Lorraine O’Grady in conversation with Adam Pendleton
Adam Pendleton: Pasts, Futures, and Aftermaths. New York, NY: DABA/KOENIG BOOKS (2021).
Adam Pendleton: Around a decade ago, 2010, 2011, 2012, what were you working on? You had a solo gallery show called New Worlds, revisiting some of your photomontages from the BodyGround series, including The Clearing, alongside a video work called Landscape (Western Hemisphere), from 2010/11. Can you speak about this moment and these different bodies of work and how they relate to one another? I’m particularly interested in the prominence of notions of landscape and world in the presentation of your work at this time.
Lorraine O’Grady: Your question gets right to the heart of why I make art in the first place. One of my goals in pursuing Both/And thinking is to imagine a balance between nature and culture. This balance is, for me, the primary redress to be made of the West’s Either/Or binary, whose hierarchical tendencies produce such oppositions as “culture or nature,” “culture better than nature”—and “white or black,” “white better than black.” These, in turn, elide by a weird twist of syllogistic logic into predictably skewed deductions: culture is to nature as white is to black; therefore, culture is the same as white, and nature the same as black. It was important to me to embed both the body (my body) and the mind (my mind) equally in both culture and nature so as to dis-establish hierarchy and begin to establish equivalence.
This process started as early as 1978, after doing Cutting Out the New York Times, when I
began scripting Rivers, First Draft as part of a trilogy to be called Rivers, Caves, and Deserts. The Woman in Red was developed then. But before I could produce that piece, I entered the art world and the shock of encountering its segregation made me narrow my focus to politics, and in 1980 Mlle Bourgeoise Noire emerged. At the time, she felt somewhere between an interruption and an inconvenience, to tell you the truth. In 1982, when I did Rivers, First Draft in Central Park, the Woman in Red became a kind of prequel to Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. But Rivers had always been there as part of my mental furniture, both because I’d already scripted it and because it was an autobiographical work. The 1982 performance was where I first did a prototype of The Fir-Palm, the piece that would become the starting point of the series Body Is the Ground of My Experience, or BodyGround, which I did in 1991.
You asked about the period 2010–12. In 2010, I did The First and the Last of the Modernists for the Whitney Biennial. That fall, I was in the Buffalo Biennial, and I did the Landscape (Western Hemisphere) video for it. But I should mention that at that point in time, I was also constantly un-archiving my career. By that I mean I was trying to bring old work back into the present. My decision to make the Landscape video was prompted in part by my feeling that The Clearing, which was part of BodyGround, needed more context than it had or, rather, that it could be amplified if I made a landscape video to accompany it. ( … )