Reflections for Now - Carrie Mae Weems at the Barbican by Sue Hubbard
Carrie Mae Weems came of age when both women and people of colour were deciding that it was time to stop being invisible. An activist, a photographer, a poet, a dancer, a feminist, an Afro-American woman and an educator, she was born in 1953 when social tides were beginning to turn. For her, the personal has always been political. Her aim has been to re-write old narratives. For, as she has said, ‘even in the midst of great social change, for the most part our lives remain invisible’.
Her one-woman show at the Barbican, opens with, what I took to be, beautiful abstract paintings, until on revisiting the exhibition a second time, I realised that Painting the Town is a series of photographs, though there is an obvious reference to American abstract expressionism. Weems photographed the boarded-up shop fronts in Portland, Oregon, her home town, where property was being protected from the outpourings of grief prompted by the heinous murder of George Floyd. Constantly painted over, the erasure of the anguished, angry slogans was yet another act of silencing after the decades of quelling black voices.
Painting the Town #3, 2021 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
Elsewhere, we see Weems walking through a forest of stone pillars, stopping every now and then to clap her hands. The pillars form Peter Eisenman’s Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. What is so special is not only Weems’s graceful presence – she trained as a dancer before studying art - but her ritualistic movement as she weaves in and out of the shadows, accompanied by the music of American composer Gregory Wanamaker, highlighting what she describes as ‘an incredible bond’ between Jews and people of colour. Two groups who have known hate, persecution and hardship.
The voices of the silenced, the marginalised and persecuted are the leitmotiv that runs through her work. In 2006, she spent time in Rome and began a powerful series of black and white photographs. Standing dressed in black in front of the city’s classical ruins and the modernist lines of Mussolini’s’ fascist architecture, she acts as her own muse, implicitly posing questions around power; about those who have it and those to whom it is denied. But the strength of her work is that it reaches beyond the Black-American experience to become universal, reflecting other forms of coercive control by one group over another.
In the mid-90s. after discovering a set of daguerreotypes in Harvard University Museum archives depicting enslaved men and women, commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz to support the racist theory of polygenism that suggested different ethnic groups have different genetic origins, she co-opted them to her own ends. By enlarging the original images, adding a red filter and then framing them in circular mounts to suggest the camera’s lens, she has given them a fresh reading, recasting those photographed within new historical narratives. There’s a terrible poignancy about the profile of a naked black women overlaid with the words: YOU BECAME A SCIENTIFIC PROFILE or the image of a glamourous, yet melancholy, young woman in a chic hat and strapless black dress with peroxide hair and obviously lightened skin, overlaid with the words: YOU BECAME AN ACCOMPLICE. Resurrected, here, these blighted, unknown lives are given a new dignity and truth in Weems’ telling.
You Became A Scientific Profile; A Negroid Type; An Anthropological Debate; and & A Photographic Subject from From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995-96 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
She has suggested that ‘through the act of performance with our own bodies, we are allowed to experience and to connect to the historical past and to the present – to the now, to the moment’. In a staged series of black and white photographs, The Kitchen Table, which she has interspersed with panels of narrative texts, she explores the power dynamics of the family to ask questions about monogamy and misogyny, the relationships between men and women and between adults and children. In this intimate setting she sits watching a small girl experimenting with makeup in front of a small round mirror. In another she smokes and talks companionably with two other women. Elsewhere she leans lovingly to embrace a seated man. Questions about hierarchies, about race, class and sexuality are all implicitly posed. What does this black man expect of his tender sweetheart? What are the pressures on a small black girl painting her face to conform to expected stereotypes of what counts as womanly? Feminism began to flex its muscles at the same time as Black Power. It’s not hard to see that this little black girl is going to have a double fight on her hands.
Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make Up) from Kitchen Table Series, 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
Constantly revisiting and revising history, Weems weaves it in and out of modern lived experience in a bid to understand who she is. In her 2021 installation Land of Broken Dreams: A Case Study Room, one of the upper galleries is set out like a living room. Photographs of leading figures from the Black Liberation movement such as Angela Davis and Bobby Seale grace the wall. Contemporary copies of LIFE magazine lie a coffee table for the visitor to flip through. Arranged on a sideboard are commemorative plates and a Black Panther lamp that show how the political began to seep into people’s homes as, after centuries of racism, African Americans began to find a new sense of dignity and confidence.
Weems has said that ‘at a certain moment in my own history, it dawned on me that seminal moments in our common history our country’s history, have shaped who we are and what we are – as Americans, as US citizens.’ Central to this show is the vast multi-screen work The Shape of Things: a video in 7 parts made in 2021. It is a wildly ambitious work that describes the ‘pageantry’ and circus-like’ atmosphere of contemporary American political life, along with the inbuilt structures of oppression and violence hardwired into the American system. Weems has stated that her responsibility as an artist is ‘to make work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment’. That’s an enormous ask of art. But by creating the possibility of new dialogues that might not otherwise never have happened, Weems’ fearlessness comes pretty close to bringing it off.
Still from The Shape of Things: A Video in 7 Parts, 2021 © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York / Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
Sue Hubbard’s latest novel Flatlands has just been published by Pushkin Press: Flatlands by Sue Hubbard | 9781911590743 | Pushkin Press