Cultural Projections of Race and Gender
Rebecca DeRoo
DeRoo: First of all I’d like to thank Sarah and Cheryl for putting
together this fabulous conference. I got the program and I was so excited
about it, and it’s really wonderful to be back. Like Cheryl said,
I was an API Fellow in 1996 and it was just a fantastic experience for
me; hearing all the presenters and talking with the other Fellows. I learned
so much, and it really builds a sense of community within the field at
large. I see people at conferences, I’ve made good friends through
the conference, I share work with people, and it’s just been such
a valuable thing to have this community of people and working out in
diverse areas of the field. So, thank you both for putting this together
for us
all.
Today I’m going to talk about how recent photography theories have
sought to address projected images of race and gender. By projected images
here, I mean stereotypes and clichés for representing race and gender
that we find in the cannon, and in more popular imagery that have shaped
our ideas about race and gender identity. So I’m going to be talking
about both how these ideas about race and gender in photography have evolved
in recent theories, and I’m going to talk about how specific images
by Lorna Simpson and respond to the questions that they raise.
I know many of you are familiar with Lorna Simpson’s work. She’s
an American artist, she was born in Brooklyn in 1960, and she’s been
having solo exhibitions since 1985. She’s won awards from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the College Art Association, etc. Could I have
the slides please?
I’d like to begin by focusing on this image by Lorna Simpson titled
You’re Fine from 1988, and I’ll be drawing on ideas from a
catalogue essay by Beryl Wright. The image is about 3x10 feet, so here
you’re seeing it about actual size. The figure in the center is about
the life size of a person. As you can see, the image is enclosed by text.
There’s a central figure and then above it You’re Fine; You’re
Hired. It’s a puzzling image because we can see that the central
figure is in the pose of the reclining female nude, yet she’s clothed
and turned around with her back to us so we don’t see her body
or her face. Furthermore, the image is split into this series of four
separate
photographs referencing the tradition of 19th century anthropological
photography, which tended to isolate and focus on specific body parts.
Today I want to use this example to explore how Lorna Simpson referenced
traditions of the nude and anthropological photography--formats in
which women and people of color have been objectified. As an African-American
woman who’s a member of traditionally marginalized groups, Simpson
seeks to draw attention to the circumstances in which such pictures were
made because the exploitation of the persons represented in the photographs
have been frequently overlooked. But Simpson goes two steps further. She
voices a criticism of these practices by inverting their elements and furthermore,
she alludes to histories that have frequently been suppressed. Simpson
produced You’re Fine at a time when the formats of the nude and anthropological
pictures were being reconsidered in the academy. Rather than seeing the
images in terms of aesthetics or scientific content, as they’d been
traditionally considered, academics began to look at the power relationships
that were involved in the production and the viewing of the images. In
particular, they focused on the power differential between the person viewed
in the image, and the viewer of the image. The person’s typically
represented as objects in images, tended to be from groups that were
marginalized in society, whereas the makers and viewers of the images
tended to be from
dominant social groups that were in a position to look at others.
Today I want to look at how these ideas on the representation of the
body and the position of the viewer evolved in critical theory. Focusing
on
how Lorna Simpson engaged these debates, I want you to think about
how Simpson problematizes the position of the viewer and resists the
objectification
of the figure in her work. Much of the theoretical basis for thinking
about the power differentials between the viewer of the image and the
person
viewed in the image were first raised in the groundbreaking essay Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema published in 1975 by British filmmaker
and theorist, Laura Mulvey. Mulvey applied psychoanalytic theory to
the study
of film, and while I won’t get into the details of her argument
today, I do want to address her main point: That a female character in
a film
is constructed as an erotic object to be looked at by a male character,
and subsequently by the film viewer who identifies with the male character
or the protagonist. Mulvey described this process as scopophilia, or
pleasure in viewing, and she drew on examples of Alfred Hitchcock movies
that thematized
this concept.
One example she refers to is Hitchcock’s Rear Window from 1954. The
story is about the main character, Jeffries, whom you see here. He’s
laid up at home with a broken leg and he takes to looking out the back
window of his apartment building with his telescope. The mystery begins
when he thinks he sees criminal activity taking place. Here you see him
looking out across the courtyard of his building, at the building behind
his.
Mulvey focuses on how the series of film cuts positions the viewer
to watch the action from Jeffries’ point of view. So here you see how the
film would cut back and forth between images of Jeffries looking through
the lens, to images of the apartment building that he’s supposedly
watching. So here you see Jeffries and then cut to a woman setting the
table in her apartment. Jeffries again cuts to a man talking on the phone;
Jeffries and then a couple looking out their window, and so on.
Whereas the male character is positioned as the active spectator, Mulvey
argues that the female character is positioned as a passive eroticized
object.
This promotional still thematizes Jeffries’ erotic fascination with
the ballerina he sees in the building behind his apartment. Although this
promotional still shows her image within the lens, you can see it right
in the lens there, the actual film operates with a series of montage’s
similar to these on the left. So the spectator seems to watch her through
Jeffries’ lens as she dances around her apartment and lounges in
suggestive poses. Because the film moves seamlessly from Jeffries looking
through the lens to the scenes of the ballerina that he supposedly sees,
the viewers of the film never question how the film aligns them with Jeffries’ point
of view. This cinematic structure illustrates for Mulvey the process by
which the female is positioned as the passive, sexualized object of the
male gaze and the bearer, not the maker, of meaning. Mulvey describes, “Ina
world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between
active male and passive female.” The determining male gaze projects
its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. This binary
opposition in which women function as passive, represented objects and
men as active viewers was subsequently reconsidered and nuanced by numerous
scholars and artists including Mulvey herself, to account for active female
viewers as well. We can certainly think of things like Cindy Sherman’s
work in the 80s where she’s posing herself as both represented and
the taker of the image to kind of challenge this binary opposition that
Mulvey set up. Mulvey’s 1975 essay, however, was extremely influential
and promoted much feminist interest in reviewing and reinterpreting representations
of women, and in particular, representations of the female nude.
Here I’m just putting this up as an example, a recent kind of 20th
century representation of the female nude. This is Tom Wesselman’s
Great American Nude #48 from 1963. He’s a pop-artist drawing on popular
representations of female nudes, but one could also put up a number of
mass media representations as well. Basically, it’s a flat, painted
painting on a wall. Here you can see the nude is painted on this flat surface,
but Wesselman is also using this 3-Dimensional furniture like the radiator
and the table to give it a sense of a 3-Dimensional space. We can see here
that the nude has this idealized body, but no kind of personal characteristics,
she has no face, her lips are defined, her breasts and her pubic area are
defined, but there are no kind of individualizing traits, and here she’s
very clearly presented in this pose of the reclining nude. Her body is
spread out and put on display for what was presumed to be the male viewer.
Here in You’re Fine we can see that Simpson’s presenting the
figure in the pose of a female nude. She’s reclining and she’s
even got her arm tossed above her head in this pose of abandon, but she’s
reversed so her back is turned toward the viewer, and thereby denies the
viewer access to her body. Furthermore, she’s clothed so that her
body is covered. Because Simpson’s referencing the tradition of the
nude, we’d expect an erotic object offered up for our visual pleasure.
But instead Simpson frustrates the viewer and resists the objectification
of the woman, so it’s almost as if the ballerina in Rear Window has
just closed/shut her curtains and cut off Jeffries’ point of view.
The Western tradition of the nude tends to represent white women, but
Simpson represents a black woman in the pose of a nude. Traditionally,
black women’s
bodies have been represented more often in anthropological photographs
that are not overtly erotic, but scientific. Looking at this tradition
can help us understand why Simpson chose to represent this figure and break
up the seamless contours of her body in these four separate photographs.
Simpson was inspired by the work of photo-historians and critics who, beginning
in the 1980s, began to reassess the objectivity of 19th century, anthropological
photographs. These critics investigated the situations in which the scientific
photographs were made and questioned the photographers’ motivations
for making the pictures. In a key 1986 article titled The Body and the
Archive, photographer and critic Allan Sekula drew on the work of French
philosopher, Michele Foucault, to argue that scientific studies of the
body, as they developed in the 19th century, were not neutral projects
but social and institutional mechanisms of control. Sekula examined how
photography was used in the disciplines of physiognomy and phrenology.
These disciplines asserted that the nature of individual character could
be scientifically correlated to physical characteristics. Physiognomy asserted
that the surface of the body, especially the face and the head, were outward
signs of inner character. So here I’m putting up two examples of
physiognomy and phrenology that Sekula sites in his article. This is Bertion’s
prometric identification from 1893, and this is an anonymous phrenology
of the skull from 1810. Bertion was a French criminologist working in the
later part of the 19th century, and you can see here his project to take
these photographic details of the body. So he’d take these photographs,
isolating physical parts, and he’d use them to compare them and organize
them into these systems of classification. So he was trying to read individual’s
physical details in conformity with a kind of personality type. Here you
can see he’s focusing on the shape of the ear or the profile of the
face. He was very interested in foreheads and the shape of the foreheads.
Over here, phrenology was interested in linking the topography of the skull
to the mental faculties within the brain. So here you can see that the
skull has been very carefully measured and labeled and detailed to try
to discern the intellectual capabilities of the person. Both physiognomy
as phrenology is you can see ordered images of the body into taxonomies
or systems of classification. Photographs of physical characteristics of
different racial groups were used in anthropology in the mid 1800s and
were seen as irrefutable visual evidence of distinct racial types. For
instance, in 1850 the photographer J.T. Seeley who was working in collaboration
with Harvard natural scientist, Louis Agazzi, used photographs of Africans
working on plantations as visual evidence for “natural differences
between the races.” Here are examples of his photographs. They’re
enlarged here. The actual photographs are daguerreotypes so they’re
about 6” in size. These pictures were used to study configurations
of muscles and sizes of limbs. Scientists used this information to construct
a racial hierarchy, positioning white above black, and presented it as
a “natural social order.” This evidence was used in turn
to argue for the social division of labor, separation of races, and biological
determinism. Men and women who were slaves were photographed as specimens
of a physical type, and they were sometimes photographed naked, demonstrating
the power over their bodies, not only by the plantation owner, but also
by the photographers.
So Simpson’s You’re Fine was to deny the spectator that kind
of privileged access to the body. She uses these multiple images focusing
on different segments of the body to refer to this tradition of 19th century
anthropological photography, but the generic body image resists this kind
of physiognomic reading. She draws attention to parts of the body through
the series of frames, but the shapeless dress and the plain hair style
conceal any individual traits. She alludes to anthropology by isolating
the body parts so we’d expect to have the subject’s body offered
for scrutiny, but Simpson limits our access, concealing the body and especially
the model’s face. As in the case with the nude, Simpson critiques
objectifying representation by using their own structure, but inverting
their terms. But Simpson not only evokes and resists the objectifying clichés
and stereotypes of projected images but she also takes her practice a step
further and combines images and text to evoke histories of oppression that
are frequently overlooked. Specifically, she suggests how injustices of
the past continue to be echoed in the present. Simpson explained that the
text in the panel recalls her personal experience of having to undergo
a medical exam as a condition of employment for a secretarial position.
She references the event with the text, You’re Fine; You’re
Hired. On the left here, she lists different physical exams on parts of
the body. For example, there is physical exam, blood test, heart, reflexes,
chest x-ray, etc. Simpson suggests that although visual access to the body
in 19th century anthropological photography and the severe power imbalances
that underlay it no longer exists, power imbalances still exist in this
case in the office workplace through medical access to information about
the body. On the right, the vertical label Secretarial Position forms a
visual and verbal pun with the horizontal figure in the center of the image.
Simpson shows the figure in “secretarial position” referencing
the stereotype of the secretary’s role as a submissive and even sexualized
one. But as we’ve seen, the defiant reverse pose of the figure
undermines this view.
What I’d like to do now is put up a few other images by Lorna Simpson,
and invite you to comment on them as well. I think people come from a variety
of different perspectives and can see different things in her work. I’ll
put up a few other examples and I’d like to invite you--I’d
welcome your comments on these works. In particular, talking about how
she’s dealing with projected images, how she’s representing
race and gender and trying to avoid stereotypes through her combinations
of images and text. This piece is called Outline from 1990. Here you can
see there’s this braid of hair on the left, and then on the right
it’s a panel of a woman’s shoulders and head, photo taken from
behind. On the left is the text “back” and on the right is
the text “lash bone ground ache and pay.” Does anyone want
to volunteer a thought on this piece?
Audience: Just a somewhat superficial point but the other one still
appeared photographic whereas this, I’m not close enough to tell, but to
me it kind of dissolves the photographic reference into one that could
also
be considered painterly.
DeRoo: Yeah, this panel over here is basically painted black, but then
it has the photo of the hair, although this one, it’s really hard
to make out in the slide, the one of the right is a photograph, but it’s
a good point that she is combining painting as well.
Audience: I think one of the other things that I noticed too is the
images are set side by side so she’s in some way wanting us to look at both
of these images as one image and there’s a comparison being made
though I’m not sure exactly at this point what that is.
DeRoo: Great. Good.
Audience: I think you’re supposed to read the two together: backbone,
backlash, background, backache, and back pay.
DeRoo: Yeah, good. And what do you make of the text. Do you have an
idea? I totally agree with you.
Audience: There’s so much that can be read into these. Backlash is
just what it says. Being responded to in the affirmative for doing something
that you should do. In my opinion, having a backbone is to stand up so
you can take that. Then there’s being in the background and stepping
forward. Having a backache, etc., etc.
DeRoo: Yeah, I think that’s a great interpretation because I think
on one level, too, the braided hair, to me, looks like it could also be
the coils of a rope, and with backlash it could metaphorically refer to
like lashes of a whip on someone’s back under slavery, or a contemporary
backlash against someone. So I like the way you’re reading both
the empowerment as well as these kinds of histories of oppression that
can
also be seen in it.
Audience: Just another comment. I do that because I’m considering
myself a revisionist of the history that I’m reading and I’m
looking at it as an affirmative for myself to move forward.
DeRoo: Yeah. I think that’s important, and I appreciate that, and
I think that Simpson is doing the same thing. Wanting to make us aware
of the history, but also go beyond it, and I think that that’s
crucial.
Audience: You can also read it the other way. Like, lash back and payback
is reading it differently from back pay. So if you play the word games
that she’s playing, it adds more depth to the piece I think.
DeRoo: Great point.
Audience: I guess the setup of the dual image as is kind of similar
to the ones that you showed before, the anthropological images, the
way
that it’s set up. In the way that these images normally have descriptions
of these people lined up to the side of the images, so I think she’s
kind of nearer that in the presentation of it, but it’s all turned
around.
DeRoo: Yeah, I like the fact that the figure’s reversed, and with
the pedal of the piece being outlined, too, with this black panel with
this braid of hair it almost looks like an empty frame or this outline
suggests the sketch of something. So to me it seems that because the figure
is reversed and we don’t look at this specific figure, she can stand
in for a number of people who’ve experienced these issues that she’s
alluding to, so it can have a broader meaning beyond just the specific
individual. Yeah. Great point.
Audience: Can I ask a question? I’m a still unclear about how you’re
drawing in the anthropological because from what I understand there’s
a sense of measurement and the use of grids. Could you just talk a little
bit more about that? think obviously a lot of people have photographed
other cultures under the guise of anthropology but they’ve also done
it in the sense of measurement, so I don’t understand how that then
transfers onto this work because that sense of measurement I don’t
really feel, and I just don’t think that by photographing a black
body immediately goes in the direction of anthropology. So could you
just talk a little more about that?
DeRoo: Yeah, sure, and I think that’s a good point. I don’t
see the sense of measurement that you’re describing. It’s definitely
not--she’s not doing this sort of rigorous grid that you’d
see in the physiognomies or some of the anthropological studies at the
time. There are a number of works where she uses the words “misidentify,” “misconstrue,” and
uses a lot of words that have this kind of clinical or scientific feel
to them. So I think it’s important to see that in relationship to
these images where she tends to zero in on torsos or hands or heads. So
I do think that the way she isolates parts of the body with these textual
labels that allude to a kind of scientific history, make it a plausible
interpretation. And as I said in the beginning, Beryl Wright suggested
some of the ideas for this paper in a catalog essay, and she’s the
one that actually suggests a link to anthropology--she was the first person
that I know of to suggest that link. So I think that given the prevalence
of these issues in the academy at the time that Simpson was working. There
was this huge interest in going back and reexamining because of the influence
of Foucault and other scholars, which makes it plausible that these were
a very important kind of paradigm to resist or answer to. But I also think
that you’re point is a good one and that we have to be careful about…go
ahead.
Audience: I just think that I don’t necessarily see someone turning
their back…as a black person, I see that as a very formal thing in
history and in the culture that people would just physically turn their
backs or there is the relationship with civil rights. So it seems like
a very-- maybe I’m looking at it with different eyes, so I don’t
necessarily see that line of thinking, although of course there’s
the history of how the body has been used and all those things, I understand
that, but I also understand the chance of different subculture ideas that
someone turning their back is someone just someone turning their back.
Like, “I refuse to listen to this anymore.” It doesn’t
necessarily have to be this--while it adapts to what you’re talking
about, it also falls into this other concept as well. That’s why
I was asking.
DeRoo: Yeah. I think that’s a great point, and I appreciate your
bringing it up in that context, and I think that you’re right. That
there are some of her images that seem to be referring more to the scientific
context than others, and maybe this is less so than some of the others,
so I think that’s a good way to look at it.
Audience: The way I see it is like when yesterday we saw the penises
being measured--that section of the body is isolated and then in some
other ones
where it’s being compartmentalized. To me that reference is actually
clearer.
DeRoo: I totally understand that isolation thing but I think there’s
definitely more than one way to see it. And I don’t mean to hold
that up as the only way to see it. I think of it as it being one way to
think about it. Engaging these theories, representing race and gender,
but there’s certainly other important cultural contexts to consider
here, so point well taken.
Audience: I just want to briefly point out that on a purely visual
level the sort of two blacks with that thin strip in-between. Having
worked
in an archive and seeing a lot of photographs where, for whatever reason,
whatever machine they were using or whatever easel they had, there
would be two negatives contacted on one piece of paper that then doesn’t
get split with information on the back and then archived. So although
I understand what she was saying, I disagree on a purely visual level.
Even
in those earlier ones that you showed, there were two images right next
to each other, fixed that way. So I think the visual component references
that in some way.
DeRoo: sOkay, so invoking a grid or a kind of sequence.
Audience: Yeah, just kind of a catalogue and a by-product of a method
of production for generating a huge amount of images.
Audience: I’m interested in the relationships between the text and
the image on a formal level as well as the depth of field. I think she
articulates some kind of relationship between background and foreground
and the role of the text. So essentially I think it’s somehow a comment
about the medium of photography itself in relationship to text. It’s
a totally formal thing.
DeRoo: Interesting.
Audience: I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a binary
set up. I don’t think I need to point that out but some of the binaries
that come to mind are presence and absence. For example, the one on the
left suggests that the body is almost by negative space, but I think it’s
pretty carefully done except for the text where you have a white text on
a black field. There’s really no white versus black, it’s just
black and black, which I think is kind of purposeful in a way, in the sense
that it’s like an interracial binary, that is sort of broken up or
withheld. That the absence of the body is over a black field, and that
the body’s presence on the other side is a black body over a black
field. There’s some sort of a thing going on there too.
DeRoo: I’d be curious to hear how you read that. I definitely think
that there are oppositions set up in some of her other works between a
white text and black grids or imagery and I’m responding to your
previous comment too about the one image echoing the other. The piece is
called Outline and it echoes this form of the shoulders in the other piece,
so there is a way in which they keep responding back and forth to one another.
Do you have other thoughts about the background? I hadn’t thought
about it in those terms and I think it’s an interesting point.
Audience: Not really, just that detail is pretty much obliterated.
Maybe it would connect with this idea of making a sort of catalog of
details;
this is obscuring details, really.
DeRoo: Shall we look at another one? This piece is called Same and
it’s
from 1991, and it’s about 3x2 meters, so as you can see it’s
four rows of four photographs each, and the text, I know it’s hard
to make it out, but the text says, “They pronounced water the same
way, we’re disliked for the same reasons, they pronounced machete
the same way, read with the same accent, we’re not related, worked
for the same pay, read the news account and knew it could easily have been
them, knew illness, didn’t wear their hair the same way, were let
go for the same reasons, had never met.” So you can see here, again,
we have the figure represented from the back, and again there’s
this kind of braid form in-between the figures.
Audience: Can you read that again? And can you pause at the end of
each?
DeRoo: Sure, sure. “They pronounced water the same way. We’re
disliked for the same reasons. They pronounced machete the same way. Read
with the same accent. We’re not related. Worked for the same pay.
Read the news account and knew it could easily have been them. Knew illness.
Didn’t wear their hair the same way. Were let go for the same reasons.
Had never met.”
Audience: There’s a relationship with history between the past and
the present obviously. The hair is connecting the person in the present
to the one in the past so that there is a sense of, nothing’s really
changed. So I see that. Then the figure that’s clothed; the figure
that’s not clothed, is naked at least from the shoulders. Then in
the figure in the third row, both of them are unclothed, again giving more
of a context and grounding for that similarity and that things haven’t
really moved or changed.
DeRoo: I think that’s a great point. I think, yeah, you can see the
braid is kind of suggesting both a historical and geographical distance,
but then also this connection, and it sounds like the connection you’re
talking about is through the text that refers to these problems, like they
work for the same pay, we’re disliked for the same reasons.
Audience: Also, I’m assuming that that is hair, which is referencing
rope but it also reminds me of a childhood thing of the little telephone
communication lines that you’d make with the cups. Of course it’s
going to the ear, but also to the mouth, and in a sense it also reminds
me of not just communication, but the lack of communication, because it
looks like the rope could be going into the mouth, therefore closing off
a sense of verbal communication. There’s a sense of power-play over
the subject but then there’s also intuitive communication beyond
that.
DeRoo: Interesting.
Audience: Also, I think there’s a sense that conditions of race
and gender supercede those of individuality and that that is something
that
is known in being in a position where one is easily objectified in this
culture.
DeRoo: And what do you make of the title? Because I think that the
point was just made that some of the figures are clothed and some are
unclothed.
So there’s not necessarily this direct kind of visual similarity.
So then what you’re saying about race and gender--how would you
talk about--what is the ground for saying this?
Audience: Just that individuality does get lost in these conditions
and that in the end it makes you kind of invisible. That invisibility
ends
up being something that in the eyes of anyone who is objectifying makes
you very much and at the same time gives you grounds for time, communication,
and understanding between--sort of on both sides. You do end up having
the same story whether or not--of course there is an individual, of
course we all have identity but in the end, historically, that is made
invisible
by these much larger conditions of culture.
DeRoo: That’s a great point, that the individuality gets effaced
when you’re put into these kinds of categories or viewed in terms
of certain clichés or in terms of race or gender. Even though
people maintain their individuality, there are certain grounds for sameness,
having
experienced that kind of discrimination or oppression.
Audience: Rebecca, when was this work made?
DeRoo: This is 1991.
Audience: And can you just talk a little bit about the response it
had in 1991and then maybe today, as well, because when I looked at
it, I
thought it was made in the late 1800s. Do you feel that it was of another
generation
almost? What was the response in ’91?
DeRoo: It was tremendously successful, and she’s won a number of
awards for this series, I think partly because of--well, I know what you
mean about it having a feel for the time, and I definitely think that it’s
able to engage these problems that had come up in photo discourse about
what one does regarding the objectification of the figure. What do you
do about the place of the viewer? I think she’s suggesting other
histories and other possibilities but there is also this need for negation,
and this response to the histories and an effort to negate them. I think
that since then there has been a lot of interest in recovering more pleasure
in the body or in viewing. I would like to open it up and hear everyone’s
responses regarding how you see people responding either in your own work
or in other artists’ work that you know of. How do they respond to
these images and are they taking up different strategies? I think this
is very strongly rooted in that moment and that need to kind of refuse
and negate. There’s this moment, I think, in the late 80s and early
90s that the representation of the body had been so fraught because of
all of these problems of objectification, you know, there’s this
real problem in feminist discussions about how can you represent the
body without falling into these patterns of objectification, and I definitely
see this as being part of that moment and providing a really interesting
response. But I do think that since that moment, Simpson herself has
changed
her practice and I think a number of photographers have been trying to
take up other avenues for responding to these issues. So can I open it
up?
Audience: I have a different response to this image. Because there
is a gap between the four images it’s more like separation than connection.
I think Lorna Simpson is trying to express female identity as compared
to the image of it in the past,
DeRoo: And how do you get that strength out of the disconnection? I
agree that that’s not a smooth connection; she’s purposely breaking
it up in the images. Can you say a little bit more about how you think
that breaking up of the connection makes it a more empowered kind of
figure? Okay, thank you.
Audience: Once again, formally I see maybe a cultural reference to
the child game of double Dutch, which would suggest that the text itself
is sort of being circulated in the space of shared gaming and that
it’s
not necessarily resolvable to one point. Maybe there is a dialogue going
temporally between past and future or present and past. I’m not sure
that it’s supposed to be read as a resolved image and perhaps it’s
a dialogue between specific cultural associations and is just being thrown
out there for dialogue.
DeRoo: I think that’s a great way to put it. Given Sarah’s
comment, why don’t we broaden it out? We’ve talked about how
Lorna Simpson is addressing these projected images of race and gender and
then also opening a space for alternative readings and histories to be
brought in rather than just negating the media clichés. Are there
ways that you all have sought to address these issues in your work or other
artists that you’re particularly interested in that have developed
other strategies for dealing with these issues?
Audience: There’s this order going on in this work, obviously but
then there’s one out. There’s three white shirts on one side
and then four on the other and there’s this. I don’t know what
that means. What’s that all about? Maybe you could elaborate on that.
I work in a very meticulous way so that was the first thing that I saw.
I see a form or order that somehow there’s one break in it.
DeRoo: I think that the point that was made by the first speaker, that
it works to deny any kind of direct physical connection by having a
clothed figure and then an unclothed figure, is that it’s distinguishing
the two and it’s not saying that there’s this biological similarity.
Here I think the alternation raises it as a question but I also think the
other parts of the image work against that interpretation. That’s
the way I see it but it’s true that there’s a specific kind
of patterning that’s going on here and I’d be interested
to hear if people have other thoughts about it. I see it as resisting
the
kind of sameness, that is, biological sameness.
Audience: If I could be plain for a second. What is the message that
she’s
trying to communicate and why is it so complicated to read? If I want to
make a political statement a) I’m not sure if I want to make it in
the gallery because in that setting it’s already a very elite population
and b) I’m going to be pretty overt about it because I want people
to get the message. As Brad was saying before, I was sitting here trying
to figure out white shirt, white shirt, black shirt, white shirt. Black
shirt, black shirt, black shirt. I’ll just say that I got so involved
with the mechanics of trying to figure out what I’m seeing that if
there’s a message there, I think it went over my head. I just feel
like if you’re going to make a political statement, you should try
to be a little more clear about it so that the audience can fully participate;
so that the viewer, regardless of their perspective, their racial or ethnic
or cultural perspective, can participate freely in what it is that you’re
trying to do.
Audience: I think Lorna Simpson uses a lot of metaphors in her work
because I think if you were to be too heavy-handed as an African-American,
you
would shut people off. You shut people off and then get on the defense
and they won’t open up to learn. So I think she’s doing a lot
with what’s going on in today’s society but she’s using
subtleties and metaphors to do it.
DeRoo: I agree.
Audience: Just a comment. I think she’s really conscious of what
she’s doing in the sense of the space that she’s working in.
I think if she wanted to make some sort of overt political statement, she
would have done that as well. But there are a lot of people doing that
and in terms of the gallery and the museum space, some African-American
women or marginalized groups don’t necessarily have a voice. If you’re
going to go in there, you’re not going to go preach to the choir
because they already know. But you’re trying to communicate an idea,
a concept, a story to a group of people that necessarily have a way of
reading in terms of academia, in terms of the curator, in terms of people
who are in the art world. They understand the language of art, and the
language of images, and those are the people, I think, that she’s
trying to access as well and I think she does a good job. Even if I don’t
know anything about art and I come to this, the very fact that you question
why there is a black shirt means that you notice that there is a rupture.
That might be actually what she’s trying to say as opposed to trying
to be overly analytical. So I think that as far as being overt goes, people
don’t want to hear that. You have to be somewhat subtle, somewhat
strategic, and somewhat sneaky. Because if I come to a place and I see
urine on the wall or feces or something, I’m going to walk right
by it. Let’s say that I’m from Park Avenue and I went to the
museum because I want to see a show, I’m not going to get any message
because I’m not even going to take the time to access what’s
going on. So there is some sort of a cross-cultural communication that
needs to happen and I think she’s trying to access that space and
is trying to infiltrate it. It’s a strategic move and I don’t
think she’s trying to be overly artsy or pretentious in her presentation.
DeRoo: Yeah, I think those are all good points. It is a question of
strategy. Some artists will favor a more direct kind of political statement
which
has the potential to have a more direct impact but also like you were
saying, it has the potential to have people react to it and screen
it out. Whereas
I think Simpson’s work is trying to work on a number of levels and
get you to play with it and think about it. I definitely agree too that
her audience is more of an art world audience who she’s aiming at.
There’s a video that was produced by the Guerilla Girls, Guerillas
in our Midst, which she in, and she talks about the hassle that she had
in art school with people saying, “Oh you’re work is too black,” and
all kinds of discrimination that she’s experienced within the academy
or the gallery system. So even though the art world is a subset of the
world at large, I still think there’s an audience there that really
needs to think about these issues and hear what she’s saying. So
it is a choice of audience, though, like a reduced one versus a larger
one, but I still think that that’s a valid choice.
Audience: It seems to me like her strategy with the viewer is to have
that sort of thread of content be continuous in her work but it’s not
like hitting you over the head with a frying pan. It’s like the ideas
are there and you can comprehend it, but you can’t comprehend it
so instantaneously that you will only take a quick look and get out of
there. There’s something about that grid disparity that makes you
stop and linger and kind of sucks you in a little bit so that you don’t
just take your pre-conceived notions, slap them on it and go to the next
one.
DeRoo: Yeah, I think the different visual and verbal levels that she’s
working with are really challenging, and the more time you spend with
it the more you can draw out of it. It can be seen as a strategy to just
keep
engaging you.
Audience: To me, what I see is, is her playing with the notion of one
race, especially a dominant race, saying that everybody of--every black
person
looks the same, every Asian person looks the same, and that sort of
invisibility and the effort to obliterate an identity and a racial
construct. She’s
sort of playing a game by setting up something that is literal or linear
by setting in a regular structure such that we expect to see all white
and all black, and she’s slipping in another game piece there and
pointing the finger back at the viewer. I believe that the line that said
something like, they both thought it could happen to them, is happening
almost right in the same space. To remove clothing that was there can also
suggest some kind of violation and some kind of exploitation, whether possible
or true, and that she’s playing with that as well. I also agree with
Debra that the viewer is not invited in unless the work of art is open
to an interpretation. I think there’s a place for slogans and it’s
not in a gallery. But I think it’s a real interesting work.
DeRoo: I think you made a number of great points. In terms of the sexual
violence or with the specific text panel, I think that’s very appropriate
and there are certain other of her images that definitely allude to sexual
violence as well. So I think that is an important context to bring in.
Audience: I’d like to go back to what Paul was saying because for
me this work has always been problematic because I don’t think it
is visually engaging. I think there that there is a certain awkwardness
about it that I’m not sure of. I guess a lot of times it seems like
there are a few--I hate to use the word “token”--but a few
people that have been marginalized who are allowed into the system. This
might be an example of one of those. Some of these pieces in this body
of work I never thought were as strong as I think they’ve been made
out to be. So I guess I don’t know if I have a question or a comment,
but for me, I agree with Paul. I don’t feel that this is successful
or that the audience has been reached.
Audience: I once saw a work in graduate school that was overtly political.
It was very different work that I was confronted with in graduate school,
so this was one of the first artists besides a few other Asian artists
like Hong Lu who teaches at Mills College, that I had seen. This was
very different. It was black and white. It was very stark and it didn’t
have any of those issues of beauty and photography that you had in the
late 80s. So there was a lot of work that I was seeing where it was landscapes
that were beautiful but kind of weird. I don’t remember the names
of all the artists but let’s say John Fall is one of them and the
other artist whose name I forget right now, is one that did the atomic
cats. Then there was the person who also does incredibly beautiful work
who teaches at New Mexico--I forget his name as well. But the thing was,
here was this beauty and here we are confronted with race and gender in
a very direct manner. So at my school, this was considered very—“Oh
My God!” You looked at it and Wow! What is she doing? So you have
to put it into context. That’s why I asked the first question about
the year of its creation, because it seems dated now with our eyes. The
other thing that you have to keep in mind is that the company Benetton
has a magazine named Colors, which was founded by an artist, who is also
using this very same kind of style to talk about various issues. Benetton
also uses this same kind of language to sell clothing but it’s much
prettier and the people are looking at you. So you have to put it into
context in order to understand it better. So that’s my point.
Younger: That’s the thing about the truth in beauty thing. You have
to realize that when we went to school, we couldn’t do anything.
I remember my work as a graduate student being rejected as being too and
people actually walking out of the room. It was horrible to be political.
So for her to have really dealt with these issues head on at that time
was really something that wasn’t being done. There’s always
this truth and beauty issue and issues of aesthetics and your work is obviously
about those things. But there are other things that people are talking
about with their work and how it’s being used and I think you have
to leave room for all of that. I also think that there’s a movement
back to the truth in beauty thing that Dave Hickey leads and Peter Schjeldahl
and people like that, because we’ve had them here before too. So
you have to keep in context time and how these things happened, and things
that weren’t even allowed. Like women’s work wasn’t even
allowed when I was going to school. We didn’t even know who Gertrude
Kasebier was, nor did we know of many black artists.
Audience: Yeah, but this is 1991. This isn’t that far . . .
Younger: Yeah, but when I went to school I graduated in 1977, so that’s
like 10 years.
Audience: This is all post Cindy Sherman work.
Younger: Yeah, but the Cindy Sherman work wasn’t out there then either.
A few people could see it, but it wasn’t like you see it now.
Audience: But I think at the same time it’s okay for Glen not to
completely fall in love with the work, and it was a different time and
it will have power for different people and marginalized communities will
jump on top of this work and love it because it was something that wasn’t
there. So I think that’s totally fine.
Audience: You have to remember--he was saying it was just ten years
ago or 12 years ago but what has happened in the past 12 years is really
quite
incredible--the amount of information being exchanged.
Audience: In terms of Glen’s question, I think it still brings up
the question will it still be there in 50 years? Is this going to be a
lasting standing piece of art in 50 years when we are moving at this pace?
If we’re having issues with it in ten years, then is this going to
be the work we turn back to in 50 years and say, “this is it”?
Audience: And maybe the position of this piece of work is not that
it’s
150% relevant in 20 years but that it leads to what happens in 20 years
after it.
DeRoo: And I also want to say that I’m not posing Lorna Simpson as
the end point for dealing with these issues, but I think she’s useful
because Cheryl had asked me to kind of lay out a perspective of the photo
history and theory for thinking about these ideas of projected images and
race and gender. I think her work is useful because I did my graduate work
at University of Chicago and they’re known for being theory people
there, so there’s a way that we just read the theory and then it
was like, oh, nothing’s possible anymore. Everything has been so
objectified, there’s just no answer. So I think that Simpson is really
useful because she’s making this work at this point where there were
all these theoretical impasses, as it seemed to many people. She’s
able to respond to the questions and theories raised and allude to a whole
other level of meaning. But I do agree that it does date from a particular
period in time and I appreciate what you said, Sarah, historicizing the
work, and I think there are definitely other avenues that people have taken
since then, so I do invite you to talk about other strategies that other
people have worked on since that time because I don’t mean to make
it sound like 1992 is the epitome of dealing with these issues and that’s
it. I think there’s a lot of interesting work going on now that
also engages these questions.
Audience: I just want to follow-up because I think Glen used the word
that I was searching for. It’s a bit early in the morning and I don’t
find my words that well, but the idea that if I don’t find it visually
engaging then I’m not going to spend time with it to figure out the
message; I’m not going to remember it. Visual engagement has nothing
to do with whether it’s beautiful or not, it’s just about whether
or not it lets me in. And I will take it in the context that this is 2002
and this is a 1991 piece. I’ve been involved in the art world since
1985, so I’m very involved in the in it and I kind of understand
that the aesthetics have changed but I can look at a David Salig today
and find it visually engaging, even though it’s somewhat passé and
somewhat banal today. I still find it visually engaging enough to enter
into it but I’m having problems with this. I didn’t have
as much of a problem with the previous piece that you showed, this one
I just
. . .
Audience: this actually more visually engages me because it’s so
minimal. To me, if these were very beautiful photographs I might pass them
by. I might look at it as photography and not read the words. Because it’s
so minimal it’s not just about the images themselves, it’s
about the text. So I think if they were beautiful prints, a lot of people
would walk right by it or take a glance and then leave.
Younger: The thing is that things have really changed as far as what
people like or don’t like. Like pictorialists; I never heard of a pictorialist
until many years after graduate school because they were just written out
of history. Women were written out of history. Anybody from another culture
was written out of history. I think then all these things get put back
in and then people start putting in other contexts for the images and allowing
those contexts to exist in the field of photography or art. I think we’re
at a time where it’s very broad and we get to do that now, we don’t
have to just keep fighting for the right to speak--we can. Now we have
to do it. So I think we’re kind of at that level. And I don’t
think it rules out any aspect of it. I think that things that are just
about truth and beauty are still as important to continue because there
are still issues that need to be addressed there as well as many of the
other things that are coming along. But boy, I’m glad it’s
changed. Because I have a lot to say in my stuff and I don’t want
people to stop me from saying it.
Audience: Yeah, I have my own bodies of work and I think you do deal
with issues of gender and race and stuff that I haven’t shown.
But I guess just for me it does come back to the fact that I just never
found this
work very visually engaging. I thought there was a lot of other work--
Younger: One thing that I’d say to think about then, is to think
about what you relate to first, because obviously if visual engagement
is very important to you and you’re going to be engaged by the pictures
and the image and not the text then it would be a problem since she has
got both things going on there. I think she’s like going at it in
two or three methodologies, plus the idea of design. She’s using
all that.
Audience: But it looks like a Photo 1 thing, honestly. I just always
thought it was handled awkwardly. The text, for me, I just . . .
Younger: But I think the point of the piece is not necessarily aesthetic
beauty or . . .
Audience: We’re going to have to agree to disagree.
DeRoo: I think we’re running out of time actually. Do we have time
for a couple? Okay. This piece is Five Day Forecast and I don’t have
the date here, it’s about 1990. Here you can see it’s got the
days of the week at the top of the image: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
and Friday, and then underneath it’s got the words Misdescription,
Misinformation, Misidentify, Misdiagnosis, Misfunction, Mistranscribe,
Misremember, Misgage, Misconstrue, Mistranslate. Should I just go through
a couple of examples quickly? Okay.
This piece is called Sounds Like. It’s from 1988 and it’s a
little hard to see the text here, but the figure has got a white blindfold
and there’s the letter “I” and then the words “Wit” and “Ness”--so
it’s a pun on Eyewitness.
This piece is called Water Bearer from 1986. “She saw him disappear
by the river. They asked her to tell what happened, only to discount her
memory”. So I see this one and it sounds like it’s being more
about like legal and judicial processes whereas the other ones are talking
about work. The idea of Eyewitness suggests the courtroom or here talking
about asking her to tell what happened, only to discount her memory. You
can see her arms being like the scales of justice, maybe tipping to one
side and kind of a pun with the jugs pouring out, like the story doesn’t
hold water. I could say more about it but do we need to wrap up Cheryl?
Younger: We have a bit more time.
Audience: I was wondering if you could relate to us a newer piece by
Lorna called The Projections that I saw I believe in 1997 over at Sean
Kelly
Gallery. Maybe you could talk about it a little bit because it’s
obviously shifted from 2-dimensional to time-based art, and I think it’s
really important to relate to this shift. So if you could shortly talk
about that.
DeRoo: I’d love to hear more about that show because I didn’t
see that specific one. I’ve seen other of her work that’s much
more narrative, from the mid-90s, that shows apartment buildings or characters
and has dialogues or stories, but I haven’t seen that show. Would
you like to describe it a little bit?
Audience: I’m not sure that I remember exactly the details, but there
were two women involved and there were like six projections within the
space, on black and white film, I think. I don’t really remember
but I just thought it’s kind of interesting to explore the shift
because she was doing 2-dimensional, straight photography and dealing
with text and then she did this piece with no text.
Audience: At CAA there’s a lecture about the black female body and
Lisa Jones was talking about Lorna Simpson’s work and the shift that
came after these bodies of work, like going on to her apartments and I
forget all the other things that she does. To answer your question about
what this work preludes to or things that you consider in your own work,
I think that for me it’s always been how to signify race without
skin. So I think that becomes a really important issue in post-multi-cultural
time--that’s what I call the early 90s--is dealing with these issues
without having that body be so prevalent. By removing that skin and that
body you can perchance have very specific ideas, but a more universal question
is posed. So Lisa Jones talked about how Lorna Simpson got the backlash
of people saying, “Well, you’re work isn’t black enough
because there are no black people in it.” So I think every artist
of every group can understand, like, “You’re works not white
enough because,” I don’t know. (Laughter) But I think that
the question is, how do you talk about differences and sameness without
putting your skin on the forefront or putting that signifier first?
DeRoo: Yeah, I think that’s a really great point and certainly the
post-black show that they had at the Studio Museum is one recent example
of trying to do that; trying to unhinge that identity from some direct
very readily apparent visual referent. So I think that’s a great
point.
Audience: I was just wondering, what do you think about a lot of the
black, British artists that are doing a lot of work now that deal with
race. They’re
not trying to take off their skin, so to speak. How do you feel about
that kind of work?
DeRoo: It’s funny because when she was just speaking about more contemporary
work I actually had Showna Barre come to mind. His work with costumes and
clothing. He makes these kind of Victorian gowns made out of fabric that
was taken to be African, when actually the materials came from British
colonies, were taken to England to be produced, and then brought back,
so he’s eluded to these cross-cultural origins of identity. I think
there’s a piece of a dress called like How Does a Girl Like You Get
to be a Girl Like You, so I think there’s a lot of interesting work
being done on both fronts, both representing the body and finding these
ways of metaphorically representing identity as a complicated subject that’s
not rooted into some kind of direct, biological, visually-apparent race.
Does that make sense? Yeah, that’s a good point.
Younger: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
DeRoo Synopsis
by Mark Slankard
Rebecca DeRoo discussed how projected images of race and gender have
traditionally operated to marginalize particular groups and how artists
can subvert these
processes. She focused on certain works by Lorna Simpson, a female
African-American artist. In these works, which date from the late 1980s
to the early 1990s,
Simpson combined text with photographs in order to disrupt the traditionally
uneven power relations between the viewer and the viewed, the subject
and the object.
DeRoo drew from Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze” which
constructs the female as a passive, erotic object, made to be visually
possessed by the dominant male viewer. She also utilized Allan Sekula’s
analysis from “The Body and The Archive,” which deals with
photography’s role in the construction of racial hierarchies based
on what would seem to be irrefutable physical evidence. DeRoo argued that
historically, segmented images of black women were most often associated
with this gaze of masculine scientific and ethnographic objectivity. These
devices serve to naturalize the authority of the white male position and
the submissiveness of “the other”.
DeRoo began with Simpson’s You’re Fine, four photographs of
segmented body parts side by side made to form a life-sized reclining black
woman in a white gown. The subject, whose back is toward us, is Simpson
herself. Secretarial Position is printed vertically to the left of the
photographs and is a pun that refers to both the job as well as her submissive
and sexualized body. A list of words that reads as “physical exam,
blood test, reflexes, and electrocardiogram” is printed to the
right. In this work, which deals with her application for a secretarial
position,
the injustices of the past are echoed in the present.
Simpson uses similar tactics in her 1990 diptych Outline. The image
on the left is of a lock of a braid with the text “Back” attached
to the photo. The left is the back of the head and shoulders of a black
woman with the list “lash, bone, ground, ache, pay” attached.
Again, Simpson resists objectification by denying the viewer her image.
In a piece called Same, a braid of hair connects two African-American
women in four sets of four images. The women face away from the viewer
as the
hair symbolizes both a connection and a separation between the two
women.
Audience discussion focused largely on the problem of too frequently
interpreting photographs of black women merely in the context of the
colonial history
of ethnographic investigation.
DeRoo Analysis
by Helen Lee
Rebecca DeRoo’s discussion aimed to show how projected images affect
our perspective of race and gender stereotypes in our culture. She began
the presentation by showing one of Lorna Simpson's images, You are fine/You
are hired. She tried to challenge a stereotype of the passive female and
the active male by comparing Simpson's image and Laura Mulvey's article, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In this article, Mulvey mentions that
in narrative cinema, female characters are represented as sexual objects
of desire by male spectators. In Simpson's work we can see a black female
who is in a dress showing only her back. According to DeRoo, this image
denies visual access to the female body as well and therefore frustrates
the “male gaze.”
DeRoo examined Simpson's image, which was made to challenge a stereotype
of gender, but the work could also be interpreted differently. A viewer
may still read this image as being a passive female because the female
image still has no identity or voice. It still supports the idea of
the female being an object of desire because of her sexual gesture.
DeRoo's
point may have been more convincing if it had been supported by Renee
Cox's images because they present a strong, black female who is confident
with
her sexuality.
The title of the presentation, "Cultural Projections of Race and Gender," created
the expectation that the discussion would cover a broader perspective of
racial stereotypes in our culture. There are many different races besides “white” or “black” in
the U.S. However, when it comes to the racial issue, the majority of
people tend to focus only these two racial groups. As an Asian female,
I have
always felt left out of the racial issue. It seemed as though the issue
of white superiority and black inferiority narrowed the idea of her theme.
It would have been more informative if DeRoo brought various examples
of racial stereotypes besides those of whites and blacks in our culture.
Also, DeRoo's choice of showing only Lorna Simpson's symbolic and metaphorical
images in her presentation seemed to confuse the audience. She raised
the questions too quickly to the audience concerning how they interpreted
Lorna
Simpson's images and it ended up taking too much time in her presentation.
Rebecca DeRoo showed only limited amounts of examples to challenge
the audience and it was not enough to cover such a broad theme like "Cultural
Projections of Race and Gender."