Between Worlds - Carrie Mae Weems, Everson Museum, Syracuse

Art in America, May, 1999 by Ernest Larsen

A recent exhibition at the Everson Museum brought together five major installations produced since 1992 by Carrie Mae Weems. Using documentary photographs, fictional tableaux, sculptural objects and evocative texts, the artist explores the tensions between art and politics, myth and history.

Driving from New York to Syracuse for the Everson Museum's recent showing of the five major pieces that photographer Carrie Mae Weems has produced since 1992, I was confident that I knew what to expect. I was familiar with all of these installations, each of which combines photographs with text and a range of sculptural elements. Nevertheless, seeing the five works together was a surprise.

Curator Thomas Piche put the exhibition together so that the individual installations resonate with full-on intensity as meditations on the politics of culture. Yet at the Everson the works also functioned as an ensemble. They seemed like visionary reports on successive stages of a dramatic journey, one which has taken the artist to the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia to encounter the tantalizing remains of Gullah culture; to Mali to walk through the streets of Djenne, thought by some to be the oldest city of sub-Saharan Africa; to Russia to witness the disintegration of a socialist culture; to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to encounter a collection of photographs of slaves. This is a pilgrim's progress, complicated by the fact that Weems always gets more, emotionally and intellectually, than she bargains for.

A plaque on the wall outside the first installation at the Everson quoted the artist: "I want to make things that are beautiful, seductive, formally challenging and culturally meaningful. I'm also committed to radical social change.... Any form of human injustice moves me deeply ... the battle against all forms of oppression keeps me going and keeps me focused." Such a clearly stated sense of intention is striking at a moment when artists often succumb to pseudo-theoretical gush, or refuse the burden of intentionality altogether. But it is Weems's conviction that radicalism and beauty are complementary, not antithetical, that gives her work its distinctive edge.

In 1984 I saw Weems's first solo show, "Family Pictures and Stories," her M.F.A. thesis exhibition at the University of California, San Diego. Those snapshotlike works, as I remember, were neither beautiful nor seductive; instead adjectives like "raw" came to mind. Already, however, Weems was using her black-and-white photographs as a motivating element in a fragmented narrative--an account of her family's migration from the South to Portland, Oreg., where she was born. In this early work, the individual photographs existed less on their own, as self-sufficient works of art, than as a kind of historical evidence that cried out for an enfolding context, which the artist provided with accompanying text and audio components.

Weems's contextual strategy was no surprise. I knew and worked among a cohort of political artists who emerged from the visual arts department at UC-San Diego in the 1970s and early `80s--Allan Sekula, Martha Rosler, Fred Lonidier, Sherry Millner and, of course, Carrie Weems, among many others. All used photographs and text in their work. All took issue, on both esthetic and political grounds, with the liberal pathos of the straight documentary approach in photography, film and video, and with the supposed authority of the individual photograph. As radicals, they clearly didn't think a free-floating photograph could be trusted to stand on its own. Thus, political art's interest in producing its own accompanying text as context, less to preempt meaning than to frame the terms of reception.

What has remained striking about Weems's approach is her canny preference for the use of text that evokes the rhythms of the spoken as opposed to the written word. The inspirational influence of novelist Zora Neale Hurston and study in a graduate folklore program at Berkeley deepened this doubtless instinctive esthetic choice. Text which has much of the fluency of transcribed speech--in its spontaneity, its intimacy, its immediacy--provides Weems's work with an unusual power of evocation, a power that is also rooted in several hundred years of African-American culture.

Following "American Icons" (1989), a tough, nervy group of still-life studies of racist artifacts like Aunt Jemima salt and pepper shakers, Weems produced the "Kitchen Table" works (1990), the project which first brought her major art-world attention. Featuring herself as the female protagonist, these photographic tableaux trenchantly dramatize male/female relations. Juxtaposing images that have the verve of movie stills, Weems uses informal-sounding written texts to tell fragmentary stories that are at least as much about class and the woes and ironies of heterosexual relationships as they are about being black.

Interestingly, by the time of the "Sea Islands" series (1992), the earliest work in the Everson exhibition, Weems was utilizing both posed tableaux and unposed photographs within the same installation, thereby joining the resources of fiction and documentary. In this work, Weems ponders the evidence left by the descendants of slaves on the Sea Islands. In the 17th century these barrier islands were the landing place for enslaved West