STUDIES FOR A 16-DIPTYCH INSTALLATION TO BE CALLED
"FLOWERS OF EVIL AND GOOD"
by Lorraine O'Grady
Charles Baudelaire is often referred to as both the West's first modern poet and its
first modern art critic. It would be no exaggeration to say that Baudelaire created
his most important poetry out of his responses to an allegedly destructive relationship with Jeanne Duval, his black common-law wife of 20 years. A close reading of his
poetry would indicate that he may also have developed his aesthetic theory, that
of a beauty which is contradictory and ambiguous and of its time, based on the example
she provided as well.
Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), published in 1857, was a turning-point for European poetry, like that given painting
50 years later in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Each work embodies the psychologically complex ways modernism constructed itself
out of Europe's encounter with the worlds it colonized. Seen in this way, Les Fleurs du mal
is the more interesting: whereas the Demoiselles
struggled to contain already mediated forms of art, Flowers
was dealing with the body and psyche of a live and messy human being.
None of Duval's own words remain: she does not speak for herself either in Baudelaire's
poetry or prose, and there is an indication that Charles' mother may have destroyed
her letters to him. In addition, there are no civil documents permitting a reconstruction of her life, though most evidence points to her having emigrated to Paris from
Haiti in the 1830s. They met in 1842, when Baudelaire was 21 and she was possibly
the same age.
The language component of the final installation, Flowers of Evil and Good, each of whose 16 diptychs contains one panel representing Baudelaire and one Duval,
will be in sustained disequilibrium: Charles speaks in poetry, Jeanne "speaks" in
prose.
On Baudelaire's side of the diptychs, the language is taken from my own translations
of Les Fleurs du mal
--I found it necessary to do my own because later translators, like the critics, erased
and demonized Jeanne in a way that Charles had not. On the Duval side, her words
are a fiction, written by me, to fill the silence of this woman-without-speech, and
I know that I am as guilty as Charles. I too am using Jeanne. Perhaps to understand my
mother, Lena who emigrated from Jamaica to Boston in the 1920s, when little had changed
for the metropolitan woman of color and, in turn, to understand myself.
Jeanne's demonization began almost immediately in the memoires of Baudelaire's friends
and has continued for 150 years to a greater extent in the writings of his critics.
John D. Bennett, in a book published by Princeton University Press in 1944 and frequently reprinted, in describing Baudelaire as a Louis XV out of time made the following
extreme but symptomatic statement: "This Bourbon Louis took his pleasures not in
the Parc au Cerfs
but in a cheap furnished room with a mulattress. His lever
was elaborate; he took two hours to perform his immaculate toilette every morning.
But the only courtier was the maniac on the bed, the raucous gesticulating Jeanne,
rolling her white nigger eyeballs, chattering incoherently like a monkey."
Charles often admitted his need for her--and his debt to her--speaking in one prose
poem of "his beloved, delicious and execrable wife, that mysterious wife to whom
he owed so many pleasures, so many sorrows, and perhaps too a large part of his genius."
Because Baudelaire was a great poet, even at his angriest and most petty, although
Jeanne is presented externally it is surprising how well she may be discerned by
the sympathetic reader, not just in the "Black Venus" cycle but throughout Les Fleurs du mal. I am not so much interested in the literal Jeanne as in the figurative one--the hybrid
woman caught up in the dilemmas of diaspora. We all are now from some other place,
trying to orient ourselves, using and being used, struggling to gain a foothold.
One frustration in trying to present Jeanne and Charles's relationship as that of
a complex couple at a particular historical moment, i.e. the apex of Europe's political
and cultural empire, is that the attempt to show them as pictorial equals is constantly subverted. Baudelaire was photographed by some of the greatest photographers of
the day, Neys, Carjat, and Nadar, but all we have of Duval is a few casual pen-and-ink
drawings by Baudelaire himself and an indifferent painting by Manet from the end
of her life. For me, layering images of Charles and Jeanne with that of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, while hardly eliminating the obvious differentials in power, is a way to show that
they were both subject to forces outside their control. Another device for equalizing
Jeanne and Charles's humanity is the use of color: a single hue across each of two
panels, changing from diptych to diptych throughout the installation, with the colors
also taken from Les Demoiselles.
It's not a fair match. Charles is the master of a tongue charged with the power of
its historical moment; he can afford the luxury of exploring his language's vulnerabilities.
Jeanne's struggle is for a language to comprehend a situation which has, for all purposes, never before existed: a post-modernist condition in a modernist time. As
a chart of her struggle, her side of the diptychs may often be difficult to read,
wavering between obscurity and clarity. For the viewer, this is a project in which
she may or may not succeed.
The studies shown here will not be in the final 16-diptych installation; they are prototypes, experiments with different ways of working on the computer and different approaches to language and color.
Study #1, digital cibachrome diptych, each panel 36 3/8" x 28 1/4", 1996.
LEFT PANEL:
At home, there were mango trees and roses. But here, what flowers should I have? Is
here real, or is there real?
is here real or is there real?
RIGHT PANEL:
Do you come from heaven or out of the abyss, O Beauty? Your glance, infernal and divine,
confusedly pours out kindness and crime.
your glance pours kindness and crime
Study #2, digital cibachrome diptych, each panel 36 3/8" x 28 1/4", 1996.
LEFT PANEL:
Their sun is not my sun. Their heat is not my heat. Am I sad because I am homesick?
What is home?
I am homesick what is home?
RIGHT PANEL:
Come from heaven or from hell, what does it matter, O Beauty... if your eye, your
smile, your foot open for me the door to an Infinite I love and have never known.
for me the door to an Infinite
Study #4, digital cibachrome diptych, each panel 40" x 30", 1998.
YELLOW JEANNE:
They said, he'll use you. I said nothing happen unless you take a chance in this world.
When he touch me, my skin felt like it scraped by stars.
he scrape my skin with stars
YELLOW CHARLES:
I prefer to opium, to wine, to aperitifs the elixir of your mouth where love dances
the pavane; and when, by caravan, my desire sets out for you, your eyes are the well
where my boredom drinks.
