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<\/a><\/p>\nThis past Sunday at the Hole Gallery, the Future Feminism Exhibition lionized artist Lorraine O\u2019Grady by honoring the 20th anniversary of the publication of her seminal art historical text Olympia\u2019s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity<\/em> with a live reading by a collective of voices. Readers included art world notables such as Narcissister, Alice O\u2019Malley, Xaviera Simmons, Ayana Evans, Martha Wilson, Ben Davis, Karen Finley and others. Following the reading, everyone shared a frosted cake in honor of O\u2019Grady\u2019s 80th Birthday.<\/span><\/p>\n A powerful and poignant essay in itself, the live recitation of Olympia\u2019s Maid<\/em> reminded all those in attendance that whatever crumbs of intersectional feminism are finally and haphazardly surfacing today in mainstream journalism certainly trace back to the clarion call O\u2019Grady made when she emerged on the New York City art scene as a critic and performer over thirty years ago. Not only did Lorraine O\u2019Grady rock the tepid and shallow waters of the art world back in the 80s with her art-critical persona Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, she was also the only person qualified and bold enough to write her renegade work into the official canon.<\/p>\n Born in the United States to parents of Caribbean Jamaican origin, O\u2019Grady always maintained a radical eclecticism and critical distance from art world politics in her work. Come 1992, she would jet-rocket the artistic canon up to speed with her publication of Olympia\u2019s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity<\/em>, the first ever comprehensive article of art criticism on black female subjectivity and the black female body.<\/p>\n Exploring race, class and social identity, O\u2019Grady\u2019s work over the years has dealt head on with issues of miscegenation, cultural appropriation, the politics of black subversive style and black female agency. It was Lorraine, during a PERFORMA panel I attended several years ago, who schooled a young feminist like myself on the cat o’ nine tails, a 9-pronged implement used to whip blacks during slavery. In that very same lecture, she argued why Michael Jackson was the last real Modernist. It was Lorraine, during a panel on Feminism and Popular Music at the Soho20 gallery (O\u2019Grady was also formerly a rock critic for Rolling Stone), who publicly thanked Eleanor Antin for doing her blackface ballerina performance, saying, it was the moment she knew that she (as a black woman) had to make art. Fast forward to 2014, where we witnessed O\u2019Grady\u2019s text read at the Hole by a large group that included successful contemporary black female artists, it\u2019s clear that her germinal text paved the way for many.<\/p>\n In the work of Narcissister, who in addition to reading O\u2019Grady\u2019s text performed her solo work as part of the Hole\u2019s Future Feminism series, one sees clear links to both O\u2019Grady\u2019s performance work and her seminal writing. Narcissister, the daughter of a Moroccan Jewish mother and African American father, always performs in a garish, Barbie-esque mask. Performing what the New York Times has termed \u201cavant-porn,\u201d Narcissister is able to metaphorically embody the shifting, double, \u201cboth\/and\u201d psychic space that O\u2019Grady attributes to black folks navigating a white world in Olympia\u2019s Maid<\/em>. Drawing from modern dance, neo-burlesque, performance art, collage, sewing, craft and a wide range of traditionally \u201cfeminine arts\u201d to construct her unique performative idiom, Narcissister of all contemporary artists best exemplifies Lorraine O\u2019Grady\u2019s shift toward black female as questioning, post-modern, diasporic subject.<\/p>\n As O\u2019Grady situates the black female body in a white male economy, she is peripheral, necessarily invisible. She doubly serves as Jezebel and Mammy, \u201cwhen we\u2019re through with her inexhaustibly comforting breast, we can use her ceaselessly open cunt.\u201d Narcissister, who has always wisely remained within and outside the commercial art market place, has in many ways brought to life Olympia\u2019s Maid<\/em> as the keystone of O\u2019Grady\u2019s work and scholarly discourse around the black female body. Whether performing as a huge, glittering and furry vagina in early work or pulling god knows what out of her own, Narcissister has garnered much attention for her work as she confronts, displaces, and obliterates various signifiers which still cling to the (black) female body in popular imagination. Narcissister is also the coronated queen of self-pleasure. Whatever queer heteroglossia of terms she adopts to seduce viewers \u2013 candy colored aerobic wear, black power Afro, self-gratifying exercise bike, junk food, cigarettes, weapons, mirrors, dynamite, Barbie dolls \u2013 her commitment to place herself and her own pleasure at center always and only prevails.<\/p>\n During Narcissister\u2019s evening at the Hole during the 13 days of Future Feminism she performed her signature four-headed doll\/house piece. In the video leading into the live performance, set against ghostly nursery music, we see Narcissister\u2019s hands playing with a topsy-turvy doll at a dollhouse. A folk toy of reconstruction, topsy-turvy is a two-headed doll that is white on one end, and black on the other, fusing a white baby girl with a black mammy hidden under her skirt (and vice versa). As the piece leads into a live performance, we see Narcissister shed layers and layers of clothing and masks and guises as is her characteristic swag. When she finally emerges – perfectly poised in a handstand – she has become the four-headed being, doll, woman, medium, monster. She is the integrated self. In place of the genitals that have often spoken in her work hangs the topsy-turvy headed version of her lingering quadruple consciousness. Narcissister as muse, as mirror, as chiaroscuro, as four-headed monster\u2026 she is certainly, black female as questioning self.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u201cThe female body in the west is not a unitary sign,\u201d begins Olympia\u2019s Maid<\/em>, \u201cRather, like a coin, it has an obverse and a reverse: on the one side, it is white; on the other, not white, or, prototypically, black. The two bodies cannot be separated, nor can one body be understood in isolation from the other in the West\u2019s metaphoric construction of \u201cwoman.\u201d Olympia\u2019s Maid<\/em> cuts to the heart of truth when it claims that black bodies in visual culture function as chiaroscuro, a mirror casting the definition of whiteness in sharp relief. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Digging deep into the West\u2019s \u201ctheatre of sexual hierarchy,\u201d O\u2019Grady\u2019s writing marked a huge shift toward \u201cwinning back the position of the questioning subject for the black female,\u201d in the art world and society at large. In this particular text Lorraine also defends the idea that black women (coming out of civil rights) were the first official Feminists, alluding to how the white middle class feminism that still to this day falsely animates the word in the popular imagination was largely built on the success of two black revolutions.<\/p>\n