"Bye, Bye Black Girl": Lorna Simpson's Figurative Retreat Author(s): Huey Copeland Reviewed work(s): Source: Art Journal, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 62-77 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068384 . Accessed: 10/05/2012 08:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org GUARDED CONDITIONS

ft m

fed

Lorna Simpson. Guarded Conditions, 1989. Eighteen color Polaroid prints, twenty-one engraved plastic plaques, seventeen plastic letters.91 x 131 in.(23I.I x 332.7 cm).

All images are by Lorna Simpson unless otherwise indicated, and are courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. In a woman One. 1989 Lorna Simpson made Guarded Conditions. It depicts black in a simple shift and sensible shoes with equally sensible neck-skimming braids, in her body rendered three subtly mismatched images whose serial iteration an Yet six versions proposes endlessly expansive repetition. among the presented one set of this antiportrait, differences obtain between seemingly identical of as to to her Polaroids and the next, if register the model's shifting relationship self. Feet are shuffled about; hair gets ever-so-slightly Huey Copeland rearranged; and in thatmiddle row of photographs, the then caresses the right hand alternately embraces, left ? Bye, Bye Black Girl": arm, echoing the rhythm of the words "sex attacks skin attacks," which caption the prints. In more since its Lorna the than fifteen years September Simpson's at debut New York's Josh Baer Gallery, this work has been Figurative Retreat frequently exhibited and reproduced ad nauseum. Indeed, on its now-familiar reliance the provocatively chosen phrase and the trope of the R?ckenfigurto interrogate the visual production of the black female body made it an emblem?both for Simpson's practice of the late terrain in art was 1980s and early 1990s and for the contested cultural which her

entrenched. As such, Guarded Conditions has been taken up by writers of various in to sense intellectual stripes, though attempting make ot its matter-oi-ract yet recalcitrant have time and seized on external referents to This paper derives from a talk delivered at the presence, they again 2004 Art Association annual conference. College clarify the artist's import. That talk, my initial stab at thinking about Simpson's off the bat, in a December review, an art critic described practice, was part of a panel organized by Darby Right 1989 reading English, entitled "Representation after representa a newspaper article about the brutal beating and rape of a black woman by two tiveness: Problems in 'African-American' Art saw white security the before he the in question. "The Now." Thanks go, then, to English for including guards day photo-text me in that as well as to Naomi in conversation, coincidence of the newspaper story and the piece the gallery," he contends, Beckwith, Gareth Glenn Eve Meltzer, James, Ligon, "revealed how work comments on the often facts of life without and Alexandra Schwartz for their incisive com Simpson's ugly ' is as a ments on earlier drafts of this text, which could simply reporting them." Guarded Conditions introduced here studied refrac not have been realized in its present incarnation not a curator tion of the real; dissimilarly, for writing three years later, it would without the tireless (and cheerful) assistance of become a double-sided of racial sufferance. her the woman's Amy Gotzler at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. metonym By lights, research was also importantly aided by ACLS examination My isolated body invokes "slave auctions, hospital rooms, and criminal Fellowship support with funding from the Henry while the "of the turned-back . . . calls Luce Foundation. Above all, thanks to Lorna line-ups," duplication figures up images for her and women on Simpson generosity, encouragement, of those who stand guard against the evils of the world the steps of continually challenging example. on black fundamentalist churches Sunday mornings."2 Differently mining the 1.Robert "New York Lorna same vein in a a Nickas, Fax: 1993, feminist performance theorist deemed the work gesture Simpson," Art Issues, December 1989-January of defiance, and in toward it, she, too, looked away, this time to Robert 1990,36. looking 2. BerylWright, "Back Talk: Recoding the Body," Mapplethorpe's LelandRichard of 1980. "Whereas for Mapplethorpe the model's in and V. Hartman, Lorna Wright Saidiya Simpson: clenched fist is a gesture toward self-imaging (his fist is like [the photographer's] For the Sake of the Viewer, exh. cat. (Chicago: the time-release the fist is a to the sex Museum of Contemporary Art; New York: holding shutter), [for Simpson], response Universe Publishing, 19. as 1992), ual and racial attacks indexed the very ground upon which her image rests."3 3. Peggy Phelan, "The Ontology of Performance: Each of these succeeds, I think, in the allusive Representation without Reproduction," in interpretations expanding Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993; scope of the work, yet in every instance, the off-frame scenarios that the artist London: and Francis Routledge, Taylor Group, courts use as to her of but just refuses picture, 1996), 158. through language, assiduously 4. See Christian and are as comes to us as a Metz, "Photography Fetish," privileged the loci of meaning.4 Guarded Conditions thus col in The Critical on Image: Essays Contemporary a a row or lection of iconographie details?the position of hand, of sentinels, Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle: Bay Press, woman as a chain associ 1990), 155-64, for an articulation of the "off simply the specter of black victim?each unleashing of frame": the outside of the photographic image ations to presumed endemic black female experience. Such readings, regardless that both qualifies and disrupts what is present art in within its confines. of their authors' intentions, effectively curtail the address of Simpson's

63 art journal Robert Mapplethorpe. Leland Richard, 1980. Gelatin silver print. 20 x 16 in. (50.8 x 40.6 cm). ?The Robert Mapplethorpe + Foundation. Courtesy of Art Commerce Anthology.

to examine not what she us to see but also how neglecting closely only gives 5. Paul Gilroy, "Living Memory: A Meeting with she would orient us toward it, since even her refusal is meant to solicit Toni Morrison," in Small Acts: Thoughts on the surely Politics Black Cultures Tail, our of (London: Serpent's engagement. 1993), 178. What is it, then, to stand before Guarded Conditions? To encounter an of 6. As numerous scholars have made clear, with image the advent of transatlantic slavery the black the human body presented on a scale and perhaps in a posture identical to our the black female body?particularly, body?came own? To a embedded in a frame whose overall reinforces a face figure shape to function as an object of mere flesh that under even as its bars enact an almost division of the woman pinned the logic of capital and set the stage for gestalt, surgical pictured? the crises of modernity. For two classic texts sense we Does the fragmentation of her body undo any of corporeal affinity that inform my thinking in this vein, see Cedric and so foreclose the of identification? in other Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black might feel, possibility How, Radical Tradition Zed Press, 1983; repr. to so us? Is (London: words, does Guarded Conditions aim interpellate, and place the model's Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, before a white studio meant to remind us of our own fram 2000), 71-171; and Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's placement backdrop An American Grammar artistic As she is in an inde Baby, Papa's Maybe: ing within the white cube of consumption? frozen Book," Diacritics 17 1987): 65-81. (Summer on are we moored to the terminate space, that nondescript platform, imaginary 7. For a reading of Guarded Conditions that from and see lines How are we to account departs anticipates my own, Lucy point projected by those telescoping of "attacks"? brief assessment inMixed New Lippard's Blessings: which resembles not so for the frantic interchange between word and image, Art in a Multicultural America (New York: New a as an into the of violence that the Press, 1990), 53. much shuttling induction regimes plague meant to resonate 8. My language here is with the woman we mere witnesses to a series before us? Are victims? Accomplices? Or opening passage of Siegfried Kracauer's brilliant of unseen allowed to examine the site this woman but essay "Die Photographie" [Photography], which transgressions, occupies, has my work on to enter our to usefully guided subsequent unable it given ever-belated relation the photographic? Simpson's practice. Frankfurter Zeitung, October What Iwant to in the lines that follow, is that to stand before Guarded 28, 1927; repr. (trans. Thomas Y. Levin) inCritical argue, Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 422. Conditions is to be suspended between repetition and difference, the visual and 9. Amei Wallach, "Lorna Simpson: Right Time, the universal?those which the sensate, the particular and fraught intersections, Right Place," New YorkNewsday, September 19, how the 1990,11:8. have persistently animated Simpson's analysis of representation stops up

64 SUMMER 2005 significatory flow of black female subjectivity. And in this work, it is perhaps first and foremost to be caught belatedly, while standing behind that figure, while the black here as in a relation historical following woman, elsewhere, of posteri as a ority. For Toni Morrison remarked in conversation with cultural critic Paul Gilroy published in 1993:

From a in terms the woman's point of view, of confronting problems of is women to where the world now, black had deal with "post-modern" problems in the nineteenth century and earlier. These things had to be addressed by black people a long time ago. Certain kinds of dissolution, the to reconstruct loss of and the need certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds . . . not to of madness, deliberately going mad "in order lose your mind."

These strategies for survival made the truly

modern person.5

As the target of both skin and sex attacks, a cipher woman in of negation twice over, the black Morrison's in words and Simpson's photographs foresees the a ravages of modernity?the loss of symbolic matrix,

the alienating effects of capital, the shattering of the in subject?that have only escalated her precipitous This are wake.6 figure's "guarded conditions," then, our whether in the very much own, "post-modern" terms of 1989 or the "postblack" ones of 2005. It is a matter we are on to just of time before each called assume her position.7

Two. This iswhat the artist looks like. She is thirty years old, featured on the front page of the arts section a of daily newspaper, standing warily before 1989's Untitled (Prefer,Refuse, Decide).The date is September. We can make out the grain, the millions of little dots

that constitute Simpson, her work, and the space they occupy. The data offered up by the dot matrix, is more or since it is however, less superfluous,8 the us we to caption that tells everything need know, that artist is at center the figured here the of things pre to cisely because of her relegation the margins, and to its Amei is no according author, Wallach, there Z*Ut%?"l'-SD Wt::?? better place to be in the fall of 1990: "This year, out r?sModem are in. . . . Tii|e|| siders And lots of museums, galleries, mag are in to seize azines and collectors standing line the moment artists with whose skin colors, languages, New York 1990. or out Newsday, September 19, national origins, sexual preferences strident messages have kept them of Ari M'mtz.? 2005, Photograph: Newsday. mainstream. it on it a the Say it's about time, blame guilt, call certificate of altru Reprinted with permission. ism for the living-room wall. Whatever, Lorna Simpson fits the bill."9 Indeed, she did: the first black woman ever to be chosen for the Venice Biennale; the sub ject of a segment on the PBS/BBC arts program Edge;and at the time, one of a artists to at institutions handful of African-American able parlay exposure like the

65 art journal Three Seated Figures, 1989.Three color Polaroid prints, five engraved plastic plaques. 30 x 97 in. (76.2 x 246.4 cm).

Twenty Questions (A Sampler), 1986. Four gelatin silver prints mounted on Plexiglas, six engraved plastic plaques. Each print 24 in. diam. (61 cm).

Arts Center in into at a mainstream in Jamaica Queens inclusion gallery Soho.IO Simpson's fortuitous rise was taken to augur the beginning of the end of white now her in the patriarchal exclusion, the absolute other given "place sun": " in representation the age of representativeness. never as Of course, such representation is without its price, and the mascot a was to for brand of specious multiculturalism, Simpson expected speak tirelessly of and for her oppressed sisters, and in the idiom that had already become her cue as signature. Wallach, taking her from pieces such Three Seated Figures of 1989 and TwentyQuestions (A Sampler)of 1986, thus concludes that Simpson's art is "about what a tangled and terrifying thing it is to be a black woman. But her methods come out art straight of the mainstream, museum-accredited white world.",2 This is in its pronouncement, while rather baldly put, entirely symptomatic emphasis on tension in the perceived Simpson's work between form and content, what Art in America critic one as Eleanor Heartney identified year earlier "hot subject '3 is 10. Ibid., 8 and 14. matter" approached with "apparent detachment." Here how she concluded I I. See Michael Brenson's "Black Artists: A Place a review at of Simpson's first exhibition Josh Baer: "Drained of surface passion in the Sun," New York Times, March 12, 1989, and toward an minimalistic art sometimes runs the 1:36. tending elegantly style, [her] 12. 9. too .. .But Wallach, risk of being understated. when her anger and pain boil just below 13. Eleanor Heartney, "Lorna Simpson at Josh the surface, restraint serves to the of her Baer," Art inAmerica, November 1989, 185. [her] magnify intensity message."14 attest to a at once 14. Ibid., 186. What these and myriad other voices is critical tendency

66 SUMMER 200? more more blatant and insidious than the overdetermined image association even that characterizes object-oriented analyses of Simpson's practice. More bla no are one and all tant, because bones made about conflating work with another, a of them with their maker, whose representative status elicits well-worn carica ture of the black subject: enraged by her victimization, frustrated by her corpo real and political lack, yet still willing to commodify her people's suffering for the mortified pleasure of white audiences. More insidious, I think, is how such assessments as exercises in applaud the artist's efforts successful self-discipline: the screaming horror of black female being reined in and made palatable by the to over Minimalist grid, its sublimatory force just enough make black life into the stuff of high art. In it is as two terms were these accounts, if those by definition disjunctive, notion a the very of "African-American art" somehow oxymoronic. Say it's "neg ative scene it on world or call it the of instruction," blame "art racism,"15 "quiet to an to confrontation" school of criticism, repurpose epithet used describe the or tactics work of Simpson, Glenn Ligon, any number of black artists, their visual an considered merely up-to-the-minute "white methods" for the expression of ever-static is as art "black experience."l6 The funny thing that the establishment sorts art discursively reproduced the of ossification that Simpson's put under numerous critics as a pressure, simultaneously claimed her part of dramatic shift one within African-American cultural production, occasioned by "the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject" and doubtless spurred on by recent In on was conceptualizations of the hybrid one.,7 fact, relatively early she a cadre counted among the ranks of "postnationalist," "postliberated" of practi tioners able to between "black" and "white" worlds: a 15.The first phrase is derived from Mich?le navigate seamlessly gener Wallace's "Modernism, Postmodernism, and the ation Voice critic T?te in whose emergence Village Greg had announced back 1986, Problem of the Visual inAfro-American Culture," and in terms that both revise and other aimed at inOut There: Marginalization and Contemporary anticipate media-sawy ploys Cultures, ed. Russell et al. in center Ferguson (Cambridge, putting blackness squarely the of things: MA: MIT Press, 1990), 41. The second refers to A Howardena Pindell's "ArtWorld Racism: These are artists for whom black consciousness and artistic freedom are not Documentation," New Art Examiner, March 1989, 32-36. mutually exclusive but complementary, for whom "black culture" signifies 16.On see Roberta Smith, "'Lack of a secure Ligon, multicultural tradition of expressive practices; they feel enough Location IsMy Location,'" New York Times, June about black culture to claim art nonblacks as of their 16. 1991, 33. On Simpson, see Mark Petr, "A produced by part Confrontation: Works Lorna Quiet by Simpson," inheritance. No anxiety of influence here?these folks believe the cultural Summer Spot, 1993,4-5. is for Yet their work both 17.On "the end of the innocent notion of the gene pool skinny-dipping. though challenges see to in essential black subject," Stuart Hall, "New cult[ural]-nationalist]s and snotty whites, don't expect find them inBlack Film/ British ICA Ethnicities," Cinema, or time soon. Ebony Artforum any Things ain't hardly got that loose yet.18 Document 7, ed. Kobena Mercer (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988), 27-31. As Three. A, E, I, O, U. The second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary of the regards hybridity, see Trey Ellis, "The New Black Callaloo 38 a as voice or Aesthetic," (Winter 1989): 233^3, English Language defines vowel "a speech sound uttered with whisper who labels his one of "cultural mulat generation resonance its enunciation and characterized by the form of the vocal cavities," toes." Thanks to Robin D. G. Kelley for pointing a is in me to this last. requiring postural opening of the body that countered Simpson's Easy for 18. T?te, "Cult-Nats Meet in Greg Freaky-Deke," Who to Say by the image of the vowel, which effects a figurai closure. Though the Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary letters the model's face intimate a of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), concealing multiplicity subject positions 207. Thelma Gulden's "Introduction: Post. . .," she might occupy?adulterer, engineer, ingenue, optimist, unflinching?such in Freestyle, exh. cat. (New York: Studio Museum are cut short the red words beneath the inHarlem, 2001 ), 14-15, revisits Tate's terms in musings by matching marching pictures. artists, much as it be describing "postblack" might "Amnesia, Error, Indifference, Omission, Uncivil": these would place her outside said to recall those of Alain Locke in Art: Negro the realm of the "I" still claims of Past and Present (Washington, DC: Associates in subjectivity altogether. Ironically, pride place Folk intrinsic to in order to center Negro Education, 1936). here, bucking the chain of equivalences language

67 art journal .AMNESIA ERROR INDIFFERENCE OMISSION UNCIVIL

Who to 1989. Five color our on now a Easy for Say, the work and attention that most basic of self-assertions, made by Polaroid ten prints, engraved plastic is at "self" that tenuously present best. plaques. 31 x 115 in. (78.7 x 292.1 cm). In this work, the meaning of the letter, like the orientation of the subject, is understood as fundamentally unstable yet always susceptible to reifying impo sitions. Easy forWho to Say thus stages the difficulty of rendering the black female body?that site of invisibility and projection so firmly fixed within the American sense that is cultural imaginary?while also maintaining the haunting of absence as in a recent on constitutive of identity such. As Judith Butler argues commentary no can the work of theorist Ernesto Laclau, particular identity emerge without foreclosing others, thereby ensuring its partiality and underlining the inability whether race or to constitute it. This "con of any specific content, gender, fully . .. not but is the and dition of necessary failure only pertains universally, 'empty

ineradicable place' of universality itself."19 19. Judith Butler, "Restaging the Universal: We Who to aims a the uni might say, then, that Easy for Say for "restaging of and the Limits of Formalism," inCon Hegemony versal" : if the words the the in which black tingency, Hegemony, and Universality: Contemporary limning photographs point up ways on the Butler, Ernesto Laclau, women its Dialogues Left, by have historically been denied coverage, then the effacement of the and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000), 32, underscores that the of this black woman can never be author's emphasis. figure identity entirely 20. 35. Butler on to that "no asser In Ibid., goes say accounted for given the structural incompletion she shares with all subjects. tion of takes from a cul universality place apart an act the the process, Simpson performs of "cultural translation," critiquing tural norm, and, given the array of contesting norms that constitute the international field, no racism and sexism of previous universalisms by contaminating them with the assertion can at once a be made without requiring on were In a 2002 very identity whose abjection they predicated.20 reading of cultural translation. Without translation, the very critic Teka Selman that such acts are at the core of the artist's concept of universality cannot cross the linguistic Necklines, suggested borders it claims, in principle, to be able to cross. us to that not be a true procedure, "help[ing] recognise representation might Or we might put it another way: without transla of'the real'; instead it is a or a translation of tion, the only way the assertion of universality can representation truly re-presentation cross a border is a colonial and in is And What through expan subjectivity, and that translation, something lost."21 also gained. sionist logic." we witness in forWho to as in is amethod the 21. Teka Selman, "Bodies, Rest, and Motion" Easy Say, Necklines, whereby peculiari (master's thesis, Goldsmith's College, 2002), 22, ties of one person's body?in both cases that of Diane Allford, photographed in author's emphasis. 1989?become the pattern on which the work ismodeled: the fall of her braids 22. Simpson's model is identified inRegina a Hackett, "Lorna Simpson Finds Meaning in and the tilt of her head determine the shape of vowel, beautifully delineated Absence," Seattle Post December 10, Intelligencer, collarbones draw us toward the neck.22 One Diane after another, she sets the 1993,5. scale for the "black the her contours and her sub 23. Kellie Jones, "(Un)Seen & Overheard: Pictures woman," "human," disrupted, by Lorna Simpson," in Lorna Simpson (London: in to are are not own. jectivity translated order speak of histories that and her Phaidon, 2002), 63. Jones, surely the most prolific and persuasive commentator on Simpson's a work, offers compelling survey of the artist's Four. Sometime around the end of 1992, so the story goes, the figure slowly career, though even her analysis at times sweeps to from art.23 Or, at least, its absence could be neither anomalies under the rug in the name of thematic began disappear Simpson's as a extension as was case continuity. explained logical of her established themes, the with

68 SUMMER 2005 necktie necking neck & neck neckline neck-ed necklace neckless breakneck

Necklines, 1989.Three gelatin silver prints, x in. two engraved plastic plaques. 68/4 70 (I74x 177.8 cm).

69 art journal 1978-1988, 1990. Four gelatin silver prints, thirteen engraved plastic plaques mounted onto Plexiglas. 49 x 70 in. ( I24.5 x I77.8 cm).

Untitled, I989.Two gelatin silver prints, two x engraved plastic plaques. 30x16 in. (76 40.5 cm).

Stack of Diaries, 1993. Photo-sensitive linen, steel, and etched glass. 8 I x 28 x 18 in. (205.7 x 71.1 x 45.7 cm).

j

A person is known Out of for the company sight he keeps. out of mind.

70 SUMMER 2005 nor dismissed as a aberration from as evi Standing in the Water, 1994.Three sen 199?'s 1978-1988, negligible them, on felt each 60 x 144 in. vacuum an graphs panels, denced by the critical that swallowed up untitled gem of 1989. x 365.8 two video monitors, (152.4 cm), adrift without the anchor of the black female and now each 2 x 4 in. (5.1 x 10.2 cm), ten etched Suddenly exegetical body each 12 x 12 in. x 30.5 with manner glass panels, (30.5 confronted wishbones, candles, and all of increasingly sculptural sound. Overall dimensions variable. cm), its synecdoches for presence, several commentators appar Installation view,Whitney Museum of explained Simpson's at ent a terms to American Art Philip Morris, New York. about-face through reversal of the previously applied her practice. On the likes Stack of critic encountering of 1993's Diaries, David Pagel opined that the work was no about but longer "sociological issues," "wide-ranging aesthetic" ones, that "seduction," rather than "confrontation," was its mode, and that now in In Simpson spoke "whispers" instead of "declarations." the final analysis, Pagel found this new art considerably less effective, much "too bland and generic" when compared with the "biting energy of [her] earlier photographs."24 Curator Thelma Golden, doubtless aware of how such readings could easily mutate into took backlash, the completion of the multipart video installation in theWater as an occasion to air her own views on turn Standing this unexpected of events to on to and, ultimately, put the question everyone's mind the artist her self. "The seems to out figure, your colored, gendered figure, have moved of the work. Our Kellie our art colleague Jones, homegirl, historian, and curator, and I have only half jokingly referred to this shift by titling the new piece 'Bye, Bye Black Girl. . . .'But I think I understand this shift. ... viewers a By denying figure 24. David Pagel, "From Confrontation to are them a to 'site' the issues so as have Seduction," Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1993, F12. you disallowing place specifically, you

71 art journal The Park, 1995. Serigraph on six felt panels with two felt text panels. 67 x 68 in. (170.2 x 172.8 cm).

72 SUMMER 200? on four felt The Bathroom, 1998.Serigraph Mj^M^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^WWE^*^ panels with one text panel. 52Mx ; STAin. 133.4x 133.4 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^B^^^^ ( cm). ESHHHP^^^^ ^-**"*W

access to a in the "Not . . . similarly denied face past?"25 Simpson's reply? really. I am just trying to work through these issues without an image of a figure. My interest in the body remains. The text in this piece refers to both political and concerns enumerated in the lines personal concerns."26 Among the scrolling two over were down the work's small monitors suitably aquatic images, the plight of enslaved Africans who jumped ship, "the promise of showers" held s out to Jews on their way to the camps, and the memory of the artist "first time in a sense the pissing the ocean." Anticipating, and in perceptually priming were a water spectator for such evocations, sound track of effects and three with the sea. These were five-by-twelve-foot lengths of felt printed pictures of surmounted by glass squares, each featuring the same photograph of a pair of shoes, yet etched differently tomimic varying degrees of submersion.27 By January of 1994, when Standingin theWater opened at theWhitney Museum at Philip Morris in New York, these were the sole traces of the body that had guided art continue to it. Simpson's and would haunt As hardly needs saying, Golden and Jones's coll?gial quip was hardly reaction that retreat from and emblematic of the larger critical greeted Simpson's of the figure, though by 1995,with greater distance from the salad days of multi 25. Thelma Golden, "An Interview with Lorna culturalism, commentators on her latest of work, the Public Sex series, could Simpson," in Lorna Simpson: Standing in theWater body (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, now speak to visual and historical nuances that had previously escaped them. 1994), n.p. Indeed, again printed on felt, and as usual paired with text, these gridded seri 26. Lorna Simpson, quoted in ibid. to invite scale cinematic 27. Golden, "An Interview with Lorna Simpson." graphs seemed such scrutiny, their panoramic calling up

73 art journal The Bed, 1995. Serigraph on four felt panels their activities narratives, lustily rendered surfaces rhyming with the clandestine with one felt text panel. 72 x 45 in.(182.9 x hinted at to occlude. for one, welcomed this 114.3 cm). they only Heartney, departure, seeing pieces like The Park as grandly metaphorical in tone and broadly inclusive in one address: "Race, previously of Simpson's dominant themes, is played down here . . . the evoke a more universal sense [and] works of melancholy."28 Most were as critics, however, markedly less sympathetic, suggesting, did Robert that once with in the we Mahoney, "Simpson again toys gaps way assign meaning to hot topics, but the idea has been attenuated by her dull-is

beautiful approach."29 is most is What instructive, if perplexing, about these responses that the to a banishment of the figure seemed compel sharp bifurcation of Simpson's one or critical project: either lauded her "new-found" interest in the universal judged the work deficient without the discursive meat of identity politics. Yet if I over status anything, would counter, her practice has consistently worried the of the body and the consequences of its divergent modes of self-perception for constitution As ver man in the of the black female subject. theorist Kaja Sil argues TheThreshold of theVisible World, each of us comes to apprehend ourself as a self not encounter our own only through the jubilant with reflected image that Jacques Lacan recounts in as famously "The Mirror Stage" but also, psychoanalyst Henri sum our contacts Wallon maintains, through the of physical with the world, in an is to resulting apposite bodily identity that keyed tactile, cutaneous, and sensation. terms two erotogenic Silverman these sch?mas the visual imago and the sensational and are ego, respectively, though they always initially disjunctive, their later not seem to It disalignment "does produce pathological effects."30 is to in art in tempting, then, reinforce the apparent fissure Simpson's the lan in guage Silverman provides, supposing that, say, Guarded Conditions, its ruthlessly on frontal presentation of the bodily image, dwells the first register, and that a to The Bathroom, 1998 addition the Public Sex series, occupies the second. To I to is do so, think, would be miss the point, since it the troubled coexis tence of these modes that is at issue in the one Simpson's art, continually quali and on the other. Listen to fying, undermining, preying how she slyly captions the later work: were stalls. In were "There five the second stall there three legs." to narrator as an Those intertwined bodies only revealed themselves the odd

three-legged, two-backed beast, necessitating the translation of appearance into the even account grammar of bodily relations, though this affords little descrip

tive pull with the image itself, which metastasizes the rift between vision and touch in the elaboration of the subjective experience. Here, proliferation of and a light-catching surfaces?of mirrors, tiles, doors?engenders volley of reflections thrown into doubt by the intransigent blur of the very material on which they are printed: we are left in The Bathroomwith felt and fantasy after the fact. Now to to photographic look again Guarded Conditions, the model's shifting contact with her herself; registration of postural integrity, of corporeal "own is at odds with the ness," disarticulation of her image perpetrated by the grid: 28. Eleanor Heartney, Absence," Art in we "Figuring there, too, encounter the remnants of a scene accessible to our gaze and America, December 1995, 87. to our but of us more than half the 29. Robert Mahoney, "Lorna Simpson," Time Out subject projection, incapable telling story. New York, November 1-8, 1995, 25. Two sides of the same these works our coin, emphasize the slipperiness of 30. Silverman, "The in The Kaja Bodily Ego," on the world the that some nav Threshold of the VisibleWorld (New York: grasp by holding open perceptual gap inevitably author's ease Routledge, 1996), 17-18, emphasis. igate with greater than others. As Silverman reminds us, and as Frantz Fanon

74 SUMMER 200S 3

75 art journal Kiki Smith. Pee 1992. Body. Wax, pigment, IBBBBB^teMriiiPhi ^ and strands of glass beads, twenty-three H^hJ^hB^^^^^HI? varying lengths. 27 x 28 x 28 in. (68.6 x 71.1 x 71.1 of PaceWildenstein. ^^^^^^HHHBH?l^j|? cm). Courtesy ^^^^^^^HHmEBBI

it is not to teaches us, the specular malediction31 of the black subject only recog a sense to nize this dis juncture but also in certain to inhabit it in order preserve the bodily ego from the deidealizing images of blackness that litter the cultural and to black skin. "I am no he tells us. "I am landscape cling given chance," overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the 'idea' that others have of

me own In text in but of my appearance."32 the lying alongside The Bed, language as as it is us it means politely arch "brilliantly annoyed,"33 Simpson tells what on one at one to so evening, hotel, be "overdetermined from without," marking at once how the syntaxes of color, class, and privilege disrupt and define what we to is to a at know be properly ourselves. "It late, decided have quick nightcap in that Hotel is curious and the hotel having checked earlier morning. security on to as to our we knocks the door inquire what's going on, given surroundings suspect thatmaybe we have broken 'the too many dark people in the room code/ More is on are if are in privacy attained depending what floor you on, you the were penthouse suite you could be pretty much assured of your privacy, if you on the 6th or ioth floor there would be a knock on the door." to the 31. A phrase adapted from Saidiya V. Hartman's Contrary consideration of Frantz Fanon in thoughtful critics, it is this disembodied voice, alive to the rhetoric of appearance, attuned "Excisions of the Flesh," inWright and Hartman, to the actualities of desire, and evident in the Public Sex series, that Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer, 55. everywhere 32. Frantz "The Fact of in returns to one woman Fanon, Blackness," entice us, asserting the presence of black who remains Black Skin,White Masks, trans. Charles Lam even as her is away. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), I 16. figure ghosted For Silverman's commentary on this text, see "The Bodily Ego," 27-31. ... Five. "The thing I think I have the most difficulty with is the thing about the 33. A description borrowed from Ronald Jones's . . . For less-than-favorable review of the Public Sex series, black figure how much 'politicized' space this figure takes up. instance, "Lorna Simpson," Frieze, January-February 1996, Kiki Smith does works about the she can do a out of resin or 67. body; sculpture it's kind of this Caucasian-ish and her work is as 34. Lorna Simpson, quoted in Pierce Davis, glass, pinkish tone, interpreted at Lorna from Both Sides "Looking Simpson speaking universally about the body. Now when I do it I am speaking about the Now," Reflex, January-February 1994, 7. .. .But at the same this is a universal . . ."34 35. "Mannered observation" is the artist's term black body. time, figure for her habits of which Ihave taken as a I to at over course looking, What have been trying get the of these "mannered obser model for own of See my protocols reading. vations"35 is this: that its deconstruction of the Lorna Simpson, "Mannered Observation, 2002," simply despite implicit particular in Jones, Lorna Simpson, 136-42. and the universal, the visual and the sensate?those notions so central to the

76 SUMMER 2005 Claims of any aesthetic enterprise?Simpson's work often found itself policed by them, outpaced by a racial specter thatwould empty the subject of all content save on for that projected its surface. Until, that is, the black female as in art as it was in body became phantasmic her effectively imagined the dis course it. own that preceded That art?recursive, repetitive, and apace with its a historicity?thus pinpoints posture of belatedness that has consistently ani mated the as "changing same" of African-American culture, because Guarded Conditionsmakes clear, it is ever our lot to be captured in the darkling wake that renders the black now as We can subject, then, irremediably "postblack."36 only Iwant to its apprehend the complexities of Simpson's oeuvre, argue, relation to to the "political," its strategic lapses and capitulations, by coming grips with not the imbrication of "black" and "white," that infernal pairing, which only the on which is forms ground "African-American art" predicated but also deforms the as no one meaning of modernity itself. Of course, needs reminding, things ain't hardly got that loose yet.

Huey Copeland is a PhD candidate in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, and Weinberg Fellow inArt History at Northwestern University. He is currently completing his dissertation, "Bound to Appear: Site, Subjection, and the Disfiguration of Slavery inMulticultural America."

36. For elaborations of the "changing same" and the recursive temporality of black resistive cul tures, see respectively Paul Gilroy, The Black Atiantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Homi Bhabha, "Conclusion: 'Race,' Time and the Revision of Modernity," inThe Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 236-56.

77 art journal