LORRAINE O’GRADY
Lorraine O’Grady on creating a counter-confessional poetry
Lauren O’Neill-Butler, 2018
Lorraine O’Grady’s longtime engagement with the diptych, as seen in her recent collage series “Cutting Out CONYT,” 1977/2017, which she discusses below, is highlighted in two solo exhibitions this fall: one is on view at Alexander Gray Associates in New York through December 15, 2018, and the other is at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia through January 13, 2019. “Cutting Out CONYT” is a radical selection from her earliest artwork, “Cutting Out the New York Times (CONYT),” 1977, now reworked and distilled into what she calls “haiku diptychs.” The eminent New York–based artist and critic also has a solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which runs until December 2, 2018. Rejoice.
THE FORM OF MY WORK has proven to me to be more important than the content. If you had told me when I started forty years ago that I would be saying that, I would probably have laughed. But the diptych has always been, in a sense, my primary form, even in the performances. For me, the diptych can only be both/and. When you put two things that are related and yet totally dissimilar in a position of equality on the wall, for example, they set up a conversation that is never-ending. It’s a totally unresolvable, circular conversation. And I think that that “both/and” lack of resolution—the acceptance and embrace of it, as
opposed to the Western “either/or” binary, which is always exclusive and hierarchical —needs to become the cultural goal. The diptych, which is actually anti dualistic, has served me to make the point against “either one, or the other.”
I taught a course in Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism at the School of Visual Arts for twenty years. I admired those artists that dodged the draft in World War I and went off to Zurich. But I also felt they’d suffered an acute shock: Their teachers and parents, formed in the nineteenth century, had led them to believe that European culture was built on the mind, on rationality. And then, of course, they’d had to face the irrationality of European culture with the outbreak of a war that even today makes no real sense. Their response to that was to willingly surrender to the irrationality they’d witnessed, and to create from the language of the subconscious a sur-realité, an above-reality. While I understood their need to surrender to the random, that could never ever interest me as a goal, since I’d always felt the culture I was immersed in was completely irrational. My trajectory instead was not to surrender but to try to conquer the random, to wrest some rationality from the irrationality that so many “others” to the normative culture have to live with. ( … )