With reference to Lorna Simpson's oeuvre, discuss the role of the African American artists, should race be their primary subject, why?Lorna Simpson...

Artists and intellectuals coming from minority groups are
often caught in complex debates about the relevance of their works for their community
and how representative they are of their traditions and customs. There are artists who
embrace and rework their past cultural heritage, making it significan to their present
contruction of a distinctive identity. However, others fear that being identified as
black (or gay or postcolonial or, generally, hyphenated) artists and thus become a
speakers for the political instances of liberation of their particular groups limits
their artistic freedom. Some critics, especially those writing from a Modernist
standpoint, may find that art should tend to aesthetic purity and thus be above material
concerns such as politics and race (this view of art has been challenged by postmodern
skepticism about artistic purity).

On the opposite side of
the debate, nationalist and liberation groups, such as Black Nationalism/Black
Power, strongly demand that artists become accountable to their community of origin
and put their art to the service of political causes. Of course, at least in democratic
societies, artists have the freedom of choosing their own subjects and topics. It should
also be stressed that postmodernism has problematized unified visions of ethnic and
racial groups and has emphasized that different perspectives on racial heritage are
possible. Because of this shift, the conception of a monolithic race identity has been
replaced by plural identities that also take into account the influence of class, gender
and sexuality on their formation.

Simpson is particularly
aware of these intersection of race with other social constructs. Usually her
photographies portrait the subject with her/his back to the viewer, escluding the face
from the audience's gaze. She thus subverts the viewers' expectations and makes them
think of the difficulty of acquiring precise information on the subject through the
visual medium. In Guarded Conditions (1989), for example, the words
"sex attacks" are repeated under 18 color polaroids of a woman giving her back to the
photographer. The unusual position of the sitter makes the viewer wonder about the power
relations that link the photographer, the sitter and the viewer. The woman becomes the
object of the gaze. If the viewer is a man, his gaze could mean the sexual
commodification of the black body and his involvement in an act of control and
exploitation.