that we are all human

Posted: December 15th, 2024 | Tags: Uncategorized | No Comments »

feeling kind of ornery that there isn’t (hasn’t been?) (**update: it’s here now phew) a proper ny times obituary for lorraine o’grady after reading all about her here and here and here. these art is… photographs / performance are hitting me. from the ny times:

When you start a new piece, where do you begin?
Well, I’m still basically a conceptual artist, so the first thing that happens is that I get an idea, and then I figure out the best way to express it. I move from idea to idea fairly rapidly. I’d say I’m a breadth artist, not a depth artist. I never went tumbling down the rabbit hole the way most visual artists did, going deeper and deeper into their craft until they got to something bigger, some bedrock of truth. Perhaps because I’m not crafted, and because, having come to art later in life, I don’t have the time. In other words, I’m not playing in art as much as other artists would be playing — I’m out there to make the best possible work and as close to a masterpiece as I can. I think of myself as somebody who’s working on the skin of the culture and constantly making incisions and stuffing works into each incision, the way you’d season a turkey so that the flavor gets in, even if you don’t have much of the original material left.

and from the brooklyn rail:

Rail: What do you believe art is supposed to do?
O’Grady: I’m old-fashioned. I think art’s first goal is to remind us that we are human, whatever that is. I suppose the politics in my art could be to remind us that we are all human.

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