sarah peters: hi, i'm very honored to introduceour guest. lorna simpson has made a career out of images that seduce the viewer withelegance while they proposition us with essential questions about identity, the body, the gaze,history and memory. her talk this evening coincides with her exhibition titled "recollection - lorna simpson" which features the walker's holdings of the artist's work, currently onview in the medtronic gallery. while consisting of only about seven pieces, the show demonstratesthe considerable breadth of simpson's photographic and cinematic practice. beginning as a documentaryphotographer in the early 1980s, simpson quickly moved into a practice that involves stagingportraits, scenes, and objects in a studio rather than finding them out on the street.interested in exploring ways that a photograph
can be read, she began to create conceptualcompositions pairing minimalist black and white images with short texts. as seen inworks such as "counting" and "queen's eyes" from 1991, and "the bathroom" from 1998, allof which are on view upstairs, simpson broadens our conception of contemporary photographyby mixing text with images, printing on unorthodox materials, and arranging portraits, objectsand words in ways that evoke the formal qualities of installation while still working in a two-dimensionalform. these images are strikingly clear and composed,yet upon extended contemplation, we realize that they omit much of the information thatwe could use to make sense of the story. the figures, primarily female and dark-skinned,have their backs turned to the camera or are
missing from the picture altogether, as inthe case of the piece titled "wigs portfolio" from 1994, where felt panels carrying imagesof 21 different hair pieces stand in for women of varying race and age. as viewers, we arecalled to employ our own experiences and assumptions to make sense of the work and to read it. a similar experience is found in simpson'smoving images. we are fortunate to have on view a work that she completed during a residencyhere at the walker in 1998, and the title of which is borrowed for the whole exhibition."recollection" was shot here in the twin cities using local actors, who play out an episodicand disjointed narrative. the construction of these enigmatic vignettes and charactersmirror simpson's strategy of working with
fragments of text and image. her most recent work, which i believe she'llspeak about a bit this evening, involves the collection and display of vintage photographsfound in flea markets and online auctions. in two series that are installed togetheron a wall upstairs, the artist inserts herself into the work for the first time. among thesnapshots of anonymous women from decades past, simpson adds her own body, staged tomimic the poses and interiors of the found pictures. these self-portraits aren't immediatelyidentifiable, but upon closer inspection they stand out from the others. this game of detectionbecomes a viewing experience that beautifully confuses time, history and personal identity.
all of simpson's images, in their variousforms, moving and still, created over the past two decades, maintain a provocative andmysterious narrative of some of the most important issues of contemporary life: race, class,sexual identity, and their revolving relationships to power. she has been honored by numeroussolo and group exhibitions, including a 20-year retrospective at the whitney museum of americanart in new york in 2007 that new york times critic holland cotter called a vision of acareer in progress, or, in other words, fresh and always changing. lorna simpson has given us much to think aboutin these 20 years so far, and i'm very pleased to welcome her to the stage to speak withus about it, but before i do that, i want
to remind you that the talk tonight is beingwebcast live on the walker channel, and it will be archived there. it's the section ofour website where we archive talks and panels. and so when we get to the q and a sectionat the end, i ask that you find one of the ushers in the aisles to get a microphone toask your question, and please stand up so that we can know whose speaking. and withthat, please welcome lorna simpson. [applause] lorna simpson: hi, good evening. i thoughti'd speak this evening about my most recent work, but the work goes from photography tofilm to found objects to drawings, and starting from now and working my way back to talk aboutthe work. one of the pieces that is here started
with this photograph, which is a photographthat i found on ebay in collecting different images for different projects. i saw it andpurchased it and after i received it, the seller contacted me and said, "oh, i haveabout 250 photographs of this sort. are you interested in purchasing them?" i agreed,and received these amazing albums of what was a project of an anonymous woman in losangeles who made it a project to photograph herself and having a photographer photographher in all these hollywood quasi-actress poses. in doing so, i took them all out of the album.the album did not contain family photographs or trips or chronicling day-to-day life; theway that they were organized was solely pictures of her in this project, which took place inbetween june and august of 1957. and so i
pinned them all up on the wall of my studiowhile working on another show, and different friends would come by and they'd go, "wow,that's really amazing, but what are you going to do with that?" which is always the casewith things that are interesting. after having them up for about eight or ninemonths, i realized what was fascinating about it was that she was posing for the camerain a particular way of learning how to pose for the camera, but also this kind of learninghow to interact with it. so i got this idea to insert myself into her scene, into herthree-month project, and mimic her poses, which, given that she, i think, is much tallerthan i and much longer-limbed and double-jointed, was really difficult.
[laughter] some of her poses, i was like, "ow, ow!" maybethat's because i'm old. it was painful to try to mimic her physically; it felt likeyoga positions. in doing so, i wanted to insert myself invisibly, so that the project forme is to mount her project, meaning to display this work of a three-month project where awoman becomes all these different characters, and that i expand that project by insertingmyself in it. that's one on the left, and my version at home on the right. for me, inthe work that i have done in the past, i have never included myself in the work, but stilli find myself with my relationship to the work of always doing what i say i'll neverdo at some point in time. had you asked me
four years ago, "would you ever do any pictureswhere you include yourself mimicking someone else?" i would have said, "no, are you kidding?no way." that was interesting, to push myself to tryto include myself in a project. every morning i cursed myself for coming up with the project,cause i really hated the physicality of going through the motions to make it, and it tookabout a month for me to become relaxed with doing so. this is a segment of different imageswhere i mimic her pose and it gets repeated in similar but different environments. i knownothing about her. this is a self-portrait that she takes the image on the left and kindof enflowers and the flash then obliterates the central part of the image, and i kindof make a version of that myself in my own
self-portrait, in upstate new york [laughter]in the cornfields. so my interest in photography as a genre hasalways been from the beginning from the kind of moment of as a child having a really badcold. and in the wintertime and realize my parents had cameras. but at that time youdidn't really give a kid a camera to shoot with. you said, "ok, you can hold it and youcan take a picture and then give it back". and so i remember cutting out, which i guessthe '60s are famous for that, of like cutting out coupons on the back of kleenex boxes toget a polaroid camera. since i had a cold i had enough boxes [laughs] to get a camerawhich i later got that spring and i had that camera everywhere.
it stands out in my mind only because i washappy to take it everywhere, on school trips, to county fairs, photographing my dog in thebackyard. but it became this kind of practice where the camera was always with me and asmy earliest moment of having my own camera. so this is a photograph of, it's called "bowof the ball" 1926 james van der zee and i had decided there were different points inmy career in my relationship to my work that i decided to try something completely new.i threw myself into a situation as completely foreign to me to come up with something newand different. at that particular point i was invited topilchuck which is a glass blowing camp school north of seattle. in doing so i thought icould have had ideas well i'll do some tests
with some glass objects that kind of vibrateon the wall with some kind of armature. but when i got there it i was not really knowingthat much about the culture of glass. i was kind of amazed at it's theatricality of likethe pyromaniacs that have found their cause and all this watching of the glory hole andeverybody sweaty and hot and it's dangerous. so i was completely shocked and captivatedby that but at the same time not knowing what the hell to do with that kind of environment.i went back down to seattle and went to a bookstore and found a book that i had at homewhich is deborah willis' book that chronicles photographs by james van der zee who is anafrican american photographer in harlem that took pictures of politicians, events and justevery day people that would just come into
the studio. so i found, i decided to the chagrin of manyof the gaffers who are kind of amazing. they could make anything you want out of glass,but i had them then blow replicas of props out of james van der zee photographs. so asyou see to her left hand there is a vase, containing some kind of orchid. they blewthat. this is a photograph of benny andrews from1976 who was a painter and this kind of teardrop vase to his left with the chrysanthemums.i had them blow that. they were disappointed. i would just show them the book drawn on theground and they were like, that's all you want? [laughs] you're here for three weeks.that's all you want.
and so i was pretty persistent and this iscalled "dinner party with boxer harry willis" 1929. in going to pilchuck what's funny about itis that you do get caught up in the kind of mesmerizing thing of blowing glass. so they'reblowing all this stuff. and then you come to the end and you go: oh, s*** [expletive]i have to pack all this stuff up and send it somewhere. so you spend all this moneyfor these kind of hand carved foam boxes to ship all this stuff but finally got it allback to my studio and then re-photographed these as a homage to james van der zee. the text beneath it then has a descriptionof the photograph from my point of view in
terms of all the details and the way thatit operates and the way that van der zee composes these images to kind of say something aboutaspirations or wealth or meaningful objects that should constitute a narrative about theperson's life. so this is about "bow of the ball". and thisis benny andrews and this one is short so i will read this; "artist born in 1930 wearinga trench coat. he's seated with his right leg crossed and holds it with his right hand.to his left is a small table with a circular top and a vase with chrysanthemums, a woodenfolding screen stands behind him." so they were very simple detailed descriptions ofeach photograph. and that is the boxer photograph with everyone is holding the champagne glasses. so it
becomes this piece called "nine props" andit was interesting because in process i love vases and objects from my own collection thathave nothing to do with my art. but getting them in the studios, like ok, what am i goingto do with all this beautiful black glass and it was a piece that evolved in terms ofmy interaction with it from my original idea and kind of just went into these heat transferredimages onto felt. so about a couple a years ago i started doingdrawings. and more it came out of a project where i did a compilation project of foundfootage from a speech pathology institution in wichita, kansas of some material that ifound. and it just came out of working on that project; wow, there's something interestingthat subjects were photographed in technicolor
against a gray background. so they were reallyalmost kind of caricatures the way actresses and different patients within this documentaryor promotional material was put together. and so, i started drawing from that and continuedon and these are just heads that are just water colors with very simple in there, verysmall, eight by ten. but what was more interesting to me than kind of picking up or thinkingto do drawing was more just about the process because so much of what i had been involvedin photography to a certain extent there's a bit of play in terms of the idea, but onceit goes into production it becomes very rote. and certainly in working with film there'sa lot of collaboration that takes place with regard to how the project gets done and howit comes to fruition and how that idea might
be slightly different than its end product.but it was quite different to sit in my studio and make these drawings and throw some awayand just the fluidity of that as a break or a change in terms of process. this is similar to a piece that is also upstairsour photo booths and actually from the first piece that i showed of the woman from 1958.this was the original project finding these small photo booths. and what fascinates meabout photo booth images are that they are all self portraits. so it's this mechanismof photography that every one sits in the booth and they prepare in front of a mirroredsurface with a light that comes on that flashes. they prepare themselves to be photographed,as opposed to having someone take their picture
and in that for the time frame which is maybe,i guess these pictures ranged from the '20s through the '70s. they are pictures that aresent either for identification or like sent home or sent somewhere else to show us proofthat you are doing well or that you look good and that things are fine even though theymight not be. so they are kind of these mini little messagesand so not so much for the nostalgia that they are old photographs and of course, everybodyin the past looks fabulous. you know, put a hat on them and really fabulous, but [laughs]more that the kind of all the rest with the same relationship to the camera that theyare all self portraits. so just to give you a sense of scale in termsof the older work, which the image on the
left which is "water bearer". i did startin terms of my relationship to photography in doing "street" photography or documentarywhen i was in college. and i guess by the, which was the late '70s or early '80s. bythe time i had gotten out of college i decided to jump ship of new york and go to southerncalifornia. and i decided to go to the university of california,san diego because i'd met carrie mae williams who is also an artist. she asked me what iwas doing and i was doing graphic design for a travel agency or big posters for lawyersin terms of criminal court cases if they needed a graphic design. i have no idea what thesubject was but i just had to make some kind of graphic or something as a visual aid inthe courtroom.
so i was doing a lot of graphic design workand she just said, "wow you should come to san diego. it's a half an hour from mexico.le hoya is a beautiful beach" and i was like, "sure." [laughs] i had no interest in it'shot there. i didn't know anything about it. [laughs] but the campus photographs were really,really beautiful. i went and at the time going to graduate schoolin california in the early '80s it was all about performance art. although i did nothave an interest in terms of performance in terms of myself it certainly almost everybodythat was there was interested in performance. and certainly san diego there was this placecalled "sushi" everybody from all over the country came there and did performance.
so it was an interesting way for me as a photographerin new york which is school of visual arts, old school view of photography to relationshipto photography to go to a more conceptual art school in california. and really gavemyself once i got used to not looking at my watch at 5:00 and going ok, you got wine?let's have dinner on the beach. once i got kind of past that ritual which took abouta year, i started concentrating on my work. [laughs] and so, that led to doing these works thatwere more spared down in the studio, slightly larger than life figures that have their backsturned to the frame with text that either were kind of mimic concrete poetry or liststhat creative narrative. and in some ways
it was an interesting time because i was inconflict with the way that photography at that time was read, in terms of showing workthat was documentary or street photography and the repetition in the way that it's read;that you kind of use the same tools to interpret every photograph by each photographer. so i wanted to play with that assumption ofhow we read photographs and their meanings and what you "get" from the "message" fromthe photographer so this one is "discounting of memory" and experience as its subject. this is similar to a piece which is also herewhich is called "wigs". there's also a felt piece that is kind of either lithographed,i think lithographed onto felt, but from all
these different wigs that i have found onfulton mall which is a mall in brooklyn. that at the time every other store was a wig store,which i don't know how they do it in terms of competition or supply and demand but iwent into every shop and found these amazing variety of different kinds of artificial andreal hair. the piece for me in that it kind of talksabout artifice and the way that we construct ourselves as individuals and it is a construction.so the text then relates to constructions of identity in and around gender and thatgender isn't this black and white completely stratisfied way of looking at gender, thatthere's all these grays in different areas and so "wigs" is to talk about that.
this is called "seven mouths" which is basicallyjust seven mouths just printed on photo linen and maybe about five feet in height or maybesix feet in height. but it's a piece that much later which was done in 1993. i returnedto as a video work, which is called "easy to remember" in 2001. i will show you like three video differentworks that i think are similar in their relationship to music. and it didn't occur to me as i started,which i think i actually started to make this piece. i started to think of music. but itis funny for me in working in this way that my interpretation of my work and the way everyone else sees it is completely different. so in making this piece, i thought it waskind of romantic. i liked the music. a particular
song by john coltrane which is a rogers andhart tune from his album of ballads called "easy to remember". and i always thought it was really melodic.i really, really loved that. i did a casting call and had about 12 different people comeand audition. basically they had to sit in front of the camera and learn very quicklywith headphones the way that john coltrane [indecipherable 0:23:17.6] jazz. he has aslightly different take on the melody. the melody kind of takes different directionsso as someone who is humming this tune which i had them do: they have to choose their octaveand kind of how they would follow along with the melody in the way that john coltrane re-composesthis music.
and what was quite beautiful was that i bygreat chance got a huge range of different people in terms of their octaves, in termsof from baritones to soprano to alto. so in putting it together either in photo shop butalso as a musical piece, to edit all these voices together, was quite amazing. one of the women who was performing whilewe were filming and we were doing it in a closed studio actually at the wexner centerin columbus, ohio. the sound guy kept, if you hear a garbage truck that's going downthe street you have to stop because you can kind of hear the beeping of the truck in thebackground or a plane is going overhead. although it's a sound studio, those sounds still kindof enter the background sound of the room
within the white noise you can hear it. for the fourth time he called me over. hewas like no, you have to come here. we have to stop for a minute. i came over and he goes:one of the people, who was humming, one of the women, her heartbeat was louder than herhumming. [laughs] so we had to, because we were freaking her out with this camera anda crew and everything like right on top of her, photographing her humming. so let's if you would please go to the video"easy to remember". [musical piece] lorna: so if we can go back to the powerpointfor a moment. and so in doing that piece was
interesting for me because i thought it wasgoing to be a very romantic kind of piece and all my friends were like, ok, it's reallydepressing in some ways. but it did not so help that actually the piece which was shownfour days after september 11. so, it kind of on it's own, even before they, people weresaying but certainly after that they really, it's a piece within new york life, showingin new york, is associated with that moment although it was done before that. so in doingthat piece and as a musical piece it involves the body, i thought, "what other piece i coulddo that involves the body?" and i came up with this work called cloudscape, which thisis a felt work of it, photograph on felt and it's called "cloud". it comes from a videowhere i had a friend of mine named terry atkins
who is also an artist and a musician performfor me. and we went through different manuscripts; american music from the turn of the centurythat are hymns. but we wanted to choose something that wasa little unfamiliar and not in terms of its melody would associate it immediately withthat. but something in its phrasing that was short and interesting. and so terry whistles,another using your body to make music whistles this piece. and so if we could go to cloudscapeplease. [whistling] lorna: and so it goes in a loop, and thenyou go back to the powerpoint but in doing so you go, "oh wow, that's really kind ofconceptually very neat. you just go in, it
takes about five hours a shoot in a spaceand shot it and film and done although the nightmare then began with transferring thatkind of information digitally. so i ended up having to re-shoot it completely in hdand, which was, kind of killed part of its magic to me because it was just kind of niceto go in and shoot it and then reverse it and be done, but no, i had to go in and shootit twice. but again, kind of just very simply in using the body and kind of reversing themelody or reversing the time sequence allows for the melody to churn into something else,into a different melody. and so there's another project called "corridor"which also uses music and then i was invited by the mass moca in north adams and the societyfor the preservation of new england antiquities
and it was collaboration between them andmass moca to invite artists and commission a work using artifacts from this collection.and in doing so i was a little bit horrified because they take you to, in massachusetts,all these different warehouses that sbnea uses. and it's you know it's basically dishware,furniture, a little bit of clothing, but very kind of domestic sphere collection of things.and when i had gotten back from california from graduate school i had worked up in yonkersin warehouses for the new york historical society with about three other people in thewinter time which, you know it's not heated so it's not fun, but it was really interestingin terms of the objects because the objects
kind of spanned american history, there werecannons, cannon balls, artifacts, it was a wide range of really interesting things thatwere kind of above and beyond just the thing of plates and dishware and domestic life asevidence of the past. and so in walking through their spaces i was like, "you guys don't compare.all the good stuff is in new york." but i kind of also felt because mass mocais like you know this space, this industrial space that's converted into an exhibitionspace it had, you know each artist had like 2000 or 2500 square feet and so i was like,"i am not making a collection of artifacts from new england for a show with that amountof space." so as i was looking through their book and kind of racking my brain and youknow planning to say no i realized that they
also had a collection of homes. and, in thatyou know people would kind of give them their homes and then they would turn them into historicalsites and you can then see them by appointments. and i realized that i could fulfill an ideathat i had a few years prior to that which was to have you know two characters 100 apart.and so they had this huge collection of homes from the like late 1600's, early 1700's andkind of all throughout massachusetts but they also had a walter gropius home in walden pond.and the house on the left is a coffin house which is really, i think it's like 1670'sbut you know american vernacular architecture is all about adding on, shifting, changingand so it looks like an 1860's home at this point in the way that it's been restored andthe way that it, and its wallpaper and the
way that it's been added on, and the waltergropius home which is done in the late 40's, a home for him and his family actually, verymuch has a feel of 1960's. so i got this 1860's and 1960's parallel that i wanted. and it took a lot of begging, especially forboth homes, in terms like carrying is, a wood structure carrying a character with a filmequipment carrying a candle down the staircase took a lot of begging and pleading that wewouldn't burn the place down and as well as having protecting the environment of the gropiushome, from walking in there with the camera crew. the protagonist or the person that appearsas wangeshi mutu who was also an artist was
actually at that time working for me as astudio assistant and was trying to figure out what she was doing next in terms of showingher work and where she was going to live. and i didn't have anyone else in mind andsince she was available i said, "do you feel like doing this?" and she said, "ok. sure." and it worked out really nice because she,as we did it which i didn't, i find actors to be really interesting because you can nevertell who can act just by looking at them. it's one to give them the role that they blossom,where they become someone else. and wangeshi does have definitely an acting side to heralso, or performer side. she also sings. not in this piece, but as a child was also trainedin singing.
so, in being able to create this kind of parallelworld, the 1860s, conquer 1860's house of the coffin house and the walter gropius houseon walden pond. i have this kind of protagonist that just goes out and nothing really happensand you follow from day to night, the kind of meandering through these domestic spaces.so they got their domestic sphere from me but at least i didn't have to do objects init. the soundtrack though, from this piece coversthat span as well. so there's a soundtrack from blind tom who was an enslaved africanwho made one of the amazing compositions based on french nocturnes and americano like dixiebut his take a kind of very dark turn in the way that he played. but he was paraded asan idiot savant of music. that he could play
anything, anywhere and in fact it was justbecause he was african and had an amazing talent and ear for music. then, it was turnedinto a kind of circus act because of course "how could africans actually play any musicon the piano?" that would be rare and unusual. and he died in poverty. but his compositions are quite amazing, giventhe tragedy of his life. on the other side i saw for me in relationship to american music,i'm blanking on the other composers, albert ayler's love child becomes the other scoreand they are kind of mixed together. and albert ayler was a jazz composer of concrete jazzin the 60's. and there's something in the cadence of his music that does remind me ofearly americana music as well.
so by [indecipherable 0:39:52.2] of just takingthose two and smashing them together, those two soundtracks together, creates interestingdialogue between two different centuries. so, if you'd play "corridor" please. [piano playing] lorna: we'll just show a clip from that [inaudible0:45:46.6] ; and so working on "corridor" and then this relationship to architecture;which i have a personal interest in architecture but also in terms of this work. the coffinhouse shows up as being very much like a vermeer painting, in terms of its lighting but giventhe conditions of that architecture, and having to light it from outside to bring in light,that's kind of unavoidable, quotation that
the photograph reveals. but also then in thegropius house, when we're shooting in the bedroom, when the bedroom has this very strangekind of voyeuristic quality, because it's like this giant piece of glass that dividesthe dressing room from the bedroom, that is paneled by a portion of glass mirror. so thebedroom has this very voyeuristic feel to it, that you can watch something from afarand be cut off from it, but as a voyeur, look into it. so, as a project, and also in termsof the gropius home, as i think of modernist architecture from that time, it's scale isvery, very small, though in photographs it looks very expansive. its scale is very intimate at the same time.so it's really interesting in terms of those
projects, with an interest in architecture,of how one actually moves in that space, or the language of the domestic space, withinthe gropius home, which there's a maid quarter behind the kitchen, so all this thing aboutclass and servitude, that's also present in the architecture of that space. and so, in doing that project, and puttingthe music with it, it was a very interesting project to work on, but i guess these arethe best examples of work that just focuses then on music as part of the narrative, andthis time lapse. in many of the other projects, there are these broken narratives, with differentcharacters that are non-linear, and don't make sense, and don't quite fit together,and it's through the agency of not communicating,
is the message, or the narrative that playsthrough a lot of the other works. what else was i going to say? and so evennow, although i don't think i have any ideas for any video work, so in the conversationtoday about dance i was reminded of a performance that i did as a child, as a dancer, and iwas like, oh, that might make a good film performance. but in terms of ideas, and choosingdifferent mediums, it really is generated by the idea that i have, and when i am pushed,either technically or by genre, into something that i had never done before; it is becauseof an idea, and not really just a pursuit of a technical aspect of things. so it's been an interesting career, in thesense that i feel that anything is possible
within the work. in doing all these differentthings, in doing film which i should say, in graduate school, i studied film and video,and it was analogue, in the 80s. after about two months of editing and video, i was like,ok, i can't do this, this is ridiculous. you make one mistake, and having to start fromthe beginning, in an analogue way, was something which really turned me off in the medium. although, i really loved studying film theory,so when an opportunity came to actually work in film, maybe ten years later, having a backgroundin photography really gelled that all together, it was like a high, almost, to have a crewof people. and it works in different forms, for different projects but to be working towardsmaking a visual idea come to fruition was
one that was really exciting for me. so, iam told we can open this up to questions. does anyone have any? ok, that's good then i can go to dinner? [laughs]this one down here. man 1: hi. i just wanted to ask. i rememberedas i was watching this that i saw a really interesting piece of yours in archive feverby okwui enwezor. it was an archive film playing on a loop encased in the wall with a drawingbeside it and i was wondering if you could talk about that piece. lorna: sure. the piece that he is speakingof, which i can't remember the name of ,no it's called "jackie", is actually is a segmentof footage from this speech pathology and
learning disability institution from wichita,kansas in the 50s. there are two projects that came out of this. one is of all thesewomen that are presented in this footage that is disassembled promotional material. andthere's one sequence of these boys, so part of this piece has drawings then on the otherside is a clip of this sequence of 8- year-old little boys drawing. and there's one childin the foreground who's being asked to draw. his name is jackie and he is resistant. hedoes not communicate but he looks at the camera while an instructor, teacher, but also doctorin some ways is sitting beside him, telling him to draw and he refuses and looks intothe camera with this kind of stare that is unnerving, but refuses to draw.
but behind him, the other seven little boysare drawing like their lives depend on it. so there you have this soundtrack in the backgroundof the sound of their crayons or whatever kind of tool that they're using in creatingdrawings in the back, and it kind of just loops. and i thought his refusal was quitea beautiful and kind of intense thing of drawing. on the other side are some drawings that icollected that are found drawing, that are cartoonish of a male character, a female character,a house, a home , a kind of assembly of what "family", might be in terms of a cartoon. and then i drew on top of that images of jackienot drawing, just sitting with his head down on the table. so, in the creation of theseimages, his refusal to participate in being
a subject within that footage was quite apowerful one. you could say as promotional material for an institution they would say,"ok, this is what we don't want, and this is how we're going to reform him" but hisresistance to reform was really interesting to me. so yeah, that was the piece that wasthere; resistance to being rehabilitated. man 2: i don't know how to ask the questionexactly but the pieces that you have upstairs, where you have the found photographs and theserendipity of finding those, i guess the question i have is; the way those images weremade, with straight photography and analog photography and then how everything has changedto digital, do you think that's going to affect your work going forward?
lorna: does the digital affect my work goingforward, you mean? man 2: well, that and the fact that the waypeople are taking photographs now, digitally, it seems like there's not going to be theserendipity of finding these old photographs that people have kept forever and becauseit seems like the nature of analog photographs is so much more archival than digital thatit's something that i think about all the time, because i'm a photographer and was inspiredby those kind of found photographs and i'm thinking to myself, what's going to happento somebody in twenty years where maybe these photographs that you find aren't going tobe there? lorna: i think you'll find external drives.[laughter]
man 2: do you think about that and do youthink it will affect your work moving forward? lorna: the technology thing is two things;in all of the film projects that i've done and having to remaster them digitally, andso for the preservation of even my own work or to show it at certain points as neededto be upgraded from one platform to another. in terms of photography, i think there arecertain photo linen pieces that i did, they don't make that any more. they didn't makepolaroid anymore. now polaroid is coming back. i think there will be a return to the objectin terms of photography that it is not going to only exist within a digital realm, butcertainly i think the way that digital photography creates a kind of democratic agency in termsof who the photographer is and what they take
pictures of is important so that you don'treally need to have a big camera, all you need is your phone, your mode of communicationthat also takes films, that also can record things. in some ways the immediacy that everyone canfilm things is an interesting one to me. and so therefore in terms of authorship, i thinkpeople are less attached. you can put it online. my daughter makes films. they put things onfacebook. there are all these different ways that those images operate or films operatenow that i think is interesting. what it all means? i don't know. but i think probablyin the future in terms of looking back even at those images and the way that authorshipoperates is different than those of the photographs
of the past. it's still interesting even thoughit's digital. woman 1: can you talk a little bit how yourwork has changed since you added yourself into the images? lorna: that was just this year. [laughter] woman 1: if it has changed. lorna: it's a new change. if it has changed?i would say it's a different process for me in terms of doing that. so in that way thatdoes change me. it makes me really uncomfortable. i have a show next year in new york and idon't know what that's going to be, so i'm kind of playing with ideas of, how much furtherdo i take that project or does that become
a film project in a different way? i thinkas an artist you're always remaking yourself to a certain extent. i am not so attached to my work that i makeit and it feels like something that it belongs to me. once it's done it's kind of in my mindsomewhat gone. and so i'm always kind of reinventing myself every time which used to drive me crazymaybe 15-20 years ago, but now it's ok, it's time to pull back and do something else orgo down the same road again and figure out what else you want to do with a particularidea. so for me i'm more interested in either dialoguewith myself or the process of making things than the end product. the end product canbe interesting, sometimes successful, sometimes
not but so long as it pushes me as an artistin terms of my own process. woman 2: in the wig piece there are some wigsin nets photographed hanging. i thought that was very interesting because the wigs themselvesalmost look like an anthropological exhibition. but the ones that are in nets look like brainsto me. lorna: look like brains? woman 2: look like brains. and it made mefeel like the piece was, and i don't if this is true, a comment on the way people are objectifiedby science, i guess you could say. and particularly the studies that used to be done to show thatwomen's brains where such and such, and black people's brains where such and such. and thatway of taking the human subject and objectifying.
it just struck me that the mass of them hangingin those nets was so brain-like; i just wondered if that was in your head at all. lorna: not really. [laughter] woman 2: yeah. lorna: but i think in terms of modes of presentationand the way we think of them. in terms of gender, if anyone has lived their life andthe society or people around them question their gender, there is all this rush to medicalscience, to determine what someone's true identity is which is much different than theway that i see things or in the way that person lives their lives. so a lot of the contentthat, that particular piece is about an imposition
of the binary idea of gender in the societythat we live in. but people don't live by that rule. therefore the conflict upon someone'spost mortem, i guess this, is what you're saying reminds me of really what i was afterin the piece in that there is a rush in terms a rush of post-mortem examination to determinewhat someone's true gender is, as opposed to acknowledging their life as a descriptionof what that is. yes. woman 3: first of all, thank you for sharingall of this work. i have a question about what happens behind the scenes, with regardsto a couple of the pieces upstairs. for the video installation "recollection", which youshot in the twin cities and the found photos,
which you later become the subject of thatare inserted into it. how much is the result of collaboration with the crew and the actorsyou're working with? how much is scripted, for example? in "recollection", how much isthe result of the site specific vibrations in the auditorium and what happens with theactors and the crew? and with the found photos, do you have like an art director or costumeperson, who's helping you bring these objects together? really, what is the production processthat leads to those products? lorna: well, what you have to remember isthat their done really really fast. in some ways i would fly in, scout locations, scoutavailability of locations, select them and then cross your fingers that they actuallywill be available the day that you ask for
them to be available, casting different peoplefrom the area. in terms of acting, it's scripted but it's more like i tell actors. i give themstories and then i ask them to retell the story. so there's never a script. the scriptcontains a story that they either have to react to or reinterpret. and those are earlyworks. so in terms of the way that i handled that, was improvisation. and early on doingthose kinds of projects with actors, you turn on the camera and because of time and becauseof budget, you turn the camera on immediately. you don't do a rehearsal, you don't prep anyone.you kind of quietly, as they're getting ready, i would talk to them about what it is. butthen we would immediately start shooting. because for some reason the first take wasalways the best take, i don't know why, although
we took many. so the projects are kind of really conciselyorganized in terms of time. i had a friend of mine who works in film who does costume.i begged her to come out there, to help me organize it, because it is in terms of time.i can't manage everything at the same time, because we're doing everything at once. but in terms of crew i worked. tom hayes isa film maker who lives in columbus, ohio that came here to work and got a crew here as well.and i worked with [indecipherable 1:03:17.9] who was a curatorial. i've forgotten whatyou guys, what do you got, curatorial? woman 4: fellow.
lorna: fellow. thank you. here and also withkelly jones who was also a curatorial, an old friend and curatorial intern here. andactually it was her inspiration to have me come. i enjoy those because they're reallytight and short and frenetically made, in a way and although it's big in terms thatthere are a lot of people but it's done in a very short period of time. there is a lotof collaboration and leeway, in terms of, if something doesn't work, you've got to makeit work, and do something else or something might come to me that morning for a characterto say, and i just have them say it. woman 5: and with the photos, how much wereyou consciously improvising for [inaudible 1:04:12.9] or fight against that, [inaudible1:04:15.4]
lorna: of course cindy sherman's work, interms of the 1958 photographs comes to mind, but i guess what was fascinating to me aboutthose images of that woman, was that she was doing that in 1958. so, in some ways, theway that she was adopting all these different kind of hollywood posing and characters, andactresses and artifice of modeling, and femininity, and setting a stage, was really an interestingone to me. so while, yes, it is definitely, and i have to acknowledge cindy sherman, butat the same time, it's about a specific person, who is adopting a particular stance at a particularperiod of time. so for 1958, for a black woman in los angeles to be making this project,is a really interesting one to me, and the focus of the characters she was playing wasinteresting. yes.
man 3: and briefly, viewing your photographyand in questioning the motive for your use of words alongside your photography, i thoughtof jean michel basquiat, and his use of words alongside his paintings, except he was moreso influenced by graffiti, and he actually sought the viewer to recognize the connectionbetween the words and his pieces, whereas you seek the viewer to recognize that photographyhas a narrative beyond what it documents. but in that, are you not guiding the viewerto, in a sense, recognize? lorna: a specific reading? man 3: exactly. lorna: yeah. [laughter]
lorna: absolutely. so in a very simple way,you would say it's an argument against being objective, or objective observer. and so then,as a viewer, you are given something very specific to think about. that's part of theintention. yes. woman 6: hi, i was wondering if you speaka little bit about the role of memory in your work, especially with the pieces of the founditems that you're using, because all of them, the photographs especially, have their ownstory, have their own memory that it's projecting. how do you negotiate your ultimate visionfor the piece, and what's out there, what your out there, presented was. lorna: i think in some ways, those piecesdangerously go close to nostalgia, which is
my one fear of them. but on the other hand,i don't think i really look at them as a collective memory, but it's more how anonymous they are,so that the impossibility of actually knowing anything about the people in the photographsbut a moment of them, having taken their own picture, kind of making an own self portrait.and i find that captivating. i don't believe i am revealing anything about them really,and even i find that fascinating. i mean, that's part of the thing with the woman from1958, that i can step in, and i become a chameleon within her projects. i still, after even mimickingher, and standing in her place, i know nothing about her. and i don't really, even in theimages, reveal anything about her, other than showing a particular moment about artifice,and a woman's project that took three months,
and kind of what that says. but in terms ofits emotional connection or exact memory, identification as to saying more about thatindividual they all remain anonymous. woman 7: in seeing the photographs on feltat the wexner center they have a very tactile feel and beauty to them that actually is verydifferent than experiencing a photograph. could you talk about the process behind thedecision to use felt? lorna: it was very simple; i got tired ofgoing to the framer. [laughter] lorna: no, i had a project at the fabric workshopin philadelphia and was invited, which was run by kippy stroud, and was invited commissionedto do a piece. and when i walked in they have this amazing table, that's like, this is probablyexaggerated, maybe it could be fifty feet,
of fabric. and i was just like, i am not doinga piece with fabric. i refuse to do a piece with fabric. but at the same time i mean that'sa simplification because they do many different things with armature and sculpture. and thatfabric workshop has more to do with the original space that they offer in terms of factorythat they occupy. and, in doing that, i think before i went to the fabric workshop i'd beenliving in paris and went to see a joseph boy show that was kind of amazing. with these different piles of felt and felton the walls with a piano. i think it was the first time i'd seen, i'd studied his work,but the first time i kind of really saw a lot of it in a beautiful installation. so,i think that was in the back of my mind.
because when i decided to work with felt isaid, "aww, s*** [expletive] , you know its boys, is it time, is it time that someoneelse can, you know, work with felt". and so i really just experimented. like, oh, i wonderwhat that would look like if you printed an image on it, and it's tactile kind of drawingsense. but what's beautiful about those pieces in a way is that as you get close to themthe more they break up and the image falls apart but kind of from a distance they'reread as these photographic images. but i think part of you know, this all soundsvery ordinary now. but i think that in the time that i started doing photography, thinkof like the late 70's or early 80's even doing large scale photography with the work thati was doing.
for different institutions, either, in museums,my work was not collected under photography. my work was collected under painting and sculpture.and so, you know, it's become much more broad now in terms of thinking of what photographyis and what it can be printed on. i mean i think at that time it was very stratisfied.it was like, ok, that's not really photography. photography is really under works on paperso to speak, within an institutional framework. and so now, all of that has changed. my playin wanting to play with materials and stuff is always been there. man 4: hi. thank you so much. you've givenus so much to think about. i wanted to ask about the mass moca project and piece. twoquestions; one is, did you think about these
two houses as racialized spaces and the waythe black women move through those houses seems quite as if it is their space. and yet,certainly the gropius house and probably the other house never had african americans livingin them, claiming them as space. so i wondered about that. and i also wonder about the relationshipin time. i think you used the verb "smash", "smashing the two periods together" and iwondered if you could say a little bit about how you think different historical periodsconnect to each other or coexist, overlap, or simultaneous or do exist in some linearway. and that might also be connected to the question about memory. lorna: for the coffin house and walter gropiushouse, you know the coffin house in massachusetts
known for its part of the underground railroadso runaway slaves would occupy, and be living in different structures and hiding, eitherin basements or out of sight, in order for them to make their way, and also as servants.basically there were all these little different variations of slavery, of servitude. so yes,there is a little sequence which i did not show for the coffin house, where she's writing,so really her most dangerous activity is sitting by a candle writing, and then hears a noiseand she gets up and puts it away and leaves the room. with the gropius house, i wouldsay 1960's and certainly within the midwest, washington d.c., parts of the south and certainlythe northeast, there is a kind of black middle class, it's the rise of the black middle classand upper class black strata. and so, yes,
there were black people and what comes tomind for me is chicago, and my family was from different parts of chicago, and the kindof johnson & johnson empire, there were black folks living in modernist homes. but partof the piece is really in two political moments, to contemplate what's going on in these people'smind, given the time period. so one is pre-emancipation, and the otherone in the middle of civil rights arrests, so if you think of chicago in 1960, and whatthat means, and what is going on in people's minds, or in 1860s, what that means in termsof pre-emancipation. but also then to think of our own lives, in terms of politics andone's interior life, what do you think about what's going on in the world around you. sothat's some of the way that works. so with
the regard to memory, there are two periodsthat are important periods in american history, and of course we continue to live throughthem now. woman 8: thank you for being here, and forsharing your insights with us, it's a real pleasure to hear you speak about your work.and i have two questions that relate to the photo booth piece. is it just one piece thatconsists of the photo booth images? lorna: yes. woman 8: ok, because i haven't been up toyour gallery yet, but i did see your work in the "dress codes" exhibition, in the fall. lorna: oh, there are several different photobooth pieces.
woman 8: ok, there are. ok, so my questionsare what motivated you to integrate the watercolor drawings into that piece and then also thearrangement on the wall. lorna: well i had been doing drawings, there'ssomething about when you find these photographs, they come ripped off what was maybe a blackbinder, and so there's stains, there's chemical deterioration, and patterns on the backs ofthese images. so the watercolors seemed to kind of mimic that for me, and because i wasdrawing, i was like, ah, throw in a watercolor, why not. it doesn't always have to just beall photography. another piece i did later where the sizes of the frames, like the bronzeframes then become little blocks as well, that mimic the solid elements of these frames,but also solid elements that mimic the size
and the shape of the photographs so the piecekind of changes from time to time. i've forgotten part of your question! woman 8: [inaudible 1:16:41.7] lorna: it's like a cloud, so i mean to methey're just supposed to be dispersed. but of course, when you show it in either in institutions,everybody wants a template, so we install it kind of just arbitrarily, and then we haveto sometimes make a template of the arbitrary installation! they're supposed to be hung;you just put them on the wall, there aren't supposed to be instructions to them. woman 9: i have a question about you're, asan artist, public persona and the public consumption
of you. there's a new york times article thatwas kind of cool, about the architecture in your home, or being in a gap ad. and i'm curioushow you.. lorna: my daughter made me do that. [laughter] lorna: she was not going to let me live withoutbeing in that. woman 9: i was kind of curious how; two things,one, how you kind of view that gaze, or that consumption or photography with this otherpurpose of you. and then, also, if there seems to be more of a demand for that in more recentyears? as opposed to how much somebody bugged you ten years ago for that sort of thing? lorna: it's funny. the gap ad, i was asked,actually, in the 80's to do that, and i turned
it down. and then i would tell my friends,and they were like, "are you crazy? you could have donated the money. are you crazy?" igot a lot of flack for turning that down, for the kind of monetary exchange, and whati could do with that so, then, when that came back again, and having, i think maybe zora,my daughter, was ten or nine? and they also asked for her. it was kind of interesting,because she was like, "oh, we're doing this." lorna: she could not, "what do you mean youturned it down?" she couldn't believe that. but what's interesting, in terms of her andthat ad, is in raising a child who is in a biracial, but kind of black identified interms of the way that she thinks about herself. and if you see this ad, her hair is like...you think my hair is out there? her hair is
really out there. it really confirmed forher, and i got tons of emails, and i see things in blogs, just in terms of the way that welooked. and within society, how that is not prevalent, or how that how that is not anideal in terms of beauty. so even her ideas about herself, that herhair isn't straight enough, or it's not this, or it's not that. or her friend's hair isstraight. or can she get her hair straight; her own sense of her own beauty. to be photographedlike that confirmed other things for her, about her own beauty which was kind of interesting. and i got a lot of comments from other peopleabout their children, and the way that they see themselves in terms of what is the "ideal"in terms of looks for americans.
so, but the other article was really aboutdavid adjay, who was the architect that my husband and i commissioned to build studiosfor us. and so the times article was really about him and his project as an architect.and kind of what is what like, somewhat, to work with him. but what his program is, asan architect. so, i'm not that consumable, i think, on apublic level. woman 10: you'd spoken some about your relationshipto reinventing yourself and your practice, over the years. and i wonder how it feelsdifferent to do that now, as opposed to, say, 15 years ago, when you said it drove you crazy.this discussion is for the artists out there, maybe younger artists who are, or, you know,people who have a studio practice as well,
and just kind of wondering what your relationshipto that desire to always bring new content, or new ideas into your studios. and how youmanage it mentally, or channel into a final project. lorna: you know if it's really difficult,not that when things are hard, and work is difficult, that it means it's going to begood. although, you know, carol walker will tell you that in a minute. like, "oh, thatwas hard, that's going to be good." [laughter] lorna: but i do think there is something tobe said about challenging yourself, and not being afraid to do so and certainly more nowthan i said in the past the kind of demand of a market; less so for maybe older artists,but certainly for younger artists trying to
fill a certain niche. or you have work thatis successful, that sells, so do you still make it? i think those are things that i reallydidn't have to struggle with. but certainly whatever the demands are or the conversationthat you have with yourself about your work is the germane thing to protect and whatevercomes out of that, comes out of that so, i kind of am not a believer in failure or badwork. not to say that i don't make bad work, but that it's more about the process, andpushing myself. and you always learn something more about who you are as an artist, and whatyour interests are, and how things come out. to experiment is important. well, thank you. thank you so much.