|
Article Excerpt
In the fall of 2002, while in New York City researching my dissertation on contemporary African-American artists' engagements with the slave past, I modeled for Lorna Simpson, a practitioner whose work has figured largely in my own. (1) In this essay, I want to consider the liabilities posed and the possibilities engendered by my positioning on both sides of the camera, and to reexamine the significance of masculinity in the oeuvre of an artist who has been lauded by numerous writers for her visual deconstruction of "the black woman." (2)
Before I posed for Simpson I had never formally met her, though we had several friends in common. It was one of those friends who made the connection. I was at IKEA, browsing for bookshelves with my roommate, when she rang and told me that Lorna needed a model. None of the artist's more obvious choices were available: was I free? "Uh ... yeah!" I immediately agreed, in part because I was honored, in part because I needed the money--and despite a vague concern that such collusion with one of "my artists" might undermine the integrity of my critical work. My confidants and colleagues were unequivocally thrilled. Posing for Simpson, they told me--as I soon came to tell myself--would be an excellent way for me to gain insight into her process. Thanks to this entree, I developed a social and professional rapport with the artist, who generously invited me into her home, answered my research questions, allowed me to consult her personal archives, and even entertained me at her wedding.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. About a week after the call, Lorna showed up at my stoop in Bed-Stuy, picked me up in her SUV, and whisked me off. The shoot itself, done in the back of her cluttered Brooklyn studio over the course of a few hours, was at once relatively unremarkable and utterly unforgettable. Having never sat for an artist, I somehow imagined a scene not unlike the one played out in Lynda Benglis's 1973 video Now, with me squirming as I tried to live up to and cannily outdo the artist's expectations. "Do you wish to direct me? Do you wish to direct me, Lorna?" Thankfully, there was no such aphasic frenzy. Simpson did direct, patiently, almost offhandedly, requesting that I turn my head or torso this way or that, occasionally snapping her Polaroid instant camera, then pulling off the black-and-white image and glancing at it briefly, as if to make a quick decision about its future before she set it down to dry.
All the while, we chatted about the work, the weather, and the people we knew in common as the radio played a procession of smooth soul hits. Knowing the coolly explosive visual effect of her work, I did my best to be equally cool. I wanted to seem laidback, though I kept worrying that I had worn the wrong T-shirt, I couldn't help thinking that I should have shaved, and I found myself hoping that Lorna would use what I considered to be the more flattering takes. Like Roland Barthes writing in Camera Lucida, I hoped "that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs," would seamlessly "coincide with my (profound) 'self' ... "Yet as the theorist is quick to remind us, "It is the contrary that must be said: 'myself' never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and 'myself' which is light, divided, dispersed ..." (3) I was similarly preoccupied. Although I well knew the ability of Simpson's work to index and undo precisely those means by which society sustains its images of black subjects, I could not help but wonder: what of my "self" would I find in Simpson's photographs once they were matted, paired with text, and arranged in grids?
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The less existential questions came later as my accounts of the experience entered into circulation. "Are you nude?" one friend asked. Another immediately wanted to know how much I had been paid for my services and only half-jokingly inquired if I could "hook a sister up." The more surreal queries arose once the works were completed and installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art for Simpson's exhibition that year, Cameos and Appearances. One day as I sat in the gallery engaged in the queer act of taking notes on art featuring my own image, a not unattractive man in his early forties approached me. I thought he was cruising, but no: he just wondered if my presence in the gallery was part of the work. The memory of that encounter evokes a heady triangulation of gaze, desire,...
|
