RISK EVERYTHING
Catherine Damman on the art of Lorraine O’Grady
By Catherine Damman, March 2021
A BALL TEMPTS two running children, their mouths joyful, their eyes on the prize. Clothes and baguettes spill onto the grass; neither modesty nor scarcity is of great concern. Suffused with delectation and too good to be true, the scene is Edenic, a black-and-white fête galante for the end of the twentieth century. Above it all float a nude couple unencumbered by gravity and ensnared in each other. His pale hips sink between her thighs, his torso presses limply on her chest. Her countenance is bolted in an ambiguous expression.
On the right, we are in the same place: the same lush trees, the same inviting field. The two figures have dropped back to earth, shoved down by gravity’s unseen hand. The man’s head is now a skull, his body wrapped in a chainmail carapace, his fingers
territorially on her breast, uninvited stray marks against her dark skin. She casts her eyes uncomfortably heavenward.
The twinned collages constitute a diptych in a 1991 group of works by Lorraine O’Grady called Body Is the Ground of My Experience. Tripping the tongue is the title’s absent article, refusing both the academic’s putative distance from flesh (“the body”) and any claim to ownership (“my body”). The work’s pairings are not new, but they retain their purchase. Eros and Thanatos, sure. Sedition disguised as leisure, of course. Half a millennium, perhaps longer, of brutality laminated with real pleasure, maybe even romance—one can never be certain. What else still furrows the brow like interracial sex? ( … )