Lorraine O’Grady: The Bicameral Self Interview
Photography by Brigitte Lacombe
Interview by Karen Leong
A-M Journal Issue No 1. 2024
Across her life’s work, American artist and writer Lorraine O’Grady has spurned the notion of a binary. Going against the grain of classic Western imagery, her body of work impels one to consider the boundlessness of creating, with radical attention to phenomenology, race and gender. O’Grady’s experience of straddling language and visual art is founded by her desire to call into question structures of imbalance and power. She assumes this stance explicitly and implicitly, embedding it into text, video and photo installation. In conversation, O’Grady uncovers the breadth of her artistic dogma and how this has bled into the critique of the world she creates within.
A-M Journal: You self-identify as concept-based across the disciplines of writing, art and critique. What, in your own words, does this entail?
Lorraine O’Grady: The ‘either/or’ logic of the binary is a conceptual prob- lem with profound social and political implications when it comes to issues of diaspora, cultural hybridity, and Black female subjectivity, which are key subjects of study for me. It was therefore necessary to refute this reasoning on a conceptual level, which is what I’ve done by advocating for the logic of ‘both/and’.
A-M: How did you come across the diptych as your central framework, and why has it remained with you over the four decades of your artistic career?
O’Grady: I use the diptych ‘both/and’ thinking to frame the key themes in my work – diasporic experience, cultural hybridity, Black female subjectivity – as symptoms of a larger problem tracing the divisive and hierarchical either/or categories underpinning Western philosophy. The diptych functions in my work as a tool, concept, and symbol. It is one way that I am able to confront the limitations of Western culture, a culture whose intellectual and philosophical traditions are built on exclusivity and resistance to difference. With the diptych, there is no before and after, no either/or; it’s both/and, at the same time.
The logic of ‘both/and’ enables a constant exchange between equals and sidesteps what I call ‘miscegenated thinking’ by eroding hierarchical oppositions within racial, gender and class identity. My use of the diptych is in service of an anti-hierarchical approach to difference, one that favours the concepts of hybridity and process, over rigid oppositions and resolution. ( … )