Colby Chamberlain, “Lorraine O’Grady.” Artforum International, Feb 1, 2019.
Frames within frames: For a lecture in 1969, Jacques Derrida distributed copies of “Mimique,” a prose poem written by Stéphane Mallarmé in 1897 describing a theatrical scene involving the pantomime character Pierrot, whom Mallarmé had read about in a pamphlet purportedly authored by the mime himself. In the scene, Pierrot learns that his wife, Columbine, has betrayed him, and he resolves to murder her—by tickling her to death. Pierrot performs this fanciful deed onstage, playing the parts of both tickler and tickled, alternately wriggling his hands ferociously and giggling with helpless delight. As he switches between masculine and feminine roles, he also oscillates temporally, from buildup to aftermath. Mallarmé quotes the pamphlet’s account of the mime’s frantic motions: “Here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present.”
Now again: For a solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates this past fall, Lorraine O’Grady presented a set of letterpress prints based on works first shown in 2006 in a group exhibition at New York’s Daniel Reich Gallery curated by Nick Mauss, but composed in 1977 as collage poems made of snippets cut from successive editions of the Sunday New York Times. That year, O’Grady was teaching a course on avant-garde literature at the School of Visual Arts in New York; she has cited Dada and Surrealist montage as an inspiration for the poems, though only to a point. Whereas Tristan Tzara and André Breton reveled in the cutup method’s aggressive nonsense—enjoying the privilege of the white male bourgeoisie, for whom sense was always a given—O’Grady sought to turn the paper of record into a medium of personal expression. (…)