Content area
Full Text
Interview with Lorna Simpson
VIEWING NEW YORK artist Lorna Simpson's life-size photograph, "Guarded Conditions," of a Black woman whose back is turned with her arms folded and the subversive words "sex attacks" and "skin attack" inscribed on plaques below her, I suffered an intellectual epiphany that occurs when you stumble a cross upon a piece of art that articulates those jumbled thoughts that have been bumping around in your head.
Like mini-plays about oppression, Simpson's minimalist photographs link the critical discussion of sexism to racism through the Black female protagonist, combined with texts. Her photographs are visually elegant, yet somewhat irritating in their cloying ambiguity.
As a graduate of New York School of the Visual Arts, she has exhibited at New York's Josh Baer Gallery, the Wadsworth, Atheneum, and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as well as a host of national and international exhibitions. She holds the distinction of being the first African-American woman to exhibit at Italy's prestigious Venice Biennale in 1990 and the first at the Museum of Modern Art. At the 1991 Spoleto Festival USA, a multimedia celebration in Charleston, South Carolina, Simpson and actress Alva Rogers electrified audiences by making slave cabins the focus of their exhibit, "Five Rooms." On April 21, 1994, she was received at the White House by Hillary Clinton who toasted Simpson and others for their work as jurors for the distinguished American Academy in Rome. That evening, she also gave a lecture and slide presentation at the virginia Museum of Fine Arts where, the next morning, we talked one-on-one. Ronica Sanders Smucker: There's something about doing an interview that requires one to wear a mask of oneself. You have to be both yourself and an image of yourself. I'm wondering if making photographs has theatrical aspects for you.
Lorna Simpson: I would say it hinges on a slightly theatrical tension. I would say, thus far, I probably avoid that on some levels, or avoid the drama in terms of its theatrics. I do invoke the spectacle in the figure, but I don't go so far that you become mesmerized by that spectacle. The work is always about stepping away from that kind of emotional charge. It sets a stage, but I leave the drama out...