Between Worlds - Carrie Mae Weems, Everson Museum, Syracuse

Art in America, May, 1999 by Ernest Larsen

The "Africa" series takes on the mythic quest for origins, subversively retelling the Adam and Eve story in an African Garden of Eden. In Weems's version, Allah is the man upstairs. She tells a half-ironic, half-romantic tale built on the potent heterosexual myth of gender difference. "Climbing up [Adam's] legs, crossing the expanse of his Mandingo chest ... she perched her loveliness upon a shoulder blade, blowing Mood Indigo gently in his ear." What at first looks like ambivalence in Weems's approach to this loaded material might equally be understood as a critique of our reluctance to historicize gender differences. The installation even provides a seductive send-up of the primary myth of seduction. Placed in the center of the installation is an intensely sensual screen; with its embroidery, its bright colors and its romantic representation of a mysteriously veiled woman, it might seem a dazzling invocation of the power of myth. But on the back of the screen we read, "Temptation my ass, desire has its place, and besides, they were both doomed from the start."

The "Africa" series was followed by "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried" (1995-96). This 32-work installation, filled with anger and anguish, grew out of an invitation from the Getty Museum to respond to "Hidden Witness," an exhibition of rare daguerreotypes, tintypes and ambrotypes depicting African-Americans from the 1840s to the 1860s. At the Getty, these photographs were displayed in a darkened gallery in individual velvet-lined cases. Weems appropriated some of the same images and others, enlarged them, toned all but two blood-red and inscribed each with an arresting text etched, phrase after stinging phrase, into the covering glass.

In beginning and ending the sequence with a blue-toned image of a West African tribeswoman, seen in profile wearing a gorgeous woven headdress and other adornments, Weems performs another crucial act of historical identification with a figure that might otherwise be relegated to the pages of National Geographic. The etched-in-glass text over the first image reads: "FROM HERE I SAW WHAT HAPPENED." The woman appears to be looking at the following suite of 30 images. The first of these, placed in a circular mat, also presents a woman in profile, but completely stripped of clothing and adornment--decultured. The inscribed text reads, "You became a scientific profile." At the other end of the installation, the same blue-toned image of the African tribeswoman reappears, but reversed so that she is looking back over the preceding photoworks. The inscription now reads, "AND I CRIED." The tension between the African woman and the legacy of slavery is held within this pairing, which Weems further enriches and complicates by appropriating some well-known 20th-century images from photographers like Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Weems's most recent installations, "Who What When Where" and Ritual and Revolution (both 1998), are attempts to discover new or at least more stable grounds upon which contemporary political artists might be able to stand. Central to "Who What When Where" is a large-scale steel model of Tatlin's never-realized 1919 Monument to the Third International, a symbol of collective will and aspiration that constitutes a high-water moment of Russian Constructivism. Tatlin's phallic leaning tower, a double helix, was intended to be always in motion while the antenna at its apex broadcast to the world the achievements of Soviet socialism.