Rx 48 / C-ration
Lorna Simpson, C-ration, 1991. Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I started to concentrate more upon how the viewer looks at photographs... I would insert my own text or my own specific reading of the image to give the viewer something they might not interpret or surmise... So I would start to interject these things that the photograph would not speak of and that I felt needed to be revealed, but that couldn't be revealed from just looking at an image.
— lorna simpson
This monochromatic diptych by American artist Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) accumulates layers of meaning with sustained viewing. The work’s title, C-ration, refers to the canned, precooked meals dispensed to U.S. soldiers during World War II, broadening the implications of the searing text, “Not good enough / But good enough to serve.” One might also notice visual similarities between the two images: the left photograph’s white platter on a black background is inverted on the right, with a woman’s dark collarbones and chest mirroring the curvature of the platter and her simple white shift. Then, the alternating black and white serif text that Simpson has imposed onto the images introduces a historico-political dimension to the work, gesturing towards Black women’s servitude in the United States.
Though they may at first seem uncomplicated in appearance, Simpson’s works do not offer a straightforward interpretation. Instead, they challenge us to make our own conclusions and reconsider our assumptions of gender, identity, race, and history. Art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw writes, Simpson’s Black female subjects “defiantly refused the gaze of the viewer, offering only turned backs and a few words of enigmatic text. When [Simpson] did photograph the front of a model, the head would be cropped out of the frame so that only the lips and chin were visible, denying access to the eyes and by extension the interiority of the subject.” Simpson draws inspiration from writer bell hooks, who describes how “the politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze.” The effect in C-ration is a kind of atemporality. The intentional obscurity harkens back to the work’s text and title; servitude, Simpson implies, is not only a historical condition.
Lorna Simpson, Guarded Conditions, 1990. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
The elusive figure in a simple white dress appears time and again in Simpson’s work; she is often photographed in fragments but her face is never revealed in full. In Guarded Conditions, for example, we see a woman from behind, overtly standing on an elevated platform, arms crossed behind her back. Below the series of images, the words “sex attack” and “skin attack” appear in rhythmic perpetuity. Art historian Huey Copeland interprets the work as evocative of the American slave trade’s auction block, which, he writes, reduced Black women to “circulating objects of sexual and pecuniary exchange.” In a similar work, Untitled (Two Necklines), Simpson uses the image of a Black woman’s collarbone as seen in C-ration, this time with the words “ring, surround, lasso” and “feel the ground sliding from under you.” These works juxtapose the “antiportrait” of Black women with violent, provocative, or otherwise oppressive text, forcing a reconciliation in the viewer between the woman and that which she has been forced to endure.
reflections…
Invoking past and present day domestic labor, Simpson’s photography engages the audience with a broad critique of servitude in its many forms. The elusive temporality of C-ration invokes the question: what does the work reveal about our society that we cannot identify whether this woman is a contemporary of the viewer or a figure of the past?
Consider the kinds of low-paid labor within the broader care economy, including hospitals, nursing homes, and long-term care facilities, usually performed by women of color and immigrants. Historian Gabriel Winant writes in his recent book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, “poverty wages, understaffing, stress, precarious scheduling, and workplace disrespect often come with the job for people who wash and feed bodies, do laundry, change sheets, clean rooms, administer medication, run tests, provide therapies, and proffer emotional support.”
How does the intentional omission of the subjects’ faces in Simpson’s work reflect their anonymity, in the eyes of the public and the government? In what way does Simpson’s aesthetic call our attention to the abuses that lack a public dimension? Why do millions of domestic workers and low-paid healthcare workers similarly remain “faceless” and “nameless,” despite their essential role in medicine and society?
A 2020 report published by the Economic Policy Institute estimates that over two million people in the United States are domestic or care workers. The vast majority of this population (ninety-one percent) are women, and just over half (fifty-two percent) are people of color. Moreover, the care industry remains under-regulated by the government, which has largely failed to incorporate these workers into federal labor and employment protections or enact measures to protect their rights, rendering them especially vulnerable to exploitation. One medical secretary interviewed for Winant’s book described holding her urine during long shifts in an under-staffed unit, where she was not afforded bathroom breaks. Over time, she incurred lasting bladder damage from such inhumane working conditions. Winant writes, “Where there had once been a service ethic—exploitative but also with real resonance—there was now something more like servitude.”
At a moment when health systems and institutions are increasingly committed to racial justice, how can the arts be instrumental in visualizing society’s contradictions, inequalities, and forms of oppression? How can the arts be an entryway into difficult conversations and ultimately materially benefit care laborers? In other words, how can the arts improve the care of those who do the work of caring for others?
sources
Copeland, Huey. “‘Bye, Bye Black Girl’: Lorna Simpson's Figurative Retreat.” le magazine, November 20, 2014. http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/08/bye-bye-black-girl-lorna-simpson-en/.
DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn. Represent: 200 Years of African American Art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Yale University Press, 2014.
Winant, Gabriel. The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. Harvard University Press, 2021.
Wolfe, Julia, Joria Kandra, Lori Engdahl, and Heidi Shierholz. Rep. Domestic Workers Chartbook A Comprehensive Look at the Demographics, Wages, Benefits, and Poverty Rates of the Professionals Who Care for Our Family Members and Clean Our Homes. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute, May 2020.
Zabunyan, Elvan. “To Complete the Analogy: Lorna Simpson, or the Question of History.” Hauser & Wirth, November 12, 2017. https://www.hauserwirth.com/news/2511-complete-analogy-lorna-simpson-question-history.
