Introducing: Lorraine O’Grady and Juliana Huxtable
MOCA, Part 2, 2016
Part two of a two-part discussion between artists Lorraine O’Grady and Juliana Huxtable. The dialogue took place by phone from O’Grady and Huxtable’s respective studios in New York City. This is part two of a two-part discussion and the first time the artists have spoken.
Lorraine O’Grady: I have a feeling that you’ll think it sounds strange, but the biggest compliment I can give you and some other young artists is that you make me feel afraid. [both laugh] Like when I come out with this new performance, “Oh my God, Juliana’s there” —I mean I realize you are capable of seeing it as retardataire, right? As totally backward, out-of-it thinking. Even in the short time I’ve become familiar with your ideas and your work in more depth, I feel they are already forcing me to become sharp my game, and that’s a thrill. It’s scary to have young artists capable of judging you, but it’s also a thrill.
Juliana Huxtable: Well, that’s a compliment. [laughs] I feel a burden of new proofs on my end constantly.
LO: Well, we’re not in easy positions, either of us, it seems. I think that has to do with representing positions that are so new. It’s interesting that, even though we may have come from different theoretical and aesthetic places, from different historical and cultural times, we’ve had similar attitudes in response to the difficult work we knew we had to make. I think one aspect of that position was a desire to make work that is beautiful.
JH: Mhm.
LO: To help make my case, I’ve often quoted the statement by Toni Morrison—I may be
paraphrasing here—where she says she believes that art can be “resolutely political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.”
JH: Right.
LO: When I was making political work in the early ’80s, there was such pressure to make it ugly, I mean mostly from white people. [JH laughs] They seemed to feel that what announced the presence of political intention was ugliness, or at least a refusal of beauty. I don’t know if that was because in the United States certainly—and the ’60s were a very thin and short-lived exception—most white artists and critics had been raised in a culture of acceptance, not of refusal. They seemed new to protest in serious art, felt uncomfortable with it, or maybe they just didn’t understand political art’s nuances. I think it also had to do with a misunderstanding of black culture. For instance, I was at the March on Washington in 1963, and the thing about the march and the event later on the Mall is that it was family time, it was picnic time; it was have-fun-with-yourfriends time. People marched with smiles on their faces and then picnicked on the grass with old and new friends. It was Sunday in the country. That night, watching the scene reflected on TV via an all-white commentariat, then discussing it at work the next day with my virtually all white colleagues and friends in the Federal Government, it was as if they’d been watching a different event from me. The consensus was that the black people and their white allies at the March could not be serious, can you believe? They all thought, if the marchers were having so much fun, they couldn’t be serious. I kept saying, “You don’t get it, you don’t get it. Don’t you realize that people can laugh and smile and be implacable at the same time?” I think the same thing is true of beauty. I don’t see why black political artists would refuse one of the greatest arms we have, which is black style. ( … )