Lorraine O'Grady

            Mauss’s article on Lorraine O’Grady highlights a number of the artist’s striking qualities, particularly her ability to express her own vulnerability as a flawed human being while simultaneously invoking striking personas and aggressive poetry. I think O’Grady explains this well in her description of Rivers, First Draft: “I confess, in my work I keep trying to yoke together my underlying concerns as a member of the human species with my concerns as a woman and black in America. It’s hard, and sometimes the work splits in two…. But I keep trying, because I don’t see how history can be divorced from ontogeny and still produce meaningful political solutions.” The context in which she uses the word ontogeny is important in understanding her emphasis on development as a person, and the transience in performance that mirrors the kinds of progress, and failure, that it takes to become who we are now. At first, I didn’t quite understand what Mauss meant when he described some of the concepts involved in the artist’s Rivers: “A multitude of characters… describe in tableaux vivants the arc of O’Grady’s becoming-an-artist as the simultaneous and incompatible experiences that actually constitute a life coming into focus.” What would constitute experiences as “incompatible” in the context of this reading?