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Email Q & A w Courtney Baker, 1998 The 1980s: An Internet Conference, 2005 |
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31 October - 1 November: Introduction Maurice Berger: I would like to welcome everyone to "The 1980s: An Internet Conference." The conference will be organized into two-day sessions, each of these devoted to a particular topic. I would like to dedicate the first session to the general question of the "legacy" of the "The 1980s"--the issues and events that matter most about it, then and now. . . . As a means of introduction, I would like each of you to speak to the issue of legacy: What issues or events of the period matter most to you now? What of that time--whether in the context of art and culture or of society in general--have the greatest implications for the present day? Feel free to select a single issue, problem, or event or several. Be as general or specific as you like; we will have time to explore these issues over the next two weeks. |
Lorraine O’Grady post: I've been having a hard time getting started. "Legacy" seems such a grand word for the vague memories I have, more a string of minute details, not necessarily sequential. I spent the first years of the ’80s doing performances and shows railing against exclusion but the last years were spent hardly knowing who the President was, in a kind of sympathetic dementia with a mother in the last stages of Alzheimer's. Most of what I do remember about the art world in the ’80s has to do with being an "insider-outsider" for the first time in my life—as opposed to the "outsider-insider" I'd been before. In June 1980, I arrived at the doorstep of the downtown black art world (how many people then or now know what that phrase means?). I'd spent my entire previous life in a succession of virtually all-white worlds: the all-white Ivy League world of the ‘50s; the all-white elite U.S. Government world of the early ‘60s; the all-white rock criticism and record company world of the ‘70s. I would still have an.... |