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On Photography

Evoking What Can’t Be Seen

Detail from “Montage,” 2018.Credit...Lorna Simpson. From Hauser & Wirth.

Blues, dark teal and deep purple. Black. The colors of night and dreams. A fully clothed woman sleeps in bed, her arms in the uncalculated attitude of the unconscious. Another woman stands on a ledge, on the verge of endangering her life or of saving it. Then the same figures, fragmented and rearranged, their colors flowing into one another, repeat across the five sections of a nearly 21-foot span, intensifying the sensation of physical precarity and dream logic. “Montage,” Lorna Simpson’s new work of photography, screen print and painting, is one of the featured pictures in her forthcoming London gallery show, “Unanswerable.” It’s an apt title. Simpson’s work, which often suspends meaning even while seeming to promise that resolution is close, has long had something productively elusive about it.

Simpson’s first notable successes were photographs paired with texts. The photos were black and white, simple and direct, usually of a single female figure, often seen from the back. The texts, far from resolving the image, were suggestive and inconclusive. In “Waterbearer” (1986), a woman in a plain white shift dress pours water from two vessels, a plastic jug in one hand, a metal ewer in the other. She’s turned away from us. The text below the photograph, rendered in all caps, reads: “SHE SAW HIM DISAPPEAR BY THE RIVER, THEY ASKED HER TO TELL WHAT HAPPENED, ONLY TO DISCOUNT HER MEMORY.” What is the incident here? Who is “she” and who “him” and who “they”? It is as though we’ve been thrust into a detective story containing only the faintest trace of the original incident. All that remains is a parable of a woman who is not believed. “Waterbearer,” in its radical simplicity, crosses a distance of more than three decades to comment on current affairs.

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‘‘Montage,’’ 2018.Credit...Lorna Simpson. From Hauser & Wirth.

Like “Waterbearer,” many other works of Simpson’s from that period — including “Twenty Questions (A Sampler)” (1986), “Five Day Forecast” (1988) and “7 Mouths” (1993) — are both figurative and fragmentary. Evenly lit, crisply photographed, they look like pictures from an illustrated medical dictionary, indexical images of heads, torsos and mouths that are detached from context. Even in a work like “Figure” (1991), the figure in question, sheathed in a black dress and set in the black infinity of no particular place, feels like a fragment, as though she had been extracted from a group photo or a furnished room. The texts accompanying her, eight engraved plastic plaques, read like excerpts from a language primer: “figured the worst,” “he was disfigured,” “figured there would be no reaction” and so on. Here, not only has the story been winnowed down; it is in fact completely gone. There’s no story. We are left with only the tensions of concrete poetry.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, Simpson began to detect clichéd responses to her work. At the same time, her own thinking was evolving. What does an image of a black woman mean? A commentary on race? An assertion about gender? Simpson branched out from figure-based images and began to experiment more with varied subject matter — landscapes and inanimate objects like wigs — and also with unusual quasi-sculptural material like felt and standing screens. A series of monumental multisectional images, several of them landscapes, collectively titled “Public Sex” (1995-1998) and featuring no figures at all, addressed the provocative title only obliquely. These pictures, made over many years, contain what the scholar and curator Okwui Enwezor calls “the rumor of the body.” Mysteries of a jagged and deadpan sort, they would go on to influence the noirish tone of Simpson’s later film work.

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“9 Props,” 1995.Credit...Lorna Simpson. From Hauser & Wirth.

Simpson began to set ever more intricate conceptual layers between her initial inspiration for a work and the finished product. The idea for “9 Props” (1995) began during a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington. With the aid of artisans at the school, she fabricated a series of dark vessels modeled on vases and other objects used in the portrait work of the pioneering Harlem photographer James Van Der Zee. But these vessels were not the final work. She shipped them back to New York and then photographed them against a plain background. And that still was not the work. Further intervention followed: She turned those photographic images into nine lithographs, which she printed on felt. Finally, she wrote captions below each lithographed vessel, describing the context in which it originally appeared. One of them, for instance, reads:

Dinner Party with boxer Harry Wills,

1926

James VanDerZee

Harry Wills a k a “The Black Panther,” boxer, businessman- sits with seven other men and women, mostly women with champagne glasses raised as a woman on his left makes a toast in his honor. There are three bottles of champagne, a crystal decanter, a bottle of port, an arrangement of flowers and fruit, and before each guest an untouched china place setting.

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Detail from “9 Props,” 1995.Credit...Lorna Simpson. From Hauser & Wirth.

From multiple directions, the work gestures at what cannot be seen: the original placement of the vessels that inspired Simpson’s own, the people in the photographs by James Van Der Zee, the social life of Harlem evoked by his photographs and the complexity of manners and class implied by them. All that vanished world of culture and experience is reduced to an elegant grid, as simple as an antiquarian’s catalog, a thought picture that demands calm engagement and imaginative intervention on the viewer’s part. Without being representational, it is about race; but race is not off in some category by itself, hemmed in only by questions of skin color, separate from life.

“Represent!” in the black American sense means standing up for your people, expressing solidarity and letting a shared ethos underwrite your presence and work. It is an exhortation, a greeting and a farewell. The word also has more conventional associations. In the visual arts, it is contrasted with the abstract or the symbolic. To represent, in this more common sense, is to make work that visually corresponds to realities out there in the world: to illustrate uncomplicatedly. This second sense of “represent” is enjoying a vogue in the art world. Realism is back. This is welcome: after so long an absence of black figures and black faces in art museums, they are now being seen more frequently. Many artists, black and otherwise, are depicting the black body. It is necessary and often successful. Just as often, it fails when it is little more than a clumsy shorthand for socially concerned art, unobjectionable and unimpressive.

A strong appeal of Simpson’s work is that she has always embraced the inherent complexity of blackness, her own blackness as well as the blackness that runs ineluctably through American history. She does not reject representational depictions, but neither does she feel the need to confine herself only to “race” work. When an artist uses a black model, she is presenting a human question by foregrounding a human presence. Is a white man a person while a black woman is and can only be a gendered and racialized subject? As the scholar Kellie Jones has pointed out, nonwhite bodies are often thought of as “not neutral enough for the dispassionate formulas thought to constitute conceptual practice.” If a black woman’s race and gender are the only things apparent to certain viewers, Simpson seems to say, the ethical responsibility to escape those shackles is the viewer’s.

Freedom is Lorna Simpson’s starting point and her permanent theme. A humane current animates all of her work, a current that neither sidesteps nor confines itself to race. Her work is simultaneously about the “neutral” space of ideas and the particularized experience of the body. “Montage” is photographic and painterly, a riff on a pair of found photographs, sequenced to look like a giant strip of film. It deals with dreams and nightmares, ambiguities and vulnerabilities. At its heart is what Simpson calls “the push and pull of photography”: the stuttering potential inherent in mechanical reproduction and the imperfect registrations that mirror subconscious life. It is a rapid response to the current political climate, situating a crucial part of it in the most intimate space of all, where the hectoring “they” is temporarily held at bay in favor of the puzzled “I.” In your own sleeping bed, images persist and words are hard to come by. It is the art we need now: rich, allusive, tongue-tied and unanswerable.

Teju Cole is a photographer and the author of four books, the most recent of which is “Blind Spot.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 12 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Evoking What Can’t Be Seen. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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