and always investigation. Kitchen Table Series features in many publications and is best known for its striking imagery of the black female protagonist embodying a range of subject positions and emotions. Yet I understand its poetic and sometimes troubling narrative as an inextricable extension (if not co-constitutive element) of the images. Through this multidisciplinary self-reflexive manifesto, Weems achieves a rigorous phenomenological gesture, one that both establishes and captures the epistemological richness of black womanhood—womanhood the artist entangles and self-implicates through the self-captured image-narrative-myth-portrait on display. Chapter 4 explores, in greater depth, Lorraine O’Grady’s subsequent modus operandi: the diptych as manifesto. Her mastery of the diptych emerged from her early performances of self-reflexive mythmaking, a strategy Weems also explores in Kitchen Table Series. Like Weems, O’Grady is deeply invested in questioning how twentiethand twenty-first-century US culture has represented and imagined the subjectivity of black women. In their respective work, both artists tap the expressive power of quotidian experiences such as familial conflict, mourning, reconciliation, motherhood, labor of all kinds, and self-actualization. They produce pieces that are captivating and formally dynamic, presenting ideas that are confrontational, and complex in their use of textual and pictorial languages. In the performances, documentation, and interpretation of Rivers, First Draft and Art Is . . ., O’Grady wields her body, both in the moments of enactment and in the present-day archive, as a site from which to issue self-actualizing narratives and creative manifestos about laboring at the margins of art historical legitimacy. In these works, O’Grady moves away from a dialectic that is written (chapter 1) and spoken (chapter 2) to explore a language of the body, a mode through which the artist arrived at her adoption of the diptych (chapter 4).

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4 THE DIPTYCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

Most of what interests me is occurring in the in-between spaces.

lorraine o’grady, 2015 1

A

glides across a dark stage as a disembodied voice issues from a tape player nearby, reciting instructions for a communion ritual. In the low lighting, artist Lorraine O’Grady, who plays both the woman in red and the ethereal recorded voice, stirs sand and gestures in an attempt to awaken the dead (fig. 19). In the backdrop of this unfolding ceremony are two large projected slides showing individuals from two black families: O’Grady’s deceased sister, Devonia Evangeline, and the ancient Egyptian monarch Nefertiti. The images on the screens change as the ritual advances, each pairing consisting of an O’Grady family portrait and a picture of a ruler from Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty rendered in ancient stone. Titled Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and first performed in 1980, the work embodied the practice and temporality of grieving and reconciliation. Holding physical and spiritual space for two unrelated casts of characters, O’Grady employed anachronistic image pairings as a conduit of transhistorical identification. Beyond an examination of the families’ physical likeness, which WOMAN IN LONG RED ROBES

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figure 19 Lorraine O’Grady, “Told to swing an incense burner, she stirs sand instead,” from the performance Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline, 1980–88. Photographic documentation by Freida Leinwand. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

is striking, the performance was also a meditation on the artist’s difficult relationship with Devonia in dialogue with what O’Grady presumed to be a similarly troubled dynamic between the ancient sisters Nefertiti and Mutnedjmet.2 The performance documentation is grainy, and only six frames are provided in any public mention or display of the piece—fleeting moments that capture a mere essence of the entire durational experience. Untrained as an actress or dramaturge, O’Grady was enabled by the open and experimental arts communities in 1980s New York, particularly Linda Goode Bryant’s Just Above Midtown gallery, to forge a practice she understood as “writing in space,” an embodied process of working through ideas otherwise inaccessible in other media. As with Rivers, First Draft (1982), Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1980–88) provided O’Grady with the necessary creative tools to execute her autobiographical narratives. “Performance’s advantage over fiction was its ability to combine linear storytelling with nonlinear visuals,” the artist reflects. “You could make narratives in space as well as in time, and that was a boon for the story I had to tell.”3 Art historian and critic Judith Wilson notes how Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, only the artist’s second performance piece, departed significantly from her debut enactment Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83, the subject of chapter 2) four months earlier: 128

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Where the first work had lampooned Black aesthetics in the 1980s by linking them with social conventions of the 1950s, the new work lamented the tragic fates of an ancient Egyptian queen and a modern African-American “princess.” Where the earlier piece had smudged the line between life and art by utilizing “real” space/time and inviting a degree of audience participation, the new performance operated in the symbolic arena and mythic time of ritual, and re-established conventional boundaries between the artist/performer and her spectators.4

Expounding on the autobiographical elements present in Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady staged a rite of ontological reconciliation with her older sister, whose life came to a shocking end at age thirty-eight as the result of an abortion, approximately the same age as Nefertiti upon her own death.5 O’Grady’s interest in this African royal family arose during a three-week trip to Egypt in the summer of 1963, nearly twenty years before Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was conceived. The artist stepped out to get some traveler’s checks, a short walk that she recalls changed her life, as it was the first time she was surrounded by people who resembled her.6 After returning home to Boston, O’Grady began buying books on ancient Egypt and questioning contemporary Egyptologists’ stubborn denial of ancient Egyptian ties to the rest of Africa. By 1980, when Goode Bryant invited her to execute a piece at Just Above Midtown, the artist had fashioned herself into a self-taught Egyptologist. The performative ritual that she enlivened out of these years of research took place on a stage betwixt a seated audience and the projected images pairing O’Grady’s family members with Nefertiti’s kin. The performance evening, which took place on October 31, Halloween, was part of the exhibition Dialogues that Goode Bryant had organized in collaboration with other downtown art spaces, and O’Grady created Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline especially for the occasion. It was the first time the artist performed in front of a paying audience: Though the invitation to perform before a seated audience at Just Above Midtown was initially disconcerting, I soon converted it into a chance to objectify my relationship to Dee by comparing it to one I could imagine as equally troubled: that of Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnedjmet. No doubt this was a personal endeavor; I was seeking a catharsis.7

As she has done in no other project, O’Grady performed in this turbulent piece what Ann Cvetkovich terms an “archive of feelings,” a melancholy and ritualistic rite enacted for an audience.8 Performed only a few weeks following her debut appearances in Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, this piece, like most of O’Grady’s work, emerged from a “repository of feelings and emotions” sedimented in the artist herself and “encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception.”9 Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline is unique in its THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 20 Lorraine O’Grady, “You are protected, and you shall not die,” from the performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, 1980–88. Photographic documentation by Freida Leinwand. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

early, and prophetic, departure from the artist’s invasive, site-specific, confrontational, and interrogative performance posture. Also, whereas aesthetics seemed to cede ground to the conceptual visual semiotics in O’Grady’s other works, they took center stage, literally, in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline. Nefertiti, meaning “the beautiful one has come,” resonated throughout O’Grady’s performance at Just Above Midtown, according to Patricia S. Jones, who reviewed the showcase in LIVE: Performance 5, an annual journal published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The performance itself connected two women separated by time, place, and circumstance, and it unfolded around vignettes about sibling rivalries, weddings, childbirth, breakdowns, and death. “What one learned” over the course of the performance was that while Devonia “was loved to death; Nefertiti was hated to death.” Yet O’Grady’s somber portrayal showed that they shared more than tragic lives and endings, including parallel desires to shift their status—as women and as members of familial structures. At one point in the show, O’Grady stood before the large slide projection of her deceased sister and attempted to resurrect her using a ritual she had discovered in the Egyptian Book of the Dead (figs. 20, 21). “The ultimate passivity of the dead seemed galling to the righteous determination of the living,” Jones reflected.10 For O’Grady, juxtaposing Devonia Evangeline and Nefertiti was a political act as much as a personal one. 130

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figure 21 Lorraine O’Grady, “The voice on the tape says: ‘Mount and straddle tubs of sand, which are now touching . . . face audience,’ ” from the performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, 1980–88. Photographic documentation by Freida Leinwand. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

Who were Devonia and Nefertiti, then? Are they kindred based solely on their subtle likeness, or do they share something more—something timeless, universal? O’Grady’s performance spoke profoundly to these questions when she took up the charge of her own demanding persona, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and created work that reconfigured personal and collective mourning and challenged the very structure of kinship. And as Judith Wilson argues, O’Grady’s performance also “drove several controversial points home—Ancient Egypt’s African heritage, Black America’s multiracial ancestry, and the existence of a pre-Cosby era African-American aristocracy were all visibly evidenced by the juxtaposed photographic imagery.” Thus, “while she [the artist] failed to restore her lost sister to sight and breath, O’Grady succeeded in giving voice to the stifled history of a great civilization, and opening our eyes to a seldom seen aspect of a people, as well as a virtually unknown social class.”11 While distinct from Mlle Bourgeoise Noire’s invasive gallery enactments, the ritualistic cadence and melancholy tone of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline posed yet another challenge for viewers, who were forced into a very personal scene of mourning and melancholia—a risk, Jones’s review suggests, that was worth taking. The artist would go on to present Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline several times before retiring the piece in 1989. Following its October 1980 inauguration at Just Above THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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Midtown, O’Grady performed it at a benefit for a high school in Manhattan in spring 1981, then at the New York Feminist Art Institute in the fall of that same year. The following spring, she performed it at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.12 After 1983, O’Grady took a five-year hiatus from the art world, and upon her return she was asked by Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammond to participate in their landmark exhibition Art as a Verb: The Evolving Continuum (1988) on avant-garde works made by black artists, developed and organized by the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. For this show, O’Grady returned to Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline by transforming eight image slides from her earlier performance into four Cibachrome diptychs. She titled the works Sisters I, II, III, IV, and similar to their appearance in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, the pairs juxtaposed images of Devonia Evangeline and Nefertiti; Nefertiti with the artist and Mutnedjmet; and Devonia Evangeline’s two daughters with Nefertiti’s daughters.13 During the spring following Art as a Verb, O’Grady presented the original Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and thereafter she decided to retire the work. The decision was rooted in self-consciousness about her aging body, as she revealed in response to a comment by Brooklyn Rail critic Jarrett Earnest that “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire is very beautiful”: I don’t know, I suppose that to do this, to put yourself on display this way, you have to have a certain kind of confidence. Would I have been able to become a performance artist if I didn’t think I was attractive enough to receive the gaze? For sure, this is part of some kinds of performance work, though not all. And in some ways I stopped doing performance because I thought I was becoming less attractive. Well perhaps not less attractive, but beginning to look different. I’d started performance in 1980, when I was forty-five. By 1983 I was forty-eight and aging was becoming a subtext of my performances whether I liked it or not. I didn’t want to have to deal with “aging” when, for me, there were so many more pressing issues to examine. Just by chance, I stopped performing in 1983 because my mother got sick. . . . It was a relief to not be looked at.14

In 1983, O’Grady had stepped away from the all-encompassing New York arts communities she had involved herself in over the past decade to care for her ailing mother in Boston, who had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was the first time she had returned to Boston for any substantive duration since she had graduated from Wellesley College, and she understood the homecoming as crucial to the production of future work. Responding to interviewer Linda Montano’s question, “Is your mother’s illness releasing in your character a new way?” she replied: Today I’m leaving on a trip to Boston, not just to see her but to prepare to work on something which needs Boston to feed it. I know that going back to Boston for the summer is not just about taking care of my mother but about going back to the source. I also know that her illness has released a lot in me. It’s released tenderness, and the ability to take 132

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care of someone, which isn’t a role I’ve ever imagined myself successful in. It’s evoking all those things, and I sense that the trip is going to release incredible creative energy.15

After finally moving her mother into a nursing home in 1988, the artist returned to New York and shifted her practice from spaces of experimental performance to the gallery wall—to examine “more pressing issues,” largely through the elaboration and revision of past work. And even though she soon retired Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, she did come back to its central images, which provided the initial spark and consummate transition into her conceptual use of the diptych as form. These avant-garde enactments, like all historic performance works, are challenging to theorize in the present, removed from the event itself, despite O’Grady’s and other artists’ efforts to immortalize their work via photo archives. Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline is a particularly difficult piece to understand in retrospect, as it is one of the few performance works by O’Grady that has yet to be re-presented in stills, a process that has come to characterize much of the artist’s practice in the last ten years.16 O’Grady did not, however, altogether abandon the sixty-five image sets used in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline. Rather, fourteen years after the work’s first appearance at the Just Above Midtown showcase, O’Grady appropriated some of the diptych pairs for a new body of work, Miscegenated Family Album (1994), a set of sixteen two-dimensional printed images framed and hung together. What remains, then, of the dark and haunting ritualized enactment O’Grady performed in honor of her sister are the concise diptychs that comprise that series. O’Grady has called it her “most complete and satisfying work.”17 Given Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline’s new framing through Miscegenated Family Album, the sparse scholarly attention paid to it to date, and the limited photographic documentation available, my only experience of this early performance has been through a variety of decontextualized snippets on the internet—a rare conundrum in the eight years of study that have produced this monograph (although I have a sneaking suspicion that video documentation does indeed exist, and my search is ongoing). Significantly, this methodological quagmire highlights how much of O’Grady’s embodied discourse of the 1980s is translated and transcribed, not through the visual text of the body in space or time but rather through the literary form of the performance script—a tension that invigorated my analysis of Rivers, First Draft in chapter 3—and the artist’s ever-changing, highly mediated website, which acts as a veritable work in its own right within O’Grady’s repertoire. Since much of my sustained engagement with O’Grady’s oeuvre has been strategically determined by the artist herself, some bodies of work have been more easily accessible than others. And coinciding with the increased rate at which O’Grady’s work is receiving critical attention, the artist has been constantly reinventing the archive through her own writing, which she has done to an impressive degree in the last five years, simultaneously reflecting on her early practice and seeking to understand her twenty-first-century audiences. In addition to this writing and revision, THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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another way one might experience O’Grady’s 1980s performance work today is through her more recent deployment of the diptych to recuperate, reexamine, and resituate her critical praxis for herself and her contemporary audiences. In a move that began in the early 1980s with O’Grady’s use of historical figures in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, and later in the projects Miscegenated Family Album and Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good (1998), the artist evolved from a focus on the relationship between herself and the art world, which she interrogated in Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83), Rivers, First Draft (1982), The Black and White Show (1983), and Art Is . . . (1983), to a broader historical archive invested in larger structural narratives about race, gender, and culture. This chapter examines the latter part of O’Grady’s career by charting this evolution, which was catalyzed by the artist’s return to the art world following her hiatus in the late 1980s. In addition to narrativizing this moment in O’Grady’s practice in detail for the first time, I theorize some of her projects of the late 1990s and early 2000s, with a particular focus on the artist’s deployment of the diptych. During this period, the diptych became a central modality in O’Grady’s transition from live performance and a central narrative script to the two-dimensionality of still images and a hung gallery installation. For O’Grady, despite this shift in form, the work she produced during the 1990s and early 2000s remained fixed to notions of writing and the artist’s own conceptions around space. The diptych, as theory and device, provided a modality the artist strategically oriented to subvert Western dualism—in her words, to produce “spatial narrative,” which was central to her early conceptual performance practice.18 In fact, O’Grady has argued recently that her early performance Rivers, First Draft was one of the “most complete examples” of her diptych methodology, despite the absence of actual diptychs.19 The diptych, then, while frozen in space and time, allowed O’Grady to bring her proclivity for critical juxtapositions to the gallery wall through two-dimensional imagery, and her proclivity for its visual form was rooted in her career-long fascination with language. In other words, O’Grady’s use of language was reconstituted, rather than abandoned, in the artist’s adoption of the diptych as idea and form. FROM PERFORMANCE TO DIPTYCH: “WRITING IN SPACE” TO “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

There is an uncanny resemblance between the cold stone and the smooth, fleshy surfaces of the subjects in Miscegenated Family Album. The faces belong to sisters. Yet, separated by more than thirty centuries, these sisters are not biological. Rather, the images were appropriated from several sources: photos sent from a cousin in Washington, DC; images scavenged in the garage of the artist’s deceased sister’s former husband; a copy of an old Louis Fabian Bachrach portrait the artist had taken for her significant other on the occasion of their parting; pages mined from books about Egypt.20 By combining images from vastly disparate sources under the title Sisters, 134

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O’Grady asks the viewer, through language and mythology, to consider the meaning and structure of kinship. Whether stone or flesh, each subject in the series possesses smooth, presumably light brown skin, chiseled features, almond eyes, and full lips. The title itself, Miscegenated Family Album, makes direct reference to the prominence and complexity of skin tone and racialized features across the African diaspora. The word “miscegenation” connotes both the social reality of mixed-race families and a long history of fear and hatred of racial mixing. Miscegenation haunts viewers’ interpretive frame as they ponder the relation between the women in each diptych pairing. Miscegenated Family Album, which was completed during a residency with the Sharpe Foundation, revisited the sixty-five diptychs used in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, which were “spread out, moved, deselected, and rearranged,” on the floor of her studio, until a final grouping of sixteen pairings emerged, a similar approach to the one taken in O’Grady’s first body of work, Cutting Out the New York Times. Significantly, Miscegenated Family Album was the artist’s first use of the diptych as a stand-alone modality, without accompanying performance. In the pairing Sisters II (L: Nefertiti’s daughter Merytaten, R: Devonia’s daughter Candace), Candace’s face on the right fills the frame, her natural hair abounds and is cropped by the white matte, and her gaze focuses off camera (fig. 22). Candace is the daughter of O’Grady’s sister Devonia, and the image was taken from a group photo of coworkers on the Berlin set of a Marlon Brando film, where she was first assistant director. The stone bust of Merytaten, Nefertiti’s daughter, hair also full, fixes her gaze in the opposite direction. Not only do the two bear a striking resemblance but so too do Candace and the artist herself, whose Bachrach portrait shares visual space with Nefertiti’s sister Mutnedjmet in Sisters IV (L: Devonia’s sister Lorraine, R: Nefertiti’s sister Mutnedjmet). The meaning embedded in the portrait pairings evokes how the artist’s hand-stitched white glove gown (a work of art in its own right) was activated through the intervening body of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. It is an instigation her later diptychs would not require. Rather, these newer works’ full articulation is rooted in the formal grounds of the diptych as a communicative and comparative linguistic tool, one that mobilizes a formal system of binary opposition—embodied by the hinge that separates the portraits—as well as narrative and spatial proximity. O’Grady takes up the diptych to pose more questions than answers, reveal more similarities than differences, suggest affinity, and force reconciliation in her subjects and in the viewer. Hierarchy is exploded as two distinct images are brought together on relatively equal terms by the artist to accomplish an unconventional narrative. Simply put, a diptych is an ancient construction, referring originally to a pair of hinged wax-filled or clay plates used in scholarly contexts, on which text was scratched using a stylus. Later, the term referred to two wooden panels, also hinged, used as transportable altarpieces. These were typically elaborately designed, ornately painted or carved reliefs of important religious scenes and figures. In both early forms, the THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 22 Lorraine O’Grady, Sisters II (L: Nefertiti’s daughter Merytaten, R: Devonia’s daughter Candace), from Miscegenated Family Album, 1980/1994. Cibachrome print, 26 × 37 in. (66 × 94 cm). Edition of 8 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

diptych was directly tied to projects of literacy and the presentation of textual and visual information. An early notebook of sorts, it captured the written words of its owner in the form of lessons, meditations, prose, and recitations. However, the wax form was temporally restrictive, serving the repetitive purpose of practice or record keeping, not dissimilar to O’Grady’s tedious Latin exercises completed ad nauseam during her time at the prestigious Girls’ Latin School in Boston. The ornately crafted forms offered a pictorial language for a largely illiterate population to learn the scriptures and connect with teachings founds in holy texts. Unlike the paired slides in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, the formally constructed diptychs in Miscegenated Family Album exist on their own, with the hinge—the space in between—facilitating their relationship to one another, and to viewers. For O’Grady, the diptych not only invokes literature but also forces two seemingly disparate or unique entities into binary opposition. This power of juxtaposition is one the artist initiated in the early 1980s with the performance Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline, then developed in the early 1990s in BodyGround, and brought to full fruition in The First and Last of the Modernists in the early 2010s, discussed later in this chapter, and Cutting Out CONYT in 2017 (covered in the conclusion). The strategy mirrors the artist’s own 136

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internal tensions between her Caribbean heritage and her New England upbringing, as well as her life as a middle- to upper-class woman and the art world’s limiting parameters for understanding and recognizing blackness. Through a form that initiates and demands a dichotomous relation, O’Grady, using both sides of each diptych pairing and the space in between, asserts a decisive epistemological both/and. In Miscegenated Family Album, for example, the diptych is a tool to both produce and contextualize mythologies surrounding ancient Egypt, historic and contemporary black womanhood, and fraught familial dynamics. Rooted in her experimental performance praxis, O’Grady’s use of the diptych hinges on a creative manifesto of tensions—one that is developed and refined across the aforementioned projects. While Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline was the artist’s first fully articulated use of portrait pairings, the images’ deployment was grounded in the work’s conception as a staged, embodied enactment. That is, the tensions O’Grady animated through the presentation of family portraits alongside reproduced imagery of ancient Egyptian royalty were activated by her conceptual and ritual enactments at Just Above Midtown in the 1980s. It was largely the market that led O’Grady in 1994 to create the wall installation Miscegenated Family Album as framed and hung Cibachromes. Additionally, as with many other experimental, process-based, and conceptual artists, the late 1980s and early 1990s was a time when their practices largely fell under attack by right-wing conservative groups. Fundamentalists’ rage and encroachment on freedom of expression during a period now widely known as the culture wars fueled their organizing efforts to defund government art programs and target art institutions receiving public support. And while O’Grady’s work maintained its cultural and critical heft during this period, her shift in creative modality came at a time when artists were being pressured to have something to show for their practice—a physical object, namely a commodity carrying cultural and financial value. O’Grady reflects, “Oddly, rather than traducing the original performance idea, Miscegenated Family Album seemed to carry it to a new and inevitable form, one that I call ‘spatial narrative.’ ” There were sacrifices, however, especially for an artist that performance had allowed to become an author in space; that process of becoming, O’Grady notes, was lost on the gallery wall. While the installation was indeed designed to deliver a total experience, when “diptychs are shown or reproduced separately, as they often must be, it is difficult to maintain and convey the narrative, or performance, idea.”21 This is a challenge O’Grady took up in her later use of the diptych as discrete and stand-alone—unfettered by a more immersive phenomenological genesis. BODY / GROUND

Upon her return to New York in 1988, O’Grady began producing a series of photomontages that would feature in her first solo exhibition, Lorraine O’Grady, at the International Arts Relations gallery. This was a groundbreaking Off Broadway theater space and arts center founded by Cuban American producer Max Ferrá in the mid-1960s. THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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O’Grady’s show ran from January 21 to February 22, 1991, and presented a body of work titled Body Is the Ground of My Experience (BodyGround). The works shown represented several themes from her 1982 Central Park performance Rivers, First Draft. Remaining deeply inspired by her personal experiences as an affluent black woman of Caribbean decent, these works emerged from several concerns affecting her art making and writing, such as identity and subjectivity in both O’Grady’s dreams and the shifting sociopolitical environment of the 1980s and 1990s. For O’Grady, the move from experimental performance to the gallery wall also “had financial, personal, and theoretical motives,” as her work developed in a way that required sustained and repeated engagement. Drawn to the psychologically driven modes of Surrealism, O’Grady’s photomontages examined what the artist felt to be a reductionist approach to postmodern historical revisionism, an endeavor she believed evacuated the theoretical heft of one’s own body in service of those in power: “For while the body undoubtedly received history’s effects and was shaped by them, it was also, in an excess, the location of resistance.”22 This thinking came across in her prePhotoshop layering of bodies through the use of collage and double exposure, elements arranged in space to contest postmodernist historicity and to produce new meaning using her own body, and personal history, as the sites through which critique and theoretical inquiry take place. The artist understood these pieces as “collapsed diptychs”—a first iteration of producing two-dimensional spatial narratives, from scratch, that would stand apart from any performance.23 In the image titled The Fir-Palm (1991, fig. 23), a direct and sharply focused capture of a black female torso, the smooth black body is strangely distorted. This porous swatch fills the bottom fourth of the image’s vertical composition. Set against a luminous sky and cirrostratus clouds is a bizarre botanical, an amalgam of long palm trunk and evergreen fronds. The “fir-palm,” as the title suggests, grows sideways from a crevice in the fleshy ground of the image. In its symbolic placement, the layered photograph suggests that the hybrid shrub, representative of two distinct ecosystems—two irreconcilable landscapes—has been conceived and nurtured via the navel of the corpus obscure. However, the reverse can also be deduced and the umbilical-like growth seen as nourishing the body ground from which it protrudes. In what the artist calls her first selfportrait, O’Grady carries over the trope of the fir-palm seen in Rivers, First Draft as well as the tensions enmeshed in cultural hybridity. A second body-as-ground arrangement, titled Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers (1991, fig. 24), is dominated by layered warships descending from the top of the frame and out of yet another cloudy sky. The bows of these ships, falling from thin air in a triangular formation, point toward the textured dermis and disappear into a horizon line joined together by coarse black pubic hair and the clouds beyond. The title suggests that these destroyers have been deployed by the ancient mythological enchantress Lilith, who, according to legend, acts in the night, stealing babies from their mothers and engaging in maleficent sexual promiscuity. The image and text in Lilith Sends Out 138

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figure 23 Lorraine O’Grady, The Fir-Palm, 1991/2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, 50 × 40 in. (127 × 101.6 cm). Edition of 10 + 3 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

the Destroyers, like The Fir-Palm, are didactic. Together, the myth and O’Grady’s surreal composite imagery allude to the systemic violence experienced by women, and the historic and contemporary battleground that has been the womb. Whether drawing upon the personal trauma of miscarriage, the experience of abortion, or practices of forced sterilization and violence enacted upon women of color broadly, this piece litTHE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 24 Lorraine O’Grady, Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers, 1991/2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, 50 × 40 in. (127 × 101.6 cm). Edition of 10 + 3 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist.

erally and metaphorically returns to the body, the ground, as the ontological site of female subjugation.24 In a third piece, The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years (1991, fig. 25), viewers are introduced to the only fully articulated figures in the series. Four women dressed in early-twentieth-century attire stand along the roof of a three-story 140

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Victorian house at the center of the piece and gaze directly out at the viewer. A US flag hangs from a second-story window, caught eerily mid-wave in the still atmosphere, casting a sharp shadow across the building’s facade. The women, appropriated from four distinct sittings, are members of O’Grady’s family, including the artist’s mother second from the left. The house is on plastic wheels, its frame slightly askance as it makes its way across yet another flesh-covered ground, this one resembling the subtle curvature and grace of a woman’s neck or collarbone. Based on a dream O’Grady had in 1982 of a peculiar taxi ride she took with her mother and “various aunts,” the photomontage narrativizes an expansive passage from Africa, to Jamaica, to Boston over two hundred years, as the title indicates. In the dream the artist is in a “therapy camp” where she is forced by several therapists, including a black woman, to “prove that [she] belong[s] there.” The artist struggles to answer. Eventually she packs her bags and readies herself to call a cab: Suddenly I have many relatives with me. Mama, and the various aunts. They are supposed to be helping me with my bags, but they really don’t. When we hail a cab, Dan Goldberg comes along driving a gorgeous antique, fully outfitted as the living room of a European country house on wheels. Mama and the others are fascinated by the décor and climb in.25

It is but one story out of millions of migrations—however, it is one that is often lost amid the violence and historic trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and its aftermath. O’Grady’s family movement is marked by access, education, and, as evidenced in The Strange Taxi, mobility. A strange ride, indeed, against the steady traffic in black bodies, routes marked in blood, from Africa to the Caribbean and finally to the United States. In the Heresies issue where O’Grady’s 1982 essay “Black Dreams” was published, the artist pairs her visions with commentary. Of the bizarre cab and the encounter with her family, she writes: Mama and the aunts can’t help me—they’re part of the baggage I’m carrying. Problems of racial identity. It’s their fascination with European elegance that’s been transmitted to me. The “European country house on wheels” is driven by Dan Goldberg, a friend whose rich, liberal parents sent him to a racially mixed high school. . . . Are we meeting in the middle here? Is this a projection of my belief in the mulatto as the crucible and the solution? Earlier today, flipping back through pages of responses to dreams in other categories, I felt short-circuited. I had an intuition: YOU KNOW, LORRAINE, YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MAY CONTAIN TOO MANY ISSUES FOR ONE CONSCIOUSNESS TO INTEGRATE. Mama. Papa. Dee. Blackness. Child abuse. Dozens of others. YOU MAY HAVE TO MAKE ARBITRARY DECISIONS, DEAL WITH EACH PROBLEM AS IT COMES UP. AS IF THE OTHERS DIDN’T EXIST. . . . This cab actually drives off. Is it possible that change can take place after all?26 THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 25 Lorraine O’Grady, The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years, 1991/2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, 50 × 40 in. (127 × 101.6 cm). Edition of 10 + 3 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

In The Strange Taxi, the artist picks up her dreamlike collage work in space, a process of simultaneity catalyzed in Rivers, First Draft. The piece connects generational trauma to personal trauma in dream meditations. This Surrealistic layering method deployed in The Strange Taxi, and BodyGround broadly, enabled O’Grady to pursue the same questions about her black middle- to upper-class background and experiences that 142

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compelled her entry into the art world and much of her work. While the method and materials moved from embodied enactment to two-dimensional collage, the power of O’Grady’s writing—the narrative produced through dream, performance script, expression, gesture, and now layered imagery—remained grounded in the artist’s subjectivity as a black woman making her way through many social, cultural, and political worlds at once. O’Grady explains: “In general [I had] avoided the most egregious forms of discrimination—perhaps due to how I looked (I was fair-skinned and still straightened my hair) . . . [and perhaps also because in my previous worlds, there were more objective measurements of achievement which I met easily]. The art world was the first place I’d felt [unfairly] ‘cornered’ that way.”27 Both the dream journal and The Strange Taxi reflect the chaos and complexity of the black migrant experience, and the psychosocial implications of middle-class sensibilities on black female subjectivity in the United States. The works together theorize a process of loss and reclamation of a black woman’s body—a body set apart, overdetermined.28 The artist deploys her own body, as she does the bodies of La Malinche and Sally Hemings (as I will discuss below), as a liminal body, making all three the subjects of hypervisuality, and of fantastical and experimental translation in the cryptology of hybridization, violence, miscegenation, and self-actualization within the visual field. These three dreamlike pieces also interrogate the minimization or complete loss of the body in postmodernism’s deconstructionist approaches to art criticism and cultural theorizing. In her photomontages, O’Grady asserts the body as the bedrock of history, and as the foundation of all experiences, personal and universal. In a new context, O’Grady pushed her claims to an entangled, undertheorized, diasporic experience in her 2020 installation of The Strange Taxi on the exterior facade of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The installation was commissioned by curator Nathaniel Silver, who also invited O’Grady to reflect on the life of Thomas McKeller for the catalogue of an exhibition the museum presented on US painter John Singer Sargent. McKeller, an African American from North Carolina and a longtime muse of Sargent, migrated to Boston in the early twentieth century around the time when O’Grady’s father, Edwin O’Grady, immigrated from Jamaica. By asking O’Grady to perform a parallel autobiography alongside her migration-inspired photomontage, Silver, with O’Grady, sought via an article for the catalogue to contextualize a city and a set of experiences proximate to those embodied by McKeller during his life in Boston. Posing more questions than answers, and drawing once again upon personal histories, the artist’s catalogue essay traces points of contact in black middle-class life: private schools, immigrant neighbors, parties and society gatherings, work. O’Grady fills the numerous gaps in the archive with narratives of her own, using both the imagery and the methodology of The Strange Taxi to guide her examination of the migration and settlement of two black men in Boston as both an isolating endeavor and a strangely entangled one. At the time of McKeller’s death on July 15, 1962, the former model THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 26 Lorraine O’Grady, Gaze, 1991/2019. Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, four panels, each 24 × 19 ¼ in. (61 × 48.9 cm). Edition of 10 + 3 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

resided at 28 Wabon Street, a small dead-end road, the very same one that Edwin and his wife, Lena, lived on in 1962. What is evidenced in O’Grady’s exercise and made apparent in the photomontage is that for McKeller, his black body denuded and made perfect by Sargent’s gaze and brush was the ground on which the record of his experiences resides. Moving away from these surreal skinscapes and into more literal, conceptually driven visualization, O’Grady presented in the original International Arts Relations exhibition two sets of quadriptych portraits, Dream and Gaze (both 1991), which were also classified by the artist as collapsed diptychs. Comprised of frontal portraits of eight different individuals, each connected in some way to the arts, these complementary works gesture toward the art historical lure of the nude model across movements and styles to produce creative visions based in both fantasy and reality, while also presenting marginalized black and brown subjectivity. Each of the portraits in Gaze is shot against a stark white background, with each individual—two black men and two black women—captured from their bare shoulders up, filling the frame and staring stoically into the camera (fig. 26).29 The outer figure was asked “to express a combination of anger and contempt—the kind of look they might have if they thought someone were stupid, but couldn’t say so.” In front, centered and directly below the figure’s head, the individual is repeated, a tiny double. These smaller figures are also frontally posed, gazes focused into the camera, but a subtle smile plays across each of their faces, an unnerving juxtaposition. For this inner figure, sitters were asked to convey “quiet pleasure, as if a secret thought had made them smile to themselves.”30 Dream follows the same formal schema as Gaze with inner and outer figures. This iteration, however, features a new group of sitters—two black men and two black women—with eyes gently closed instead of open, reversing the expressive standpoint (fig. 27).31 The faces of the larger subjects are tranquil, their thoughts presumably 144

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figure 27 Lorraine O’Grady, Dream, 1991/2019. Archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, four panels, each 24 × 19 ¼ in. (61 × 48.9 cm). Edition of 10 + 3 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist.

pleasant; they had been “asked to present . . . that they were having a light and amusing dream.” Now the tight-lipped, clenched-jaw visages belong to the miniatures, who were asked “to imagine themselves submerged in deep spiritual trance.”32 In both Dream and Gaze, bodies—all flesh, bone, and expression—are juxtaposed and flattened, a flattening that exemplifies the artist’s critiques of both multiculturalism’s persistent cooptation and postmodernism’s deconstructive approaches to the subject, history, and culture.33 In Gaze and Dream, the body layering presents to the world two faces of the same individual, and through the artist’s prompting, both an outer and an inner view is captured—the metaphysical and the physical. As noted by Calvin Reid, “The works attempt to locate the existential core of their subjects, stripped of defenses, presumptions and psychic bric-a-brac.”34 Dream and Gaze offer a sterile glimpse of what remains—the denuded flesh of black bodies, all expression and imagination. In both approaches to the “collapsed diptych”—the body/ground compositions and the dialectic arrangements presented in Gaze and Dream—the theoretical conduit between O’Grady’s language-driven critiques and the narrative underpinnings of her own conceptual framing through title and writing further advance the mythological imperative central to spatialized storytelling. O’Grady’s is a version of self-mythologizing that, while based in the formal presentation of layered imagery, for the artist, is reliant on the linguistic determinants that accompany each project (text and voice). Indeed, central to the artist’s practice is a proclivity toward inexhaustible explanation and theorizing, written and oral, that she performs again and again for each set of artistic ideas. Few projects are left theoretically unattended, unattached from the artist’s own interpretation, which is fundamental to one’s experience of O’Grady’s imagery. In her writing on the diptych, O’Grady often makes the case for this formal dynamic (images and ideas presented side by side) as distinct for conveying narrative and producing nonhierarchical discourse, which might be extended to constitute a unique language all on its THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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own, without written or spoken words. However, the artist herself stops short of this potentiality, as she has clarified in the presentation of her work online: “I didn’t want people to just look at the pictures. You can’t even get to the images without going through text; every link lands you back into text.”35 This language-driven redirection and the entanglement between the artist and her work often makes the work’s meaning overdetermined, which raises questions about how, when, or if any of O’Grady’s projects can be experienced outside of her meticulous control. For now at least, with O’Grady constantly monitoring (and editing) the sites through which her work is engaged, adding both new and old material, interpretations of the artist’s complex conceptual art praxis remain inextricably linked to her own. JUXTAPOSITION AND SPATIAL NARRATIVE

The remaining works in the BodyGround exhibition were two diptychs, at this point O’Grady’s dominant modus operandi. Both made in 1991 and titled The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me (fig. 28) and Dracula and the Artist, these diptych photomontages hone O’Grady’s spatialized theorizing in the frame, in two dimensions rather than the full range of space and the sensorial accessible via site-specific performance.36 In the left panel of The Clearing, a well-dressed little boy and girl of ambiguous racial background chase a ball in a grassy field, their exuberant bodies frozen mid-stride. The ball rolls toward a heap of clothes that has been unceremoniously discarded, along with a handgun, in the left-hand corner of the frame. The scene is full of tensions. Subtitled “Green Love,” the collage also includes a naked, embracing couple hovering in the air over the dense tree line—a white man atop a black woman, appearing to penetrate her. Their cheeks touch and the woman’s head lolls back in what might be read as ecstatic abandon. The subtitle and its color reference suggest newness, hinting at both the playing children and the coital couple. The right panel, subtitled “Love in Black and White,” shifts dramatically in tone, from youthful energy and pleasure to ambiguity and potential violence. The black woman’s body is now lying still on the ground, legs splayed and arms straight by her side. Her eyes, wide open and unfocused, gaze overhead. She is fondled by perhaps the same white man, now in a torn mesh chain mail bodysuit and lying beside her, whose head has been replaced by a human skull. Their figures rest in the same clearing, but the playful children, abandoned clothes, and gun are now gone. The grass is empty aside from the two bodies. The title of the work, again, is instructive, as it references two historic interracial couples: Hernán Cortés and La Malinche, and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Cortés was a Spanish conquistador who led the sixteenth-century expedition that initiated the fall of the Aztec Empire. Famously, he was part of the first wave of Spanish colonizers to ravage the Americas. La Malinche was an Indigenous Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast who was one of nearly two dozen enslaved women given 146

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figure 28 Lorraine O’Grady, The Clearing: or Cortés and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, from the series Body Is the Ground of My Experience, 1991/2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Baryta pure cotton photo rag paper, diptych, each panel 40 × 50 in. (101.6 × 127 cm). Edition of 10 + 3 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

to the Spaniards by the natives of Tabasco in 1519.37 She is notorious for her central role in the Spanish conquest as an interpreter, advisor, and liaison for Cortés. One of her most valuable roles was that of a polyglot, providing the strategic cultural and linguistic translation necessary to defeat the powerful Aztecs. La Malinche also gave birth to Cortés’s first son, who has been mythologized as one of the first mestizos, or people of mixed Indigenous American and European ancestry. Today, the epic destruction of the Aztec Empire and La Malinche’s role in it are still hotly contested; she has become simultaneously the symbolic mother of the new Mexican people, the embodiment of treachery, and the quintessential victim of the powerful legacy of mass enslavement and colonial violence.38 The title also alludes to Sally Hemings, the enslaved mixed-race African American woman owned by third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who bore five of his children. Hemings is thought to be the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Jefferson; she came to live on the Jefferson estate with her mixed-race mother and siblings following the death of her owner and presumed father, John Wayles.39 Historians believe that Thomas Jefferson pursued a sexual relationship with Hemings soon after his wife’s death, when Hemings was around age sixteen and Jefferson forty-six. Despite their long-term sexual relationship and the subsequent controversy surrounding Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children, Hemings remained enslaved until Jefferson’s death, even after he liberated her children as they came of age. Both historical couples invoked in the title, Jefferson and Hemings and La Malinche and Cortés, help viewers interpret the relational dynamic presented in the right panel of the diptych. The title contextualizes both sides of the diptych by locating the modern subject—a hybrid subject—within histories of conquest and subjugation. THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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Since The Clearing was first exhibited, the piece has been included in a number of shows and O’Grady has experienced a variety of responses to it, many from individuals who find the diptych troubling. The artist describes one studio visit encounter, two years after the work’s creation, with a white male curator from the South: “I don’t like it,” he said. “That’s not the way sex is supposed to be.” O’Grady’s account is ambiguous as to whether the curator was referring to the violence or the interracial dynamic. However, the artist responded by pointing toward the unacknowledged relationships that created culture in the Western Hemisphere. The curator remained unconvinced, and he followed up their exchange on the appropriateness of the presentation of O’Grady’s black and white couple with a query about the historical timeline: “Are the two panels before and after?” To which the artist replied, “No. They are both/and.”40 The artist returned to The Clearing once the curator left her studio, reflecting on the ways it collapsed several of her personal romantic relationships, which she had “only recently begun to view in historic and cultural terms,” combining them in this diptych “into a single event in which beginning and end, ecstasy and exploitation are simultaneous.”41 Shortly after this particular studio visit, The Clearing was requested for inclusion in Ellen Cantor’s exhibition Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, presented at David Zwirner Gallery and Simon Watson / The Contemporary. O’Grady was looking forward to the show; her diptych would be the only inclusion by a black woman, and she was nervous. At the opening, however, only “Green Love,” the left panel, was on the wall. “Love in Black and White” was purportedly omitted because it made the piece too large relative to the many other featured works. O’Grady seemed placated by this nicety. She remarked in retrospect: “At least she doesn’t say, ‘That’s not the way sex is supposed to be.’ ”42 The incident was shameful, however, not only for the glaring omission of any other black women, the feeble excuse of lack of space, and the curatorial silencing of the less-than-romantic revelation O’Grady offers her viewers, but also for the wrenching apart of two pieces of a single composition in the cowardly service of, one can only assume, nearsighted and misplaced respectability politics. The diptych The Clearing speaks out of turn, and in the exhibition Coming to Power, O’Grady was forcefully abridged, her spatial narrative silenced. Twenty years later, another curator requested to include The Clearing in a show. This time, Bennett Simpson, then curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, included the full work in his landmark exhibition Blues for Smoke. In the catalogue, Bennett recognized the centrality of the diptych’s content to the artist’s conceptual explorations of hybridity in the cultural formation of the Western Hemisphere: Lorraine O’Grady insists upon, rather than running from, the profound racial and sexual collisions that have shaped America from its origins. An allegory of miscegenation spanning multiple eras—from the colonial past to the contemporary present—the work . . . reflect[s] the deep intermingling of pain, pleasure, abuse, and desire that gave birth to and continues to inform the peculiar hybridity of the New World.43 148

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O’Grady’s use of La Malinche is significant for several reasons, but the Nahua woman’s position as a translator has gone largely unaccounted for in discussions of the work, which tend to focus on interracial sex, histories of violence, and miscegenation. As O’Grady herself states: My attitude about hybridity is that it is essential to understanding what is happening here. People’s reluctance to acknowledge it is part of the problem. . . . The argument for embracing the Other is more realistic than what is usually argued for, which is an idealistic and almost romantic maintenance of difference. But I don’t mean interracial sex literally. I’m really advocating for the kind of miscegenated thinking that’s needed to deal with what we’ve already created here.44

Like La Malinche, Hemings is a figure surrounded by much speculation and lore. Could these women have been in love, or were they simply violated and exploited? Could La Malinche and Hemings have experienced agency, pleasure, and provisional power in their relationships to two of the most influential men in history? Are these women and their offspring only ever tragic? And is the comingling of race and sex only ever a violent proximity, historically, and as suggested by the final couple named in the title, “N. and Me,” in the present? What resounds is the Southern curator’s tone-deaf assertions and Ellen Cantor’s obtrusive omission: that’s not the way sex is supposed to be. The last pairing named in the title, “N. and Me,” suggests an affinity between the artist, her sexual partner, and the two historic couples. The concealing of his name is suggestive of an analogous power dynamic characterized by pleasure, subjugation, and the production of a hybrid lineage, embodied by the would-be children frolicking in the clearing and haunting the frame of the first diptych panel. The artist’s both/and revelation in the years following the creation of The Clearing has further strengthened her conceptual imperative—and her turn toward the diptych as form. EVIL AND GOOD

For nearly two decades, in the years leading up to her break from the New York art scene in 1983, O’Grady had taught the work of Charles Baudelaire at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she assigned only two books: Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857) and Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations (1886).45 O’Grady admired Baudelaire’s ability to seamlessly and fearlessly abandon his early Romantic prose for the more self-reflective and socially reflexive work that would lead him to be known as the father of modernism. Along with being the West’s first modern poet, he is also largely considered its first modern art critic. O’Grady was also drawn to Baudelaire out of curiosity and fascination for the long life and love he shared with Jeanne Duval, a young black emigrant from Haiti. Duval and Baudelaire were both about twenty-one years old when they met, and without the formality of a legal marriage or the duty of children, the pair shared a life and residence THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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for more than twenty years.46 Baudelaire created some of his most important work in response to his relationship with Duval, and after years of close reading, O’Grady has argued that Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory of beauty, which is contradictory, ambiguous, and of its time, is rooted in the example of Duval’s life—a life O’Grady herself felt a connection with.47 In 2010, the artist was invited to create a centerfold for the French feminist magazine Pétunia, which ignited the piece O’Grady would go on to create for the Whitney Biennial later that year. In Pétunia, the artist wrote: As a black woman who’s had white partners, I don’t have to speculate to say Charles learned a few things about his own culture he wouldn’t otherwise have known. . . . That kind of insider-outsider position makes a leap from romanticism to modernism look easy. Although Jeanne is present in every line of his poetry, even when he writes about Mme Sabatier, she is absent everywhere. Where is her own voice? It isn’t until I hear her in the voice of my mother Lena, born 80 years later into a world which has not yet changed, that I can begin to know who Jeanne is.48

Trying to understand her love for Baudelaire, O’Grady began searching for Duval instead. In 1995–96 she was awarded a Bunting Institute Fellowship in Visual Art at Radcliffe College / Harvard University, which provided her time and resources to study cultural theory, conduct in-depth research on the couple, pay for high-resolution archival scans, and teach herself Photoshop. Yet by the end of her fellowship year, O’Grady had scarcely found any information on Duval, which meant that the work she would go on to produce involved more improvisation and artistic license than she had envisioned.49 As Courtney Baker and others have noted, despite Duval’s importance in Baudelaire’s life and work—“it was she who inspired the Black Venus Cycle, arguably the most poetically significant poems of Les Fleurs du Mal”—little is known about her history or background, and Baudelaire scholars have largely relegated her to the margins of their studies. Indeed, among those who have made mention of her, “the majority of musing on Duval during the one hundred and fifty years of Baudelairian criticism have portrayed her as ignorant, malicious and manipulative—figuring as little more than an obstacle to the artist’s genius.” Despite the artist’s need to reimagine and improvise much of Duval’s life in Paris, O’Grady’s visual explorations assert that the pair’s relationship was in fact authentic and complex. Ultimately, O’Grady creates a new language that locates Duval as a “cultural hybrid living in colonial and sexual exile.”50 Eight diptychs and three “wall color studies” make up the in-progress series Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good (begun in 1995), the immense visual and material culmination of O’Grady’s extensive research on Duval and Baudelaire.51 In approximately half of the image panels, a sketch-rendered figure of Duval, culled from the margins of Baudelaire’s personal notebooks and papers, meets the viewer’s gaze. Within the panel, she is surrounded by text and image and awash with color. The text mixes Baudelaire’s own writing with poetic insertions by the artist. O’Grady reflects: 150

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figure 29 Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 04 Day Sky Grey Color Study (Jeanne and Charles), in progress 1998. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist.

On Baudelaire’s side of the diptychs, the language is taken from my own translations of Les Fleurs du Mal—I found it necessary to do my own because later translators, like the critics, erased and demonized Jeanne in a way that Charles had not. On the Duval side, her words are a fiction, written by me, to fill the silence of this woman-without-speech, and I know that I am as guilty as Charles. I too am using Jeanne.52

Layered with the text and portraits of Duval are composite clippings from Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s famous Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The colors, pulled from Picasso’s painting—a “fire red,” “burnt yellow,” “day sky grey,” and “evening sky blue,” as the titles announce—and text/image amalgamations of Duval’s visage have been meticulously layered in Photoshop and juxtaposed with similarly layered photographs and an oil painting of Baudelaire by Émile Deroy. The pair seem to meet each other’s and their contemporary audiences’ gaze at once (fig. 29). Duval stares back from her crosshatched features with a proud (and subtly seductive) posture, while Baudelaire looks on from a place of relaxed amusement in one image, contemplative seriousness in another, and a chic pose in yet another. When O’Grady failed to find sufficient information about and imagery of Duval in the archival record, the artist mined another, unexpected archive—that of her own family. In the last four diptychs in the series, in place of Duval’s pen-drawn character, O’Grady has inserted posed and dignified portraits of her mother, Lena (fig. 30); Lena’s THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 30 Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 07 Greensick Color Study (Lena and Charles), in progress 1998. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist.

sister Gladys; and her father’s favorite cousin, Vy. All three women, captured in youthful elegance, mirror—in pose and gesture, if not also in expression—the ghost of Duval, who, only eighty years prior, set out for nineteenth-century Paris to make a cosmopolitan life for herself. Flashes of Picasso’s painted ladies also haunt these diptych pairings. The figure of Baudelaire is the same in these new juxtapositions. However, the poet seems to age physically in his coupling with Gladys and Vy, and in his two pairings with Lena, O’Grady’s use of color weathers him further. The colors the artist selects are notably less vibrant—rich primary shades of blue, red, and yellow are replaced with the muted tones of “wet sand,” “rosewater white,” “tobacco,” and “greensick.” The diptychs that pair the artist’s family with the French poet are also free of text by either Baudelaire or O’Grady—a difference that further alludes to the absence of Duval, Baudelaire’s true muse. Finally, the artist expands the eight diptych pairings to three arresting gridded wall studies that integrate a total of sixteen diptych pairings of Duval and Baudelaire, and Baudelaire with each of the contemporary women in O’Grady’s family: Lena, Vy, and Gladys. Each wall study is a striking tessellation of figures (painted, sketched, and photographed) and color (brown, gray, and red). The text found in the diptychs of Duval and Baudelaire and written by the poet and O’Grady has been removed, and the figures float within their layered framing, their bodies blending together. Baudelaire is ever-present while Duval fades in and out of view. Her presence, eerily and perhaps 152

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intentionally, is evinced by the other three women, who have been bodied forth to amplify Duval’s proud existence despite her historic silence and erasure. Looking for Duval in the archive, O’Grady experienced less success than she had by searching for her in Baudelaire’s poetic forms and sketches. Years of correspondence between the pair seems to have been burned by the poet’s mother after his death. “Her words exist only as paraphrase in his poems, her image remains mostly in his quick sketches on scrap paper. It was discouraging. I wanted to do a piece showing the two as the equals I felt they must have been. I knew her in my bones, but how would Jeanne speak?”53 In many ways, O’Grady began speaking for Duval through the surrogates of Lena and her aunts, as well as through her own voice, much the same way that she would connect her father’s life to Thomas McKeller’s several years later. Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, thus, is accumulated voice and presence “out of turn,” deployed conceptually to render the figure of Jeanne Duval physically and intellectually present. This speculative orientation to Duval via cultural theory freed O’Grady as she sought to locate and liberate Duval from historic erasure. “Delving into the texts of the Birmingham school of cultural theory, Stuart Hall and others, proved a blessing,” according to O’Grady. “It gave me not just Jeanne, but something I had not anticipated—it gave me Lena, my mother.”54 Importantly, O’Grady asserts: If most definitions of postmodernism, however contested, contain elements of globalization, diasporan [sic] movement of peoples, hybridity of cultures, and increasing gender equality, then while Charles was waging his valiant struggle with modernism, Jeanne was already living a postmodern life. She was closer to me and to current generations than she had been to Charles!55

Significantly, by the time O’Grady began work on Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, her relationship with her own mother, Lena, which had been an underlying tension in earlier works such as Rivers, First Draft (1982), took a dramatic shift, an evolution initiated during the time O’Grady spent away from the art world. When she failed to locate Duval herself, the artist kept returning to pieces of evidence that suggested Baudelaire’s “bravery, the condition of mind needed to embrace the unprecedented cultural change in Europe, to leap from romanticism to modernism, to carry that flag. And also, toward the figure of Jeanne.”56 In O’Grady’s own writing, she posits the ways in which Duval’s experiences as a black woman in nineteenthcentury Paris must have affected Baudelaire by proximity. According to the artist, “Charles often admitted his need for her—and his debt to her—speaking in one prose poem of ‘his beloved, delicious and execrable wife, that mysterious wife to whom he owed so many pleasures, so many sorrows, and perhaps too a large part of his genius.’ ”57 While many scholars of the poet often relegate Duval to the margins of Baudelaire’s life and creative praxis, alluding to their union in narrow and often racist terms, O’Grady understands Duval as a quintessentially postmodern woman THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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“grappling inter-racially with life in diaspora” and within a “proto-global economy.”58 O’Grady believes that the sheer length of the couple’s relationship speaks volumes about their connection, a union that should not be left unexamined or undertheorized. Slowly, O’Grady began replacing Duval’s images and voice with those of her mother, a woman with whom O’Grady shared a fraught proximity to biculturalism and isolation. This interchange helped O’Grady come to terms with Duval and Baudelaire’s relationship. According to the artist, she began to “see these two aspects of Charles, the relationship with Jeanne and the meeting of modernism’s challenges, as somehow connected.”59 During her season of intensive research on European modernism, specifically through the lens of cultural studies, O’Grady was able to approach Baudelaire’s 1857 volume of poetry The Flowers of Evil anew after having studied the work for many years. The artist’s Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good visually explore Baudelaire’s orientation toward Duval as an orientation to “the other,” specifically a postmodern figure ahead of her time. Duval’s presence, O’Grady argues, emanates from even the volume’s lesser poems, particularly when there is a lack of lyrical mention of her physical body. This presence, and Duval’s voice, is vital to O’Grady’s own understanding of Duval’s place within Baudelaire’s history, as well as similarly culturally hybrid experiences. In the two-color studies that contain text from both Baudelaire and O’Grady, the artist illuminates words written by Baudelaire that she associates with Duval while inserting her own, as if by call and response, in the space of absence. In Fire Red color text study (Jeanne and Charles), the panel on the left containing Duval’s image is paired with prose from O’Grady: “stretch out my hair like a bridge,” and in the right-hand panel Baudelaire is paired with his own excerpt: “tumbling my soul from the crystal throne,” the gold text set in varying typefaces. In 02 Burnt Yellow color text study (Jeanne and Charles), O’Grady offers on Duval’s behalf on the left, “he scrape my skin with stars,” and on the right, again with Baudelaire’s own image and voice, “your eyes the well my boredom drinks” (fig. 31). O’Grady recognized the presence of Duval in the linguistic cadence of Baudelaire’s verse, as many postmodern cultural theorists have located a distinctly African presence in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, the painting O’Grady appropriated and layered into her studies, where the specters of hand-carved African masks and statuary haunt the painter’s colorful vision of loitering French prostitutes. In the writings of Edward Said, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy, modernism was not simply marked by rapid advances in technology as the Industrial Revolution drastically shaped the built environment and society but also, and more importantly, catalyzed and solidified vis-à-vis projects of colonization and imperialism—disorienting encounters between “modern” European selves and “primitive” foreign others. Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good explores modernists’ aesthetic attempts to understand, mediate, and reflect these sudden shifts, particularly during a period when cultural producers were still waxing on about 154

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figure 31 Lorraine O’Grady, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 02 Burnt Yellow Color Text Study (Jeanne and Charles), in progress 1998. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy the artist.

God and peaceable, pastoral, idyllic nature. O’Grady observes, “It was still easy even for the artist in cities to view himself as a servant, making art in God’s image. But now the city had changed. One had to see God and beauty in homelessness, in the oil slick on a mud puddle, in the noise and greed.”60 Baudelaire was one of the first poets who did this—who recalibrated his orientation to Romantic ideation, to God, in order to embrace other anchors of human experience. When O’Grady tried to understand the characteristics and sensibilities in Baudelaire that allowed him to make such a leap so effortlessly, the artist found herself returning to Duval. Drawing upon her own experiences nearly a century and a half later, O’Grady was convinced that Baudelaire’s relationship extended beyond an “encounter” with the other, representing more closely an alliance where Duval’s experiences as a black Haitian woman in Paris, and his experiences with her, shaped his unique worldview and aesthetic approaches. Indeed, Baudelaire even lost a job due to his connection to Duval—an incident that no doubt shaped both his professional trajectory at the time and his relationship to one of modernism’s core tenets—racism.61 In Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, O’Grady’s transition from her performance work of the 1980s to her gallery-wall-based diptychs was all but complete. The artist continued to summon her own genealogy, however, and her personal relationship to her mother in particular, to inform her engagement with the historical figures that she began to turn toward more forcefully: THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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Imagining Jeanne in turn helped me imagine Lena. It’s a sad admission to make, but even just secondhand through Charles’s poetry, I knew Jeanne better than I knew my own mother.62 Perhaps [I am using Jeanne] to understand my mother, Lena—who emigrated from Jamaica to Boston in the 1920s, when little had changed for the metropolitan woman of color—and, in turn, to understand myself. Jeanne’s demonization began almost immediately in the memoirs of Baudelaire’s friends and has continued for 150 years to a greater extent in the writings of his critics.63

As with Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and Miscegenated Family Album, O’Grady utilized radical juxtaposition as a conceptual bridge between two distinct lives, lived in two distinct cultures and time periods. The artist’s shift in focus and modality from selfreflexive performance also came with a move, albeit at a much slower pace, from the visual semiotics of the personal to an orientation toward historical figures and the cultural archive, as will be seen in O’Grady’s 2010 Whitney Biennial piece The First and Last of the Modernists. Rather than grappling with her relationship to the art world as a bicultural black woman from an affluent emigrant background, these new diptychs, outward facing, engaged a much broader cultural milieu and found new ways to introject her personal history into this expanded scope. FIRST AND LAST

In four new diptych pairings produced in 2010, the same four images of Baudelaire from Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good share the visual field with four distinct photographs containing the visage of another cultural icon, that of pop superstar Michael Jackson. In Diptych 1 RED (Charles and Michael), the seated, slouchy poses of the poet and the popular music icon, elbows resting on chair and knee, mirror each other (fig. 32). Both men’s gazes are set, their posture toward the viewer, the entire composition bathed in a murky red, a background of O’Grady’s crafting. Baudelaire’s expression is amused, Jackson’s defiant. In the other three pairings in the series, the two men are juxtaposed based on their age, as well as their expression and gesture, the artist using color to further unify this unlikely marriage through tonal variations in red, blue, gray, and green. A decade after O’Grady began her work on Baudelaire and Duval, the artist found herself struck with inexplicable grief when Jackson was found dead of a drug overdose— the result of involuntary manslaughter. The death of the “king of pop” triggered global mass mourning on an unprecedented scale. O’Grady recounts crying over Jackson for several days “as though a member of her own family” was gone.64 Along with millions around the world, despite her preference for Prince and the decades that had passed since her last real interest in Jackson’s music, the artist was sucked into the deluge of fan websites, YouTube videos, and tributes, determined to locate the source of her grief. 156

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figure 32 Lorraine O’Grady, The First and Last of the Modernists, 2010, installed at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins / Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Much to her surprise, Jackson’s “genius had continued to develop” long after she had left off listening to his music. “The extent of his brilliance and his humanity overwhelmed her.”65 It was not long after his death that O’Grady began making comparisons between Michael Jackson, the king of pop, and Charles Baudelaire, the father of modernism (fig. 33). Beyond the similarities in outward appearance, which were striking to the artist—ostentatious clothing, makeup, and flamboyant yet abstruse sexuality—the two cultural titans shared an obsessive commitment to their respective creative praxis, extraordinary self-assuredness, and earnest ambitions toward greatness: I really saw them not as figures of two different modernisms but rather as two ends of a continuum. If modernism was the aesthetic attempt to deal with industrialism, urbanization, the de-naturalization of culture, and the shock of difference, then it was an effort in which all sides shared and were equally affected—from Charles trying to find his way in the stench of the torn-up streets of Baron Haussmann’s Paris, to Michael with lungs permanently impaired from a childhood in Gary when the steel mills still belched fire. While the old dichotomies between white and black cultures, and between entertainment and fine art, are understandable—it’s hard to live on both sides simultaneously—the hierarchies between these imagined oppositions seem not just passé but fundamentally untrue.66 THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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figure 33 Lorraine O’Grady, The First and Last of the Modernists, Diptych 3 Blue (Charles and Michael), 2010. Fujiflex print, diptych, each part 46 ¾ × 37 ³∕₈ in. (118.7 × 94.9 cm). © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

What struck her most was “the price they had each paid for taking the role of the artist so seriously. What could be more godlike or quixotic than Michael’s belief that he could unite the entire world through his music—or more amazing how close he came?”67 In 2010, nearly ten years after completing the work that would comprise BodyGround, O’Grady was selected as one of fifty-five artists to participate in the 75th Whitney Biennial, an exhibition of contemporary art typically featuring young and/or emerging US artists. Renowned for leading art market trends, it is widely regarded as one of the premier exhibitions in the art world. For this momentous occasion, O’Grady would produce the four minimally composed diptychs juxtaposing Baudelaire and Jackson.68 It was an idea that came to her on the spot, when, with less than a day’s notice, she was visited by the biennial curators, Francesco Bonami and Gary CarrionMurayari. “What will you do for the exhibit?” they asked. O’Grady recounts, “I answer spontaneously, as if I already knew: ‘Four diptychs on Charles Baudelaire and Michael.’ Later, the piece has to be named.” She titled this body of work The First and Last of the Modernists. “The name is a risk, of course,” muses O’Grady. “But peeling back the cultural assumptions of Europe will always be like scraping off a tattoo.”69 O’Grady was selected for the biennial only months after Jackson’s death. Yet she now realizes it was the exact right moment to revisit her work on Baudelaire. For the straightforward installation, O’Grady traded images of Duval and her mother for pictures of Jackson. The process of searching the internet and mining, from tens of thousands of 158

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images, the four to use in the installation was the most challenging part of the process— a process not unlike her late-1970s culling of words and phrases from several months’ worth of New York Times Sunday newspapers. Interestingly, the work itself has yet to be discussed in terms of its process-based approach; work conducted online is often taken for granted in the practices of artists like O’Grady. However, I argue that her rock criticism in the 1970s, early teaching in the 1980s, research in the late 1990s, and more recent internet sourcing comprise a unique multidisciplinary process-based approach that is underexamined in the case of O’Grady’s praxis in general, and this work in particular. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is an approach that reflects O’Grady’s relationship to language and translation, which is one of textual hybridization and theorizing on the page and within the visual object. Once the four images of Jackson were chosen, another process of cropping and color editing was initiated. When the work was finally installed on the gallery wall at the Whitney, O’Grady remembers feeling shocked, having been newly interpellated by the work’s final presentation. She admits feeling like there was still so much to learn from these two figures. In addition to setting up a platform for comparison, O’Grady’s diptych generates visual semiotic bookends for the history of modernism, which has been argued on many fronts as also the history of racism, and as symbolic of the West’s disentanglement with “the other” amid the Industrial Revolution and shifting colonial encounters. For O’Grady, the pair precisely embodies this now well-traversed road, a thoroughfare that began with Baudelaire’s experiences as Paris industrialized during the mid-nineteenth century and ended nearly a century later as a young Jackson breathed the poisonous air gushing from steel mills in Gary, Indiana. For writer and artist Malik Gaines, O’Grady’s juxtaposition presents “a map of Modernism’s dead-end.”70 The First and Last of the Modernists also points to a missing link in this narrative, namely the absent figure of Jeanne Duval, the black woman who haunts each tinted diptych. Duval, a Haitian emigrant to Paris and Baudelaire’s common-law partner of twenty years, has been posthumously exorcised from his life and disassociated from his work, despite her being the subject of much of his poetry and prose. O’Grady returns Duval to history, to Baudelaire, in her massive Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, the product of the artist’s search for the visual and archival substance necessary for reimaging Duval’s role in the history of modernism. Indeed, if Baudelaire was the father of modernism, O’Grady implies that Duval was the mother of postmodernism, occupying a position that facilitated the poet’s bold and early departure from Romanticism. O’Grady posits that living with the first postmodernist is what catalyzed Baudelaire’s rapid shift. Not only was the poet, like his contemporaries, faced with an industrializing Paris, he was also confronted with the modern consequences of racist imperialism through his association with Duval. Thus, in her research, writing, and public speaking, O’Grady suggests that it was his devoted proximity to a black woman and her (and his) experiences with racism that produced the intellectual and artist that is celebrated today.71 THE DIPT YCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

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O’Grady’s provocation that Michael Jackson is the unsuspecting heir and the individual through which the line died is fascinating, especially considering Jackson’s parallel striving for universalism in his craft and his own physical transformation from black to white. Indeed, Jackson achieved a kind of mixed or hybrid race in the middle of his career, a time when the most popular and enduring imagery of the star was celebrated globally. The First and Last of the Modernists is captivating and disturbing, much like the lives of those depicted (and not depicted). O’Grady fascination with Baudelaire and Jackson, and with Baudelaire and Duval, accords with the artist’s concerns regarding racial mixing and the cultural implications of hybridity. These obsessively celebrated men, who achieved great things through unparalleled genius, did so, not coincidentally, by way of their proximity to blackness and femininity.72 What O’Grady’s later work reveals is an evolution, a refinement, of her conceptual imperatives. Throughout this chapter, I have analyzed a critical moment of transition, arguing for an understanding of O’Grady’s trajectory as inspired and catalyzed by the artist’s relationship to language and her deployment of a host of linguistic strategies within her work. Since the 1990s, O’Grady has used her multimodal approach of research, teaching, and writing to produce two series of diptychs that conceptually push the boundaries of writing, while also challenging viewers to make deeper connections between Western history and certain cultural outpourings we take for granted. Juxtaposing her deceased sister, Devonia Evangeline, with Egyptian queen Nefertiti; her father with Thomas McKeller; mothers and aunts with Charles Baudelaire; and, later, Baudelaire and Michael Jackson, O’Grady has been engaging in acts of translation. Marshaling historical antecedents for her contemporary theorizations of kinship, modernity, celebrity, and genius, the artist reads structures of power and hybrid ontologies back onto the subjects of her diptychs. It is a move that completes her evolution from an embodied, wholly reflexive, and confrontational orientation to the art world to one that is articulated through the historical and cultural significance of other complex subjects. Furthermore, this shift paved the way for O’Grady’s most recent project, Cutting Out CONYT (2017), which brings her forty-year artistic practice full circle with a critical return to the process-based experimentation that started her professional art career and provides a crucial point of entry, and now bookend, for this monograph.

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Several artists would . . . focus on language and linguistic theory . . ., developing extensive bodies of critical writing that would rival the writings of professional art critics and test yet another art world relationship, that between artist and critic.

frances k. pohl 1

B

LACK TEXT—WORDS AND PHRASES— floats

in the blank space of two large sheets of paper, separated by threeeighths of an inch and mounted side by side in a white frame. The phrases “STAR WORDS” and “WORK OF ART” leap out of the haiku-inspired poem. This typescript, once cut from a Sunday New York Times printed in 1977, has since been magnified, letterpress-printed on fine Japanese paper, cut out once more, and collaged on the white space of paper. Today, at eighty-six, Lorraine O’Grady is as productive as she was in the 1980s and 1990s, creating bodies of work that continue to invigorate the theoretical and political import of language. Her Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), a process-based body of work in which the artist hand-cut words from the Sunday New York Times, was the focus of this monograph’s first chapter; its revision, Cutting Out CONYT (2017), is the emphasis of this conclusion. Significantly, O’Grady began her cut-paper newspaper poems as, in her own words, a “writer.” At the project’s completion, she was a “visual artist.” 2 161

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In recent years, O’Grady has spent significant energy recuperating old projects, one piece at a time, with the aim of helping new audiences make sense of her practice and its evolution. As a result, the artist’s website has become a virtual archive of her original projects and their ongoing reception, while O’Grady’s exhibition schedule has increasingly involved her reiterations. According to O’Grady, CONYT has been one of the last of her early works to be recuperated because of the piece’s visual unwieldiness.3 Logistically, the artist was unable to fully display the work in a gallery setting, or share the complete work on her website. On the gallery wall, in its entirety it covers close to 120 linear feet, even when stacked, as it was during its 2010 exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland. Online, this has meant limiting the number of publicly accessible works to only five out of the original twenty-six poems. Several more have been added in advance of O’Grady’s 2021 Brooklyn Museum retrospective, where the original CONYT series will not be included. Her 2017 revision of the series came at the invitation of German master printer René Schmitt. Using the original collages, but discarding the poems as they had been structured before, O’Grady transformed them, through rearrangement, into new work entirely. The process resulted in twenty-five diptych haikus, one of the most reduced forms in poetry, plus a single-panel manifesto, referred to as “a statement for the entire suite.”4 The artist straightforwardly titled the series Cutting Out CONYT, and used corresponding numbers to identify each individual poem. The fifty-one panels in total, printed at thirty by (approximately) forty inches each, represent a significant reduction from the 221 panels of the original collection still owned by O’Grady. Consistently invested in the rigor of formal process, O’Grady followed a set of rules for the new iteration. First, each new diptych had to be made from a single one of the original poems, but not necessarily from contiguous panels in the original. Second, each panel had to be used “as it was”; none were altered in any way. Third, each diptych panel had to be printed on Japanese paper and re-collaged on thirty-by-forty-inch laid paper to mimic the original 1977 making process; each line was separately printed from handmade zinc plates, then cut with scissors and pasted onto its corresponding panel.5 Finally, the twenty-five diptychs and manifesto would not comprise a singular work. Rather, they remain individual haiku, each working in its own mode. Reflecting on the original Cutting Out the New York Times and the critical juncture at which it was produced, O’Grady observed that the process itself enabled her to make the important transition between the realm of language and that of art. However, what then is the process and function of re-cutting, re-writing, and re-collaging? It is a query perhaps best answered by Michel Foucault’s prophetic statement, “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”6 Introduced in the first chapter, “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business” was the poetic compilation of cuts O’Grady made from the September 25, 1977, Sunday New York Times. Comprised of eleven panels, this original piece would become one of the most important compositions in O’Grady’s 2017 revisions. Of the original eleven panels, four 162

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figure 34 Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 03, 1977/2017. Letterpress print on Japanese paper, cutout, collage on laid paper, diptych, each part 41 ¾ × 30 in. (106 × 76.2 cm). Edition of 12 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

were selected to form two new diptychs. A fifth panel was also culled from the heart of “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business” to become the single-panel declaration in the contemporary series. Cutting Out CONYT 03 (fig. 34), an eleven-line poem that floats within the white space of the two diptych panels, is unique in that these same panels were presented side by side in “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business.” The new abridged segment is made up of six distinct newspaper clippings and reads: 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 CONCLUSION

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Poetically articulating O’Grady’s artistic standpoint, past collage processes, and the formal and theoretical import of the Japanese-inspired writing, Cutting Out CONYT 03 has been refined to pack a more incisive punch. Phrases such as “reckless storytelling,” “star words,” and “almost-everything-included” capture the artist’s relationship to language as well as her final iterative mode—the “work of art.” The second diptych to emerge from “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business” is Cutting Out CONYT 20 (fig. 35), in which panels containing bold blocks of text—“THE SOUND THAT SHOOK HOLLYWOOD” on the left and “Have we found the beginning of existence—or the end of it?” on the right—were taken from the beginning and end, respectively, of the original composition, separated by nine of the eleven panelstanzas. The new full two-panel poem now reads: White and Black and THE SOUND THAT SHOOK HOLLYWOOD The Crisis Deepens in Theatrical Détente / You’re the artist Have we found the beginning of existence— or the end of it?

This modification by O’Grady brings two dialectic tensions together, separated now by only three lines and the freighted three-eighths-inch space between the diptych’s two panels, “white and black,” and the notion of beginnings and endings. Both reoccurring binary oppositions have featured prominently throughout O’Grady’s practice, but these frictions are especially apparent in projects inspired by the artist’s own subjectivity—those driven by an innovative and exploratory selfreflexivity. Prior to settling on the diptych as form in the late 1990s, O’Grady experimented with language and the telling (and retelling) of personal beginnings and endings, particularly through the narrative imperative of hybridity, driven by the artist’s own experience of amalgamation between Afro-Caribbean and Western European cultures. O’Grady visually carried these binaries—black/white and beginning/end—into the works Rivers, First Draft (1982, the subject of chapter 3), Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (1980–88, chapter 4), and several pieces in her BodyGround series (1991, also chapter 4). Their subtle reappearance through poetry in Cutting Out CONYT meditates on the preliminary processes that led O’Grady into her conceptual art praxis, from her

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figure 35 Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 20, 1977/2017. Letterpress print on Japanese paper, cutout, collage on laid paper, diptych, each part 41 ¾ × 30 in. (106 × 76.2 cm). Edition of 12 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

previous work as a writer and translator in the mid-1970s to her full development as a celebrated visual artist by 2017. Cutting Out CONYT thus serves as a bookend to a forty-year narrative about the artist’s creative trajectory vis-à-vis her relationship to the art world, both then and now. The final panel represented in both the 1977 and 2017 variations of CONYT was the centerpiece of the original poem, “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business,” and serves as the stand-alone statement that opens up onto the entire series, Cutting Out CONYT 26 (fig. 36): 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.7

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figure 36 Lorraine O’Grady, Cutting Out CONYT 26, 1977/2017. Letterpress print on Japanese paper, cutout, collage on laid paper, 41 ¾ × 30 in. (106 × 76.2 cm). Edition of 12 + 1 AP. © Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York.

In many ways, mash-up poetic expression—the literal and metaphorical dismantling and reinscribing of one’s creative existence using a language not one’s own—has become O’Grady’s permanent revolt against the limiting strictures of her identity, specifically her experiences within the binarily opposed categories of blackness, femaleness, wealth, and education. Her inventive wielding of language’s full potential to mean against the textual grain of Western dualism—to speak out of turn—has inspired the formal fine-tuning of her voice in Cutting Out CONYT. The manifesto, Cutting Out CONYT 26, reminds us that indeed, O’Grady will continue her rebellion, as she has in numerous recent collaborations and forthcoming projects. And, “because life doesn’t wait,” the artist insightfully directs us back to the here and now to look for her, and her art, “where we are.” This book conducted a focused investigation of the work that artist Lorraine O’Grady has produced from the late 1970s to the early 2000s to the contemporary moment. However, as the final panel of Cutting Out CONYT suggests, the work continues, demanding our attention and further exploration. What has been revealed in this first monograph is a conceptual practice predicated on acts of rebellion and agitation, one that has experimented with, and been expressed through, the artist’s specific relationship to and mobilization of language. The written and spoken word in O’Grady’s work has less to do with a particular time period or political moment than a personal and artistic rejection of, and escape from, the familial and bourgeois stric166

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tures that shaped the artist’s experiences as a black woman in the northeastern United States. From the late 1970s through the 1990s, O’Grady used a distinct set of conceptual tools to speak her creative existence into the world, deploying both pen and voice.8 The artist today continues to craft the ways in which each project is received and engaged with using her website, an online archive that predetermines, particularly through the written word, how one accesses the ideas embedded within O’Grady’s visual articulations. Discussing this approach in an interview, she stated: My writing and my visual art have a very symbiotic connection. Because I always seem to be working at the edge of acceptability and/or comprehensibility, I often feel that I have to defend my work. Since 1992 I’ve been employing the writing as a way of creating the theoretical context for the work.9

After a lifetime of disquieted searching, O’Grady became captivated with the art world, shifting her intellectual output in her forties from professional language translator and music critic to conceptual artist. Working across collage, experimental poetry, performance, and installation, the artist has wielded language, the cornerstone of her creative praxis, as a means of grappling with the tensions that have characterized her own life and experiences. Having felt out of place—out of turn—as an educated, upper-middle-class, light-skinned black woman born to emigrant parents from the Caribbean and coming of age in New England, O’Grady has unpacked through her work the dichotomies that have ruled her existence. Race, gender, class, and social tensions between black and white, male and female, good and evil, body and mind, rich and poor animate O’Grady’s entire practice, as do enduring concerns with family, cultural hybridity, miscegenation, and her aging body. I came to O’Grady’s work largely through her online archive—a space where almost all the documentation and writing on the art she has been producing since the late 1970s is centralized. The archive, both outside of and containing O’Grady’s entire practice, is a unique point of entry, an exhibition in its own right filled with information, criticism, and contradiction from the artist’s forty-year career. Over time, each body of work has been taken up and reiterated by O’Grady and contemporary interlocutors. A historical game of telephone has unfolded through the perpetual retelling of the artist’s visual narratives, her “writing in space” a kind of changing same, much like the history of art that O’Grady is both a part of and authoring herself anew. Not unlike art and cultural historians who spend extended periods of time holed up, sifting through dusty archives in private and public collections, libraries, and museums, my work on O’Grady has oscillated between this more traditional labor at the artist’s own archives at Wellesley College, her alma mater, and research in situ at exhibitions and gallery installations of the artworks, interviews both digital and CONCLUSION

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in person, time spent with the artist, and, importantly, innumerable hours scrolling and clicking through pages of digital content that was being uploaded, edited, rewritten, and revised in real time by O’Grady herself. The cultural art historian Frances K. Pohl notes: “Many artists created their own websites as a way to distribute their work, coming up with new computer-based forms in the process. Artists of color took advantage of this expansion of information and communication, drawing on an ever-wider array of sources that ranged across religious, ethnic, gender, and economic categories.”10 Unavailable in the 1980s, in 2020 O’Grady’s website is a living compilation of documents, previously unpublished thoughts, recollections, and reiterative musings on the work, from, presumably, both the time of its production and today, as the artist revisits each project years after its conception.11 Throughout this meticulous process, the artist has maintained an incredible amount of control over the dialogue surrounding her work. Indeed, only limited interpretation exists outside of the artist’s own explanatory framework—that is, the art has yet to exist in a context removed from O’Grady’s own didactics. However, with the now-steady exhibition of the work itself across the nation and abroad, and the opportunities to encounter the artist’s writing anew in an anthology—Writing in Space 1973–2019, published by Duke University Press—my hope is that future scholarship might break away or extend the possibilities of O’Grady’s living archive in critically innovative ways. While the artist’s conceptual work is both the visual objects and her written words, her art, like all art, has the immense potential for fresh interpretation and readings that cut against the artist’s own understanding of its significance. I hope I have started this work here, but I admit to a reliance on, and productive grappling with, ideas presented via both the digital medium of the archive and the artist herself. By the time I discovered O’Grady’s art, I was well into my search for black women artists, an endeavor I began in desperation during my undergraduate degree and continued into my doctoral program, and a quest O’Grady has discussed as characterizing her own experiences of isolation and rebellion.12 The tools the artist takes up in her search for alternative expressions of black creativity in the art world, and in her search to find herself, is what this book set out to illuminate. O’Grady’s deployment of the “weapons of high culture”—her elite education and her unique relationship to language, specifically—is what interpellated me as a researcher, and what sets her apart in the history of conceptual practice. The artist says it best in a recent interview with filmmaker and actress Zawe Ashton for Tate Modern: I’m not unusual in this, I think that everybody has parts of themselves that don’t seem to fit together, and somehow or the other you have to make them fit together if you’re going to become a whole person. You’re either doing it consciously or unconsciously, but you’re pasting yourself together somehow. I wanted to fight with the weapons that I had, and they were not the weapons of the street, they were the weapons of high culture, and I felt 168

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I could do it. I thought about this character that I was, and I realized that I was not alone and that there were young women like me all over the world, all over the world, and this business of being overly educated, [an] overly well-brought-up et cetera young black woman, young black man, [and] finding themselves completely made invisible. . . . That that condition was shared . . . and that I could bring the understandings that I had gained from that position to bear on what I thought were the really rather ridiculous arguments for keeping us out, you know, all the arguments of quality. We need mirrors in order to see ourselves, if we’re not mirrored, we can’t. To our great envy, the young white artists could cobble themselves together out of so many different artists, and we had so few to choose from.13

Despite the lack of mirrors early on, throughout my research process, I did discover for myself the black women artists working at the art world’s margins in the mid- to late twentieth century, and I was continually drawn to the communicative potential of the art I encountered. O’Grady’s work began to epitomize the creative mode I dedicated my entire dissertation to investigating and theorizing—namely, speaking out of turn—and her use of language became the linchpin for my thinking. This book comes at a moment when undergraduate art students no longer have to search so hard to discover the work of diverse artists. It also comes into the field at a time when O’Grady’s work, and that of many of her contemporaries, is experiencing a vitally important renaissance. The artist herself, in a letter to Tony Whitfield in 1983, prophesied the belated arrival of an audience for her early work. To quote a portion of the artist’s musings: Right now, my goal is to discover and create the true audience, and something tells me that, for a black performance artist of my ilk, this will take a many-sided approach. Because I sense that the true audience may be coming, not here now, I try to document my work as carefully as I can. It may seem odd for a performance artist to be concerned with the preservation of the work. But despite my devotion to the fluidity of performance, its privatistic and ephemeral aspects have never interested me much. Instead, I’m concerned about the future audience of the work, about those who will know. . . . Such standing within can only be achieved through the profoundest identification with the work: not just with its form, but with its content as well. And it’s precisely this sort of identification that is hardest for the avant-garde black artist to come by. For one can only succeed in knowing at this depth if one is seeking to know his/ her self. My experience has been that the audiences for my pieces have been typically elite, with a fairly good mix of both black and white artists and intellectuals. But though a large crosssection have liked and appreciated the work, the most multi-dimensional “knowing” hasn’t come from a formal eye or a grounding in avant-garde art forms (although both may be requisite). It’s come from the intellectual and emotional need to find a “home in the work’s

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figure 37 The author meets Lorraine O’Grady for the first time in Los Angeles, 2015. figure 38 The author and Lorraine O’Grady on stage for the public program “Artist in Conversation: Lorraine O’Grady,” Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, February 18, 2020. Photo courtesy Emma Chubb.

truth.” Those who’ve understood the work best have been primarily women, particularly black women such as the critics Gylbert Coker and Patricia Jones. But I don’t take this as a permanently limiting condition of the work. The problem as I see it is simply that, so far, the context of black art hasn’t been broad enough for either whites or blacks to become so familiar with it that they can cross the barriers of race and sex to seek themselves.14

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I believe that the future audience for whom her work will finally reach its potential to mean, whose possibility O’Grady once theorized, has arrived. Over the course of my work with O’Grady, it has been fascinating to witness an artist, all but obscured from contemporary art history and the commercial art market when I set out, lead and direct her own reemergence (figs. 37, 38). And just in time for her true audience, those ready to stand within, to know and seek the work as a way of knowing and seeking themselves. We are here.

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NOTES

SPEAKING OUT OF TURN: AN INTRODUCTION

1. “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest,” Brooklyn Rail, February 3, 2016, https://brooklynrail.org/2016/02/art/lorraine-ogrady-with-jarrett -earnest. 2. In the last five years, for example, more than forty-five articles, interviews, and reviews have been published on O’Grady’s work, online and in print, in such venues as Artforum, Frieze, Cultured, ARTnews, Culture Type, New York Times, W Magazine, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, Project Muse, and Hyperallergic. Additionally, the artist was the subject of a chapter in Ellen Tani, “Black Conceptualism and the Atmospheric Turn, 1968–2008” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2015). 3. It should be noted that O’Grady uses the term “cutouts.” My choice to instead use “cut-up,” for legibility purposes, is consistent with the art historical specificity of this modality. 4. See Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary ed. (1990; repr., New York: Routledge, 1999); Sara Lynn McKinnon, “The Discursive Formation of Gender in Women’s Gendered Claims to U.S. Asylum” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008). 5. Jennifer A. González, Subjects to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 3.

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6. Specifically the work of Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks. See the bibliography for relevant sources. 7. See Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 8. Michele Wallace, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Feminist Creativity,” in Invisibility Blues: from Pop to Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 213–40. 9. Lucy R. Lippard, “Out of Turn,” Transition: Under Review, no. 52 (1991): 144. 10. Here I use “methodology of the oppressed,” as outlined by Chela Sandoval in Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), alongside Nicole Fleetwood’s “troubling vision” in Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), as both a theoretical and a methodological standpoint. The work of Macarena Gómez-Barris on representation and cultural memory as decolonial apparatus has also influenced my thinking here and throughout the monograph. See Macarena Gómez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 11. On the ways in which black artists and artists of color have historically responded to and challenged erasure within Western culture, see Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). The term interpellation was coined by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to describe the process by which ideology addresses the individual. Both Althusser’s and Frantz Fanon’s deployment of interpellation is predicated on dominant ideological structures—“the imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence”—to which individuals are addressed. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Books, 1971). See also Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, rev. ed. (New York and Berkeley: Grove Press, 2008). 12. I meditate on speech and radical presence underlying visual art objects as a political technology in ways similar to Sandoval’s meditations on love as a political technology in Methodology of the Oppressed. 13. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 3. For more on the definition and use of “cosmopolitics” see Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 14. See Brandon Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art since 1970 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Art, 2005). 15. By modernism I mean the styles and creative movements that dominated Western culture and thought from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s. This period is most often characterized by its rejection of past styles, emphasis on experimentation in materials and form, and innovation in technique. Modernist ideals encompassed notions of the “cutting edge,” “progress,” and the “avant-garde”—distinctions from which artists of color (and women) have been almost entirely excluded. 16. Here, in addition to O’Grady’s work, my thinking is deeply indebted to the artists Adrian Piper, Coco Fusco, Shirin Neshat, and Carrie Mae Weems, who have provided rich models of directaddress modalities with which to theorize the practice of “speaking out of turn.” For more on the “dematerialization” of art see Lucy Lippard’s seminal essay, coauthored with John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36. Lippard’s later book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973) was immensely influential on O’Grady’s early career. 17. See Craig Owens and Scott Stewart Bryson, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 174

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18. Shauna Miller, “The Unsettling, Text-Driven World of Barbara Kruger’s ‘Belief + Doubt,’ ” The Atlantic, August 21, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/08/the -unsettling-text-driven-world-of-barbara-krugers-belief-doubt/261348/; “Barbara Kruger,” The Art Story, http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kruger-barbara.htm. 19. Patricia J. Saunders, “Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora: Conversations with Saidiya Hartman,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2008): 7, quoted in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 8. 20. This approach to art, culture, critical space making, and language was inspired by the work of multidisciplinary ethnographers such as Lanita Jacobs, Dorinne Kondo, and dozens of cultural and linguistic ethnographers whose work centers formations of race and gender. See Dorinne Kondo, “Soft Power: (Auto)ethnography, Racial Affect, and Dramaturgical Critique,” American Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2019): 265–85; Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Lanita Jacobs, From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Lanita Jacobs, “The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among ‘Native’ Anthropologists,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 791–804. 21. Here I borrow Tani’s formulation of black conceptualism as a philosophical approach to art making that critically interrogates the paradox of race. Tani, “Black Conceptualism and the Atmospheric Turn, 1968–2008.” 22. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001), 29, my emphasis. I arrived at this powerful image by Brand through Sharpe, In the Wake, 12. 23. This is a trend that O’Grady herself took notice of in her writings and interviews at the time. 24. The show was curated by Connie Butler. It originated at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and traveled to PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York. 25. “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest,” my emphasis. 26. O’Grady’s collection of essays Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020) demonstrates the persistent argument the artist makes through her work against the binaristic logics underpinning Western culture. Despite the existence of O’Grady’s early writings, those who approach her work today often regard the artist’s “both/and” thinking as new, or revelatory. Even the artist herself has often “rediscovered” her own concepts when revisiting past writings or artworks. An idea from Toni Morrison continues to resonate with O’Grady—that the “purpose of racism is distraction.” Indeed, O’Grady has felt the need to continuously repeat herself over the course of her career, often without even knowing she was doing it. Her new and in-depth indexical work with Duke University Press, however, makes apparent the artist’s sustained thematic engagement with the concepts of both/and, diptych, hybridity versus binaristic thinking, either/or, hierarchy, and the West. Adapted from a note to the author on August 1, 2020. 27. Like interdisciplinary scholars Dorinne Kondo and Robin D. G. Kelley in their writings on Anna Deavere Smith and Thelonious Monk, my relationship with the artist deepened my access to her archive and my understanding of her work and its contexts. Yet this proximity occasionally put me in a strange place as a historian and critic. An example of this double bind of access and limitations can be found in the highly mediated presentation of myriad textual sources on the artist’s website, whereby each source, rather than being scanned as an archival document and presented in its original form and context, has been standardized in font and format across the platform. In addition to maintaining a uniform literary schema, which seems to have required a retyping of each published and unpublished document, the newly incorporated texts also include the artist’s own framing, usually as an introduction or as citational notes. 28. Josephine Carson, Silent Voices: The Southern Negro Woman Today (New York: Delacorte, 1969), 1. NOTES

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29. Anohni, Facebook post, November 29, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/AntonyandtheJohnsons /posts/10154794332208552. 30. Daniel Kreps, “Watch Anohni’s Devastating ‘Marrow’ Video,” Rolling Stone, November 30, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/watch-anohnis-devastating-marrow -video-114713/. 31. For more on direct address—communicating directly from a source to an intended audience—as a formal strategy across diverse cultural media see Leslie Dunkling, A Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. the introduction, 1–36; Theo Van Leeuwen, “Moving English: The Visual Language of Film,” in Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities, ed. Sharon Goodman and David Graddol (London: Routledge, 1996), 81–103; Richard Nordquist, “What Is Direct Address in Grammar and Rhetoric?,” ThoughtCo, updated November 3, 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/direct-address-grammar-and-rhetoric-1690457; Cara A. Finnegan, “Studying Visual Modes of Public Address: Lewis Hine’s Progressive-Era Child Labor Rhetoric,” in The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn J. Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 250–70. Finnegan engages Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s now-canonical visual literacy text Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (New York: Routledge, 1996), noting, “Images in which the gaze is directed at the viewer of the image create ‘a visual form of direct address. It acknowledges the viewers explicitly, addressing them with a visual “you.” ’ Kress and van Leeuwen call these images ‘demand’ images because they demand ‘that the viewer enters into some kind of imaginary relation with him or her.’ A classic example of the ‘demand’ image is the Uncle Sam recruiting poster, ‘I Want YOU!’ ” (254). Another body of literature that attends to the relationship between modes of speech and strategies of address includes important research in linguistic anthropology, specifically work focusing on African American speech cultures. See Charles Briggs, Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Mary Bucholtz, “Bad Examples: Transgression and Progress in Language and Gender Studies,” in Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse, ed. M. Bucholtz, A. C. Lian, and L. A. Sutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–24; Barbara Christian, “Creating a Universal Literature: Afro-American Women Writers,” in Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, ed. Barbara Christian (New York: Pergamon, 1985), 159–63; Signithia Fordham, “ ‘Those Loud Black Girls’: (Black) Women, Silence and Gender ‘Passing’ in the Academy,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1993): 3–32; bell hooks, Talk Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989; bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994); Vyacheslav Ivanov, “Heteroglossia,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9, nos. 1/2 (200): 100–102; Jacobs, “The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back,” 791–804; Lanita Jacobs, From the Kitchen to the Parlor; Sonja Lanehart, Sista Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Norma Mendoza-Denton, “Fighting Words: Latina Girls, Gangs, and Language Attitudes,” in Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity, ed. D. Letticia Glaindo and María Dolores Gonzales (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 39–56; Marcyliena Morgan, “Conversational Signifying: Grammar and Indirectness among African American Women,” in Interaction and Grammar, ed. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, Sandra A. Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 405–34; Marcyliena H. Morgan, Language, Discourse, and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Linda Williamson Nelson, “Code-Switching in the Oral Life Narratives of African American Women: Challenges to Linguistic Hegemony,” Journal of Education 172, no. 3 (1990): 142–55; Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Marsha Houston Stanback, “Language and Black Women’s Place: Evidence from the Black Middle Class,” in For Alma Mater: Theory and Practice in Feminist Scholarship, ed. Paula A. Treichler, Cheris Kramarae, and Beth Stafford (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 177–93; Denise 176

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32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

Troutman, “African American Women: Talk That Talk,” in Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, ed. S. Lanehart (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001), 211–37. For more on the coloniality of Western fine art see Bridget Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011); Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Huey Copeland, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Lisa Corrin, ed., Mining the Museum: An Installation (New York: New Press, 1994); Jennifer González, Subjects to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Kimberly N. Pinder, ed., Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History (New York: Routledge, 2002); Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz’s Slave Daguerreotypes,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 38–61. Rhondda Robinson Thomas, “Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879),” in Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, ed. Yolanda Williams Page (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007), 1:536. “I am sensible that there are many highly intelligent gentlemen of color in these United States, in the force of whose arguments, doubtless, I should discover my inferiority; but if they are blest with wit and talent, friends and fortune, why have they not made themselves men of eminence, by striving to take all the reproach that is cast upon the people of color, and in endeavoring to alleviate the woes of their brethren in bondage? Talk, without effort, is nothing; you are abundantly capable, gentlemen, of making yourselves men of distinction; and this gross neglect, on your paper, causes my blood to boil within me. Here is the grand cause which hinders rise and progress of the people of color. It is their want of laudable ambition and requisite courage.” Maria W. Stewart, “(1833) Maria W. Stewart, ‘An Address at the African Masonic Hall,’ ” Blackpast, October 24, 2011, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1833 -maria-w-stewart-address-african-masonic-hall/. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 6. Anthony V. Alfieri, “Speaking Out of Turn: The Story of Josephine V.,” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 4 (1990): 634, 643. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Sounds of Race,” lecture presented as part of ASE Conversations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, March 27, 2015. For more on the act of speaking as habituated embodiment in cultural matrices of power and hegemony and the disciplining of noncompliant speaking bodies see Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown, “A Phenomenology of the Racialized Tongue: Embodiment, Language, and the Bodies That Speak,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 5, no. 2 (2016): 101–22. Sekimoto and Brown address the performative effects of the act of speaking in constituting the speaking subject and offer rich phenomenological descriptions of their experiences with learning to speak Standard American English as a second language. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1. Uri McMillan, “Unruly Polyvocality: Networks of Black Performance Art,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2020), 361. Moten, In the Break, 1. For important work on sound and space studies see Josh Kun, “The Aural Border,” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000): 16; Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1–2. Here my thinking has been greatly informed by scholars in American studies who contributed to the groundbreaking collection of essays “Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies,” special issue, American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2011). NOTES

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44. As discussed in Kobena Mercer, “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde,” in Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 137. See also Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 45. Mae G. Henderson, Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing, Race and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. 46. Henderson, Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora, 2. 47. Sandoval inspires an occasion to think through speaking out of turn as a neo-rhetoric of existence. In her book, Sandoval provides seven ways to negotiate dominant systems of power, all of which center rhetoric (speech and orality) as a means for deconstructing structures of supremacy. Speaking and existing out of turn and through visual art objects can be comprehended as a kind of insurgent methodology for outlasting various projects of supremacy, domination, oppression, and exploitation. O’Grady is part of a cohort of contemporary artists whose work agitates for a new consciousness that intervenes in the forces of the aesthetic neocolonizing multiculturalist postmodernism of this particular art historical moment. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 3. 48. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 49. Judith Butler reading Louis Althusser in Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 33. 50. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 6; Ahmed quoting Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 144. 51. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519. 52. Lorraine O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” Art Journal 71, no. 2 (Summer 2012), reprinted in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 206. 53. Helen Molesworth, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s,” in This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012), accessed at https://www3.mcachicago.org/2012/twhb/catalogue/essay/index.html. 54. Molesworth, “This Will Have Been.” The Goldstein reference is from a telephone conversation between the two of them on July 1, 2009. 55. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage 20, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 14–15. 56. The Guerrilla Girls members select aliases named after important historic women artists. That O’Grady revealed her identity as Guerrilla Girls member Alma Thomas is significant in that it breaks the code of silence surrounding any one member’s individual identity or artistic career. In many ways, O’Grady’s transgression can also be theorized as speaking out of turn, a strategy of claiming literary and art historical space for herself in the context of her own writing. In a comment to the author on August 1, 2020, O’Grady noted: “When the GGs split into two factions, I didn’t join either group but instead helped to organize the Old Girls, the much larger group who had become inactive over the years during which I/Alma remain a primary spokesperson.” 57. “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest,” my emphasis. 58. O’Grady left the New York art scene in 1983 to care for her mother and remained away until her mother was moved into a nursing home in 1988. After this five-year hiatus, Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammond invited the artist to participate in their landmark touring exhibition Art as a Verb (1988), consisting of avant-garde works made by thirteen black artists, which opened at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. For this show, O’Grady returned to Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline in two different formats. Not only did she perform the 178

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59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

piece one last time, but she also transformed four of the sixty-five pairs of slides that had been projected during the performance into four Cibachrome diptychs. Titled Sisters, the new wall work included images of Devonia Evangeline and Nefertiti, paired with their respective family members in a format reminiscent of their appearance in Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline. When Art as a Verb traveled to New York, O’Grady did not perform the original Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline. Instead she would set the piece aside until 1991, when she began to develop Sisters into a new body of work. I draw much of my timeline information from the forthcoming 2021 Brooklyn Museum retrospective catalogue. O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 212. For more on the stages or phases of multiculturalism’s development see Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 (89) (Winter 2006): 1–24; Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Roderick Ferguson also outlines and critiques the market-based cooptation of “pedagogies of minority difference” taking place in the 1960s and 1970s in US academic contexts in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). From the book’s back cover: “Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power.” Lorraine O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 212. Lorraine O’Grady, “Performance Statement #3: Thinking Out Loud: About Performance Art and My Place in It (1983)” (letter to Tony Whitfield in preparation for Just Above Midtown’s Afro-Pop catalogue), in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 44. O’Grady, “Performance Statement #3,” 47. In this piece, Pendleton intervenes in O’Grady’s interview narrative with abrupt cuts, soundtrack overlay, out-of-context speech fragments, and a use of unusual, at times disorienting perspective. Throughout the narrative portrait, O’Grady speaks about her experiences of sexism and racism in the art world and the ways she explores these realities in her work. Simultaneously, Pendleton forces viewers to confront the uneven and often nonlinear, non-teleological nature of contemporary art’s history and production.

1. MARK MY WORDS

1. Patricia Hill Collins, On Intellectual Activism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013), xiii. 2. Wendy K. Kolkata and Frances Bartkowski, eds., “Lexicon of the Debates: Language,” in Feminist Theory: A Reader, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities, 2010), 44. 3. O’Grady entered Wellesley as part of the class of 1955 but completed her degree and received her diploma with the class of 1956. 4. Lorraine O’Grady, “Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), 1977 (2006),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 7. 5. The chronology is as follows: O’Grady worked for the US government before moving to Europe to write, sometime between 1961 and 1964. She enrolled in Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1965 to 1967, then was sidetracked into translating her instructor José Donoso’s novel from Spanish. Then she moved to Chicago with her second husband (whom she’d met when they were fellow students at Iowa) for his job in film. There, she became a professional translator, broke up with her husband, and pursued her novel again without success. O’Grady left Chicago and her translation business to be with a new boyfriend who had been hired as the head of publicity for Columbia Records in New York. She became a rock critic to avoid being “just his old lady,” in NOTES

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

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her words, and near the end of their relationship, she took a teaching gig at the School of Visual Arts to have a more stable income, which turned her on to art. During this time (1974), O’Grady read Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973). Three years later, she made Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), and three years after that, while teaching full time at SVA, entered the New York art world as Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980). Chronology adapted from a comment the artist made on a draft of this manuscript, July 29, 2020. O’Grady, “Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), 1977 (2006),” 7. Lorraine O’Grady, email to author, July 2017. My observations about the poems and their dates are made from direct digital study of the complete body of work, provided by the artist. The two poems she has identified as missing— “Mountain Trekking” (September 4, 1977) and “The American Beauty” (July 3, 1977)—were provided in transcript. Lorraine O’Grady, email to author, spring 2017. Holland Cotter, “Art in Review,” New York Times, March 24, 2006, E31, https://www.nytimes .com/2006/03/24/arts/art-in-review-hernan-bas.html. The curator of CONYT’s 2010 presentation was Adam Szymczyk, then chief curator at Kunsthalle Basel, who had been introduced to the work in a conversation with Alexander Gray when Szymczyk was curating the group show Strange Comfort (Afforded by the Profession). Learning of O’Grady’s friendship with Nick Mauss, Adam invited Mauss to exhibit with O’Grady, and to install CONYT. O’Grady and Mauss had the most prominent space, a hundred-foot-long gallery on the institution’s ground floor. O’Grady offered an additional work, Miscegenated Family Album, to fill some wall space left over. Mauss’s double-facing chairs (Inversions/L’Amitie, 2010) were arranged in the center of the floor, and Latifa Echakhch did charcoal architectural interventions at the bottom of the walls near the floor. The 2016 exhibition was the artist’s first major solo (and international) exhibition and included most of her important series. Pavel Zoubok, ed., “Introduction,” in Remix: Selections from the International Collage Center (n.p.: International Collage Center in association with Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), 9. Tristan Tzara, “Kurt Schwitters, 1887–1948,” in Sidney Janis Presents an Exhibition of Collage, Painting, Relief and Sculpture (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1952), n.p. A discussion of Tzara and Schwitters in relationship to collage can be found in Thomas Piché Jr., “Remixed Metaphors: A Brief History of Post-War Collage,” in Remix: Selections from the International Collage Center, 10–12. O’Grady’s work in this regard was largely focused on inclusion and integration efforts within the New York art world. Through her participation in several radical art collectives, including the Guerrilla Girls, the artist was a fierce advocate for spaces that centered the voices of women and black artists in ways that were heterogeneous and rigorously conceptualized. Piché Jr., “Remixed Metaphors,” 10–12, informs the commentary here. Katie Vida, “Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories through a Feminist Lens” (Stamford, CT: Franklin Street Works, 2016), n.p. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984); Patricia Hill Collins, “Third World Women in America,” in The Women’s Annual 1980: The Year in Review, ed. Barbara Haber (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 87–116. O’Grady was hardly alone in her search for self and meaning amid so much chaos. The decades following the hard-fought and hard-won victories of the 1950s and 1960s rights movements saw a period of heightened political tension. In the wake of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and during a period characterized by overwhelming

NOTES

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19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

disenfranchisement, the recalibration of many black Americans toward self-determination and self-defense was met with increasing police violence. The focus during this time on individual black male leadership and community-wide criminality meant that the unique experiences of black women were largely marginalized, with black female subjectivity and quotidian black life rendered invisible. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” (1992), in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 208–20. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): 16. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” April 1977. The statement has been published in numerous places, including Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 264–74. The first “black feminist retreat” was held by the then-developing collective in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in summer 1977. The final statement, drafted by Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, was generated after the retreat in dialogue with dozens of black feminists across several northeastern states. “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest,” Brooklyn Rail, February 3, 2016, https://brooklynrail. org/2016/02/art/lorraine-ogrady-with-jarrett-earnest. The books mentioned are Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1983); Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). Lorraine O’Grady, email to author, July 2017. Lorraine O’Grady, note reproduced in an email to author, July 2017. O’Grady, “Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT), 1977 (2006),” 7. Other lauded confessional poets included Maxine Kumin, and later Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds. Since they were regionally concentrated in the Boston area, O’Grady most likely came into contact with their work during and/or after her time at Wellesley. Kobena Mercer, Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 57. This has been argued elsewhere in Huey Copeland, “Making Black Feminist Art Histories,” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 27–29; Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2016); Helen Molesworth, “Art Is Medicine: Helen Molesworth on the Work of Simone Leigh,” Artforum 56, no. 7 (March 2018): https://www.artforum.com/print/201803/helen-molesworth-on-the-work-of -simone-leigh-74304; Helen Molesworth, This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), and several others. This is asserted in O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid,” n18, which cites a telephone conversation between Judith Wilson and O’Grady, January 21, 1992; John Parish Bowles, “Food for the Spirit: Transcendence and Desire,” in Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 207. Stephanie Sparling Williams, “Speaking Out of Turn: Race Gender and Direct Address” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2016), 187. Bowles, “Food for the Spirit,” 207. Bowles, “Food for the Spirit,” 207. Quoted in Bowles, “Food for the Spirit,” 207, and expounded on in 290n12. Bowles, “Food for the Spirit,” 208. Bakhtin emphasizes that textual objects do not exist in themselves, but only in relation. See for instance Maurizio Lazzarato, “Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theory of the Utterance,” paper delivered at NOTES

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

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a symposium at Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, the Netherlands, May 16, 2009, translated by Arianna Bove and reproduced at https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato6.htm. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 115. As discussed in Kobena Mercer, “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde,” in Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 137, 141. See also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Dover, 1994). James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work (New York: Dial, 1976), 75. Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work, 54. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 194. Judith Baxter, “Bakhtin’s Theories of Double-Voiced Discourse,” in Double-Voicing at Work (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. Baxter’s book explains this concept in more depth. Pam Morris, ed., The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1995), 105. Baxter, “Bakhtin’s Theories of Double-Voiced Discourse,” 3. Mercer, “Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde,” 137. Baxter, “Bakhtin’s Theories of Double-Voiced Discourse,” 2. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–434. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984), 110–14. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 40–41. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 9. Lorraine O’Grady, email to author, April 2018. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 236. This quote is also invoked in an assessment of Piper’s work by Dennis A. Nawrocki and Mark Pascale in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 216. Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1:253. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 1:253. Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 1:253. Marjorie Welish, “In This Corner: Adrian Piper’s Agitprop,” Arts Magazine 67, no. 7 (March 1991): 46. The artist on her use of German throughout the series: “Sometimes I try to enhance the neutralizing effect of the drawings by adding deflationary text, ‘What if . . .?’—‘So what?’ Sometimes I use the German rather than the English idiom because the German ‘Und wenn nun?’—‘Na, und?’ has an aggressive, challenging edge that the English lacks and that better reflects the stereotypes of blacks as aggressive and powerful. The German could also be translated into English as ‘Now what?’—‘Oh, yeah?’ It thus has a broader, more provocative meaning that eggs one on while it deflates.” Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 253. Lorraine O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” Art Journal 71, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 8. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson used the term first in 1991: “A retelling of modernism to show how it predicts the triumphs of the current sequences would reveal that ‘the Other’ is your neighbor—that black and Modernist cultures were inseparable long ago. Why use the word, ‘post-Modern’ when it may also mean ‘post-black’?” Robert Farris Thompson, “Afro Modern-

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58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71.

ism,” Artforum, September 1991, 91–94. However, the more recent and notorious usage is the one discussed in this chapter. For an in-depth account and theorization of the history of “postblackness” see Derek Conrad Murray, Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming AfricanAmerican Identity after Civil Rights (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016). Thelma Golden, Freestyle (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001), 14. For an incisive critical theorizing of the link between global capitalism and US multiculturalisms see Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Thelma Golden, “My Brother,” in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994), 20. Murray, Queering Post-Black Art, 4. Murray, Queering Post-Black Art, 4–5, emphasis in original. Touré, “Dedication,” in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (New York: Atria Books, 2011), v. O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 8. O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 9. Lorraine O’Grady, “Interview with Laura Cottingham (1995),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 223 O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 9. This narrative was last accessed on November 12, 2017, on the artist’s website, along with the artist statement for Cutting Out the New York Times, but it is no longer there; however, see https:// lorraineogrady.com/tag/post-black/. Pendleton also shares a special relationship with O’Grady, as the two staged performances together at both New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Biennial in 2012. Pendleton also made a video of O’Grady that same year—the first in what would become a series of videos featuring artists and activists who have inspired him. Adam Pendleton, Adam Pendleton: Black Dada Reader (London: Walther Koenig Books, 2019); Pendleton’s poem appears on pp. 333–46. Also see Terence Trouillot, “What Is ‘Black Dada’? Artist Adam Pendleton Lays Out His Disruptive Theory in a New Book,” Artnet News, October 4, 2017, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/adam-pendletons-black-dada-reader -1103051. Trouillot, “What Is ‘Black Dada’?.”

2. “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST”

1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Performance Statement #1: Thoughts about Myself, When Seen as a Political Performance Artist (1981),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 38. 2. O’Grady, “Performance Statement #1,” 38. 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “Performance Statement #3: Thinking Out Loud: About Performance Art and My Place in It (1983)” (letter to Tony Whitfield in preparation for Just Above Midtown’s Afro-Pop catalogue), in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 43, emphasis in original. 4. Lorraine O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981)” (performance script), in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 10. 5. See bell hooks’s essay on black female spectatorship, “Oppositional Gazing,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31. 6. As Amelia Jones notes, the art performance and its conceptual framework(s) have achieved this position of assumed authenticity and “truth” in contemporary art discourse. Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 16–47. NOTES

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7. Tavia Nyong’o, “Between the Body and the Flesh: Sex and Gender in Black Performance Art,” in Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museums Houston, 2013), 26. 8. Against the backdrop of the feminist artistic movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the emergence of multicultural discourses and critiques of the 1990s and early 2000s, O’Grady summoned, as performance studies scholar Daphne Brooks articulates in her work on performers from 1850 to 1910, “multiple performance strategies, performative ideologies, and new popular cultural technologies to counter-intuitively articulate and deploy the discourse of sociopolitical alienation.” Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. My analysis of O’Grady’s work builds on Brooks’s understanding of alienation as a state of being and a creative process to consider the position—that is, the state of being—of the alien artist and the process of alienation within the context of the contemporary art world, and how O’Grady has navigated the limiting discourses of both feminist and black art history. 9. Throughout the chapter, the term “multimodal” is discussed alongside performance in order to highlight the multilayered complexity of O’Grady’s performance iterations. Multimodal is the combination of multiple processes, approaches, or iterations within a single work of art. This category is broad, but here multimodality is explored alongside developing definitions of direct address and theories of alienation effect(s). Furthermore, multimodal performance practices are culminations of enormous creative labor, which is mobilized across a wide range of expressive techniques by O’Grady in order to, as I argue throughout this book, speak and exist out of turn. It is important to note that Adrian Piper’s early work also participates in this kind of direct-address approach to alienation. Specifically, Piper’s Mythic Being (1973–75) series relies heavily on “alien” and disruptive enactments by a mythic persona who publicly speaks and acts “out of turn.” 10. Adrian Piper, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I: Essay,” in Out of Order, Out of Sight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1:245. 11. Uri McMillan defines avatar production as strategic performances of objecthood uniquely developed by black female subjects that “rescrambl[e] the dichotomy between objectified bodies or embodied subjects by reimagining objecthood as a performance-based method that disrupts presumptive knowledges of black subjectivity.” Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 9. 12. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 2. In her introductory discussion, Ahmed highlights often taken-for-granted characteristics that are embedded in our collective psyche regarding aliens. 13. McMillan’s framework is an important and necessary critical offering in the discourse of performance studies, and it has richly informed and sharpened this chapter. Another important text in the study of artists performing “others” is Cherise Smith, Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). This chapter, however, is less invested in theorizing artists’ complex personas as avatars and/or others; that work is being done by McMillan and Smith. Instead, I seek to continue the work this book sets out to accomplish, namely to develop the analytic of speaking out of turn in order to theorize O’Grady’s language-centered practice. 14. Having particular influence on this chapter as a whole is the work of art historian and performance theorist Amelia Jones. Others include Uri McMillan, Daphne Brooks, Judith Butler, and Monica Miller. 15. For more on the historical relationship between blackness, black bodies, and black art and the US art museum see Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). 184

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16. There is urgent and necessary work to be done in challenging the marginalization of the creative practices of women-identified artists of color within the art world understandings of feminist art, and the disavowal of nonwhite artists as participating in (and, frankly, initiating) the history and production of the avant-garde. As I suggested in my introduction, performance art and the art of performance must begin prior to its art world historiography of a limited white- and male-dominated canon. 17. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady,” 1998, accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com /wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Courtney-Baker-Lorraine-OGrady_Email-Interview_Unpublished.pdf. Baker was a Duke University graduate student at the time. 18. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” 19. This is a critique the Black Arts Movement started in the early 1960s and continued well into the 1970s, when it was taken up and maintained by arts collectives such as AfriCOBRA, which still exists today. 20. While the field has seen rapid shifts with the proliferation of scholarship addressing performance, installation, and participatory art, early and now canonical texts such as John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), and Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Les presses du réel, 1998) tend to focus on a single medium, or more traditional art historical approaches to defining their objects. Even works in later anthologies dealing with reception as an embodied experience, such as Joseph D. Parry, ed., Art and Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2010), remain largely grounded in canonical works in traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture. 21. Scholarship that has been particularly informative to the analysis presented here includes Barbara Smith, “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism,” Radical Teacher, no. 7 (March 1978): 20–27; Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988); Elaine Aston, “Finding a Tradition: Feminism and Theatre History,” in An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35–40; Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997); Brooks, Bodies in Dissent; Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 22. See Caroline Jones, ed., Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Nathaniel Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (Canterbury, UK: Gylphi Limited, 2013); Christine Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 23. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” 24. For example there is the Chinese city of Chu-Hsien, which translates as Chrysanthemum City. In Japan, the Imperial Order of the Chrysanthemum is the highest order of chivalry. To learn more about the history and cultural significance of this symbolic bloom, visit the National Chrysanthemum Society’s website, mums.org. 25. For more on multiculturalism in the arts see Jeff Chang, Who We Be: The Colorization of America (New York: Macmillan, 2014); Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). For resources on feminist conceptualisms and performance art see Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan, eds., Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). 26. For more on the periodization of multiculturalism see Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 27. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” NOTES

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28. For more on the economic and social conditions of the 1980s, particularly for black communities, and the social science of race and class dynamics see Thomas F. Pettigrew, “Race and Class in the 1980s: An Interactive View,” Daedalus 110, no. 2 (1981): 233–55. For more on the economic dimension of racial inequality in 1980s, from a sociological perspective, see William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For more on Reagan-era politics and the “war on drugs” see Dimitri A. Bogazianos, 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Doris Marie Provine, Unequal under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (June 2015): 126–40. For an intersectional analysis of race and class disparities among African Americans see Elizabeth R. Cole and Safiya R. Omari, “Race, Class and the Dilemmas of Upward Mobility for African Americans,” Journal of Social Issues 59, no. 4 (December 2003): 785–802. 29. Lucy Lippard, “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” Art Journal 39 (Fall–Winter 1980): 362. 30. For more on neoliberal capitalist multiculturalism see Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003); Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 24, no. 4 (89) (Winter 2006): 1–24. 31. Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as it relates to race and gender discourse. For more on how women of color feminism and queer of color critique, emerging from this moment, has informed the work of scholars today see Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick Ferguson, eds., Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), which “examines the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the ‘strange affinities,’ afforded by nuanced comparative analysis of racial formations” (press kit). 32. See Lorraine O’Grady, “Interview with Laura Cottingham (1995),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 223–24; Lorraine O’Grady, “The Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Project, 1980–1983 (2018),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 253. 33. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” 34. For more on the ways in which enslaved Africans became literate and pursued educational advancement see Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 35. Du Bois and Washington were prominent black thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each representing a distinct set of approaches to the issue of educating and advancing the black masses during and after Reconstruction. Du Bois sought to mobilize the black intellectual elite through liberal education, and with “pen and voice” fought for equal opportunity for black Americans in all aspects of society, whereas Washington advocated for a practical-trade-oriented approach to education that would equip blacks for work in industry (and in continued service to whites). 36. For more on the New Negro Movement, its aesthetic arm, the Harlem Renaissance, and the cultural aftermath of both phenomena, as well as a comprehensive look at organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and seismic shifts in black access and mobility catalyzed by the Great Migration and fostered in urban centers like Harlem, see the following historical and recent scholarship: Alain Locke ed., The New Negro (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925); Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Davar186

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

ian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” On Hammons’s work’s popularity among reviewers as well, see for instance Carrie Rickey, “Singular Work, Double Bind, Triple Threat,” Village Voice, March 3, 1980, 71. Lorraine O’Grady, “Artists Chronicle,” High Performance #13 4, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 56. O’Grady, “Artists Chronicle,” 56. Lorraine O’Grady, “Interview with Linda Montano (1986),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 80. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” She had collected large, old-fashioned dictionaries, and in the Funk & Wagnalls (twelve inches thick) found a picture of a cat-o’-nine-tails, which she gave to a woman in her apartment building to replicate for her; she recalls that the woman was a prop maker for theater and/or movies. Lorraine O’Grady, phone conversation with the author, July 11, 2018. See for instance Cody C. Collins, Love of a Glove: The Romance, Legends and Fashion History of Gloves and How They Are Made (New York: Fairchild, 1945). Monica Miller, “Crimes of Fashion: Dressing the Part from Slavery to Freedom,” in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 77–136. In addition to celebrating a cotillion, O’Grady’s older sister, Devonia, was basileus of the New England AKA sorority chapter based in Boston. When O’Grady came of age, she refused to participate in the coming-out ritual or join a black sorority. Instead the artist became pregnant in her teens and left Boston at age twenty-one so she did not have to “publicly embarrass” her family by rejecting their world. O’Grady continues in her note to the author: “As a management intern, the elite of elite entrances to the US government at the time (I was the first girl from Wellesley to pass the exam), I felt I was going to a much bigger world. But it wasn’t as big as I thought it would be, so I eventually had to leave it as well, to become what I thought I could be.” “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady,” my emphasis. In fact, the artist felt that her friendship with many of the Just Above Midtown artists might be compromised following her first appearance as MBN. She recounted her fear of rejection in a comment made to this author during a review of this text, August 1, 2020. “The device was suspended by the Royal Navy in 1879 but it had fallen out of use long before this date. The cat-o-nine tails created some English expressions: ‘Not enough room to swing a cat’ referred to the whip; ‘Letting the cat out of the bag’ refers to the device being kept in a special bag on board.” Science Museum Group, “Cat-o-nine tails, United Kingdom, 1700–1850,” https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co154902/cat-o-nine-tails-united-kingdom-1700–1850-whip. In one image caption, the artist labeled her performance actions as “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire beats herself with the whip-that-made-plantations-move.” Lorraine O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Gallery,” http://lorraineogrady.com/slideshow/mlle-bourgeoise-noire/. Lorraine O’Grady, phone conversation with the author, July 11, 2018. “Every square inch of [the dress] bore an overlapping glove, so that the Miami-special synthetic original was no longer visible except for the spaghetti straps. A couple of friends basted the white cotton dress gloves to the gown, while I worked with two students to figure out the cape, which was made exclusively of the long white leather opera gloves I had found. It was difficult NOTES

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56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

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because there weren’t enough opera gloves to cover more than just the back. And there was no understructure like the gown, so they had to be pinned carefully and laid flat so the whole thing [wouldn’t] just fall apart. At the end of the day, everybody left. And I had to start sewing the whole thing by myself. After two weeks my hands were so swollen, I could barely move them. . . . Each time I’ve seen the costume exhibited in a museum context (starting with the Wadsworth Athenaeum), it has looked cleaner and more beautiful than when I wore it. Eileen Norton, now the costume’s owner, has done a sensitive, almost reverential job of maintaining it in a pristineness it had not been used to when it was in the bottom of my closet.” Lorraine O’Grady, note to the author, August 1, 2020. For a classical (albeit controversially critical and dismissive) study of the black middle class in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, including its origin, development, behavior, attitudes, and values, see E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Book That Brought the Shock of Self-Revelation to Middle-Class Negros [Blacks] in America (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). More recent scholarly work includes Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Bart Landry, Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class in the Twenty-First Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018); Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999/2013); Karyn R. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Amy Robinson citing Brecht in “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest” Critical Inquiry 20 (Summer 1994): 715–36. Judith Butler on the “drag queen” is also important here, as is Jack Halberstam. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999): 137, 174–80; and Jack Halberstam on Esther Newton’s trailblazing work on drag in Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 236. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 121. “Damas, Léon Gontran,” in Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia, ed. Donald E. Herdeck (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1979), 349. Another interesting connection between the two luminaries is that both Damas and O’Grady shared a fascination with literature and studied languages: in Damas’s case, Eastern languages, and in O’Grady’s, Latin, French, and Spanish. Another similarity is their respective associations with Surrealism. When Damas was living in Paris, he associated with the Surrealist movement and published poems in prominent French literary journals, which O’Grady no doubt was familiar with, and perhaps even teaching in her course on Surrealist writers at the School of Visual Arts in the late 1970s. Finally, in ways analogous to Damas’s 1934 ethnographic study “Bush Negroes of French Guiana,” O’Grady’s later fascination with and study of Egypt, which incorporated a self-reflexive, autoethnographic bent, also examined the history, culture, and people of a distinct and particular community. Damas continued this research and other studies into Caribbean and South African culture after World War II (he had been active in the French Resistance), whereas O’Grady’s interests moved away from focused place-based studies to include social and cultural theories. O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981),” 10. In other poems like “Réalité” (Reality, 1937), Damas expresses the shame of feeling culturally white, a departure O’Grady also makes in her work. In addition to challenging her own assumptions about blackness in relation to “white culture,” the artist begins challenging other black artists, whose response to the internalized shame that Damas writes about ironically manifests

NOTES

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

in problematic appropriations of black working-class culture in order to cater to white sensibilities and expectations of black art. Author conversation with the artist, Chelsea, New York, November 7, 2019. Author conversation with the artist, Chelsea, New York, November 7, 2019. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 6. Artist Tracey Rose speaking in a video in 2008, since deleted but viewed by the author on several occasions between 2013 and 2016. hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, 115. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 6. Here I am borrowing heavily from Brooks’s concise reading of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), 5; Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, 52; Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” and “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willet (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91–99, 179–205. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 349. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” In his work, a gest is located within the rubric of epic theater, or modern theater, as Brecht has sometimes referred to it. Simply stated, epic theater provokes self-reflection in spectators, and it promotes a critical position in one’s relationship to the performance narrative and how actions unfold on stage. For the purpose of my discussion, Brecht’s notion of gestus (or social gest) is derived from Brecht on Theatre, 86, 92, 104–5. Translator’s note, Brecht on Theatre, 42. What is particularly useful for this discussion on raced and gendered performances in contemporary art is that a Brechtian gestus makes visible artists’ (or characters’) social relations and the causality of their behavior, as interpreted from a historical materialist perspective. According to Elizabeth Wright, “every emotion,” when treated under the heading of gestus, “manifests itself as a set of social relations.” Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation (New York: Routledge, 1987), 27. As Brecht insists, “It is what happens between people that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter.” Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” 200, emphasis in original. In several interviews throughout the years, whether with this author or with other scholars and critics (including for instance “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady”), O’Grady has expressed a felt sense of failure in the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance, and disappointment in its overall reception in the early 1980s. The artist’s attitude is also an important consideration within conceptions of gestus, as this attitude is embodied as an act of epic narration—the “showing” that is “shown” in the “showing,” to use Brecht’s turn of phrase. I, along with Brecht, am interested in the “political” basis from which an artist (here, O’Grady) interprets her role and develops her own alien existence through this caged character’s gestus—a process that inevitably involves exploring a set of concrete and actual behaviors, and then mobilizing them according to principles and direct-address strategies of selective realism. Furthermore, this creative modality provides a unique occasion for marginalized figures (specifically the artists themselves) to experiment within the repertoire of out-of-turn speech using innovative methods for critiquing and deconstructing the conditions of exploitation, silencing, and violent oppression by these cultural institutions. In this way, O’Grady performs her own unique versions of revisionist cultural politics. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 6. Amelia Jones has written and curated some of the principal work on this exact phenomenon: Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body (New York: Phaidon, 2012); Amelia Jones, ed., Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012); Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, eds., Performing the Body / Performing the Text (New York: Routledge, 1999); Amelia Jones. “ ‘Presence’ NOTES

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76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

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in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 11–18. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 8. As Uri McMillan puts it in a response to a statement made by Adrian Piper, “Indeed alienation has its uses.” McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 151. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981),” 290n1. O’Grady, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981),” 291n4. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” In 1983, O’Grady conceived and executed an elusive one-time performance that took place at Franklin Furnace, an exhibition and performance space dedicated to experimental and avantgarde works since its founding in 1976. For the advertised price of $5, audience members filled the dimly lit space to view O’Grady’s piece Fly by Night, in which the artist performed a silent specter in blackface, accompanied by her then-assistant Andrew Nahem. The documentation captures a strange and alienating performance (for both artist and audience members) where O’Grady summoned the character of MBN by projecting images of the rogue debutante on a large screen that lit the dark performance space. The images slowly faded into a white nothingness—the image of MBN was erased over the course of the enactment. The artist later characterized her efforts in the performance as representing “a state of physical and psychological exhaustion” after having produced three major performances (Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline, and Rivers, First Draft) in the previous two years. O’Grady has described the work as an “unresolved piece,” one that she felt embarrassed by at the time and quickly pushed aside to pursue other things. And while the visual semiotics of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire were revisited in Fly by Night, such as the white gloves, white chrysanthemums, and photos of MBN herself, the artist stresses that the work was “clearly not about MBN, it was about Lorraine.” Lorraine O’Grady, “Fly by Night,” http://lorraineogrady.com/projects/fly-by-night/. An interesting assertion to consider alongside this chapter’s laser focus on the Mlle Bourgeoise Noire performance, and the conditions in which the artist’s black female subjectivity might produce such a work, self-reflexive in process and yet distinct from the more biographical shadow work Fly by Night. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 125. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 105. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 109. “Correspondence from Lorraine O’Grady to the 36 selected ‘Advanced Black Artists’ working across the country,” June 22, 1982, MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, Lorraine O’Grady Papers, Wellesley College Archives, Massachusetts (hereafter O’Grady Papers). Correspondence from Ray Grist to Lorraine O’Grady, June 26, 1982, MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, O’Grady Papers. Correspondence from Sandra Payne to Lorraine O’Grady, June 28, 1982, MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, O’Grady Papers. Correspondence from Janet Henry to Lorraine O’Grady, n.d., MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, O’Grady Papers. Correspondence from Howardena Pindell to Lorraine O’Grady, n.d., MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, O’Grady Papers. “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady.” Lorraine O’Grady, “The Black and White Show,” Artforum 47, no. 9 (May 2009): 190–95. Lorraine O’Grady, “Email Q&A with Artforum Editor (2009),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 200. I believe O’Grady was referring to the 1983 invasion of Grenada.

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95. O’Grady, “The Black and White Show,” 191. 96. This is according to the artist in a note to the author, August 1, 2020. 97. Lorraine O’Grady, “Interview with Laura Cottingham (1995),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 226–27. The review was “Eye Hot Spots,” East Village Eye, May 1983. It seems that another notice was published in The Villager, but I have been unable to track it down: “Black and White and Promising,” The Villager, New York, April 21, 1983, 13. 98. O’Grady, “The Black and White Show (1983),” available at http://lorraineogrady.com/art/the -black-and-white-show/. 99. For more on Fekner’s work, persona, and the East Village art scene see C. McCormick and I. Sandler, The East Village Scene (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1984); Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990); Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1997). 100. Correspondence from Lorraine O’Grady to Elizabeth C. Baker, editor of Art in America, October 22, 1984, MSS.3, box 10, folder 5, O’Grady Papers. 101. Donald Kuspit, “Adrian Piper: Self-Healing through Meta-Art” Art Criticism 3, no. 3 (1987): 9–16. Despite both verbal and written conversations with the artist and her well-founded criticism and suggested revisions, Kuspit effectively evacuated Piper’s voice from his essay, and with it, her contribution to the writing process. Kuspit published his essay in a periodical he edited at the time, Art Criticism, despite the copious feedback he had solicited from Piper regarding not only the misinterpretation and misrepresentation of her work but also the accuracy of his research and the intellectual rigor of his criticism. His decision to completely ignore all feedback demonstrates both an intellectual refusal of Piper’s labor as both a scholar and an artist as well as a violent silencing of Piper’s dynamic creative practice, which he systematically dismissed through his criticism. Over the course of Piper’s career, she would go on to pen several open letters to editors, critics, and others involved in the critical reception of her art. And in the face of Kuspit’s dismissive silences, Piper penned her now widely praised, unrelenting, judicious, fact-checking piece “An Open Letter to Donald Kuspit,” written in 1987 and first published in Real Life, nos. 17/18 (Winter 1987–Spring 1988): 2–11. The letter can also be found in Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, 2:107–26. 102. O’Grady notes that the exhibition was not as conflict-ridden as it might have been, as Overstreet agreed to let the artist’s friend, George Mingo, whom they both trusted, help him hang the show. As a result, O’Grady “got almost exactly the show I wanted. It took four days, and changes had to be made—as a result of . . . the space, and the nature of the work they were encountering. George was a pure aesthetic soul and we were close. He had an impeccable eye, and I trusted the decisions he would make on my behalf. We discussed the hang every evening, and I could agree, disagree, make suggestions—almost as if I were there. When I came to the opening, there were only two or three surprises, all positive.” Note to the author, August 1, 2020. 103. Correspondence from Lorraine O’Grady to Joe Overstreet, May 7, 1983, MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, O’Grady Papers. 104. Correspondence from Lorraine O’Grady to Gylbert [Coker], May 8, 1983, MSS.3, box 10, folder 4, O’Grady Papers. 105. This is an extension O’Grady does not attribute to another 1983 creative mixed-media performance, which she staged in Harlem (discussed below). 106. Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . .,” accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/. 107. See Stephanie Sparling Williams, “On Turning: Video Installation and the Question of Orientation,” in “Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2016), 40–87. NOTES

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108. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 46. This quote was originally retrieved from Joanne Klein, “Looking at Looking (at Looking): Experiments in the Interrogation of Spectating,” in Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, ed. Susan Kattwinkel (London: Praeger, 2003), 110. 109. Judith Sebesta, “Audience at Risk: Space and Spectators at Feminist Performance,” in Audience Participation, 151. 110. See Stephanie Sparling Williams, “ ‘Frame Me’: Speaking out of Turn and Lorraine O’Grady’s Alien Avant-Garde,” Stedelijk Studies (2016): https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal/frame-me -speaking-out-of-turn-and-lorraine-ogradys-alien-avant-garde/. 111. Such is the case for the text-based works discussed in chapter 1. Just as most literature is not dependent on a particular response from its readers, direct address and speaking out of turn that is manifested in textual art may solicit a response, but it does not require one. As argued in the previous chapter, this art is a consummate example of the interpellative function of an ideological calling, an intimate capture of its spectator’s subjectivity without the one being hailed actually becoming marked as such at the moment of encounter. See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” 112. Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 1997), 273, my emphasis. 113. Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 103, my emphasis. 3. MANIFESTOS AND MYTHMAKING

1. Lorraine O’Grady, “Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture (1994)” (lecture delivered at Wellesley Found Table, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 1994), in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 120. 2. Lorraine O’Grady, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 64. 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” Art Journal 71, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 8. 4. Lorraine O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown,” in Lorraine O’Grady (New York: Alexander Gray Associates, 2015), 3. 5. O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown,” 3. 6. O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown,” 3–4. 7. In an email sent to the author on September 24, 2019, the artist discussed how her experimentations with the diptych were grounded in this early performance context. Furthermore, she confirmed the significance of the script to the work’s development and meaning: “Of my art works, the two most complete examples of the ‘diptych’ methodology are not actually those that contain literal diptychs. I could be wrong, but as I see it, the two most capacious examples I’ve achieved so far of the ‘diptych—both/and idea’ are the Rivers, First Draft performance, and the Landscape (Western Hemisphere) video. . . . My 1982 script is kind of essential for understanding what’s going on.” 8. Zawe Ashton, “Meeting Lorraine O’Grady: A Film by Zawe Ashton,” for Tate Modern, associated with the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, available to view on YouTube: https://youtu.be/60U8FXYS69A. 9. O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown,” 3–4. 10. Linda Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), in Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties: Sex, Food, Money/Fame, Ritual/Death, ed. Linda Montano (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 400. 11. O’Grady, “Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity,” 119. 192

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12. More on these dynamics appears in Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 400; “Courtney Baker Interviews Lorraine O’Grady,” 1998, accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content /uploads/2015/11/Courtney-Baker-Lorraine-OGrady_Email-Interview_Unpublished.pdf; Lorraine O’Grady, “Miscegenated Family Album,” 1980/1994, accessible at http://lorraineogrady .com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/OGrady_MFA_summary.pdf. 13. Lorraine O’Grady, “Rivers, First Draft, 1982: Working Script, Cast List, Production Credits (1982),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 12–13. 14. “Rivers First Draft Gallery,” descriptive image caption, http://lorraineogrady.com/slideshow /rivers-first-draft/#jp-carousel-1630, also at Lorraine O’Grady, “Rivers, First Draft, 1982: Working Script, Cast List, Production Credits (1982),” 16. 15. Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 401. 16. Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 402. 17. Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 402. 18. Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 405. 19. Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 403. 20. Montano, “Lorraine O’Grady” (interview), 401–2. 21. The inspiration for the helmet was of “Pallas Athena, an eighteen-foot statue of whom in the Girls’ Latin auditorium was the school’s most overpowering and ‘indoctrinating’ visual image.” Note from O’Grady to the author, August 1, 2020. 22. What has been tricky, at times, in the research is seeking answers to questions regarding language—questions evaded by the artist and the archive. The use of the word and physical suggestion of “rape” became something I sought to unpack for myself and future readers. The inclusion of a rape scene in Rivers, First Draft struck me, especially within the current political context, which includes the hypervisibility of the MeToo movement. This is what I found: But instead of going downstairs, the Woman in Red dances back up the corridor. Soon she is intersected by the Debauchees who are coming back down again. The Woman in Gold, the dancer leading the Debauchees, pins the Woman in Red against an imaginary wall and makes love to her against her will, but without the Woman in Red protesting too strongly. When the Woman in Gold breaks away and continues dancing with the others, the indignity of this experience seems to have strengthened the Woman in Red’s will. She begins to move back down the corridor and to descend the stairs, slowly, hesitantly. It takes her a minute and a half to reach the castle kitchen. —O’Grady, “Rivers, First Draft, 1982: Working Script, Cast List, Production Credits (1982),” 18–19 In Section 5 on the Woman in Gold, there’s a brief description of the scene I call “the rape.” Images #29–31 in the Gallery sort of show it. “Rivers” plays more like a waking dream, and of course, it’s outdoors in a public space. Hope this helps. It’s the scene that makes her break away from her former life and begin to become an artist . . . again, metaphorically, as she paints her own stove red. —Lorraine O’Grady, email to author, March 31, 2019

23. In the performance script, the actors are given much more direction and conceptual context behind the unfolding enactments. For example, and to quote at length the section titled “The Nude Swimmer”: NOTES

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The Woman in Red lays the photo album down on the bed beside her and (depending on the prop) either watches a movie on TV or goes to sleep and dreams. Suddenly the image she is seeing (either watching TV or dreaming) materializes physically. A nude swimmer comes onto the bed where she is lying (either through the TV screen or out from under the bed, emerging from the end nearest her head), and brushkisses her lightly in a sweeping, rolling motion, and then says: “I’m not interested in meaning or significance or importance.” Next the two Production Assistants come to the foot of the bed and say: “And what about the Bomb?” “Will anything last?” As if responding to this, the Woman in Red breaks free of the Nude Swimmer and forces him off the bed. Apparently trying to get back to something real, she picks up the photo album and looks at it again, carefully, as if either remembering or making aesthetic decisions, it’s hard to tell. —O’Grady, “Rivers, First Draft, 1982: Working Script, Cast List, Production Credits (1982),” 19–20

  While this information is not provided in either the performance still or accompanying wall text, its existence suggests an additional layer of meaning for both the artist and her 1980s actors and audience members. 24. The performance script reminds those studying the work in its fullness that sounds indeed played a large role in the one-time-only “three-ring circus” event. Importantly, but what contemporary viewers miss, are the sounds of the New York radio station WLIB—a West Indian newscast, followed by reggae music—that blasts at the start of the first vignette as audience members are introduced to the Woman in White. Later, New Wave music plays as the Debauchees dance onto the scene, and both the Little Girl in Pink Sash and the Art Snobs speak pointedly scripted text through their amplifiers in a drone of voices and song as their simultaneous actions unfold. Possibly unheard by those present at the performance, and certainly unheard by gallery audiences, the Nude Swimmer whispers to the Woman in Red, “I’m not interested in meaning or significance or importance” as he sweeps over her in a rolling motion, an embodied and performative trance. An apparition, a train of thought disrupted by another sound inaccessible to museumgoers, is that of two Production Assistants who enter the scene to speak the lines: “And what about the Bomb?” and “Will anything last?” Perhaps most significantly, the script outlines that upon the intervention of the Nantucket Memorial, a woman’s voice singing the Episcopal Advent hymn “O Come Emmanuel” in a flat West Indian accent begins. This singer continues until the trio reach the end of the stream. 25. My reference to “being and becoming” is inspired by the work of interdisciplinary anthropologist Lanita Jacobs, who uses these terms to reference “Black women’s self-perceptions as individuals and members of a collective (being), as well as their transition into different dispositions, ideological stances (or positions), professional statuses, and phases of life (becoming).” Lanita Jacobs, From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 5. 26. O’Grady, “Rivers and Just Above Midtown,” 3. 27. O’Grady, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,”64. 28. Tracey Warr, “Preface,” in The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), 13. 29. Nick Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets’ and Other Los Angeles Collaborations,” East of Borneo, December 7, 2011, https://eastofborneo.org/articles/senga-nengudis -ceremony-for-freeway-fets-and-other-los-angeles-collaborations/.

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30. Jones continues: “Nengudi’s stated interest in the hybrid performative art practices of the 1960s (from Gutai to Happenings), her firsthand knowledge of Japanese contemporary art through her year of study in Tokyo in 1966–1967, and her training as a dancer could be thought of as key motivating forces inspiring the spatial, embodied, and affective/phenomenological aspects of her practice.” Amelia Jones, “Please Respond: Senga Nengudi’s Art as “Human Relationship,” in Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures, ed. Nora Burnett Abrams and Elissa Auther (Denver: Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2015), 45, 46. 31. Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets’ and Other Los Angeles Collaborations,” emphasis in original. 32. Rebecca Peabody, “African American Avant-Gardes, 1965–1990,” Getty Research Journal, no. 1 (2009): 214. 33. Amelia Jones, interview with Senga Nengudi, October 2009, transcript copyrighted by LACE, Los Angeles, p. 3. Corrected interview transcript provided to the author via email by Amelia Jones on July 14, 2020. 34. Peabody, “African American Avant-Gardes, 1965–1990,” 214. 35. See for instance Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in Collected Papers (London: Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924–50), 5:198–204; Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” chapter 1, section 4, of Capital: Volume 1. Other scholars have taken up and expounded upon early writings on the fetish. Anne Cheng brings attention to the racial dimension of the fetish in Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 36. Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets’ and Other Los Angeles Collaborations.” 37. Stillman, “Senga Nengudi’s ‘Ceremony for Freeway Fets’ and Other Los Angeles Collaborations.” 38. Ruth Wilson Gilmore expounds upon this influential conception of race in “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, 2nd ed., ed. R. J. Johnston, Peter J. Taylor, and Michael J. Watts (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 261–74. 39. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage 20, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 14–15. 40. O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 14. 41. O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 14. 42. Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . .,” accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/. 43. Stephanie Sparling Williams, “Speaking Out of Turn: Race, Gender, and Direct Address in American Art Museums” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2016). 44. O’Grady, “Art Is . . .” 45. O’Grady, “Interview with Linda Montano (1986),” 83. 46. In an interview with then Studio Museum curator Amanda Hunt in 2015, O’Grady discussed the impending crack epidemic in Harlem in the early 1980s, and the narrow window in which a performance reliant on photo documentary was possible. Indeed, “1983 was really one of the last moments that these photographs could have been taken, with a whole population so open to the camera. The business of framing is really problematic now, as you know. I don’t think this piece could have worked now, in 2015. Just this past fall, we did a shoot at the Brooklyn Parade for a video I was doing on Carnival. Before and during the parade—just talking to people and trying to take their pictures with a still camera, or interview them on video—they wouldn’t cooperate. Nobody would talk to you!” Amanda Hunt, “Art Is . . . : Interview with Lorraine O’Grady,” Studio: The Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine, Summer–Fall 2015, 23. 47. O’Grady, “This Will Have Been: My 1980s,” 14. NOTES

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48. Judith Sebesta, “Audience at Risk: Space and Spectators at Feminist Performance,” in Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, ed. Susan Kattwinkel (London: Praeger, 2003), 151. 49. Lucy Lippard. “Sweeping Exchanges: The Contribution of Feminism to the Art of the 1970s,” Art Journal 39 (Fall–Winter 1980): 362–65. 50. Hunt, “Art Is . . . : Interview with Lorraine O’Grady,” 24. 51. Henry Lesnick, Guerilla Street Theatre (New York: Avon, 1973), 12–13. 52. Stephanie Sparling Williams, “White Walls, Black Service Bodies,” unpublished essay, 2012. 53. I use the word “genius” here for several reasons. First, black bodies in the specific context of Harlem and through these creative modalities and enactments would never be understood as such. In using a concept that signals “natural ability,” I am highlighting the ways in which creative survival (and visibility) can and should be considered a kind of specialized knowledge—an intelligence born on the fringes. Another reason I insert the seemingly misplaced “genius” following an assertion of alienness is to draw attention to how art histories of the avant-garde have always been undergirded by an inexplicable (almost spiritual) attributed aptitude for and positioning within creative contexts, namely the fine art world at large. The predominantly white and male artists who are written into avant-garde creative movements have never had to justify their presumed “genius,” their specialness. Here, the creative sensibilities of O’Grady in partnership with the residents of Harlem are ingenious, cutting edge, and avant-garde, and so I name them as such. 54. Biden-Harris campaign, “President-Elect Joe Biden & Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris| America the Beautiful,” YouTube channel “Joe Biden,” November 7, 2020, https://youtu.be/xJc_SRsbGS0. 55. Rachel Wetzler, “Meet the Artist Who Called Out a Museum by Scrubbing the Floor for Hours,” Timeline, December 15, 2016, https://timeline.com/mierle-ukeles-cleaning-museum -64d274a0a19c. “MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969!” was originally drafted as a proposal for an exhibition titled CARE, and written in Philadelphia in October 1969. The work comprises four typewritten pages and is regarded as a work of art rather than a publication, copyrighted by the artist and managed by Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York. 56. Wetzler, “Meet the Artist Who Called Out a Museum by Scrubbing the Floor for Hours.” 57. Wetzler, “Meet the Artist Who Called Out a Museum by Scrubbing the Floor for Hours.” 58. Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976). 59. Yilmaz Dziewior, Andrea Fraser: Works, 1984 to 2003 (Cologne: DuMont, 2003), 242. 60. Amelia Jones, “Survey,” in The Artist’s Body, 16–47. 61. Hilary Moss, “Revisiting Carrie Mae Weems’s Indelible Series—Almost Three Decades Later,” New York Times Style Magazine, April 5, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/t-magazine /art/carrie-mae-weems-kitchen-table-series-book.html. 62. Hilarie M. Sheets, “Carrie Mae Weems, Photographer and Subject,” New York Times, September 16, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/arts/design/carrie-mae-weems-photographer -and-subject.html. 63. The kitchen table is a multipurpose piece of furniture, and the written words produced “in its vicinity” are phenomenologically significant. See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 35. The kitchen table also held particular significance for black feminists in the 1980s, as many gathered their artistic, intellectual, and activist energies in domestic spaces and specifically around these tables. In fact, the radical feminist publisher Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was started in 1980 by author Barbara Smith. Two of its most popular titles are Cherríe Moraga and Glora Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1981), and Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983). Moreover, the field of phenomenology is largely concerned 196

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with human perception in relation to objects and spaces. Seemingly quotidian material objects (such as Weems’s kitchen table) bring this study of consciousness (on the part of both Weems and the viewer) into greater relief. Sara Ahmed eloquently reminds us that phenomenology has been historically linked to tables, chairs, paper, and writing desks since its philosophical conception. In her work, Ahmed meticulously unpacks Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of his writing table. She goes on to use this analysis to advance her transformative arguments on orientation(s). Sara Ahmed, “Orientations towards Objects,” in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Ahmed and other feminist philosophers explore the labor that occurs on and around these quotidian objects, revealing that this labor is gendered—and, I argue through Weems’s work, raced as well. Not only does this radical self-staged portrait series visually and literarily speak into existence one experience of black womanhood but it also belongs in the lineage of canonical philosophic pursuits that took place at desks, in chairs, and around tables. When understood through this history, Weems’s kitchen table enables philosophical theorizing astride the modes of both creative production and domestic labor—creative production in her photographic and written articulations, and domestic labors of child-rearing and physically catering to a significant other. As also seen in Adrian Piper’s Cornered (1988), tables can be a mechanism of protection, and when overturned, a strategy of diversion—retreat. 64. Kathryn E. Delmez, “Kitchen Table Series, 1990,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, ed. Kathryn E. Delmez (New Haven, CT: Frist Center for the Visual Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2012), 76. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was first published in Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. 65. This text panel by Weems is reproduced in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, 78, plate 6.2. 4. THE DIPTYCH AND “SPATIAL NARRATIVE”

1. Susan Saccoccia, “At 81, Her First Solo Show at Home,” Harvard Gazette, November 20, 2015, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/11/at-81-her-first-solo-show-at-home/. 2. Much has changed in the forty years since O’Grady conducted her research. Scholars now believe Nefertiti’s younger sister’s name was likely Mutbenret. 3. Lorraine O’Grady, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 64. The artist continues: “I will always be grateful to performance for providing me the freedom and safety to work through my ideas; I had the advantage of being able to look forward, instead of glancing over my shoulder at the audience, the critics, or even art history” (64). 4. Judith Wilson, “Lorraine O’Grady: Critical Interventions,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Photomontages (New York: INTAR Gallery, 1991), pages unknown (this item is known to the author only though reprints in the artist’s archive and website). 5. In discussing the political significance of the project with Linda Montano, O’Grady stated: “The piece would be about her death as the result of an abortion, so the piece had feminist overtones. But for me its main political import was the placing of images on the screen that focused on the physical resemblances of a black American and an Ancient Egyptian family.” Linda Montano, interview with Lorraine O’Grady for the “Ritual” section of her projected book Performance Artists Talking, June 1986, and later edited and published as “Lorraine O’Grady” in the “Ritual/ Death” section of Linda M. Montano, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 400–406. 6. The anecdote has been recounted and cited on many occasions. Wilson dates it to 1964, but it is 1963 in “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest” (interview), Brooklyn Rail, February 3, 2016, https://brooklynrail.org/2016/02/art/lorraine-ogrady-with-jarrett-earnest, and O’Grady did not NOTES

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7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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revise the date in the reprint of the Earnest interview in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 239–49. O’Grady, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,” 64. See Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 176. Jones’s review dedicated more column inches to O’Grady’s piece than to any other work that evening. Patricia Jones, “ ‘Dialogues’: Just Above Midtown Gallery (October),” LIVE: Performance 5 (1981): 33–35. Wilson, “Lorraine O’Grady: Critical Interventions,” n.p. O’Grady’s interest in Egypt’s African heritage predated Cheikh Anta Diop’s 1967 The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality and the first volume of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, published in 1987. Here I turn to Wilson, “Lorraine O’Grady: Critical Interventions,” to support my own research on O’Grady’s performance timeline. Again referencing Wilson, “Lorraine O’Grady: Critical Interventions.” “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest,” emphasis in original. Within the same response, O’Grady references an exchange she had with art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, whose seminar she visited: “There were all these pictures of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and Carrie said ‘I just can’t believe you were forty-five when you did this!’ And then, ‘Art historians always say the women who did this kind of work were so beautiful—from Carolee Schneemann and you in the ’70s and ’80s to Andrea Fraser now.’ ” Clearly delighted, O’Grady then expressed to her interviewer the complicated relationship she was beginning to negotiate with her aging body as an objet d’art. Lorraine O’Grady, “Interview with Linda Montano (1986),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 83. Another work that has yet to be re-presented is Fly by Night (see chapter 2, note 83). Lorraine O’Grady, “Miscegenated Family Album,” accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/art /miscegenated-family-album/. O’Grady, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,” 65. Lorraine O’Grady, email message to author, September 24, 2019. In an email to the author, the artist conveys: “Devonia had died in January 1962, while I was in Norway. Between the time I graduated from high school and when I finally settled in New York, I’d moved so many times, I was traveling light. My mother was unsentimental and didn’t keep photos. Wedding and graduation pics and not much else. I sent to my cousins in Washington and got a few more. I was counting on my sister’s husband. But by August 1980, when I asked him if I could borrow her photo albums for an art work I was doing, he was divorced from his second wife, staying in a condo in between houses. He told me everything he owned was in a storage space and the photo albums were at the back of it. There was no way he could find them. I begged, and a week later he called. He’d found about 40 or 50 pics scattered about the bureau drawers in his apartment. Those were the basis of the 65 slide diptychs I projected behind me in the performance. David Hammons said you could tell there hadn’t been much to work with. But no matter how limited the selection of family photos I had to work with, I knew the imagery of the Am[a]rna period of Egyptian history so well, I could go immediately to the book and page that had the perfect match for them. Not whole images, of course. I had to crop like crazy to make the images match as diptychs. And sometimes I flopped them so their faces looked in the right direction. It was important to me that their images be in the right kinds of conversations.” Email from the artist, March 21, 2018.

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21. O’Grady, “Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline,” 65. 22. Lorraine O’Grady, “Body Is the Ground of My Experience,” accessible at http://lorraineogrady .com/art/body-is-the-ground-of-my-experience/. 23. O’Grady’s use of “diptychs” references the literal form of two physical panels presented side by side. By “collapsed diptychs,” the artist refers to the increasingly frequent images in which the dissimilar is contained within a single frame, what she describes in her writing as the “diptych idea.” Examples of the collapsed diptych include “The Fir-Palm,” “The Strange Taxi,” and Cutting Out CONYT 26. This is per a note from O’Grady to the author dated August 1, 2020, and Lorraine O’Grady, “BodyGround Image Descriptions,” 2010, accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/11/Lorraine-OGrady_BodyGround-Image-Descriptions_Unpublished.pdf. 24. California’s Asexualization Act of 1909 led to the sterilization of more than twenty thousand women and men living in California alone. See Alexandra Minna Stern, “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health: Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in Modern California,” American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 7 (July 2005): 1128–38; Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Approximately thirty-two other states practiced governmentsponsored sterilization efforts on “undesirable populations” throughout the twentieth century. See Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 25. Lorraine O’Grady, “Black Dreams,” Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 4, no. 15 (Fall 1982): 43. 26. O’Grady, “Black Dreams,” 43. 27. Lorraine O’Grady, “Email Q&A with Artforum Editor (2009),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 198–99. The bracketed additions come from an email exchange between O’Grady and the author on October 4, 2018. 28. According to the artist: “The ‘body’ throughout BodyGround is that of the black Sierra LeonianBritish model Lilith Dove. (I thought I’d struck gold with her name!)” O’Grady, note to the author, August 10, 2020. 29. The individuals who sat for “gaze” included: Gaze 1: a sculptor and performance artist; Gaze 2: a jazz band leader; Gaze 3: a choreographer; Gaze 4: a classical music composer. 30. Lorraine O’Grady, “Body Is the Ground of My Experience, 1991: Image Descriptions (2010),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 29. 31. Dream 1: an art historian; Dream 2: a painter and installation artist; Dream 3: a costume conservator; Dream 4: a sculptor. 32. O’Grady, “Body Is the Ground of My Experience, 1991: Image Descriptions (2010),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 29. 33. Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity,” Afterimage 20, no. 1 (Summer 1992): 14–15. Reprinted with added postscript in Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven, eds., New Feminist Criticism: Art/Identity/Action (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 152–70. See also Lorraine O’Grady, “Some Thoughts on Diaspora and Hybridity: An Unpublished Slide Lecture (1994)” (lecture delivered at Wellesley Found Table, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, 1994), in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 119–25. 34. Calvin Reid, “A West Indian Yankee in Queen Nefertiti’s Court,” in “COLOR,” special issue, New Observations 97 (September–October 1993): 5–9. 35. “Lorraine O’Grady with Jarrett Earnest.” 36. Dracula and the Artist is a lesser-known piece that, while familiarly descriptive in its title, is ambiguous in its spatial narrative. The content is similarly visually direct, but the imagery itself is formally darker than The Clearing. In Dracula and the Artist, O’Grady dramatically contrasts NOTES

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37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

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light and dark, and she shifts viewer focus abruptly between foreground and background. In the left panel, a young black woman in a simple white shift with her back to the camera, reminiscent of Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer (1986), gazes up and off to the left, where six visible wide-toothed hair combs float onto the scene on a beam of light. Each black comb is missing several teeth, presumably the result of the plastic being forced, roughly, through thick, tightly coiled hair. The appearance of the young woman suggests the same, as her short hair mirrors the state of the combs: clumps appear to be missing, and strands are broken and in disarray. The panel’s subtitle, “Dreaming Dracula,” cues the viewer to the narrative behind the surreal apparition. Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 171–72. Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 2–4. Monticello, “The Life of Sally Hemings.” https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/. Lorraine O’Grady, “On Being the Presence That Signals an Absence,” an essay in the photocopied catalogue for Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women, curated by Ellen Cantor, presented by David Zwirner Gallery and Simon Watson / The Contemporary, New York, 1993, accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Lorraine-OGrady _On-being-the-presence-that-signals-an-absence_Coming-to-Power-25-Years-of-Sexually-X -plicit-Art-by-Women.pdf. O’Grady, “On Being the Presence That Signals an Absence.” O’Grady, “On Being the Presence That Signals an Absence.” Bennett Simpson, “This Air,” in Blues for Smoke (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), 23. Lorraine O’Grady, “New Worlds,” Alexander Gray Associates exhibition press release, 2012, https://www.alexandergray.com/exhibitions/lorraine-o-grady2. O’Grady started teaching poetry and art, on impressionist and expressionist impulses in art, using just Baudelaire and Rimbaud as examples, around 1976. At Harvard University in 1995–96, she began working on Flowers of Evil and Good. Although the artist had left the art world, she could not leave her New York apartment, or afford to leave her job at SVA. Thus, she commuted weekly between New York and Boston for five years, teaching throughout. This is per a note from the artist to the author dated August 1, 2020, and also Cecilia Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” Mousse 24 (Summer 2010): http://moussemagazine.it/lorraine-ogrady-cecilia -alemani-2010/. Lorraine O’Grady, “Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good,” accessible at http://lorraineogrady .com/art/studies-for-flowers-of-evil-and-good-1998/. Lorraine O’Grady, “Studies for a Sixteen-Diptych Installation to Be Called Flowers of Evil and Good, 1995–Present (1998),” in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 30–34. Lorraine O’Grady, “Four Diptychs,” Pétunia: magazine féministe d’art contemporain et de loisirs 2 (Summer 2010): 43–46, reprinted at http://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11 /Lorraine-OGrady_Four-Diptychs_Petunia.pdf. O’Grady, “Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good.” Courtney Baker, “A Legacy of Silence,” unpublished museum handout, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1996, accessible at http://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11 /Courtney-Baker_New-Histories_A-Legacy-of-Silence.pdf. The eight base diptychs were doubled to make the sixteen diptychs that comprise the three wall studies. The two sets are related but utilize different colors, text, and cuts from Demoiselles

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

d’Avignon. O’Grady sampled Pablo Picasso’s painting to produced her own distinct color palette, for which dozens of tests were made. The artist was beginning to translate and write the texts for the works with Baudelaire and Duval, and her mother and aunts, when she put the project aside to move to California and start teaching at the University of California at Irvine. In 2012 she picked up where she left off but had to remake the base diptych files, as the technology had since changed. She continues to work, in her own words “desultorily,” having recently constructed a brand-new layout for her Brooklyn retrospective catalogue. Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good was displayed in its entirety for the first time in New York in 1998 at Thomas Erben Gallery. Two sketches from the series were exhibited two years prior as diptychs in New Histories (1996) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. O’Grady, “Studies for a Sixteen-Diptych Installation to Be Called Flowers of Evil and Good, 1995–Present (1998),” 31. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. O’Grady, “Studies for a Sixteen-Diptych Installation to Be Called Flowers of Evil and Good, 1995–Present (1998),” 32. Lorraine O’Grady, “The First and the Last of the Modernists,” Alexander Gray Associates exhibition press release, 2010, https://www.alexandergray.com/series-projects/lorraine-o-grady11, also available at http://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/OGrady_FLM _summary.pdf. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 101. O’Grady, “Studies for a Sixteen-Diptych Installation to Be Called Flowers of Evil and Good, 1995–Present (1998),” 31. O’Grady, “The First and the Last of the Modernists.” O’Grady, “The First and the Last of the Modernists.” Alemani, “Living Symbols of New Epochs,” 102. O’Grady, “The First and the Last of the Modernists.” During and after the Whitney Biennial, O’Grady wrote and interviewed extensively about The First and Last of the Modernists and the project from which it emerged, Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good. I rehearse several narrative mainstays in this chapter for those less familiar with O’Grady’s work and the complex ways this particular work has unfolded in the past and the present. The manner in which O’Grady uses her artist website as a virtual archive through which to mediate encounters (both past and present) with her work is part of the methodological considerations of this larger monograph project; for more see the introduction and conclusion. O’Grady, “Four Diptychs,” 46. Malik Gaines, “Looking Back, Looking Forward,” Frieze, no. 136 (January–February 2011), https:// www.frieze.com/article/looking-back-looking-forward. See “The First and the Last of the Modernists (2010) by Lorraine O’Grady,” accessible at http:// lorraineogrady.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/OGrady_FLM_summary.pdf. Portions of this section of this chapter will appear in Stephanie Sparling Williams, “The First and Last of the Modernists,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, ed. Catherine Morrison and Aruna D’Souza (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum of Art, forthcoming 2021).

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CONCLUSION

1. Frances K. Pohl, Framing America: A Social History of American Art, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 502. 2. Lorraine O’Grady, “Lorraine O’Grady on Creating a Counter-Confessional Poetry,” ed. Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Artforum, November 19, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/lorraine -o-8217-grady-on-creating-a-counter-confessional-poetry-77735. 3. Author telephone conversation with the artist, October 23, 2018. 4. Carly Fischer, “This Could Be the Permanent Rebellion,” in Lorraine O’Grady: Cutting Out CONYT (New York: Alexander Gray Associates, 2018), 6. 5. According to O’Grady, the selection of paper and determination of letterpress on zinc plates was made by the printer, but it was the artist who insisted on the use of scissors when early tests showed the cuts to be too regular. 6. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 88. 7. O’Grady has referred to this panel as a “collapsed diptych” and uses the gap in between the stanzas to suggest the diptych concept within the single panel. In notes shared during her review of this book, O’Grady observed, “I had made that space between the stanzas large in the original poem, because I saw them as a single page somehow, but one that was cut in half. It was the most haiku-like panel of all those in CONYT, already a proto-diptych, though I didn’t know it.” 8. “Pen and voice” refers to modes through which African American women have historically enacted social and political change. For examples, see the collection of speeches in Shirley Wilson Logan, ed., Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995). 9. Laura Cottingham, interview with Lorraine O’Grady, in Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History 15, ed. James V. Hatch, Leo Hamalian, and Judy Blum (New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1996), 204–19, available at http://lorraineogrady.com/wp-content /uploads/2015/11/Laura-Cottingham-Lorraine-OGrady_Interview_Hatch-Billops-Collection -Artist-and-Influence.pdf. 10. Pohl, Framing America, 562. 11. The artist has shared with me that this accessibility will likely change with the publication of her collection of essays Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 12. Zawe Ashton, “Meeting Lorraine O’Grady: A Film by Zawe Ashton,” for Tate Modern, associated with the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, available to view on YouTube: https://youtu.be/60U8FXYS69A. 13. Ashton, “Meeting Lorraine O’Grady.” 14. Lorraine O’Grady, “Performance Statement #3: Thinking Out Loud: About Performance Art and My Place in It (1983)” (letter to Tony Whitfield in preparation for Just Above Midtown’s Afro-Pop catalogue), in Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 47–48.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations. For exhibitions, see the heading “exhibitions mentioned.” Abbreviations: LOG = Lorraine O’Grady; MBN = Mlle Bourgeoise Noire; CONYT = Cutting Out the New York Times; JAM = Just Above Midtown. abolitionists, direct-address strategies of, 3 Achakhch, Latifa, 180n11 address. See direct address; double voice (multilayered speaking) African American Day Parade, 22, 97, 115. See also Art Is . . . (performance) African American literary tradition: orality and storytelling in, 14–15; the power of voice and phonic articulation in, 15; vocal suppression (institutional) and, 15 African diaspora, 4; Négritude movement and, 77; skin tone, 135 AfriCOBRA, 185n19 Afro-American Abstraction (1980 exhibition), 68; The Black and White Show as critique of, 91; LOG’s disappointment with the art in, 69, 70–71, 73, 101; LOG’s identification

with the black bourgeois audience at, 68, 69, 74, 187n51 Ahmed, Sara, 15–16, 184n12, 196–97n63 Alfieri, Anthony, 13 alienation: overview of LOG’s engagement with, 63–64, 184nn8–9; alien avant-garde/alien genius, 83, 93, 118, 196n53; alien body (out of turn), 63, 64–65, 73–74, 82–83, 88, 124, 184n9; aliens (extraterrestrials), 64, 184n12; Art Is . . . and, 116, 118, 196n53; and black female subjectivity, 64, 80–83, 113–114; cultural, historical, socio-political alienation, 21, 64, 76–77, 78, 82–83, 91–92, 118; as generative, 64, 83, 190n77; as lost in the media and the archive, 88; manufactured, 81; mythic beings, 124; and the optics of diffraction, 98; and “outsider within” status, 37;

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alienation (continued) performative, 116, 190n83; popular interpretations of the work as alienating the work, 87; Rivers, First Draft gallery installation and, 109; strategic alienation, 63–64, 66, 81–82, 116, 184n8, 190n77; violence against black bodies, 82–83. See also alienation effects (Brecht) alienation effects (Brecht): overview, 2; and audience, presence or absence of, 98; call for, 81; direct-address approach to, 184n9, 190n83; and methodology of the text, 6–7; and props, use of, 64, 80; and radical presence, 64 alien avant-garde/alien genius, 83, 93, 118, 196n53. See also black avant-garde expression alien body (out of turn), 63, 64–65, 82–83, 88, 124, 184n9; black middle-class lady, 73–74, 77 alien genius/alien avant-garde, 83, 93, 118, 196n53. See also black avant-garde expression aliens (extraterrestrials), 64, 184n12 Allen, Dr. Edward B., 70 Althusser, Louis, 15, 174n11 Alvi, Tariq, 29–30 Anohni, lip-synching project for album Hopelessness, 10–11 anonymity, 18 Antin, Eleanor, Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev, 56 archive: alienation as lost in, 88; archival document as art, 6; archival praxis, and methodology of the text, 7–8, 175n27; archival trace, 80; “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich), 129; CONYT‘s aesthetic archive, 47–48; exploited in performance by LOG, 21–22; research by LOG on Jeanne Duval, 150. See also archives of LOG; performance documentation; website archive of LOG archives of LOG: alienation effects as lost in, 88; direct address as unifying, 2; methodology of the text and, 167–68; at Wellesley College, 5–6, 8, 167. See also website archive of LOG Artforum, LOG article on The Black and White Show, 91–92 Art in America, 92–93 Art Is . . . (performance), Color Plates 12–16; overview, 21–22, 115–16; and alienation, 116, 118, 196n53; appropriation of concept for BidenHarris campaign victory video, 118–19; audience participation and, 17, 117–18; and black creative labor, 120, 121, 125; democratization of art and, 118; and direct address/alienation, 116; and LOG’s personal pair of white gloves, 73, 116; as part of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire project, 22, 96–97, 116; as public art project, 115, 116–17, 195n46;

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and the question of what qualifies as art, 116, 118, 196n53; and ritual/exchange, 117; as spatialized manifesto, 100–101, 115–16, 124; and speaking and existing out of turn, 116, 124; website archive of LOG and, 118 art museums. See museums of art ARTnews, exclusion of black artists, 83–84 art world: and blackness, limited recognition of, 65, 136–37, 188–89n62; chronologies of LOG and, 18–20, 25–26, 179–80n5; and discrimination, LOG experience of, 143; entrance of LOG into, 5, 26, 29; hiatus of LOG from (1983–1988), 18, 132–33, 178–79n58, 200n45; labor proximate to, feminist performance and, 119–25, 196–97n63; market pressure on conceptual artists to show a physical object, 137; race and class and, 65, 69; underground practice of LOG (1999–2007), 19. See also exclusion of artists of color and women; multiculturalism; museums of art Asante, Molefi Kete, 112–13 Ashton, Zawe, 168 assemblage, 5, 44, 66, 89, 110, 112 audience: alienation and presence or absence of, 98; Art Is . . . and, 117, 118; belated arrival of, for LOG’s early work, 169–70; and the development of LOG’s early performance practice, 65–66; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and, 63, 65–66, 70, 86–87, 97–98; as phenomenologically situated at the interstices between subject and objet d’art, 16; Rivers, First Draft and, 100, 106; tacit expectations for behavior of, 12; website archive of LOG as addressing, 162. See also participation audience reception studies, 65, 185n20 autobiographical narrative: autobiographical example (Hartman Saidiya), 6–7; autobiography and, 6; Cutting Out the New York Times and, 33–34; and evolution toward a broader historical perspective, 134, 155–56, 160; LOG on McKeller, 143; Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and, 128, 129; Rivers, First Draft and, 100–101, 108–9 autoethnography: and LOG’s work, 188n60; and methodology of the text, 6–7, 12, 175n20 avant-garde: alien/alien genius, 83, 93, 118, 196n53; challenging the disavowal of nonwhite artists in the history of, 185n16; works of LOG as grounded in, 30–31. See also alien avant-garde; black avant-garde expression avatar production (Uri McMillan), 11, 14, 64, 184nn11,13, 190n77 Baker, Courtney, 71, 87, 96, 150 Baker, Elizabeth C., 92

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Baker, Houston, 15 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 21, 30; double voice, 42, 43–44, 45–46, 47, 48, 181–82n34; heteroglossia, 45–46 Baldwin, James, 21, 30, 81; The Devil Finds Work, 42–44, 47 Baraka, Amiri, 58 Barthes, Roland, 48–49, 185n20 Bartkowski, Frances, 25 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 91, 92 Baudelaire, Charles: aesthetic theory of beauty, Duval and, 150, 155; demonization and erasure of Jeanne Duval’s relationship with, 150, 151, 153, 156, 159; Duval as postmodern figure, and modernism of, 153–54, 159; Flowers of Evil, 149, 150, 151, 154; LOG teaching course on, 23, 149; and modernism, 149, 150, 153, 154–55, 157, 159; relationship with Duval, 19, 149–50, 153–54, 155, 159, 160. See also The First and Last of the Modernists; Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good beauty: and aging, 132, 198n14; Baudelaire’s theory of, 150, 155 Berger, John, 185n20 Biden, Joe, 118–19 binaristic logics: longstanding LOG commitment to working against, 134, 175n26. See also both/ and; dualism binary opposition: the diptych and, 135, 136–37, 164; and evolution of LOG from writer to visual artist, 164–65; mash-up poetic expression as revolt against the limiting strictures of identity, 166–67. See also juxtaposition Birmingham school of cultural theory, 153 Bischofberger, Bruno, 91 black affluence. See black middle and upper class The Black and White Show (1983 exhibition): curated by Mlle Bourgeoise Noire/LOG, 21, 91–96; curatorial authority as conflict in, 94–95, 191n102; and John Fekner’s Toxic Junkie, 92–93; flyer for, 92, 93; as ignored by the art establishment press, 92–93; and language, 91–92; restrictions on works the artists could contribute, 92 black artists, mail art of LOG soliciting feedback from, 88–90 Black Arts Movement, 55, 58, 185n19 black avant-garde expression: as alien avant-garde/ alien genius, 83, 93, 118, 196n53; appropriations of black working-class culture by, in response to white expectations, 65, 188–189n62; Art Is . . . and the question of what qualifies as art, 116, 118, 196n53; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as revealing “too safe” art by black artists, 65, 66–67, 73–74,

76–77, 87, 185n19, 188–89n62; race, class, and the art world, 65, 69; respectability politics as barrier to artists, 69, 74; as unacknowledged by the art world, 69 black conceptualism, 7, 175n21 black cultural politics, and historic uses of direct-address strategies, 3–4 Black Dada, 57–59 “Black Dreams” (article), 141 black female subjectivity: and art, 17, 18; and cultural alienation, 64, 80–83, 113–114; embodied disruption of essentializing subject positions, 121–125; and the “excessive” black female body, 87–88; and goals of white bourgeois feminism, 18; and literature, 17–18; LOG’s narrative and, 143; “Olympia’s Maid” on, 17–18, 114 black feminist discourse: overview, 2; and “both/ and,” 34–35, 37; caution against reliance on the tools of oppression, 47, 49; Combahee River Collective, 37, 67, 181n21; and conceptual art, 39–41; eschewing of traditional forms and, 34; intersectional feminisms, 9, 34–35, 37, 67, 186n31; on learning to speak the languages of power, 25; LOG’s counter-confessional poetry and, 39; methodology of the text and, 9; as non–white feminist response, 39; oppositional gaze, 81; and the outsider within, 34–35, 37, 180–81n18; the potential in situated knowledge, 37–38; specificity produced through, 57; and violent vocal suppression and erasure, 15; and white supremacist claims to universalism, 81; works of LOG as grounded in, 30–31 Black Is Beautiful, 119 Black Lives Matter, 119 black middle and upper class: the Afro-American Abstraction exhibition and LOG’s identification with, 68, 69; assimilation to white culture, pressure for, 78, 188–89n62; and black avant-garde art, 65, 168–69; the debutante ball and, 76, 187n49; history and formation of, 68–69, 186–87nn35–36; investment in the arts by, 68–69, 89–90; invisibility of, to white world, 69, 73; LOG reminding black artists to utilize their backgrounds in, 76–77, 168–69; LOG’s upbringing in, 9, 23, 42, 96, 136–37, 138, 143, 167; LOG’s upbringing in, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as protest of, 71–72, 73–74, 76–77, 187n49; Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline and the existence of the black aristocracy, 131; origins in, conceived as inauthentic for black artists, 65, 69, 188–89n62; positionality of the researcher and, 9; racism

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black middle and upper class (continued) and formation of, 68. See also black avant-garde expression; respectability politics; West Indian heritage of LOG blackness: the art world’s limited recognition of, 65, 136–37, 188–89n62; and the avant-garde (Art Is . . .), 116, 118; the black middle class and distancing from, 78, 188–89n62; and excess, 87–88; fear of, 53; as form and medium, 57; limiting strictures on black identity, 44, 65, 69, 121, 166; oral traditions in literature of, 14–15. See also light-skinned privilege; post-black art black working-class culture, appropriated in black avant-garde expression, 65, 188–89n62 body/bodies: African-descent performance artists pursuing alternative representational strategies of the black female body, 113–14; alien (out of turn), 63, 64–65, 73–74, 82–83, 88, 124, 184n9; and beauty/aging, 132, 198n14; black female subjectivity and cultural alienation, 64, 80–83, 113–114; embodied disruption against essentializing subject positions, 121; excessive black female body, 87–88; labor of, and feminist performance, 119–25, 196–97n63; as language, 109; liminal, 143; performance and residual effects left in, 80; postmodernism and loss of the body, 143 BodyGround. See Body Is the Ground of My Experience Body Is the Ground of My Experience (BodyGround) (photomontage series), 139–40, 142, 147; overview, 19, 22, 137–38; and binary opposition, 164; the “body” in, 143, 199n28; and both/and, 148, 149; and the collapsed diptych, 138, 144, 145–46, 199n23; and colonialism/enslavement, 146–48; controversiality of images, 148, 149; curatorial silencing of, 148, 149; hybridity and, 148–49; and juxtaposition, 136, 145; positionality of the researcher and, 6; postmodernist historicity contested by, 138; spatialized narrative and, 146; website archive of LOG and, 8 —individual works: The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, 6, 146–49, 147; Dracula and the Artist: Dreaming Dracula, 146, 199–200n36; Dream (quadriptych), 144–45, 145, 199n31; The Fir-Palm, 138, 139, 199n23; Gaze (quadriptych), 144, 144, 145, 199n29; Lilith Sends Out the Destroyers, 138–40, 140; The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years, 140–44, 142, 199n23 Bonami, Francesco, 158

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Both/And (2021 Brooklyn Museum retrospective), 200–201n51; and Cutting Out CONYT (2017), 162; title of, 9 “Both/And” (lecture), 9 both/and: black feminist discourse and, 34–35, 37; The Clearing and, 148, 149; definition of, 9; the diptych and, 137, 192n7; longstanding LOG commitment to, 9, 175n26; Rivers, First Draft and, 134, 192n7 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 185n20 Bowles, John Parish, 40, 41 Brand, Dionne, 7 Brecht, Bertolt, 2; drag, 76; social gest, 82, 189nn71–73. See also alienation effects Breton, André: as influence on LOG, 31; Manifestoes of Surrealism, 27, 28; Nadja, 27 Brockington, Horace, 100 Brockman Gallery, 111 Brooks, Daphne, 2, 11, 80, 82–83, 174n7, 184nn8,14 Brown, Christopher, 177n38 Brown, Henry “Box,” 3 Brown, Jayna, 174n11 Butler, Connie, 8, 19, 175n24 Butler, Judith, 15, 16, 188n57 Calle, Sophie, 67 canon: the 1980s as the last period of cohesion within, 17; positionality of the researcher as intervention in formation of, 7 Cantor, Ellen, 148, 149 Carrion-Murayari, Gary, 158 Carson, Josephine, 9 Cartesian subject, 121 Cartwright, Lisa, 97 Cash, Juan, 92 Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville, Spain), 30, 180n11 Césaire, Aimé, 77 Charlesworth, Sarah, 38 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 195n35 class: black working-class culture, appropriated in black avant-garde expression, 65, 188–89n62. See also black middle and upper class Coker, Gylbert, 95, 100, 170 Colescott, Robert, 44 collage, 31, 33–34, 138. See also Cutting Out CONYT (2017, collage); Cutting Out the New York Times (1977, CONYT) collage in space, 100, 108–9 collapsed diptych. See diptych, collapsed Collins, Patricia Hill, 2, 21, 25, 30, 34–35, 37, 39, 57, 81

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colonialism: and The Clearing, 146–48; modernism and, 154–55, 159; Négritude movement as renouncing, 77; silencing of the speech of the colonized other, 12–14, 177n38; speaking out of turn as decolonial apparatus, 4, 12, 174n10; Third World feminists and critique of, 67 Colo, Papo, 18 color line, sonic, 13–14 Combahee River Collective, 37, 67, 181n21 confessional poetry, 39, 181n25 Conrad Murray, Derek, 55 Conwill, Houston, 83, 111 CONYT. See Cutting Out CONYT (2017, collage); Cutting Out the New York Times (1977) Cooks, Bridget R., 176–77n32, 184n15 Copeland, Huey, 176–77n32, 181n27 Cotter, Holland, 29–30, 55 Cottingham, Laura, 56 COVID-19 pandemic, 119 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 186n31 culture wars, 147 curatorial authority: as conflict in The Black and White Show, 94–95, 191n102; and silencing of The Clearing, 148, 149 Cutting Out CONYT (2017, collage): overview, 23, 161; and binary opposition, 164–65; and the collapsed diptych, 199n23, 202n7, 202n11; description of, 161; and juxtaposition, 136; and mash-up poetic expression as revolt against the limiting strictures of identity, 166–67; process-based approach of, 160, 162–64, 202n5; as speaking out of turn, 166 —individual poems: Cutting Out CONYT 03, 162–64, 163; Cutting Out CONYT 20, 164, 165; Cutting Out CONYT 26, 165–66, 166, 199n23, 202n7 Cutting Out the New York Times (1977, CONYT): overview, 20–21; as autobiographical, 33–34; birth of, 27, 29; as counter-confessional poetry, 38–39; and critique of consumer optimism, 34; “cut-up” vs. “cutout” as term for, 173n3; description of, 27, 31–34; direct address and, 26–27; and double voice (multi-layered speaking), 41–49, 53, 181–82n34; exhibitions of, 29–30, 162, 180n11; as failure, LOG’s view of, 29, 49; and the figurative, rejection of, 41; language as fundamental preoccupation of, 29, 31; and nihilism, 34; and the outsider within, 34–35, 37, 180–81n18; and post-black art, 55–56, 57; and postwar collage technique, 31; process-based approach of, 29, 44–45, 49, 161, 180n8; as proto-diptych, 202n11; and randomness, 35,

38–39; reception of, 29–30, 54, 55–56, 57, 180n11; recuperation of, 162; and transition of LOG from writer to visual artist, 161, 162; and translation, LOG and, 35, 53; and white European knowledge production, 38, 39, 41, 58 —individual poems: “The American Beauty,” 180n8; “Coins of the Rebellion,” 27, 29; “Conversations with Fata Morgana,” 26; “Finding the one you love . . . is finding yourself,” 26–27, 27, 29; “I Heard My Sister Speak My Name,” 31–34, 42; “Missing Persons,” 46–47, 48–49, Color Plate 2; “Motion Equals Progress,” 26, Color Plate 1; “Mountain Trekking,” 180n8; “The 99 Critical Shots in Pool,” 26; “The Renaissance Man Is Back in Business,” 45, 46, 162–63, 164, 165; “The Right Face for the Right Job,” 26; “Salad Days,” 26, 29; “Vivo,” 27, 29, 35, 36, 37; “What Have We Done? Where Are We Going?,” 27; “Where Are All Those Ex-Giants Now,” 29 cut-up technique (découpé): overview, 31; and feminist eschewing of traditional forms, 34; and hybrid literary/art forms, 31 Cvetkovich, Ann, 129 Dada: course taught by LOG, 27, 188n60; cut-up technique/collage and, 31; and hybrid artworks, 31; as influence on LOG, 30, 31–32, 37, 38, 54, 100; irreverent performance tactics of, 114; newspaper poems and, 27, 29; Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” 57–59 Damas, Léon-Gontran, 69, 77–78, 188n60; “Black Label,” 77–78; “Bush Negroes of French Guiana,” 188n60; “Hoquet,” 77, 78; “Réalité,” 188–89n62; “Trève,” 77, 78 Daniel Reich gallery, 29 DeGussi, Richard, 115 dematerialization of the art object: direct-address strategies and, 5. See also Lippard, Lucy, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object Deroy, Émile, painting of Baudelaire, 151 Diallo, Delphine, 9 Diamond, Elin, 2, 185n21, 189n68 diffraction, optics of, 98 diptych: overview, 125; and binary opposition, 135, 136–37, 164; and both/and, 137, 192n7; as central modality, 134, 146; definition of, 199n23; and evolution toward a broader historical perspective, 134, 155–56, 160; history of form, 135–36; language and, 134, 135, 145–46; and LOG’s recuperation and resituating of her works, 133–34, 162; longstanding LOG

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diptych (continued) commitment to, 175n26; Miscegenated Family Album and, 135–37; Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and, 22, 132, 133, 136; Rivers, First Draft and, 134, 192n7; separate or partial showings of, 137, 148, 149; and subversion of Western dualism, 134. See also diptych, collapsed; spatialized narrative diptych, collapsed: and Body Is the Ground of My Experience (BodyGround), 138, 144, 145–46, 199n23; Cutting Out CONYT (2017) and, 199n23, 202n7, 202n11; definition of, 138, 199n23; The Fir-Palm and, 199n23; Gaze and Dream quadriptychs as, 144, 145–46; The Strange Taxi and, 199n23 direct address: Art Is . . . and, 116; black cultural politics and historic uses of, 3–4; as Brecht’s “breaking the fourth wall,” 12; CONYT and, 26–27; definition of, 2; exclusion of artists of color and women and use of, 11–12; as inheriting the concerns and techniques of literature and theater, 5, 12, 14–15; legacy of violent and hypervisual performances of, 14; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and, 80, 97–98, 192n111; and multimodal performance, 63–64, 184n9; as technology of speaking out of turn, 4–5, 174nn12,16; as unifying LOG’s archive and cutting across mediums, 2, 5; visual forms of/”demand” images, 176–177n31. See also alienation effects (Brecht) documentation. See archive; performance documentation Donoso, José, 25–26, 179–80n5 double consciousness, 42–43 doublethink, 42–43, 44, 47 double voice (multilayered speaking): overview, 2; Mikhail Bakhtin and, 42, 43–44, 45–46, 47, 48; CONYT and, 41–49, 53, 181–82n34; heteroglossia and, 45–47; and Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares, 53 Douglass, Frederick, 12–13 Dove, Lilith, 199n28 dualism, the diptych and subversion of, 134 The Dual Soul (film script), 20 Du Bois, W. E. B., 43, 68, 186n35 Duchamp, Marcel, 115–16 Duggan, Lisa, 186n30 Duval, Jeanne: as absent from The First and Last of the Modernists, 159; and Baudelaire’s aesthetic theory of beauty, 150, 155; demonization and erasure of, 150, 151, 153, 156, 159; and Lena (LOG’s mother), 150, 153, 154, 156; as postmodern figure, and Baudelaire’s modernism, 153–54,

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159; relationship with Baudelaire, 19, 149–50, 153–54, 155, 159, 160. See also Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good Earnest, Jarrett, 8, 18, 132, 198n14 East Village Eye, 92 education: of LOG, 25–26, 71, 106, 136, 179–80n5, 181n25, 193n21; and rise of the black middle class, 68, 186n35 Edwards, Adrienne, 58 Edwards, Mel, 69 Egyptology of LOG, 129, 130, 188n60, 198n20 either/or, longstanding LOG commitment to working against, 175n26 enslavement: abolitionists speaking and existing out of turn, 3; alienation and the historical memory of, 81; and The Clearing, 146–48; and the formation of the black middle and upper class, 68; and the oppositional gaze, 81; and the whip as symbol in Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 74, 187n53. See also Stewart, Maria W. exclusion of artists of color and women: in accession practices, vs. inclusion in group shows, 19; and alienation as generative, 64; direct-address strategies as intervention in, 11–12; Just Above Midtown, exclusion of coverage of, 83–84; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as rebuking, 83, 84; modernism and, 174n15; positionality of the researcher as intervention in canon formation and, 7; white mainstream feminism and exclusion of black women, 9, 18. See also multiculturalism exhibitions mentioned: Art as a Verb: The Evolving Continuum (1988), 18–19, 132, 178–79n58; Between the Lines (2006), 29–30; Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1994), 55; Blues for Smoke (2012), 6, 148; Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-plicit Art by Women (1993), 148; Cut-Up: Contemporary Collage and Cut-Up Histories through a Feminist Lens (2016), 34; Dialogues (1980), 84, 129; Freestyle (2001), 54, 55, 57; Lorraine O’Grady (1991 solo), 137–38, 144; New Histories (1996), 200–201n51; Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 (2011), 111; Outlaw Aesthetics (1980), 56, 69, 70; Persona (1981), 83, 84–87, 85–86; This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s (2012), 17, 118; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007), 7–8, 19, 175n24; We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985 (2017), 37, 102, 111, 118; See also Afro-American Abstraction (1980

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exhibition); The Black and White Show (1983 exhibition); Both/and (2021 Brooklyn Museum retrospective); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), John Singer Sargent exhibition (2020); Whitney Biennial existing out of turn: abolitionists and, 3; Art Is . . . and, 116, 124; and feminist performance of labor proximate to the art world, 120–21, 124; and historic uses of direct-address strategies, 3; and LOG’s socioeconomic and cultural positioning, 167; Rivers, First Draft and, 124; as rupturing expectations of the status quo, 64; Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good and, 153. See also speaking out of turn failure: LOG’s view of CONYT as, 29, 49; LOG’s view of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as, 89, 96, 97, 98, 116; productivity of, 82, 97, 98 Fanon, Franz, 174n11 Fekner, John, Toxic Junkie, 92–93 feminisms: and “art as idea,” 66, 67; and exchange, 117; and labor proximate to the art world, 119–25, 196–97n63; as plural noun, 18; recalibration needed, 18; and theories of audience reception, 65. See also black feminist discourse; white mainstream feminism Ferguson, Roderick, 179n61, 186n31 Ferrá, Max, 137 fetish/fetishism, 111–13, 195n35 Finnegan, Cara A., 176–177n31 fir-palm: and Body Is the Ground My Experience, 138, 139, 199n23; and Rivers, First Draft, 103, 104, 138 The First and Last of the Modernists (photo installation), 157–58; overview, 22; absence of Jeanne Duval in, 159; commissioned for the Whitney Biennial (2010), 19, 150, 156, 158, 159, 201n68; description of and sources for, 156, 158–59; Diptych 1 RED (Charles and Michael), 156, 157; Diptych 3 Blue (Charles and Michael), 157, 158; emerging out of Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 156, 201n68; and evolution toward a broader historical perspective, 156, 160; and hierarchy, explosion of, 156–58; interpellation of LOG into, 159; and juxtaposition, 136, 159, 160; process-based approach of, 159, 160; title of, 158 “Flannery and Other Regions” (essay written under pseudonym Alma Thomas), 17–18 Fleetwood, Nicole, 87–88, 174n10, 185n21, 190nn84–86 Flowers of Evil and Good. See Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good

Floyd, George, 119 Fly by Night (performance), 190n83 Ford, Charles Henri, 29 Foucault, Michel, 2–3, 42, 162, 182n35 Franklin Furnace, 83; Fly by Night, 190n83 Fraser, Andrea, 120, 121, 198n14; Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 121 Frazier, Demita, 181n21 Frazier, E. Franklin, 188n56 Freud, Sigmund, 111–12 Fusco, Coco, 9, 11, 174n16 Gaines, Malik, 159, 201n70 galleries, and the disruptive nature of direct address/speaking out of turn, 63, 82, 86–87. See also exhibitions mentioned; museums of art Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 14–15 gender discourse: definition of, 2–3; dichotomies and, 3; as the politics of representation, 3 genius/alien genius, as term, 118, 196n53 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 195n38 Gilroy, Paul, 154 Girls’ Latin School (Boston), 106, 136, 193n21 Goldberg, Dan, 141 Golden, Thelma, and “post-black art,” 54–55, 57, 183nn58,60 Goldstein, Ann, 17 Golub, Leon, 92 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 174n10 González, Jennifer, 3 Goode Bryant, Linda: and the Downtown Consortium of Alternative Spaces, 83–84; Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline commissioned by, 22, 78, 84, 129; response to Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 78, 79, 80; and volunteer work of LOG, 70, 101. See also Just Above Midtown Gray, Alexander, 180n11 Grist, Raymond, 89 Halberstam, Jack, 188n57 Hall, Stuart, 154 Hambleton, Richard, 92 Hammons, David, 18, 44, 56, 69, 70, 83, 111, 112, 198n20; Victory over Sin, 69 Haraway, Donna, 98 Haring, Keith, 91 Harlem: African American Day Parade, 22, 97, 115; Art Is . . . and changes in, 116, 195n46; and genius as term, 118, 196n53. See also Art Is . . . (performance) Harris, Kamala, 118–19 Harris, Lyle Ashton, 11

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Hartman, Saidiya, 6–7, 14 Harvard University: Bunting Institute, 19, 150; and Flowers of Evil and Good, 200n45 Hassinger, Maren, 83, 109, 111, 112 Heidegger, Martin, 15–16, 22–23, 196–97n63 Henderson, Mae G., 15 Henry, Janet, 90 heteroglossia, 45–47 hierarchy: the diptych as disrupting, 135; The First and Last of the Modernists as disrupting, 156–58; longstanding LOG commitment to working against, 175n26 HIV/AIDS epidemic, 16–17, 19–20 Hockley, Rujeko, 102 Hollywood film industry, Baldwin’s critique of, 42–43, 44 Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 186n31 hooks, bell, 2, 15; oppositional gaze, 81 Hoptman, Laura, 58 Hunt, Amanda, 195n46 Husserl, Edmund, 196–97n63 hybridity: and alien connection between mediums and genres, 64; black middle-class existence and, 121; and The Clearing/Jeanne Duval, 143, 147, 148–49, 153, 154; collage/cut-up technique and, 31; and CONYT, 31; cultural hybridity, 80, 138, 150, 154, 160, 167; and dichotomies, use of, 3; the fir-palm metaphor, 103, 138; and The First and Last of the Modernists, 160; longstanding LOG interest in, 3, 159, 164–65, 167, 175n26; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and, 80; Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and, 124–25; Senga Nengudi and, 195n30; racial, Michael Jackson and, 160; Rivers, First Draft as hybrid literary form, 103 immigration, and the black middle class, 68 imperialism. See colonialism Indivisible Landscapes: Rivers, Caves, Deserts (performance), 20, 101 Ingberman, Jeanette, 18 International Arts Relations gallery, 137–38 interpellation: definition of, 174n11; direct-address and, 98, 192n111; and independence from audience response, 98; of LOG into The First and Last of the Modernists, 159; mail art questionnaire for black artists and, 90; and the optics of diffraction, 98 invisibility of women and black, Indigenous, and other persons of color from representation: the black middle and upper classes, 69, 73; CONYT as addressing, 39

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Iowa Writers’ Workshop, LOG’s education, 25–26, 179–80n5 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), John Singer Sargent exhibition (2020): exterior installation of The Strange Taxi, 143; LOG catalogue essay for, 143–44 Jackson, Michael: death of, 156, 158; as mixed or hybrid race, 160; and modernism, 157–58, 159, 160; universality, striving for, 158, 160. See also The First and Last of the Modernists Jacobs, Lanita, 175n20, 176–177n31, 194n25 JAM. See Just Above Midtown Jeantel, Rachel, 3, 13–14 Jenkins, Ulysses, 109, 111 Jennings, Corrine, 94 Jones, Amelia, 2, 110, 111, 183n6, 195n30 Jones, Patricia S., 130, 170, 198n10 Just Above Midtown (JAM), 69–70; as community, importance to LOG’s creativity, 100, 101, 108, 115, 128; Dialogues (1980), 84, 129; excluded from press coverage, 83–84; “Gaunt Gloves” talk by LOG for, 84; LOG as volunteer at, 70, 101; Outlaw Aesthetics (1980), 56, 69, 70. See also Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline juxtaposition, 134, 136–37, 145, 156, 159; as act of translation, 160 Kant, Immanuel, 39, 41 Kelley, Robin D. G., 175n27 Kelley, Robin D. G., 175n27 Kenkeleba House, 91. See also The Black and White Show King-Hammond, Leslie, 18–19, 132, 178–79n58 Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 196–97n63 kitchen table, phenomenology and, 196–97n63. See also Weems, Carrie Mae: Kitchen Table Series Kolkata, Wendy K., 25 Kondo, Dorinne, 175nn20,27 Kress, Gunther, 176–177n31 Kruger, Barbara, 5, 67 Kumin, Maxine, 181n25 Kun, Josh, 177n42 Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland), 30, 162, 180n11 Kuspit, Donald, “Adrian Piper: Self-Healing through Meta-Art,” 93, 191n101 labor proximate to the art world, 119–25, 196–97n63 Lacy, Karyn R., 188n56 Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 8, 198n14 Landry, Bart, 188n56 Landscape (Western Hemisphere) (video), 192n7

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language: and the African American literary tradition, 14–15; as art, 2–3; The Black and White Show (1983 exhibition) and, 91–92; the body as, 109; CONYT and LOG’s fundamental preoccupation with, 29, 31; the diptych and, 134, 135, 145–46; evolution of LOG from writer to visual artist, 161, 162, 164–65; explanation and theorizing, LOG’s proclivity for, 95–96, 145–46, 167; and identity of LOG as a black woman artist-linguist, 39; Latin education of LOG and, 106, 136; “pen and voice,” 167, 186n35, 202n8; of power, 25; process-based approach to works and, 159; as situating spectators at the interstices between subject and objet d’art, 16; the voice as implement of, 11. See also autobiographical narrative; direct address; double voice (multilayered speaking); linguistic anthropology; spatialized narrative; speaking out of turn; translation; writing in space Leeuwen, Theo van, 176–177n31 Levine, Lawrence, 186–187n36 light-skinned privilege: and positionality of the artist, 9, 78, 135, 167; and positionality of the researcher, 6, 9 Ligon, Glenn, and “post-black art,” 54–55, 57 linguistic anthropology, 175n20, 176–177n31 Lippard, Lucy, 2, 4, 67, 117, 121; on Adrian Piper, 50 Lippard, Lucy, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, influence on LOG, 105, 174n16, 179–80n5 Locke, Alain, 186–87n36 Lorde, Audre, 15, 34, 47, 49 Lorraine O’Grady: A Portrait (video) (LOG collaboration with Adam Pendleton), 23, 179n65, 183n69 Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space, 1973–2019, 2, 168, 175n26, 202n5 Loving, Al, 83 McCullough, Barbara, 109, 111; Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space, 1111 McDonald, Daniel, 29–30 McDonough, Tom, 58 McKeller, Thomas, 143–44, 153, 160 McMillan, Uri, avatar production, 11, 14, 64, 184nn11,13, 190n77 mail art: “ADVANCED BLACK ARTISTS,” 88–90 Manfredi, Jennifer, 100 Martin, Trayvon, 13–14 Marx, Karl, 111, 112

Mauss, Nick, 29–30, 55, 180n11; Inversions/L’Amitie, 180n11 MBN. See Mlle Bourgeoise Noire medium and medium specificity: alien connection between genres and, 64; audience reception studies and, 65, 185n20; the black body in performance, 63; blackness as, 57; direct address cutting across, 2, 5; feminist challenges to boundaries of, 66; the labor taking place on both sides of, 123; of LOG’s visual projects, 6; participation as method and, 17; the voice as, 11 Melamed, Jodi, 179n60, 183n59 Mendieta, Ana, 5 Mercer, Kobena, 11, 39, 43, 44 methodology of the text: archival praxis and, 7–8; autoethnographic research, 6–7, 12; and constructive self-reflexive knowledge production, 9; and documentation, lack of, 133; and LOG’s website archive, 8, 167–68, 201n68; multi-sited ethnography and, 7, 175n20; positionality of the researcher and, 6–7, 8–9, 96, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175n27; sites of engagement, 5–6 Mingo, George, 100, 115, 191n102 Miscegenated Family Album (photo installation), 136; overview, 22, 133; and connotation of “miscegenation,” 135; description of, 135; as diptych, 135–37; and Egyptology of LOG, 198n20; evolving out of Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and Sisters, 18, 22, 133, 135; exhibition of, 19, 180n11; image sources, 134–35, 198n20; Sisters II, 135, 136; Sisters IV, 135; spatialized narrative and, 137 Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (performance, “MBN”), 62, 79, 85–86; overview, 21, 101; and alienation effects, 64, 80, 81, 184n9; as alternative persona, 82; Art Is . . . as project of, 22, 96–97, 116; audience and, 17, 63, 65–66, 70, 86–87, 97–98; and beauty/aging, 132, 198n14; birth of, 70–72; The Black and White Show as curated by, 21, 91–96; and black creative labor, 120, 121; and Brechtian drag, 76; and Brechtian “social gest,” 82, 189nn71–73; budget for, 74–75, 75; LéonGontran Damas as muse of, 69, 77–78, 188–189nn60,62; direct address and, 80, 97–98, 192n111; documentation (reenactment) of, 78, 79, 80, 82, 111; as failure, LOG’s view of, 89, 96, 97, 98, 116; and failure, productivity of, 82, 97, 98; and feminist conceptualism, 66, 67; first appearance of, at JAM, 51; “Gaunt Gloves” talk, 84; the gown and cape, making of, 74–76, 187–88n55; historically risky reality of speaking out of turn and, 12; and letter writing, 93–94;

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Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (continued) and LOG’s fear of rejection by black artists, 187n51; mail art: “ADVANCED BLACK ARTISTS,” 88–90; media representation of, 86–87, 96–98; museum displays of gown, 74, 187–88n55; Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline compared to, 128–30; New Museum restaging of, 83, 84–87, 85–86; New York gallery scene as disrupted by, 63, 82, 86–87; pleasure and play and, 80–81, 86–88; poem of (and variations), 63, 78, 84; as protest of middle-class upbringing, 71–72, 73–74, 76–77, 187n49; as protest of “too safe” black art, 65, 66–67, 73–74, 76–77, 87, 185n19, 188–89n62; reception of, 80; sash of, 70; the whip as symbol, 74, 187nn52–53; the whip, research and production of, 72, 187n45; white gloves, acquisition of, 72; white gloves as symbol, 65, 72–73, 116; as writing in space, 20 —and alienation: overview of LOG’s engagement with, 63–64, 184nn8–9; the alien body, 63, 64–65, 82–83, 88; cultural alienation, 64, 80–83; as generative, 64, 83, 190n77; as lost in the media and the archive, 88; the optics of diffraction and, 98; performative alienation, 116; social alienation, 76–77 —individual works (silver gelatin prints): Mlle Bourgeoise Noire asks, “Won’t you help me lighten my heavy bouquet?,” 86; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire leaves the safety of home, 62; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Shouts Out Her Poem, 85 modernism: Charles Baudelaire as father of, 149, 150, 153, 154–55, 157, 159; colonialism and racism and, 154–55, 159; contemporary art and shift away from discourses of, 5; discourses of, 174n15; Jeanne Duval as postmodern figure and rise of, 153–54, 159; exclusion of artists of color and women from, 174n15; Michael Jackson and, 157–58, 159, 160; Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good as addressing, 154–55, 159. See also The First and Last of the Modernists Molesworth, Helen, 17, 118, 178n53, 181n27 Montano, Linda, 132, 197n5 Morris, Catherine, 102 Morrison, Toni, 175n26 Moten, Fred, 14 multiculturalism: acknowledgment of past conditions of exclusion, 19; homogeneity of token works exhibited, 66–67, 69; and the neoliberal turn to free-market inclusion, 19, 67, 84, 179n61; pleasure and play as absent in token works exhibited, 80; post-black art as distinguished from, 55; recuperative impulses

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in the art world and, 7–8, 175n23; remedying exclusion in ways that left the status quo intact, 18; schizophrenia of inclusion in group shows but exclusion in accession practices, 19 multimodal performance: and alienation effects, 63–64; definition of, 184n9 Mulvey, Laura, 124 Muñoz, José Esteban, 11 Murray, Derek Conrad, 182–83n57 museums of art: alien bodies and alienation in, 82, 83; and care for artworks, 187–88n55; as complex (alien) institutions for black women, 76–77; and cultural alienation, 80–83; direct address and inclusion of women in, 5; and the disruptive nature of direct address/speaking out of turn, 4, 12, 63–65, 98, 120–21; and methodology of the text, 6, 7; and post-black art, 54; questioning of, as a knowledge-making institution, 41; race and gender discourse and the politics of representation in, 3; as spaces of social control, 2–3. See also exhibitions mentioned Nahem, Andrew, 190n83 Nardal, Paulette and Jane, 77 Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline (performance), 130–31; overview, 22; aesthetics and, 130; and the African-American aristocracy, 131; and Ancient Egypt’s African heritage, 129, 131; and the archive of feelings, 129; autobiographical narrative and, 128, 129; commissioned by Linda Goode Bryant, 22, 78, 84, 129; and community of Just Above Midtown, importance of, 128, 137; description of, 127, 130–31; and the diptych, 22, 132, 133, 136; documentation of, 128, 133; and Egyptology of LOG, 129, 130; and juxtaposition, 136, 160; Miscegenated Family Album as evolving out of, 18, 22, 133, 135; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire compared to, 128–30; mourning and melancholia and, 129, 131; and multiracial ancestry of black Americans, 131; performance history of, 18, 129, 130, 131–32, 178–79n58; and physical resemblances of black American and Ancient Egyptian family, 127–28, 197n5; retirement of, 132, 133; as ritualized reconciliation, 101, 113, 124–25, 127–28, 129, 130; script for, 133; and sisters, difficult relationship of, 128, 197n2; and spatialized narrative, 22, 128; as writing in space, 20, 128. See also Miscegenated Family Album; Sisters Négritude, 77 Nengudi, Senga, 2, 21, 83, 108, 121, 195n30; Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 109–15, 110, 113–14; Freeway Fets, 110, 111, 112–13

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neoliberal turn to free-market inclusion, 19, 67, 84, 179n61 Neshat, Shirin, 174n16 New Museum, Persona (1981 exhibition), 83, 84–87, 85–86 newspaper works: Sarah Charlesworth, 38; Dada and Surrealist artists and, 27, 28, 29; Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares series, 49–53, 50, 52, 182n55. See also Cutting Out CONYT (2017, collage); Cutting Out the New York Times (1977, CONYT); cut-up technique Norton, Eileen, 187–88n55 “NOTES on Living a Translated Life” (exhibition catalogue essay), 143–44 nude self-portraits. See “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity”; Piper, Adrian: Food for the Spirit Nyong’o, Tavia, 11, 63 O’Connor, Flannery: “Flannery and Other Regions” (essay written under pseudonym Alma Thomas), 17–18; as influence on LOG, 37–38; Mystery and Manners, 37–38, 181n22 O’Grady, Devonia Evangeline (sister): cotillions and sororities and, 187n49; death of, 129, 197n5, 198n20 O’Grady, Edwin (father), 143, 144, 153 O’Grady, Lena (mother): hiatus of LOG from art world to care for (1983–1988), 18, 132–33, 178–79n58, 200n45; images in Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good, 151–53, 152; LOG not wanted by, 103–4; residence of, and Damas as muse, 143–44; Rivers, First Draft addressing relationship with, 103–4, 153; Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good and research into Jeanne Duval as addressing relationship with, 150, 153, 154, 156 O’Grady, Lorraine: and beauty/aging, 132, 198n14; education of, 25–26, 71, 106, 136, 179–80n5, 181n25, 193n21; evolution from writer to visual artist, 161, 162, 164–65; evolution toward a broader historical perspective, 134, 155–56, 160; explanation and theorizing, proclivity for, 95–96, 145–46, 167; and Guerrilla Girls, 18, 178n56, 180n14; health of, 27; increased visibility of, 1–2, 30, 97, 173n2; and Old Girls, 178n56; as post-black before she was black, 53–59. See also archives of LOG; art world; black middle and upper class; exhibitions mentioned; hybridity; language; process-based working method; website archive of LOG; West Indian heritage of LOG; writing in space

—job history: chronologies of, 18–20, 25–26, 179–80n5; government intelligence analyst job, 23, 25, 37, 179–80n5, 187n49; rock music criticism, 17, 23, 26, 67, 105, 159, 179–80n5; teaching at School of Visual Arts (New York), 23, 27, 105, 116–17, 149, 159, 179–80n5, 188n60; teaching at University of California at Irvine, 23, 200–201n51; as translator, 23, 25–26, 179–80n5 Okiishi, Ken, 29–30 Olds, Sharon, 181n25 Olowska, Paulina, 29–30 “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity”: on black female subjectivity, 17–18, 114; and proximity/opposition to whiteness, 37; publication history, 1, 173n2 oppositional gaze, 81 the other: alienation and the historical memory of enslavement and, 81; and Baudelaire’s relationship with Duval, 154–55; and modernism, 154–55, 159; the other of the other, 19, 124; silencing of the speech of, 12–14, 177n38 “outsider within” status, 37 Overstreet, Joe, 94, 191n102 pan-African racial identity, 77 Parker, Franklin, 111 Parry, Joseph D., 185n20 participation: as the art itself, 98; direct-address strategies and, 11–12; LOG and calls for, 17–18; MBN and, 63, 129; and productive gap between artist, spectator, and work of art, 98; as shared aspiration of 1980s artists, 17. See also audience Payne, Sandra, 89–90 Peabody, Rebecca, 110–11 “pen and voice,” 167, 186n35, 202n8 Pendleton, Adam, 183n69; Black Dada Reader, 57–59; Lorraine O’Grady: A Portrait (video), 23, 179n65, 183n69 performance: African-descent artists pursuing alternative representational strategies of the black female body, 113–14; as a history of relations, 80; assumed authority and “truth” of, in contemporary art discourse, 63, 183n6; as challenging to theorize in retrospect, 133; conservative attacks on (culture wars), 137; of excess, 74, 87–88; as free of the weight of history, 197n3; market forces demanding a physical object/commodity for, 137; postwar artists of European descent and, 113; residual effects left on the performer’s body, 80; and spatialized narratives, 128, 137; white women

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performance (continued) artists and exploitation of the female form, 113. See also audience; participation; performance documentation performance documentation: lack of, 111; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 78, 79, 80, 82, 111; Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline, 128, 133; Rivers, First Draft, 102–3, 109 performative alienation, 116, 190n83 Pétunia (magazine), 150 phenomenology: the act of speaking and, 177n38; and the audience at the interstices between subject and objet d’art, 16; and the call-andresponse nature of speaking out of turn, 16; defined as a turn toward objects, 15; the diptych as unfettered by genesis in, 137; and the kitchen table, 196–97n63; methodology and, 6–7, 16; orientation and, 15–16; and vocality, 15–16; Weems’s self-reflective manifesto and gesture of, 125 Picasso, Pablo, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 151, 152, 154, 200–201n51 Pindell, Howardena, 30, 83, 89, 90, 121 Piper, Adrian, 2, 5, 9, 18, 21, 30, 59, 108, 124, 174n16; and alienation, 64, 184n9; Cornered, 196–97n63; Food for the Spirit, 39–41, 40, 69; “Funk Lessons,” 92; Mythic Being series, 184n9; “An Open Letter to Donald Kuspit,” 93, 191n101; Vanilla Nightmares series, 49–53, 50, 52, 182n55 Plath, Sylvia, 39 Pohl, Frances K., 161, 168 police killings of black Americans, 19, 119 polyphony. See double voice (multilayered speaking) polyvocality, and LOG’s lip-synch collaboration with Anohni, 11 post-black art: and Black Dada, 57–59; coining of term (Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon), 54–55, 182–83n57; LOG and, 53–56; LOG’s transformation to black from, 56–57 postmodernism: Body Is the Ground of My Experience (BodyGround) as contesting historicity of, 138; Jeanne Duval as figure of, and Baudelaire’s modernism, 153–54, 159; loss of the body in, 143 presence: radical presence, 64–65, 174n12. See also existing out of turn process-based working method: Cutting Out CONYT (2017), 160, 162–64, 202n5; Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), 29, 44–45, 49, 161, 180n8; and evolution of LOG from writer to

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visual artist, 164–65; The First and Last of the Modernists, 159, 160; as multidisciplinary, 159; translation and, 159 PS1 (Institute for Art and Urban Resources), 68. See also Afro-American Abstraction Purifoy, Noah, 109–10 race discourse: black conceptualism and, 175n21; definition of, 2–3; dichotomies and, 3; as the politics of representation, 3 racism: and formation of the black middle class, 68; modernism and, 155, 159. See also colonialism; enslavement; exclusion of artists of color and women Reagan, Ronald, 16, 19–20, 67, 91–92 reconciliation: ritualized, Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline as, 101, 113, 124–25, 127–28, 129, 130; Carrie Mae Weems and, 124–25 Reid, Calvin, 145 Reinhardt, Ad, 58 reproductive violence, 139–40, 199n24 respectability politics: as barrier to artists, 69, 74; the gown of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire as metaphor for undoing of, 76 Rich, Adrienne, 181n25 Rimbaud, Arthur: Illuminations, 149; LOG teaching course on, 23, 149 Rivers, First Draft (performance): overview, 21–22; abridged form of, 102; addressing relationship with Lena (LOG’s mother), 103–4, 153; audience and, 100, 106; as autobiographical narrative, 100–101, 108–9; being and becoming of the artist and, 108, 194n25; and binary opposition, 164; and black creative labor, 125; as collage in space, 100, 108–9; and community of Just Above Midtown, importance of, 100, 101, 108, 115; description of, 99–100, 103–8, 193n21, Color Plates 3–11; and the “diptych—both/and idea,” 134, 192n7; documentation of, 102–3, 109; and existing out of turn, 124; as folktale, 20; gallery exhibitions of, 102, 109, 111; mythmaking/ storytelling and, 100–101, 124; public nature of, 101, 109, 114–15; rape scene in, 107, 193n22; script for, 101, 102, 103, 193–94nn22–24 Rodriguez, Geno, 18 Rose, Tracey, 80 Saar, Bettye, 44, 89; The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 44 Said, Edward, 154 Sandoval, Chela, 4, 12–13, 174nn10,12, 178n47

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Sargent, John Singer. See Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), John Singer Sargent exhibition (2020) Savage, Thomas, 32 Schlenzka, Jenny, 58 Schmitt, René, 38, 162 Schneemann, Carolee, 198n14 Sebesta, Judith, 97 Sekimoto, Sachi, 177n38 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 77 Sexton, Anne, 39 Sharpe, Christina, 6–7, 175n22 Sherman, Cindy, 5, 67 Silver, Nathaniel, 143 Simpson, Bennett, 6, 148 Simpson, Coreen, 86 Simpson, Lorna, Waterbearer, 199–200n36 Sims, Lowery Stokes, 18–19, 132, 178–79n58 Sisters (quadriptych), 18; arising out of Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline, 132, 133, 178–79n58; evolving into Miscegenated Family Album, 18; exhibition of, 132 Smith, Barbara, 181n21, 196–97n63 Smith, Beverly, 181n21 Smith, Cherise, 184n13 Smitherman, Geneva, 15 social gest (Brecht), 82, 189nn71–73 social justice movements, 17, 19–20; Black Lives Matter, 19, 119; civil rights/Black Power movements, 33–34, 180n14, 180–81n18. See also feminisms sonic color line, 13–14 sonic landscapes, 14–15 spatialized manifesto, Art Is . . . as, 100–101, 115–16, 124 spatialized narrative: The Clearing and, 146; the diptych and production of, 134, 135; and diptychs, reduced or separate showings of, 137; Dracula and the Artist and, 146, 199–200n36; Miscegenated Family Album and, 137; Nefertiti/ Devonia Evangeline and, 22, 128; as new form, 137; and the oral and storytelling traditions of African American literature, 14–15; performance and, 128, 137; the process of becoming as lost in, 137. See also diptych, collapsed; writing in space speaking out of turn: overview, 169; abolitionists and, 3; Art Is . . . and, 116, 124; and art museums, effects on, 4, 64–65; breaking the code of silence of the Guerilla Girls as, 178n56; call-andresponse nature of, 16; Cutting Out CONYT (2017) and, 166; as decolonial apparatus/

methodology of the oppressed, 4, 12, 174n10; definition of, 2, 3–4; direct address as technology of, 4–5, 174nn12,16; as failure, productivity of, 82; historic uses of, 3–4, 12–14; as intervention in Western-, white-, male-centric discourses of art history and study, 4–5, 178n47; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and historically risky reality of, 12; as neo-rhetoric of existence, 178n47; as rupturing expectations of the status quo, 64; as sole “tradition” available to the black female critical voice, 4; solicited speech silenced for being, 12–14, 177nn34,38; as “straining,” 14; Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good and, 153. See also direct address; existing out of turn Spero, Nancy, 91 Stein, Gertrude, 58 Stepto, Robert, 15 sterilization, forced, 139–40, 199n24 Stewart, Maria W., 3, 12–13, 177n34 Stillman, Nick, 112–13 Stoever, Jennifer Lynn, sonic color line, 13–14 Strobert, Kianja, 29–30 Studies for Flowers of Evil and Good (photo installation): overview, 22; descriptions of and sources for, 150–56, 200–201n51; and evolution toward a broader historical perspective, 155–56, 160; exhibitions of, 200–201n51; The First and Last of the Modernists as emerging from, 156, 201n68; at Harvard, 200n45; and juxtaposition, 151–52, 156, 159; research on Jeanne Duval and, 149–50, 151, 153–55, 159; and speaking and existing out of turn, 153 —individual works: 02 Burnt yellow color text study (Jeanne and Charles), 154, 155; 04 Day Sky Grey Color Study (Jeanne and Charles), 151, 151; 07 Greensick Color Study (Lena and Charles), 151–52, 152; Fire Red color text study (Jeanne and Charles), 154 Studio Museum, Freestyle exhibition (2001), 54, 55, 57 Studio Z collective, 111, 113, 115 Sturken, Marita, 97 subjectivity. See black female subjectivity Surrealism: course taught by LOG, 27, 188n60; Léon-Gontran Damas and, 188n60; and hybrid artworks, 31; as influence on LOG, 30, 31–32, 34, 37, 38, 54, 100, 138; irreverent performance tactics of, 114; newspaper poems, 27, 28 Szymczyk, Adam, 180n11 Tani, Ellen, 175n21 Third World Feminist Alliance, 67

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“This Will Have Been: My 1980s” (lecture), 30 Thomas, Alma (pseudonym of LOG), 18, 178n56; “Flannery and Other Regions” (essay), 17–18 Thomas Erben Gallery, 200–201n51 Thompson, Robert Farris, 182–83n57 Thompson, Susan, 58 Touré, 54, 55 translation: as business, 23, 25–26, 179–80n5; CONYT and, 35, 39, 53; juxtaposition as act of, 160; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire and, 77; processbased approach to works and, 159 Trump, Donald, 19–20, 59, 118, 119 Truth, Sojourner, 3 Tzara, Tristan, 31 Udé, Iké, 11 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 2, 5, 21, 67, 120–21; Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance, 120; “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” 120, 196n55 Vida, Katie, 34 voice. See double voice (multilayered speaking); language; “pen and voice”; speaking out of turn WAC (Women’s Action Coalition), 8 Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT), 120 Walker, Alice, 2; “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” 37–38; In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 37–38, 181n22 Wallace, Michele, 4 Wall, Cheryl, 15 war on drugs, 16, 19, 67 Warr, Tracey, 109 Washington, Booker T., 68, 186n35 Watts Uprising, 109–10, 115 website archive of LOG: overview, 168; accessibility of LOG’s written works on, 168, 202n11; and CONYT (1977), 162; as exhibition, 167; highly mediated/standardized presentation of, 133–34, 146, 175n27, 201n68; and methodology of the text, 8, 9, 167–68, 201n68; Rivers, First Draft and,

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102; self-conscious resuscitation of her art via, 7–8, 162; text as focus of, 8, 145–46. See also archives of LOG Weems, Carrie Mae, 2, 11, 121, 174n16; Family Pictures and Stories, 124; Kitchen Table Series, 122–25, 122, 196–97n63; Untitled (Woman playing solitaire), 122 Wellesley College: archives of LOG at, 5–6, 8, 167; LOG’s education at, 25, 71, 181n25, 187n49; Miscegenated Family Album at, 19 West Indian heritage of LOG: family history, 104, 143, 156; the fir-palm image and, 103; and Miscegenated Family Album, 136–37; parade attendance as cultural mainstay, 116, 117; perfectionism and, 104; and Rivers, First Draft, 103–5, 194n24; and The Strange Taxi: From Africa to Jamaica to Boston in 200 Years, 140–44, 142, 199n23 white heterosexual men: always their turn to speak, 14; claims to universality by, 39–41, 81. See also art world white mainstream feminism: colonialism, Third World feminist critique of, 67; confessional poetry and, 39, 181n25; exclusion of black women and, 9, 18; and film theory, 81. See also black feminist discourse; feminism Whitfield, Tony, 22–23, 169 Whitney Biennial, 158; (2010), 19, 150, 156, 158, 159, 201n68; (2012), 183n69. See also The First and Last of the Modernists Williams, Randy, 83 Wilson, Fred, 83, 100 Wilson, Judith, 128–29, 131 Woman in Red. See Rivers, First Draft Wright, Elizabeth, 189n72 writing in space: as a kind of changing same, 167; the artist’s formulation, 20; Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline and, 22, 128. See also spatialized narrative Young, Roderick “Quaku,” 111 Zoubok, Pavel, 31

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