Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast with Lucas Zwirner
Episode 37, June 15, 2021
Jarrett Earnest in Conversation with Lorraine O’Grady
DAVID (0s): I’m David Zwirner and this is Dialogues, a podcast about artists and the way they think.
LORRAINE (11s): I’ve never, ever, tried anything that I couldn’t do, and as soon as I could do it, I would become bored. My problem was much more about finding the thing that would not bore me. And the thing that would not bore me was making art. I knew that, and I knew the reason why it was never going to bore me was because I was never going to be able to do it as well as I could write.
LUCAS (32s): Hi, I’m Lucas Zwirner. This season of Dialogues, we’re inviting on new hosts for certain episodes so we can expand not only the diversity of our guests, but also of the subjects we tackle on the podcast. This episode, the curator and writer Jarrett Earnest, on a subject he has always been deeply interested in—serious artists who are also serious writers.
JARRETT (55s): I’m Jarrett Earnest, your guest host for this episode. Today I’m talking with legendary conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady on the occasion of her retrospective Both/
And at the Brooklyn Museum and on the release of her book Writing in Space, which brings together essays and conversations from the last 40 years. This conversation picks up in the middle of our ongoing years-long discussions of literature, philosophy, and history, dipping into our mutual love of filmmaker Maya Deren’s book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, as well as the development of her autobiographical essay “Notes on Living a Translated Life,” which was published in Hyperallergic late last year.
O’Grady is unique for many reasons, not least for coming to art later in life at the age of 47, after successful careers working for the U.S. Labor and State Departments, running her own translation business, and becoming a critic. To contextualize, this is the beginning of a conversation which I’m having with artists who write or who engage with writing as a part of their work. You are kind of the poster girl of this particular nexus.
Really. Because you came to art through writing more or less after having done very well, a number of other things. It was almost like only after having been a translator, been a rock critic, gone to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop to study literature that you then kind of ended up starting to do writing in the New York art world in the eighties. ( … )