Daring as a Woman: An Interview with Lorna Simpson
The following is excerpted from Conversations with Artists, a collection of conversations by Heidi Zuckerman with thirty-four contemporary artists.
INTERVIEWER
Your work is extensive and takes many different forms. How do you respond when people ask you what you do?
SIMPSON
It gives me pause when people ask me what I do, because there are so many different avenues that my work has gone down. Photography being one avenue, film and video another, more recently—over the past five years—drawing, using inks, and collage.
Although I’m trained in different areas, I gravitate more toward the photographic arts. I’ve always left it open as to how I work in different mediums and try not to put too many boundaries on what I do. It’s more about experimenting or the process of making that matters.
INTERVIEWER
Do you consider your works to be narrative based?
SIMPSON
Many, yes. My earlier works from the eighties and midnineties are very narrative based. But even more recently, the work has an undercurrent of the narrative of the archive, of found photographs, implied narratives, and fictions.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe it’s because of the stage that was set by your earlier pieces, but there’s something about your work that allows viewers to figure out what their relationship is to the image that’s presented. There’s comfort in establishing some idea of a story line, whether it’s there or not.
SIMPSON
True. There’s some context, history, or implied narrative that exists in the things that I find, and in some of the more recent work, my own memory gets played out. At the same time, not everyone is going to interpret the work in the same way, which I find interesting—that’s the area where it seems more open because I don’t try to force an interpretation on those metanarratives that are operating.
INTERVIEWER
Right, it’s surprisingly open. Sometimes you depict yourself in your work, sometimes you don’t. When do you choose to use your own image?
SIMPSON
More recently, I’ve been in my work, but in the past, I’d always used surrogates or even friends of mine to pose for me. A number of years ago, I found a photograph of a woman from 1950s California who was an actress
