CARRIE MAE WEEMS Strategies of Engagement
♦
edited by Robin Lydenberg and Ash Anderson McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College
CARRIE MAE WEEMS Strategies of Engagement
edited by Robin Lydenberg and Asb Anderson McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College
This publication is issued in conjunction with the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement in the Daley Family and Monan Galleries at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, September 10-December 13, 2018. Organized by the McMullen Museum, Strategies of Engagement has been curated by Robin Lydenberg and Ash Anderson and underwritten by Boston College with major support from the Patrons of the McMullen Museum and Robert ’63 and Ann Marie Reardon P ’91.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949941 ISBN: 978-1-892850-33-1
Distributed by the University of Chicago Press Printed in the United States of America
© 2018 The Trustees of Boston College © 1978-2016 Carrie Mae Weems
Works by Carrie Mae Weems appear courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Copyeditor: Kate Shugert Designer: John McCoy
Front: Profile 2 (left) from All the Boys, 2016, plate 11.2 Back: A Considered Space, 2013, plate 14.2
CONTENTS
PREFACE i
INTRODUCTION 3
Ash Anderson
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT 7
Robin Lydenberg
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”: LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S
PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS 19
Faith Smith
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT 25
Rhonda D. Frederick and Leigh Patel
SCREENED MEMORIES, A CHOREOGRAPHY OF GRACE: THE VIDEO ART OF
CARRIE MAE WEEMS 33
Stephen Pfohl
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: GUIDE TO CIRCUMSTANCES SELDOM SEEN 43
Maren Stange
SHE WEARS THE MASK: BLACK ATLANTIC MASQUERADE IN THE WORK OF
CARRIE MAE WEEMS 47
Kyrah Malika Daniels
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: THE MUSE AND HER MUSES 57
Angela Ards
“THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY”: THEOLOGICAL [RE]VISIONING WITH
ALL THE BOYS 63
Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones
PUBLIC FORUM: “PICTURES AND PROGRESS” 67
Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Carrie Mae Weems, Jose Rivera, and Jeremy McCarter
PLATES 71
187
CONTRIBUTORS
PREFACE
The McMullen Museum is honored to present this major exhibition devoted to the work of celebrated artist Carrie Mae Weems. Her dedica¬ tion to creating work of considerable aesthetic power relevant to the most urgent issues of our time makes this exhibition an occasion for deep medi¬ tation and dialogue on the relationship of the arts to social justice.
The project originated in the summer of 2014 when Robin Lydenberg and I met to discuss ideas for an exhibition that she would curate to mark her anticipated retirement from teaching at Boston College. Over more than four decades as a distinguished professor of English at Boston College, Lydenberg has introduced many students to the historical avant-garde and contemporary experimental literature. She has contributed to numerous exhibitions at the McMullen, including curating GONE: Site-Specific Works by Dorothy Cross and writing its accompanying book in 2005. In recent years her scholarship has focused on the relationship between text and image, with research on several artists who construct visual narratives. One of these artists, Carrie Mae Weems, emerged immediately from our conver¬ sation as a compelling figure around whom Lydenberg could curate a ret¬ rospective. Indeed, Weems was well known to the McMullen, having been one of six artists featured our 1997 exhibition Original Visions: Shifting the Paradigm, Women’s Art, 1970-1996.
Immersing herself in Weems’s work, Lydenberg wrote a long essay on the artist that came to be the thematic basis of the exhibition. When Lydenberg approached the artist with her ideas for curating an exhibition organized by the McMullen, Weems responded with enthusiasm. Lydenberg then arranged with Boston College’s Institute for the Liberal Arts and its Lowell Humanities Series to sponsor a residency for Weems at the Univer¬ sity that would coincide with the exhibition. Thus, it is to Lydenberg that we owe our greatest debt of gratitude for this visionary project. She has steered this complex endeavor with the energy, erudition, generosity, and grace for which she has always been known at Boston College.
One of Lydenberg’s first tasks was to enlist as a co-curator Ash Ander¬ son, who teaches Weems’s work in his history of photography courses at Boston College and who had curated the McMullen’s exhibition Paris Night and Day: Photography between the Wars in 2014. Anderson has played a key role in crafting the exhibition with Lydenberg and Weems. The exhibition and catalogue have benefited in no small way from Anderson’s vast knowl¬ edge of the field and curatorial practice, experienced eye, and thoughtful-
Lydenberg and Anderson also attracted an exceptional group of con¬ tributors from a broad range of disciplines to write essays for this publica¬
tion. We thank Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, Angela Ards, Kyrah Malika Daniels, Rhonda D. Frederick, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Jeremy McCarter, Leigh Patel, Stephen Pfohl, Jose Rivera, Faith Smith, and Maren Stange for their insightful dialogue.
Needless to say, such a project would never have been possible without the investment of the artist. Carrie Mae Weems could not have been more helpful at all stages of shaping and strengthening the presentation. Our appreciation for her generous participation and support remains boundless. At the Carrie Mae Weems Studio in Syracuse, New York, Pamela Vander Zwan and Petra Szilagyi graciously collaborated with the Museum on all aspects of production and planning Strategies of Engagement. Jack Shainman, Elisabeth Sann, and Ruth Phaneuf of the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York too played an important role, loaning photographs and coordinating logis¬ tics with the artist.
The Hampton Project, Weems’s monumental installation created for the Williams College Museum of Art, generously was loaned by that institution with the support of Lisa Dorin, Pamela Franks, Diane Hart, and Rachel Tassone. Additionally, we thank Hava Gurevich of amart Circulating Exhi¬ bitions for arranging subsequent venues to host Strategies of Engagement.
The project has been managed adroitly by the McMullen staff and others at the University. Assistant Director Diana Larsen designed the complex installation in our Daley Family and Monan Galleries. Assistant Director John McCoy designed this publication and the exhibition’s graphics. Man¬ ager of Publications and Exhibitions Kate Shugert copyedited this volume and oversaw the loan process, and Manager of Education, Outreach, and Digital Resources Rachel Chamberlain arranged an array of programs for audiences of all ages to engage with the exhibition. Jessica Lipton, BC class of 2018, served as research assistant. We are grateful also for the assistance of Anastos Chiavaras and Rose Breen of the Office of Risk Management; Peter Marino, Jacqueline Delgado, and Gaurie Pandey of the Center for Centers; Ginger Saariaho, Joanne Goggins, and Natalie Hachem of the Office of Advancement; Jack Dunn and Rosanne Pellegrini of the Office of University Communications; Mary Crane, director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts; and James Smith and Shaylonda Barton of the Lowell Human¬ ities Series.
We remain grateful for the following Museum endowments that provide vital support for all our projects: Linda ’64 and Adam Crescenzi Fund, Janet M. and C. Michael Daley ’58 Fund, Gerard and Jane Gaughan Fund for Exhi¬ bitions, Hecksher Family Fund, Hightower Family Fund, John F. McCarthy and Gail M. Bayer Fund, Christopher J. Toomey ’78 Fund, and Alison S. and
PREFACE
William M. Vareika ’74, P’09, ’15 Fund.
As always, the McMullen Museum could never have undertaken this ambitious endeavor without the ongoing support of the administration of Boston College and the McMullen Family Foundation. We especially thank Jacqueline McMullen, President William P. Leahy, SJ; Provost David Quig¬ ley; Vice Provost Billy Soo; and Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Dean Gregory Kalscheur, SJ. The Peggy Simons Memorial Publications Fund underwrote part of the cost of this catalogue. Major support for the exhibition was provided by the Patrons of the McMullen Museum, chaired by C. Michael Daley, and Robert ’63 and Ann Marie Reardon P ’91.
Nancy Netzer
Director and Professor of Art History
INTRODUCTION
Ash Anderson
In the second minute of Carrie Mae Weems’s film Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, as the camera moves through a darkly lit classroom, the artist’s voice intones:
This is a story within a story; how to enter this history, what to show, what to say, what to feel. It was a creation myth, how things came to be as they are. In this constructed place, our classroom, we revisit the past. The students examine the facts and will participate in the construction of history, a history that has been told to them by others. But now, with their own bodies, they engage their own dark terrain, their own winter.
Some of the children are young, learning about civil rights, human rights, for the first time. A teacher will guide them through lessons. For many of them the day will be long and hard, and for others, painful. Some things will be difficult for them to see.
It is appropriate that this video appears in the first gallery of the exhi¬ bition that is the occasion for this catalogue. Weems’s authorial voice is often that of a teacher, and the words spoken in the video set us up for the difficult education we are about to receive as viewers of her work and visitors to the exhibition. Weems both deconstructs and recontextualizes the history we are familiar with, and presents us with new readings, new discomforts, and ultimately new illuminations, all driven by her own desire to understand how things came to be as they are. For Weems, the way things are encompasses the present seen through a range of lenses: political, social, spiritual, theoretical, emotional, and aesthetic. In a similarly diverse array of materials, including black-and-white and color photographic prints on paper, canvas, and muslin, as well as combinations of video, sound, etched glass, and mixed-media installation, she confronts, among other concerns, the long history and horrific effects of anti-black racism in the United States. In so doing, she gives us a new set of interpretive tools to participate in the history we construct going forward.
This invitation to engage is at the core of Weems’s practice, and has guided the logic by which Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement took
shape. Each work of art contained in the exhibition and reproduced here represents a strategy for engaging with history and the present. It is typical of Weems’s generosity as an artist that the tools she developed to better understand how we arrived at this moment — political, social, artistic — are not just demonstrated in the works themselves, but offered to viewers, equipping us for an ongoing cultural education. Among the most power¬ ful of these strategies is the invitation to engage physically with history. In the Constructing History photographs and video this embodied engagement is modeled by students inhabiting the postures of figures in well-known representations of tragic events from the late 1960s (plates 1.1-10). In The Hampton Project she invites viewers to literally immerse themselves in an encompassing landscape of historical photographs on sheer banners and an ambient recitation examining the intersection of education, cultural iden¬ tity, and forced assimilation, and the particular kind of loss and violence that can result (plates 2.1-25). In American Icons (plates 9.1-3) and Ain’t Jokin’ (plates 10.1-6) her strategy involves making viewers aware of their complic¬ ity in perpetuating seemingly superficial racist practices and language, what Weems calls “little packages of consumer racism.”1 These artworks go beyond interactivity to help viewers experience the reverberations of Weems’s art in their relationship to the world and to others, fulfilling the artist’s early desire to get “off the walls”2 and offer us more intense and productive modes of engagement with her work.
The exhibition came together during a period of national reckoning over racial inequality and its violent effects. There is perhaps no other artist so adept at articulating and clarifying the truths and consequences of our nation’s treatment of its citizens of color during the last two centuries. In order to deal with our troubled present, Weems utilizes and transforms photographic material dating back to the 1850s and casts her gaze back even further while exploring the visual records and cultural memories of the intervening years. Strategies of Engagement includes works from as early as 1987 up to 2016, the most recent projects deepening her analysis of the present, exposing the roots and broad effects of police violence, and explor¬ ing the ways it both contradicts and critiques our presumption of a uni¬ versal shared humanity. The penultimate section of the exhibition, which includes All the Boys, Usual Suspects, and People of a Darker Hue (plates 11.1—4,
1 Qtd. in Andrea Kirsh, “Carrie Mae Weems: Issues in Black, White and Color,” in Carrie Mae Weems, Andrea Kirsh and Susan Fisher Sterling, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993), 14.
2 “Carrie Mae Weems: YoungArts Master Class,” YouTube video, 1:03:05, posted by YoungArts, Apr. 7, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch3vJWseogIu8L8.
3
INTRODUCTION
12.1-9, 13), all made in 2016, and responding in different ways to these inci¬ dents and their sickening bureaucratic aftermath, combines information and imagery that is already painfully familiar from the news with beautiful evocations of strength, fear, and mourning.
The exhibition ends with a moment of explicit hope and beauty, a trip¬ tych of photographs that features Weems’s muse figure flanked by represen¬ tations of The Hope Peony (plates 14.1-3) that Weems designed in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois with the American Peony Society and Hollingsworth Peonies to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the NAACP founder’s death. Conceived as part of a larger desire to create contemplative spaces to honor African American leaders, Weems invites gardeners to “plant hope in your very own garden.”’ In the same way that she invites viewers to be her students, and students to be her actors in the Constructing History project, The Hope Peony invites us to participate in ways that at first seem familiar. Full engage¬ ment, however, requires of us a more rigorous and dedicated perception and self-examination.
Like all exhibitions at the McMullen Museum of Art, this one is the result of faculty research and is addressed to diverse audiences of all ages. Its myriad pedagogical intentions extend to the catalogue. We invited con¬ tributors from a wide range of disciplines and areas of expertise to add new perspectives to the already diverse literature on Weems.3 4 Many of the essays thus follow Weems’s example, taking stock of both our history and our present circumstances, and helping readers inhabit new vantage points, new ways of seeing that serve and expand our understanding of both the artist’s work and the wider world as well. All these writers are teachers, and we are confident that this catalogue will both enrich the experience of the exhibition it accompanies and have an important afterlife to serve as the basis for new conversations about, among other things, the power dynamics around race, gender, history, education, and art.
The research for Robin Lydenberg’s essay on one of Weems’s most cel¬ ebrated series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (plates 3.1-33), formed the basis for the exhibition. It examines in detail the strategies Weems has developed to engage with an ongoing history of violence and to involve her audience in pedagogical and collaborative encounters. A profes¬ sor of English, Lydenberg treats this complex project that appropriates and transforms a historical archive of images of African Americans, tracing its roots in Weems’s early work and its impact on subsequent projects in which she uses an increasingly diverse range of material, performative, and social practices.
One example of Weems’s expanded field of practice is manifested in a very different intervention in an existing archive. Exploring the entangle¬ ments of institutional history and the larger cultural forces represented by those institutions and their values, professor of African and Afro-American studies and English Faith Smith analyzes Weems’s installation The Hampton Project as an indictment of the notion that a person’s humanity is contingent on the institutions that seek to judge or define it. Smith reassesses the 2000 work through the lenses of activism and literature, finding parallels in the critical treatment of historically black institutions in the novels of Ralph Ellison and Nella Larsen and noting how related archives demand critical deconstruction to expose their negative lessons.
Many of the writers in this collection offer models of an alternative progressive pedagogy. In keeping with Weems’s commitment to collabora¬
tion and dialogue, scholar of pedagogy Leigh Patel and English professor Rhonda D. Frederick use the format of an extended conversation to explore the promise and attendant difficulties in using photographs to help stu¬ dents engage with race in the classroom. Drawing on Weems’s work, includ¬ ing From Here I Saw What Happened and Ain’t Jokin’, and Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series, they describe their desire to unsettle students, to use their pedagogy to intervene in the normalized voyeurism of black suffering, and ultimately to make students aware not just of what they are seeing, but of how and why they see the world in the predetermined ways they do.
If we are to unlearn negative or destructive ways of seeing that we have absorbed from our surroundings, we must also attend to the different kinds of seeing that we encounter. Stephen Pfohl and Maren Stange each explore the particular demands and effects of Weems’s work in video and live per¬ formance. Sociologist Pfohl reflects on the growing importance of video in Weems’s work during the last fifteen years, and questions what her videos ask of their viewers through their representations of a violent historical past. The sharing of visual DNA that characterizes all of Weems’s work car¬ ries over to these moving images as well, where videos remix other videos and build on one another. Pfohl describes this practice as a kind of life-sus¬ taining ritual, designed to inspire thoughtful mourning of the dead as well as celebrations of life.
Stange, historian of photography, explores Weems’s use of her own body as an important strategy in her creative and critical process. She traces these effects through still photographs and video, but primarily in Grace Notes, the evolving live piece that Weems has performed since 2016, and which shares imagery, including the muse figure, with several series in Strategies of Engagement. This performance is both a particular momentary event and a broad exploration of music, memory, history, and present politics that calls on its audience to engage civically and critically.
The body and performance are also central to the essay written by Kyrah Malika Daniels, a professor of art history and African and African Diaspora studies. She explores the affinities between Weems’s use of masks and mas¬ querade and related traditions of Africa and the African Diaspora. Taking into account the importance of the body as a source of knowledge percep¬ tion and production in African cultural traditions, and such varied refer¬ ence points as the minstrel in blackface, the conjure woman, the dandy, and the Haitian spirit Legba, Daniels provides a rich context for understanding Weems’s relationship to a long heritage of African maskers in Missing Links (plates 4.1-6) and Hopes and Dreams: Gestures of Demonstration (plates 6.1-8).
Another source of power exerting a formative influence on Weems’s work is delineated by English and journalism professor Angela Ards in the black feminist roots that shaped her relationship to her viewers, and the development of her muse figure. Ards considers in particular the influences of novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and literary critic and theorist Barbara Christian, who helped Weems define the dynamic rela¬ tionship of herself to the larger world, and her treatment of the black sub¬ ject as universal.
Honoring the particular and claiming for it not only humanity but uni¬ versality is an important aspect of Weems’s vision. Theologian Amey Vic¬ toria Adkins-Jones uses icon theology as a lens through which we see the artist’s work from yet another perspective, in particular the powerful series of photographs All the Boys. She challenges us to expand our ways of seeing:
3 “ Fresh Talk: Carrie Mae Weems: Can an Artist Inspire Social Change?,” YouTube video, 1:20:50, posted by National Museum of Women in the Arts, Jan. 4, 2016, https:/ / www.youtube.com/watch7vJbBxwugaFRhg.
4 The scholarship on Weems is vast, but our contributors are especially in conversation with Dawoud Bey, Huey Copeland, Kathryn E. Delmez, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Christina Sharpe, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Laura Wexler, and Deborah Willis.
INTRODUCTION
What can you tell by looking? What can you not tell by looking? The icon bridges the gap between humanity and divinity, changing us radically.
This collection of essays concludes with the transcript of a roundtable discussion between Weems, art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, playwright and screenwriter Jose Rivera, and theater producer and director Jeremy McCarter that begins with a consideration of Frederick Douglass and his belief in the profound power of pictures to shape opinions, to enact change both good and bad. Weems explains that an artist’s mission is to stretch toward the truth about the world, and how truth can thereby become inter¬ twined with beauty, with power, and with what it means to be human. Essential to our humanity is our ability to appreciate beauty, our ability to engage in a particular kind of sight. And for Weems, beauty, like love, is defined by a profound impact that enables “a moment of clarity when something allows you to see yourself far more deeply than you would in any other way or through any other means.” In the closing moments of the panel discussion, Weems expresses her commitment to be part of something larger than herself, and to engage in her artistic work and activism with what she calls “interested bodies.” It is a reminder that, for Weems, the work aims for — more than merely engagement with the mind — engagement with the body, getting to a new kind of understanding through physical as well as mental means.
Weems has said of the election of President Obama that it represented “a change in the American imagination,” that added “complexity to the making of history.”’ Here Weems describes the effects one might hope for after an encounter with her work: a change to the boundaries of the imagi¬ nation, the welcome complication of our conception of history and its con¬ struction, the laying of groundwork for an expanded set of possible futures for humanity.
Humanity, complete with its terrible faults and ultimate grace, ends up being an important thread connecting the stories told by Carrie Mae Weems and this catalogue’s contributors. We were aware from early on in planning the exhibition that amongst themes of violence, racism, forced assimilation, and mourning, joy was in short supply. But any regret at its absence was supplanted by the distinct presence of grace, in the form of an unshakeable hope for humanity against the burden of experience and history. We are, all of us, fully invested in that hope, and find our way to grace through the power of pictures, the power of language, and the power of education.
5 “Left of Black with Carrie Mae Weems and Thabiti Lewis,” YouTube video, 59:46, posted by John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, Feb. 15, 2011, http: .youtube.com/watch?v=5g7QvomaEBI.
5
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
Robin Lydenberg
Carrie Mae Weems has spent over thir¬ ty-five years producing a unique body of work distinguished by its theoretical sophis¬ tication, its formal elegance, and its commit¬ ment to social justice. Her art has been widely recognized for its critical deconstruction of both the master narratives of history and the conventions of visual and textual representa¬ tion. In her major contributions to cultural debates about the racial dynamics that domi¬ nate American culture, Weems has expanded those discussions to encompass the even more complex power relations at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Bridging the gap between the particular and the uni¬ versal, she reveals through the specificity of the varied lived experiences of black bodies in the world the common humanity shared by us all.
Weems has developed a range of strategies to engage with a global history of oppression and resistance as it relates to our present moment. One of her early strategies involved presenting the past from the perspective of a critical witness, accompanying photographic images with textual narrative. She soon devel¬ oped more active modes of intervention: questioning the photograph’s status as eviden¬ tiary document; appropriating and transforming verbal and visual archives; negotiating with the persistent effects of the stereotype; and animating his¬
tory in the present as performance. Her aim is to disrupt the smoothness of official accounts of the past, immersing herself and her viewers in the “tangled web just beneath the veneer of order.”1 Weems’s process is at once pedagogi¬ cal and collaborative, as she enters history in the fullness of her humanity and brings her audience along with her.
The common goal that drives all of Weems’s work is to bring about what bell hooks calls “a revolution in the way we see, the way we look.”2 For Weems, this is an ongo¬ ing revolution that is continually revitalized by new aesthetic and political strategies. The fulcrum for my analysis will be the 1995-96 photo/text series From Here I Saw What Hap¬ pened and I Cried (plates 3.1-33), a mid-ca¬ reer piece that fully realizes Weems’s early photographic practices and anticipates the expanded field of her subsequent projects in video, performance, installation, and com¬ munity activism.3
Weems began her artistic career with a broad background in photography, dance, folklore, and radical politics. In her earli- work, however, her focus was personal. Challenging the distorted characterization of black family life given official sanction by the 1965 Moynihan Report,4 Weems presents a lively and intimate portrait of her own family history in the images and accompanying narrative of Family
1 Denise Ramzy and Katherine Fogg, “Interview: Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project , ed. Vivian Patterson, exh. cat. (New York: Aperture; Wil- liamstown: Williams College Museum of Art, 2000), 78-80.
2 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), 4.
3 Other critics have recognized the pivotal importance of From Here I Saw. Celeste-Marie Bernier sees it as paradigmatic of major issues in the larger field of contemporary African American visual art: African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 14-17 and Thelma Golden locates it as an “interesting axis” of “the historic past of the Black Arts Movement and the yet to be named black aesthetic present”: “Some Thoughts on Carrie Mae Weems,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992-1998, ed. Thomas Piche Jr. and Thelma Golden, exh. cat. (New York: George Braziller; Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1999)- 31-
4 Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965).
7
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
Pictures and Stories (1978-84, fig. 1). In subsequent photographic series she tions of their subjects could function more like participant/observers than
confronts more directly and with biting wit the racist caricatures that per- detached investigators.7 Breaking out of the distorting frames of scientific
sist in popular discourse ( Ain’t Jokin’, 1987-88, plates 10.1-6) and are made and social classification, photographs could present African American indi¬ familiar in the kitsch collectibles that decorate domestic interiors ( American viduals as worthy citizens.
Icons, 1988-89, plates 9.1-3). By the early 1990s Weems begins to seek out In addition to such alternative evidentiary archives, black photographers in the muted history of slavery in America the remnants of ties to Africa also produced highly aesthetic works that established black lives as worthy
( Sea Islands Series, 1991-92 [fig. 2]; Africa, 1993; Slave Coast, 1993), leading subjects of art. One influential example of this movement from the eviden-
herself and her viewers into “diasporic landscape[s] of longing.”7 These early tiary to the aesthetic is the 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life in which
strands of Weems’s development converge powerfully in From Here I Saw in which she confronts directly the relationship of her medium, photography, to the position of the black subject in history.
QUESTIONING DOCUMENTARY
Weems’s thoughtful engagement with the history of photography looks back to the nineteenth cen¬ tury when photography was one of the most effective tools used for var¬ ious systems of classification. The early perception of this medium as a transparent recording of reality gave weight to the claims to objec¬ tive fact made by the developing sciences of criminology, anthro¬ pology, ethnography, and physi¬ ognomy. As John Tagg and others have demonstrated, however, the supposed accuracy of documentary photographs, especially those used for surveillance and prosecution, is actually a “reality effect” artificially produced by a set of codes and con- silver Pnr
ventions. In the early twentieth
century these techniques were sometimes marshaled to promote positive social reforms, but even in that context documentary photography often supported ideologically distorted notions about race, gender, and class.5 6
Inspired by the invention of the daguerreotype, Frederick Douglass argued that photography could be used to counter distorted racist charac¬ terizations from the popular and scientific press. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an alternative archive of portraits of and by African Americans, like the ones assembled by W. E. B. Du Bois for the Paris Exposi¬ tion (fig. 3), challenged anti-black visual representations in circulation. The work of black photographers familiar with the everyday lives and aspira-
photographs of Harlem residents by Roy DeCarava were combined with a fictional narrative by Langston Hughes (fig. 4). This hybrid work presents its audience with a view of Harlem life that acknowledges its inhabitants’ struggles, honors their labor, and celebrates their vibrancy, beauty, and dignity. The sequence of photographs is narrated by a fic¬ tional character, Sister Mary Brad¬ ley, who witnesses and comments on the lives of those depicted in DeCarava’s images.
DeCarava’s work had a formative impact on Weems’s art. Her critical disruption of the conventions of documentary photography puts her in a group of contemporary artists who emphasize “the inauthentic, the staged, the fictional... [interro¬ gating] the institutional formations, means for exchange and social ste¬ reotypes that position subjects in photography.”8 9 Weems describes how she was initially attracted to the potential of the genre: “There , 20 x 20 m. was something appealing about it,
the whole idea that you were some¬ how describing the complicatedness of the human condition. That’s what documentary was... to me.” But she also understood the form’s negative implications: “Part of documentary had a lot to do with the notion that you would go into somebody else’s backyard and capture it and bring home the ethnic image, as trophy.. ..In your passion to document you encounter a tragic reality that transforms, so that you can come back even bigger, with your prize, and be praised for that.”5 Instead of merely rejecting the docu¬ mentary genre, Weems decides to use her art to “make a direct intervention,
Weems, Untitled (Praise House) from Sea Islands Series, 1991—92. Gelati
5 hooks, Art on My Mind, 73.
6 On the “reality effect” of the photographic medium see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984); John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photography and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). On the complex evolution of documentary photography see Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
7 Weems encountered this participant/observer model of anthropological research in her formal folklore studies with Alan Dundes at Berkeley and in the work of anthro¬ pologist/folklorist/novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
8 Brian Wallis, “Questioning Documentary,” Aperture 112 (Fall 1988): 60.
9 Qtd. in hooks, Art on My Mind, 80.
8
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
extend the form by playing with it, manipulating it.”10
WITNESSING THE ARCHIVE
Weems had an opportunity for such an intervention in 1995 when she was commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum to create a work in response to its exhibition of an archive of mid-nineteenth-century photographic images of African Americans, Hidden Witness: African-Americans in Early Photogra¬ phy. In the resulting work, From Here / Saw What Happened and I Cried, Weems expanded the original selection (from the Getty’s hold¬ ings and from the private collection of Jackie Napoleon Wilson) to include several more contemporary examples. As several critics have noted, by overlaying these images with her own narrative, Weems practices what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “signifying,”* 11 a mode of critical reading in which the meaning, intention, and effect of the original image or concept is rad¬ ically transformed.12 Weems reads the Getty’s photographic archive against the grain of view¬ ers’ acceptance of its status as a repositoiy of documentary evidence. Her sequential narra¬ tive, etched in glass over the images that have been tinted red, acts as a running commentary on the violence committed by systems of racial classification and representation.
The impulse to assemble and to believe in the veracity of the archive has been identified by Pierre Nora as characteristic of contem¬ porary systems of knowledge.13 Theorists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argue that far from being a neutral assemblage of information, the archive legislates what can be known or said and produces effects of objectification and subjection.14 Nevertheless, there are contemporary artists like Weems who engage in critical play with the archive, intervening and disrupting its power.13
The strategy Weems utilizes here is to remove the Getty archive from its institutional isolation by introducing a witness to expose its alleged neutrality. Like the voice of Mary Bradley in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a narrative voice witnesses and guides how we see the archive in Weems’s
re-presentation of it. The function and authority of witnessing are displaced from the camera lens to the photographed subject. Weems’s series opens with the figure of the witness: a young African woman in profile, facing right; the same photograph printed in reverse, looking left, closes the series. This figure provides a verbal as well as a visual frame: the first image bears the phrase “From here I saw what happened” and the final one concludes with “And I cried.” This photograph was originally part of a 1925 collection of ethnographic photographs taken by George Specht on an expedition to central Africa. Exhibited in colonial expositions and natural history museums, this portrait was often pre¬ sented as a primitive “type.” Perhaps because she was the wife of a high-ranking chief, she retains her name in the original photograph’s caption: “Nobosodru: Femme Mangbetu.” Widely circulated on postcards, stamps, and even as a car hood ornament, Nobosodru became a decorative image of the “exotic other.” In a different vein, her beauty was also celebrated by some Harlem Renaissance art¬ ists as emblematic of a modern black aesthetic seeking to honor its African heritage.16
Weems opens her work, then, with an image that already has a complicated history, and she adds yet another layer to the palimp¬ sest of its varied and even contradictory sig¬ nifications. The profile pose that is a classic convention in ethnographic display (used in this case to emphasize the skull elongation practiced by the Mangbetu tribe) is doubled and reversed by Weems, so that the two pro¬ files face each other across the intervening representations of American race relations past and present. Traditionally made the object of the classifying gaze of Western sci¬ ence, the ethnographic subject here exercises her own power to see and to see through the abuses of that allegedly superior civilization. “From here” (in Africa), “I saw what happened” (in America).
Nobosodru’s function as the witnessing gaze of the work is reinforced by her voice guiding viewers through the series. Weems tints her bookend portraits blue, perhaps suggesting Nobosodru’s sad response to what she
3. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Exhibit at Paris,” Colored American, Nov. 3, 1900, jl
10 Qtd. inDawoud Bey, “Carrie Mae Weems,” Bomb, no. 108, July 1, 2009, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/carrie-mae-weems/. For an illuminating analysis of the critique of documentary photography see Cherise Smith, “Fragmented Documents: Works by Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Willie Robert Middlebrook at the Art Institute of Chicago,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 24, no. 2 (1999): 244-59, 271-72.
11 See Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xix-xxviii.
12 Smith, “Fragmented Documents,” 254; Bernier, African American Visual Arts, 16.
13 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," in “Memory and Counter-Memory,” ed. Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Stam, special issue, Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989): 13.
14 Michel Foucault sees the archive functioning as “the first law of what can be said”: The Archaeology of Knowledge; and The Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert Swyer (1972; New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 129 and Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) argues that “there is no political power without control of the archive” (4) that “produces as much as it records the event” (17). For an overview of theories of the archive see Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labor and Capital,” in Visual Culture: A Reader, ed. Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London: Sage Press, 1999), 181-92.
15 See Sven Spieker, “The Archive at Play,” in The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 173-93.
16 For a discussion of how artists like Aaron Douglas “countered [the] ethnographic and pseudo-scientific view” of photographs like Specht’s with “art works that spoke directly to a new racial and cultural consciousness” see Richard J. Powell, “Re/Birth of a Nation,” in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey, exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 25-29.
9
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
sees, and that melancholy note is echoed in the narrative’s reference to Billie Holiday “crfying] strange fruit tears.” Through Weems’s intervention, this young African woman is empowered with an active gaze, a critical voice, and a complex emotionality. She escapes the constraints of ethnographic photography and presides over this work as a witness to and commentator on the history of racial struggle.
In her later work, Weems often plays the role of witness herself. As she explains, “Maybe because of my experience in theater, I had a great sense of how to use my body, not as Carrie, but to stand in for more than myself, for a black female subjectivity and subject, who was thinking and acting according to her own will.”1? Recording her own presence in various historically charged locations,
Weems bears witness to slavery’s past and its aftermath in The Louisiana Project (2003) and Dreaming in Cuba (2002). She also stands in as the challenging presence of the racial “other” inserted into classical and modern scenes of Western European culture and power in Museum Series (2007) and Roaming (2006), and most recently on the sets of mainstream American televi¬ sion dramas in Scenes & Take (2016). An anonymous everywoman, this peripatetic figure “can stand in for the audience.”18 As the strategic function of witnessing extends to include viewers of her work,
Weems replaces the detachment of the documentary or ethnographic gaze with a more intimate interaction.
Just two years after first exhibiting From Here I Saw, Weems was creating works in which her audience is literally immersed in a world history made pres¬ ent and palpable. In the installation Rit¬ ual and Revolution (1998), viewers wander among layers of diaphanous cloth ban¬ ners printed with enlarged photographs representing political struggle and suf¬ fering throughout history (fig. 5). Their journey is accompanied by the artist’s distinctively mellifluous voice in an ambient audio recording in which she responds to those images: “From the four corners of the world / I saw you bewildered, startled & stumbling / Toward the next century / Looking over your shoulder / With fingers crossed / From the ruins of what was and what will be / I saw your longing / Felt your pain / And tried to comfort you.”15 Weems sees and speaks from multiple points of view, “from the four corners of the world,” transcending her personal singularity to identify and empa¬ thize with the oppression and resistance of many.
Ritual and Revolution enacts the power of witnessing as projection and
identification across racial, gender, ethnic, geographical, and temporal divides. Differences are bridged in the communal experience of history as continuous struggle. In her incantation, the artist witnesses events (“I saw you”) but also actively enters into them (“I was with you”) in the Bastille, in the Middle Passage, in the death camps. As viewers of this installation wander through suspended images, they experience a similar entry into past conflicts. In such works witnessing is transformed into active participation by artist and audience alike.
APPROPRJATING AND TRANSFORMING THE ARCHIVE
In From Here I Saw Weems begins to actively appropriate and transform archives of images. Appropriation can be understood here as not merely incor¬ porating but recontextualizing and mul¬ tiplying the meanings of selected images. Through enlarging, cropping, tinting, reframing, and captioning Weems opens images to new and critical readings.
The opening of From Here I Saw enacts a particularly powerful and articulate transformation. The first images Nobo- sodru witnesses in the series are two Afri¬ can men (Renty from Congo and Jack from Guinea) and their daughters (Delia and Drana). The four daguerreotypes by Joseph T. Zealy that Weems’s piece repro¬ duces and alters were originally commis¬ sioned by Louis Agassiz in 1850 to support his theory of “separate creation” or “dual genesis” — his belief that Africans were not just another race but a different spe¬ cies with an entirely different origin from the white race. In Weems’s reproduction and textual labeling of these images she makes explicit the complicity of the pho¬ tographic medium in supporting a racist science that justified slavery by dehuman¬ izing its victims (plates 3.2-5). Addressing directly the individuals exposed in these images, the narrative voice laments the impact of their objectification: “You became a / Scientific profile,” “A negroid type,” “An anthropological / Debate,” “& a photographic subject.”
Weems’s use of the Zealy daguerreotypes gives the postmodern aesthetic practice of appropriation a particular urgency. There are many appropria¬ tions at play here: enslavement as an appropriation of the Africans’ bodies and labor; ethnography as an appropriation of images of those bodies for ideologically motivated classification; and finally Weems’s appropriation of the evidence of those abuses in what has been described as a “poetics of
4. Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955), 58.
17 Qtd. in Kristin Braswell, “Artist Carrie Mae Weems on 30 Years of Genius,” Ebony, Feb. 5, 2014, https://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/artist-carrie-mae-weems -on-30-years-of-genius-999#axzz3a3KdxCAU.
18 Qtd. in Bey, “Carrie Mae Weems.”
19 Quotations from the Ritual and Revolution audio are from Piche and Golden, Carrie Mae Weems, plates 75-76.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
resistance.”20 As Brian Wallis observes of the original Zealy daguerreotypes, “If colonialism and ethnographic exploitation depend on appropriation, one must acknowledge that what is taken can always be taken back.”21
Weems takes back these images by transforming them: they are re-pho- tographed, enlarged, saturated with a dark red tint, and overlaid with a critical text etched into the glass. Although Celeste-Marie Bernier notes that this inscription-effect recalls the branding of slaves as property,22 that practice is displaced here by an alternative inscription on those bodies of an oppositional voice that recognizes their humanity and their potential critical agency. Although they are silent, these four individuals and others who follow in the series, are addressed directly by the narrator, Nobosodru, suggesting a possible communication with her across space and time. She asserts later in the series that every¬ thing “You became” was “Anything / But what you were,” reminding viewers of the relentless denial of the subjecthood and humanity of enslaved persons.
In our modem systems of repre¬ sentation and communication any individual can be emptied of his or her lived experience and turned into a signifier of something else.
Roland Barthes’s semiological anal¬ ysis of how such ideological myths are produced provides some useful insights into Weems’s work. In his essay “Myth Today” Barthes exam¬ ines a 1955 cover of Paris Match showing a young black soldier salut¬ ing the French flag. In this particu¬ lar photographic “myth” the young man is not only made to “stand for”
French imperialism, he is also used to justify it, and ultimately to assert its presence as something that sim¬ ply goes without saying. A situation that is, in fact, contingent, histori¬ cal, and political is overlaid with what Barthes describes as the “alibi” that naturalizes the concept.23 The black soldier’s lived history must be emptied out so that his image can be filled with its new ideological meaning: the naturalness of French imperialism. As Barthes emphasizes, however, that black soldier’s life cannot be totally evacuated, because the parasitic myth needs the host image to retain just enough life, just enough presence, to give “nourishment” to the new meaning projected onto it.24 In Weems’s appro¬ priation of the Zealy daguerreotypes this process is laid bare. These men and women have been robbed of their individuality and their history in the
service of racist “science,” but the layer of critical commentary added by Weems reanimates them and suggests the possibility of resistance.
Viewers encountering the original Zealy daguerreotypes often try, like Weems, to counteract their dehumanizing classification of these enslaved Africans. Determined to see past the objectification of the black body as specimen, they intimate “tales of slave sorrow and humanity [communi¬ cated] through the expressive individualism of their eyes and forcefulness of their gaze.”25 Wallis detects an even more active resistance in these same images, in the mask-like non-gaze of individuals who have been forced into passive display: “In what seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage with the camera... they stare into the lens, their faces like masks, eyes glazed, jaws clenched.”26 That non-gaze is seen as a defense against precisely the sort of violation of their inner life commit¬ ted, although with the best inten¬ tions, by the viewer sympathetically seeking “the hidden lives... hov- er[ing] just beneath the surface.”27
Alan Trachtenberg points out that the individuals in Zealy’s daguerreotypes, isolated from any relation to family, profession, or community, “are permitted no social persona.”28 The individualizing ele¬ ments of the portrait mode have been stripped from these enslaved people along with their clothing. In From Here I Saw, Weems situates them in relation to the framing figure of the free African woman, restoring them to social interaction and to a historical context indepen¬ dent of the ethnographic archive. What is staged here is not a defin¬ itive triumph over pseudoscientific myths, but a palimpsest in which we see both the persistence of racist characterizations and the ongoing struggle against them.
Later in the series Weems introduces another daguerreotype with a very different history from those in the Agassiz archive. This image shows a “con¬ traband” subject, identified by researchers as “Gordon,” posed to display his scarred back, leaving his face in shadow (plate 3.17). This photograph was taken as part of the medical examination required for Gordon’s enlistment in the Union army, but it also records the evidence of the abuse he suffered as an enslaved worker. It was in this latter context that the photograph was appropriated by white abolitionists who reproduced it on cartes de visite. Gordon’s anonymous image was displayed on the front of the card under
5. Carrie Mae Weems, Ritual and Revolution (installation view), 1998, PPO-W Gallery, New York.
20 Bernier, African American Visual Arts , 17.
21 Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: The Slave Daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 59.
22 Bernier, African American Visual Arts , 15.
23 Barthes, Mythologies, 128-29.
24 Barthes, 118.
25 Bernier, African American Visual Arts, 16.
26 Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 40.
27 Bernier, African American Visual Arts, 16.
28 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photography: Images as History; Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 56. On the useful distinction between the type and the portrait see Wallis, “Questioning Documentary,” 54-56.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
the caption “The Scourge,” its reverse side revealing the image’s function as a fundraising device for “the education of colored people.”29 An 1863 article in Harper’s Weekly entitled “A Typical Negro” juxtaposes “The Scourge” with other images that show Gordon “in his uniform as a U.S. soldier,” dignified and strong (fig. 6). While the format and title still reduce him to a “type,” the article does recognize Gordon in his role as an active citizen.90 Eschew¬ ing the representation of the black individual as victim in need of rescue, such positive images would not have been effective in a fundraising cam¬ paign for salvation through education and assimilation.
In contrast to the sort of appropriation that reduces Gordon’s suffer¬ ing to a marketing ploy on cartes de visite, Weems’s transformation of the image restores his humanity in the powerful voice etched over his wounded body: “Black and tanned / Your whipped wind / Of change howled low / Blowing itself— ha — smack / Into the middle of / Ellington’s orchestra / Billie heard it too & / Cried strange fruit tears.” The flat declarative critique that accompanies the first four photographs (“You became a / Scientific profile,”
“A negroid type,” “An anthro¬ pological / Debate,” “& a pho¬ tographic subject”) escalates here into a powerful poetic cry.
Weems has protectively covered Gordon’s wounded body with a description of descendants who give expression to his survival and resistance. His whipped body becomes the “whipped wind / Of change” demanded by the powerful “howl,” “blow,” and “smack” of suffering, anger, and resistance evoked in the music of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. No longer isolated in a medical frame or serving a propagandic function, Gordon is connected to a present that remembers and feels the violence of his lived experience — even as Weems recognizes the impossibility of fully articulating its impact beyond the explosive “ha” that runs throughout From Here I Saw ,3‘
Weems’s practice of etching text over image in this series obstructs the viewer’s access to the bodies on display, casting a literal and metaphorical shadow over photography’s claim to fully illuminate and comprehend those bodies. In addition to the etched text that intervenes between the viewer and the photographed subject, Weems also adds a layer of color, tinting the images a deep red, perhaps evoking, as one critic suggests, “the life’s blood
still flowing through the memory of their enslaved experience.”32 Dehuman¬ izing representations are left in place, but disrupted and transformed.
One transformation not to be overlooked here is Weems’s metamorpho¬ sis of a documentary archive into an artwork. In 2000 she was invited by the Williams College Museum of Art to do just that, to bring her contemporary artist’s eye to the 1899 archive of photographs by Frances Benjamin John¬ ston documenting the mission of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute to educate and assimilate Native Americans and formerly enslaved Africans.33 In The Hampton Project Weems liberated some of these archival images from their frames and from the wall, enlarging and hanging them as banners; and she liberated them as well from their function as a celebratory historical record or public relations vehicle. Johnston’s photographs were commissioned for the “Ameri¬ can Negro” exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they were displayed alongside albums of photographs assembled by W. E. B. Du Bois as evidence of the dignity and accomplishments of African Americans. Shawn Michelle Smith points out that while Johnston’s photographs “forwarded the American iden¬ tity of Hampton students over their racial identities,” that emphasis shifted in the context of Du Bois’s exhibit to suggest that “the African American could indeed be both an Ameri¬ can’ and a ‘Negro.’”34
Weems acknowledges the important role played by South¬ ern black educational institu¬ tions in shaping African Amer¬ ican leadership, and she respects Johnston’s contribution and commitment to the economic survival of the Hampton Institute. However, she sees her own relationship to Johnston’s archive as necessarily informed by an im¬ portant contemporary critique of “the very nature of representation, about who makes and who looks.”35 In her intervention in the archive, original photographs of “before and after” transformation are enlarged, reproduced on canvas, and overlaid with textual commentary in bold red letters. Some¬ times the narrative voice is that of the students themselves, sometimes that of a critical witness, but always there is a recognition of losses suffered in the process of assimilation: “With your missionary might / You extended the hand of grace / Reaching down & snatching me / Up and out of myself” (plate 2.3); “You checked in one way / And came out another // Educated
6. “A Typical Negro,” Harper’s Weekly 7, no. 340 (July 4, 1863): 429.
29 Although she does not pursue the issue explicitly in From Here I Saw , Weems takes up the problematic aspects of education-for-assimilation in The Hampton Project (2000). See Weems as quoted in Patterson, Hampton Project, 29-30.
30 On the black soldier as embodiment of “patriotism and manhood” (301) see Deborah Willis, “The Black Civil War Soldier: Conflict and Citizenship,” Journal of American Studies 51, no. 2 (May 2017): 331-38.
31 For a detailed analysis of Gordon’s image and its accompanying text see Smith, “Fragmented Documents,” 255.
32 Deborah Willis, “Carrie Mae Weems: A Look Back on Three Decades,” Time, Sept. 20, 2012, http://time.com/52802/carrie-mae-weems-a-look-back-on-three-decades/.
33 On Weems’s aesthetic transformation of the Johnston archive see Sarah Bassnett, “From Public Relations to Art: Exhibiting Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Institute Photographs,” History of Photography 32, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 152-68.
34 Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 158.
35 Ramzy and Fogg, “Interview,” 80.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
away from yourself?’3*"
Hie provocative juxtaposition of an early photograph of a Native Amer¬ ican being baptized in a river (plate 2.23) with the more contemporary image of Birmingham demonstrators blasted with water canons (plate 2.24) rewrites the narrative of peaceful assimilation of non-whites into Ameri¬ can society. Contemporary viewers cannot miss the irony of the image of a classroom of Native American and African American students in European formal attire clustered around a man in Native American dress, examin¬ ing him as a specimen of the very culture they are being trained to leave behind (plate 2.13). With her transformation and strategic arrangement of its images, Weems makes Johnston’s album into a space haunted by diaphanous portraits and a poetic critique that brings past and present into powerful dialogue.
NEGOTIATING THE STEREOTYPE
The photographs in Du Bois’s “American Negro” exhibit, including Johnston’s archive, were meant to counteract degrading stereotypes of Native Amer¬ icans, African Americans, and their cultures. Such negative representations were used to justify forced assimilation even as they implied that such efforts to “civilize” the “savage” would never be totally successful. The troublesome question remains: if documentary photography can enact an “epistemic violence,”37 exposing its subjects to a “double act of subjugation” as victims of social injustice and of mechanical reproduction,38 can the artist appropri¬ ating those images and the audience viewing them escape complicity with its effects?39 Brian Wallis argues, for example, that the widespread circula¬ tion of images of abused enslaved people attests to an almost pornographic preoccupation with the beaten black body in the nineteenth century.40 Asserting the persistence of such attitudes into our contemporary culture, Elizabeth Alexander traces the consumption of “black bodies in pain” for entertainment from “public rapes, beatings and lynchings to the gladiato¬ rial arenas of basketball and boxing.”41 In her art, Weems seeks strategies for negotiating productively one’s relationship to this legacy of anti-black
actions, images, and narratives.
The challenges of such negotiation have been an important part of Weems’s work throughout her career. Critics have recognized her strug¬ gle to find “ways in which [the] farcical returns [of racist representations] might be negotiated.”*1 Weems sees the situation as a question of survival: “I’m always trying to figure out how to have a conversation with myself around the materials and ideas that are deeply troubling for me.. ..How do we negotiate and make it through this complicated maze of life that we are involved in?”43
One useful model for understanding the ethical challenges of Weems’s work is an essay entitled “White Metonymy” by Siona Wilson. In her analysis of Jo Spence and Terry Dennett’s image Colonization from the series Remodelling Photo History (fig. 7), Wilson raises the question: “what might an ethical negotiation look like?”44 Productive negotiation, she argues, first requires an acknowledgment of the inevitability of our own complicity in the effects of negative gen¬ eralizations about race, class, and gender. From the perspective of a “non-complacent recognition”43 one can trace the genealogy of the stereotype, identify¬ ing what needs gave rise to its invention and what anxieties seem to necessitate its repetition. Internal¬ ized and unconscious negative representations must be drawn out into the open where their invisible power (as something that goes without saying) can be challenged. This is the work of negotiation.
As theorists like Homi K. Bhabha and others have argued, the stereotype is an ambivalent form, expressing both desire for and fear of the other.46 Its compulsive repetition is motivated by an anxiety arising from that ambivalence. The myth of white superiority depends on a structure in which a myth of whiteness is set up as the opposite of a fantasy of blackness riven by contradiction: evil yet childlike, sinful yet dangerously seductive, the terrifying monster and the entertaining clown. Weems nego¬ tiates with these fears and fantasies in the interactions of image and text that constitute From Here I Saw.
In her treatment of the Agassiz daguerreotypes, Weems exposes how white dominance depends on the reduction of the black body to a scientific
36 Ambient recording of Weems’s voice in the installation of The Hampton Project quoted in Patterson, Hampton Project , 72.
37 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Caiy Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 280.
38 Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, 176.
39 For a thorough critical overview of the risky terrain of the repetition of negative representations of minority subjects in Weems’s project and of the question of the inherent violence of documentary photography see Claire Raymond, Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South: Women, Specularity, and the Poetics of Subjectivity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). On the very problematic use of images of racially motivated violence as a means of education see Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
40 Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 49, 54.
41 Elizabeth Alexander, ‘“Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 78-79.
42 Huey Copeland, “Close-Up: Specters of History; Carrie Mae Weems’s Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me, 2012,” Artforum International 53, no. 1 (Sept. 2014): 344; emphasis added.
43 Edward Rubin, “The Many Shades of Black: Three Decades of Carrie Mae Weems at the Frist Center for the Arts in Nashville, Tennessee,” dArt International 31 (Fall 2013): 3; emphasis added.
44 Siona Wilson, “White Metonymy: A Discussion around Jo Spence and Terry Dennett’s Colonization,” Third Text 10, no. 37 (Winter 1996/ 97): 5.
45 Wilson, 16.
46 Homi K. Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 66-84.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
specimen. In deconstructing the myths of white superiority she also lays bare the ways in which whiteness defends itself by exploiting the black body as a source of entertainment and jokes. Early in her career Weems exposed this strategy in her series Ain’t Jokin’ (1987-88, plates 10.1-6) in which racist jokes are paired with photographic portraits in which the dignity of the sitters defeats the degrading intentions of “humorous” anti-black stereo¬ types. For example, a portrait of a mature, serious-looking, and well-dressed African American man sitting on his porch (plate 10.1) bears the caption, “What are the three things you can’t give a black person?” The viewer must slide aside a panel to reveal the punchline: “A black eye, a fat lip and a job!” As viewers are lured into this direct participation in the riddle’s “message” they are made literally complicit with its racist humor.
Weems’s study of an archive of American humor during her graduate work in folklore at Berkeley reinforced her consciousness of the “insidious nature of the devastatingly real effects of humor on a race of people.”47 From Here I Saw builds on the bold early work of Ain’t Jokin’, analyzing further the aggressive racist humor generated by white anxiety. One photograph shows what appears to be a group of entertainers including three African women seated next to a clown in whiteface (plate 3.26). The overlaid text laments the loss of dignity suffered by Africans who “became / The joker’s joke.”
Another example of this series’ use of racist humor refers to the per¬ ceived threat of racial mixing. Over a photograph by Garry Winogrand of an interracial couple with their chimpanzee “children” Weems etches a text that highlights the forced tone of these attempts to cover up eugenic anx¬ iety with racist humor (plate 3.28): “Some laughed / Long & hard & loud.” The aggressive laughter accompanying these racist jokes is drowned out in Weems’s work by the intermittent explosive “ha” that appears throughout the series. That “ha” of contempt, derision, and even triumph gives these silenced black subjects the last laugh. For Weems this is another strategy for survival: “we don’t laugh to keep from crying, we laugh to keep from slapping the inventor of these crazy-ass images upside his head.”48
Addressing further white anxiety about racial purity and superiority, Weems appropriates several formal portraits typical of those produced for family albums that came into fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. Laura Wexler describes the mid-nineteenth-century white family photo album’s production of “saccharine fictions of the ‘good darkey’ who happily served the family’s interests from his or her ‘place’ just outside the focus or the frame.”45 From Here I Saw includes one domestic group posed in clear descending order of importance: the white patriarch, his two daughters, and, last in line, the household servant, whose contrasting blackness is fur¬ ther emphasized against her stark white shawl (plate 3.25). Weems derails the myth of white masters and their contented slaves with an inscription
that activates the power of the marginalized maid: “Your resistance / Was found in / The food you placed / On the master’s table — ha.”
Overlaid with this subversive defiance, the power dynamic within the photographs shifts dramatically. The purity and dominance of the white race certified by the family photographic album50 is undermined when Weems pairs the white family portrait with a family group exhibiting a wide range of skin tones (plate 3.24): “Out of deep rivers / Mixed-matched mulattos / A variety of types mind you — ha / Sprang up everywhere.” Weems’s allu¬ sion here to racial mixing adds an ironic note of revenge — blackness has not been contained and the white dream of racial purity and segregation is challenged “everywhere” — “ha.” The power of the subaltern is embodied with particular force in the portrait of the “Mammie” figure who transcends that persistent caricature with the recurring “ha” (plate 3.6): “You became / Mammie, / Mama, / Mother & / Then, yes, / Confidant — ha.”5 This imposing figure looks down at the camera and at any viewer from the superior posi¬ tion of the servant who knows everything about the master while remaining unknown to him or her.52
The “Mammie” figure is just one of several caricatures of black women exposed in From Here I Saw. For example, Weems draws attention to the contradictions of a racist system that denounces the imagined innate sinful sexuality of the black woman, yet entrusts her with its children. Weems places an erotic image of a naked black woman lying on a bed next to a por¬ trait of a black nursemaid holding a white infant (plates 3.20-21). The text running across these two photographs declares, “You became / Playmate / To the / Patriarch” “And their daughter.” Myths of black female hypersexu¬ ality are juxtaposed with the history of the reproductive labor of enslaved women, making explicit and legible the contradictions at the heart of the stereotypes that are continually repeated and reinforced.
Weems recognizes that the most challenging obstacle to negotiating with racist myths may be their unconscious internalization. Although she describes some of her work as a “feverishly toned polemic,”53 the artist also insists that it cannot be reduced to the drama of helpless victims and guilty perpetrators. Weems positions herself against what she sees as a tendency to blame injustices on “‘them over there’” rather than accepting one’s own complicity for having “allowed a certain amount of victimization to take place.”54 In From Here I Saw this issue comes up explicitly in relation to the figure of Josephine Baker. Baker’s performances in Paris in La Revue Negre in the 1920s, half-naked in a banana skirt, were seen by some as reinforcing fantasies of racial primitivism, and she was denounced for letting herself be marketed as an exotic “other” for the entertainment of white audiences.55 Weems’s text etched over a photograph of Baker seems to echo that critique (plate 3.22): “You became an accomplice.” Interestingly, Weems has not used
47 Qtd. in Susan Canning, “Carrie Mae Weems,” in Interventions and Provocations: Conversations on Art, Culture, and Resistance, ed. Glenn Harper (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 62.
48 Qtd. in Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 190.
49 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 9.
50 On the role of the nineteenth-century white family album as an evidentiary tool in establishing racial purity of the line, see Shawn Michelle Smith’s “‘Baby’s Picture Is Always Treasured’: Eugenics and the Reproduction of Whiteness in the Family Photographic Album,” in American Archives, 113-14.
51 Weems also used this expressive “ha” in the texts of The Kitchen Table and Slave Coast series.
52 The original 1932 photograph by Prentice H. Polk, a black photographer, bears the appropriate and ironic title, “The Boss.”
53 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Foreword,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, ed. Kathiyn E. Delmez, exh. cat. (Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), vii.
54 Weems qtd. in Canning, “Carrie Mae Weems,” 59.
55 A recent resurgence of interest in Baker’s performances has produced new critical assessments that attempt to see beyond any easy denunciation of their reinforcement of primitivist stereotypes to recognize their possible subversive effects. See Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (Urbana: Uni¬ versity of Illinois Press, 2007) and Anthea Kraut, “Between Primitivism and Diaspora: The Dance Performances of Josephine Baker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 3 (Oct. 2003): 433-50.
14
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
any of the widely circulated images of Baker in her pseudotribal costume, grinning for her audience, but has chosen, instead, a candid photograph in which Baker is elegantly attired, demurely seated, and lost in a moment of private reflection. The accusation of complicity is tempered by Weems’s choice of an image that hints at Baker’s lonely isolation behind her public roles and the stereotypes that shaped them.
PERFORMING HISTORY
Moving beyond From Here I Saw,
Weems externalizes and animates internalized racist caricatures, making them available for purpose¬ ful manipulation that will neutral¬ ize their power.’6 By strategically “playing” those prescribed roles, and playing with them, Weems exposes the artificial and theatrical constructions that constrain black subjects: “[This black body is] laid with a certain kind of history that’s almost insurmountable. I’m always attempting to push against it, to insist that there be another kind of read.”57 In her performance-ori¬ ented works, the corporeal image, activated by its accompanying text, becomes a powerfully animated presence.
Weems often acts out with her own body multiple roles in the his¬ torical narrative of race, gender, and class relations. In The Louisi¬ ana Project (2003), for example, she photographs herself in period garb in various locations including a his¬ toric grand plantation house (fig. 8), modest slave quarters, and a contempo¬ rary working-class apartment house. In the same project, she also performs in Missing Links (plates 4.1-6), a set of stunning portraits of figures in fancy dress tuxedos and white gloves incongruously wearing animal heads (zebra, donkey, ape, elephant, sheep, chicken). James Gill describes the 1873 origin of a Mardi Gras performance entitled “The Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species,” a masquerade through which, giving particular attention to the figure of the gorilla, the white elite reassured itself of its superiority through this evolutionary satire.’8 With the stunning images in Missing Links, each illuminated figure posed against a stark black background and striking an
elegant pose, Weems counters the degrading animalistic caricature of Loui¬ siana’s black citizens enacted in this white ritual, hijacking the performance in an arch parody of defunct elitism and power. In another portrait, If I Ruled the World (plate 6.8), Weems appears as a clown/trickster figure del¬ icately dangling a world globe from her fingers, her mouth wide open as if expressing that familiar triumphant “ha.” By performing with her own body the roles of both the enslaved and the master, Weems levels the class and race hierarchies on which the unequal distribution of power depends.
Exposing in her performances the artificiality and constructed- ness of racial, gender, and class ste¬ reotypes, Weems also makes them available as strategies of resistance. She finds one inspirational model for this work in a Nina Simone song, “Four Women,” in which the singer evokes four “types” of black womanhood, giving each one her own strong voice as she names her¬ self, humbly, sadly, defiantly, bit¬ terly. In her turn, Weems animates four female “types” of her own era: Peaches, Liz, Tanikka, and Elaine (1988, plates 8.1-4). Dramatizing the individual’s power to manipu¬ late, construct, and continuously redefine her identity, she shows how “the self-conscious styling of ‘black¬ ness’ [has a] long history... as a strat¬ egy of self-determination.”’’ The grip of anti-black and anti-female caricatures that tighten, as Weems puts it, “like a noose about the neck”60 of every black woman is loosened here by her playful enactment, a theatrical embodiment that paradoxically disempowers and disembodies racial and gender stereotypes.6"
In the last ten years Weems has turned increasingly to performance-ori¬ ented video and installation work in which she uses not only her own body but the bodies of her students, friends, and viewers as active agents in an encounter with history. Performance, as she understands it, entails “using one’s body as a site of protest. . .as a focus for critique.”62 What Weems has in mind here is something more than being present as a witness or even posing in various guises for the camera. In Hopes and Dreams: Gestures of Demon-
8. Carrie Mae Weems, A Single Waltz in Time from The Louisiana Project, 2003. Pigment ink print, 20 x 20 in.
56 See JeffKelley, “The Isms Brothers, Carrie Mae Weems at SFAI,” Artweek 23, no. 15 (May 7, 1992): 4 on Weems activating the stereotype within.
57 Qtd. in Hilarie M. Sheets, “Photographer and Subject Are One,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/arts/design/carrie-mae-weems -photographer-and-subject.html.
58 James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 101-4. Gill also cites an article in the Daily Picayune making the racist observation that the gorilla in the parade float was “amazingly like the broader-mouthed variety of our own citizens, so Ethiopian in his exuberant glee, so at home in his pink shirt collar, so enraptured with himself and so fond of his banjo that the Darwinian chain wanted no more links” (104).
59 Robert Storr, “Carrie Mae Weems: Anyway I Want It,” in Delmez, Carrie Mae Weems, 31.
60 Weems qtd. in Willis and Williams, Black Female Body, 190.
61 Deborah Willis, “Photographing between the Lines: Beauty, Politics, and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Delmez, Carrie Mae Weems, 35.
62 Audio from Carrie Mae Weems in reference to Hopes and Dreams: “Interview with Carrie Mae Weems” (Aug. 2013), Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, accessed Feb. 9, 2018, http://radicalpresenceny.org/7page_kU664.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
stration (2004-07), for example, she takes her art into the streets (plates 6.1-8). Reanimating the clown/trickster figure from The Louisiana Project, she appears dressed in white striped pants, tuxedo jacket, white gloves, and top hat, riding the subway or set up on street comers in Harlem. In response to the Republican National Convention underway in New York, she wanted to draw attention to the manipulations and false promises of political dis¬ course. In her trickster guise, Weems advertises to passersby with bullhorn and signage: “Hopes & Dreams in a bottle only $19.99” — empty promises reenacted with satirical bitterness and elan.
Weems appears again as this trickster/clown figure in Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me: A Story in 5 Parts (2012, plate 7) where it is one of several “charac¬ ters” she conjures up with a nineteenth-century technique of illusionistic projection called the “Pepper’s Ghost” effect. This unique installation has a mysterious allure; in a darkened room visitors stand behind a red velvet rope in front of what appears to be a luxurious red velvet-curtained stage, watching ghostly figures appear and disappear. No longer hawking “hopes & dreams in a bottle” to those in need, here the trickster/clown speaks for them, expressing anger and foreseeing a dramatic change in structures of power: “Revenge is a muthafucka,” she hisses.63
In a different register, Weems has taken her art and activism into the streets not as some contrived “character” but as herself— one member of a community working for social justice. Several community projects in her hometown of Syracuse, New York demonstrate the artist’s commitment to engagement and change. In collaboration with three other women — Tanya Rice, Jo Shonalda Jackson, and Petra Szilagyi — Weems formed the collective Social Studies 101. That group initiated Operation: Activate (2011), a project that saturated her neighborhood with billboards against gun violence. One sign declares “Our failure to respond is the problem!”; another warns, “As militants you were feared, as thugs you are only despised! Stop the violence!” Weems also created the Institute of Sound and Style, a summer program to give high school students from underserved communities experience and education in the arts, a project that looks to the creative and productive life of future generations.
This commitment to activism and education is at the heart of one of Weems’s most powerful animations of the historical archive: Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008, plates 1.1-10). Working with art students and community members as actors, the artist staged a series of moments of historical crisis often fixed in our collective memory by widely circulated media images. Among the moments staged and mourned in this project are the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Benazir Bhutto, and the tragedies of Hiroshima and Kent State. Her student collaborators are engaged in what one critic describes as “embodied research [that] brings historical archives back into focus in the present.”64 Weems herself explains how “through the act of performance, with our own bodies. . .we live the experience; we stand in the shoes of others and come to know firsthand what is often only imagined, lost, forgotten.”63
Rather than creating an illusion of reality in the resulting stills and video
sequences, Weems foregrounds the theatricality of these staged represen¬ tations; lighting equipment and raised pedestals are left exposed, remind¬ ing viewers of the mechanisms by which these images and the historical moments they record are constructed. One image depicts a classroom, stag¬ ing the institutional mechanism used to convey that constructed history as fact, but which might be repurposed for a more critical engagement with the past. If histories and identities are constructed, Weems seems to suggest, they can be reconstructed, redirected for a different present and future. In “Woman in Winter,” one section of the project’s video, Weems’s voiceover insists on the necessity of looking back in order to move forward: “to get to now, to this moment, she needs to look back over the landscape of memory.”
Weems is fiercely committed to the truth, no matter how bleak. In Con¬ structing History the recitation of those lost to assassination seems relentless. In the final section of the video, “The Fall: The Assassinations,” the visual image flickers on and off, broken, and Weems’s voice stalls on the repeated phrase “the assassinations... the assassinations... the assassinations.” Although the narrative also directs the viewer to look to the horizon for “little sight¬ ings of hope or dreams,” there is no guarantee, no neat resolution. “The thing hoped for,” she warns in “Woman in Winter,” is always “just out of reach.” In their embodiment of iconic moments of historical tragedy the participants in Constructing History collaborate with the artist to reanimate and enter a history that preceded many of them. The resulting photographs and videos enact a haunting beauty that does not deny but helps us endure the reactivation of those painful events.
SORROW SONGS
When image and language break down in the face of a history of vio¬ lence and oppression that lives on in the present, it is often the power and beauty of music that can lift us out of the paralysis of defeatism. Weems describes moments of despair when “music has saved my life, more than once.” She finds inspiration in the voice of Abbey Lincoln, “a woman of yearning and of longing”66 like herself and in the foresight of Sam Cooke who “had been seriously on the money when he said ‘a change is gonna come.’”67 Following their lead, Weems is renewed in her commitment to face up to the injustices of the past and the inadequacies of the present while remaining determinedly hopeful for the future.
More than a century earlier, W. E. B. Du Bois heard in the “sorrow songs” sung by enslaved people many tales of “death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.” In The Hampton Project Weems appropriates David Wojnarowicz’s photograph Untitled (Buffalo), superimposing her own figure as viewer, and the text: “From a great height I saw you falling / Black and Indian alike / And for you I played / A sorrow song” (plate 2.25). Du Bois prefaced every chapter in The Souls of Black Folk with a different spiri¬ tual, finding in each one not only an expression of “the message of the slave to the world,” but more broadly, “the most beautiful expression of human experience.”68 Weems, too, has insisted that the multiple forms of African American experience make connections across all differences, yielding com-
63 For a very insightful reading of Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me see Copeland, “Specters of History,” 342-45.
64 Tirza True Lattimer, “Carrie Mae Weems @ Cantor Arts Center,” review of Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video, Squarecylinder, Nov. 13, 2013, http:/ / www.squarecylinder.com/2013/11/carrie-mae-weems-cantor-arts-center/.
65 Qtd. in Laurie Ann Farrell, “An Opus: Carrie Mae Weems,” in Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, exh. cat. (Savannah: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2009), n.p.
66 Weems qtd. in Bey, “Carrie Mae Weems.”
67 Qtd. in Andrea Kirsh, “Carrie Mae Weems: Issues in Black, White and Color,” in Carrie Mae Weems, Andrea Kirsh and Susan Fisher Sterling, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993), 16.
68 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), 197-98.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
mon ground and universal lessons. Often integrating music into her work with image and text, she demonstrates its power as a strategic implement in communicating those shared losses, longings, and hopes.
Weems was already using musical references in From Here. I Saw to express a complex range of feelings, from despair to the rising up of hopes and dreams on a not-so-distant horizon. Music cannot soothe Gordon’s wounded body, but Weems’s inscription on his body breaks the silence of the “specimen” with the musical eloquence of Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday voicing his pain. Another image in the series shows a young girl formally posed in white and holding a bouquet of white flowers, a studio portrait typical of the positive images of African Americans put into cir¬ culation in the late nineteenth century (plate 3.23). Over this portrait the artist has etched the sheet music of the song “God Bless the Child”: “Yes, the strong gets more / While the weak ones fade / Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade / Mama may have, Papa may have / But God bless the child that’s got his own.” The hopeful innocence and potential of this young girl’s life are cast in shadow by lyrics reminding us of the struggles that await her in the harsh cultural context outside the controlled setting of the photo¬ graphic studio.
Music gives voice to pain and struggle, but Weems also finds in it a source of strength and hope, a strategic resource for resistance. The pen¬ ultimate image in From Here I Saw shows a dense crowd of people of color gathered together but looking off in different directions (plate 3.32). The accompanying text quotes a popular spiritual: “In your sing song / Prayer you asked / Didn’t my Lord / Deliver Daniel?” Although Weems does not include the final lines of the song in her inscription, they hover just beyond the work: “Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel / But then why not you and me?. . . / Can’t you see it coming? / Can’t you see it coming?” Weems’s use of this spiritual contrasts with an earlier image in From Here I Saw in which several older men, heads bowed, wait patiently for their reward in heaven: “For your names you took / Hope & Humble” (plate 3.16). Weems recognizes that, beyond this passive stance, the spiritual “sorrow songs” in which Du Bois found one of the enslaved Africans’ great gifts to the nation could also turn one toward action. The next lines of the spiritual Weems references here express a demand for justice (“Why not you and me?”) and anticipate its advent on earth. The figures captured in the penultimate image of From Here I Saw constitute a community of individuals no longer looking meekly down but looking up and beyond the injustices of the past and present.
One might hope that in sharing their music with an audience, perform¬ ers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone might feel lifted out of their isola¬ tion, embraced by a community of listeners who share their pain, longing, and joy. Weems laments that many black female singers have faded from our historical consciousness, and she wants to remind her audience of the
tremendous “gift and. . .legacy” of their artistry.6? To that end Weems created a piece called Slow Fade Co Black (2014) in which she drew from an archive of publicity photographs representing artists including Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, Mahalia Jackson, and Betty Carter, not statically posed, but animated in the act of performance.70 Weems has blurred these images so the singers are out of focus and out of reach — we can barely see them through the fog of history and the overlay of contrived identities. Weems brings these figures back to us, but they return to us as lost.71 The sadness of this loss is mitigated in Slow Fade Co Black by Weems’s wordplay. She explains that as a cinematic cue “slow fade to black” signals a definitive ending, but it is also an indicator of movement, “to black,” promising a new generation of black artists emerg¬ ing from and nourished by the earlier tradition.72 Weems has mastered the art of making beauty out of loss, finding hope in disaster, and music is one of the tools that helps her accomplish this.
Weems often incorporates music into her videos and installations, but she also looks to it as a model and metaphor for her strategies as an artist. She explains that she set out to study how composers and performers use voice and meter to bring ideas and feelings to life for an audience. In her own work she aspires to make her visual art “sing” for her audience: “When you hit it, there’s something that really sings, and I think the thing that sings is that I create a space for not only myself but for the viewer to inhabit. It is this shared space of habitation where the magic happens.”73 Weems’s “magic” is never an idealized evasion of hard truths, but an expression of suffering and longing that ultimately gives courage, strength, and vision.
SEDUCING WITH BEAUTY
For Weems the aesthetic pleasure of music or visual art or poetry is not merely an embellishment of the truth but a strategy for drawing her audi¬ ence into the complex thoughts and feelings with which her art engages: “I’m very interested in how I map something, how I enter it.... And then, I’m always aware that I need to take somebody with me, that I don’t want to experience any of this by myself.. ..So if there is a beauty and elegance that allows my self and the viewer to be engaged, then I have a sense that you’ll be more willing to enter the terrain and ask the difficult questions.. ..I think a certain level of grace allows for the entry.”74 Thelma Golden has rec¬ ognized this strategy in Weems’s work: “She seduces the viewer through the very process of creating luscious prints, or beautiful images, without ever using beauty purely to seduce. Beauty is always tempered by other concerns that take the viewer beyond aesthetics. But no matter what... the religion of beauty always undergirds Weems’s vision and informs her work.”73
Directing us beyond aesthetics, while never abandoning beauty, Weems brings along on this journey not only her audience but many artists past and present whose work gives her courage and joy. As viewers wander
69 Weems qtd. in Maurice Berger, “Black Performers, Fading from Frame, and Memory,” New York Times , Jan. 22, 2014, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/black -performers-fading-from-frame-and-memory/?_r=o.
70 In Berger’s analysis of Slow Fade to Black he recognizes the effect of the images Weems has chosen as presenting these women not as “static icons of racial martyrdom or stereotypes of black divas” but appearing almost animated in the midst of the “flourishes of performance.” Berger, “Black Performers.”
71 In a related piece, Weems creates an album cover bearing the title Dee Dee Live at the Copa (featuring herself in the role of the singer), and a gold record with the label “Ode to Affirmative Action.” The lyric featured on the album cover, “If you should lose me,” stops short of the rest of that line that some listeners may recall: “... you’ll lose a good thing.” It is not only black female performers of the past who are at risk of disappearing from our memories, but contemporary black creators in all fields who often suffer invisibility in the present. With this “affirmative action” Weems shares the stage with them all.
72 Weems qtd. in Felicia R. Lee, “Two Artists Salute a Legacy,” New York Times, June 15, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/arts/design/slow-fade-to-black-at -celebrate-brooklyn-in-prospect-park.html.
73 Braswell, “Artist Carrie Mae Weems.”
74 Weems qtd. in Susan Sollins, “Carrie Mae Weems,” in Art:zi — Art in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marybeth Sollins, vol. 5 (New York: Art2i, 2009), 47.
75 Golden, “Some Thoughts,” 33.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS: STRATEGIES OF ENGAGEMENT
through the labyrinth of photographs printed on thin fabric in the instal¬ lation Ritual and Revolution they hear her voice naming a community of artists from Vladimir Tatlin to Lorna Simpson, artists who have also faced the music and pointed a way to the future. Caught in the spotlight of her recent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2014, the first solo retrospective on the work of a black female artist at the institution, Weems responded with characteristic generosity by inviting others onto her stage. She organized a three-day celebration of events at the museum, “Car¬ rie Mae Weems LIVE: Past Tense/Future Perfect,” featuring sixty African American artists, musicians, poets, and dancers whose collective creative energies were gathered in an elite cultural space in which they have so long been underrepresented.
In 2017 she organized an ambitious ten-hour convening of artists, per¬ formers, poets, scholars, and activists to share strategies for confronting “The Shape of Things” in the ongoing history of violence we inhabit. Hosted within the imposing architecture of the Park Avenue Armory, among the most extravagant accouterments of military power and prestige, the arts emerged as a precious resource and strategy for desperately needed change. It is the gift Weems brings with her wherever she goes.
In much of her work Weems’s aim has been to “storm the barricaded doors,” to open a pathway to the archive of history, to guide her viewers, who are sometimes her collaborators, into the “mess of a messy world”76 from where a different future might be glimpsed and constructed. Her ongoing evolution as an artist is fueled by her belief in the potential of creative com¬ munities, of interdisciplinary work that would include the broadest range of participants. Her politically inflected art is never reduced to a polemical harangue delivered by the artist to a passive audience; her commitment is to collaboration and dialogue, her yearning is for connection. Moving forward from the mournful witnessing of From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Weems has offered her audiences the experience of animated and embodied immersion in a shared history of struggle, in the ongoing effects of injustice, while drawing their attention always toward those “little sightings of hope or dreams” on the horizon. As her audience, we are grateful for the invita¬ tion and mindful of the challenges of the journey.
76 Weems qtd. in Patterson, Hampton Project, :
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”: LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS
Faith
Rather than conceiving of photography as a mere repository of the past, both individual and collective, we might follow Walter Benjamin’s lead and think of photography as dialecti¬ cal. In this view, the indexical, reflective function of the pho¬ tograph is imbued with a living engagement with the past....
What we might call a practice of critical black memory is one of many tools New World blacks and African Americans in particular have employed as a response to the dislocation, subjection, and dehumanization that has marked their expe¬ rience of modernity.
— Leigh Raiford1
Encountering Carrie Mae Weems’s The Hampton Project (2000) in 2018 is an uncanny experience. The artist’s textual and acoustic engagement with the late nineteenth-century photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston and others feels newly relevant in our contemporary moment of Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock, and it reminds us, as Leigh Raiford does in the epigraph above, that each generation has its own “living engagement with the past.”2 Commissioned by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Insti¬ tute and shown as part of the “History of the American Negro” section of the US exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Johnston’s photographs elicit recognition of a particular kind. The starched rigidity of her sitters’ poses is meant to convey the efficiency and morality of the conjoined national proj¬ ects of, on the one hand, the internal colonization of Native Americans, and on the other, an African American “emancipation” that was “less the grand event of liberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection.”^ Weems responds to the implications of this complex double archive: “From a great height I saw you falling / Black and Indian
Smith
alike / And for you I played / A sorrow song.”* 1 2 3 4 5
Weems’s resignification of these images in terms of “falling” and “sor¬ row” questions the integrity of these late nineteenth-century projects and their aftermath. Indeed, as is well known, Hampton University found it troubling that she saw “conformity” where she should have seen “libera¬ tion.’^ We might say, following Wayne Modest, that Johnston’s photographs elicited the wrong feelings from Weems — an inappropriate response that she has passed on to viewers of her work.6 What does it mean to look at John¬ ston’s images (and Weems’s interaction with them) today, when we know only too well that neither the visual, juridical, nor other forms of repre¬ sentation and evidence on which we have grounded our freedom struggles can guarantee justice, let alone freedom? Perhaps the arrested poses and gestures of Johnston’s sitters offer strategies and resources on how to live with conquest in the present.
By the time Frances Johnston was commissioned to take photographs of Hampton’s campus, its institutional history was deeply immersed in the sei¬ zure of land and the upheaval of communities across the US and the globe. Hampton’s founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, was bom on Maui, part of the Mokupuni 0 Hawaii archipelago, where his New England missionary family was engaged in the fruit cultivation and Christian conversion that would help to secure formal US annexation generations later at the end of the nineteenth century. When Armstrong moved from Honolulu’s Puna- hou School (attended by Barack Obama in the 1970s) to Williams College in Western Massachusetts, he was moving between institutions with deep ties to the Congregational Church and the American Missionary Associa¬ tion: abolitionist organizations involved in educational work among Afri¬ can Americans in the post-abolition South. It is these educators, we are taught, who embody the spirit of the post-Civil War era as one of benef-
Many thanks to my brilliant spring 2018 Brandeis students in Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography.
1 Leigh Raiford, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (Dec. 2009): 119.
2 Raiford, 119.
3 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.
4 As part of The Hampton Project Weems added this inscription on a photograph of herself standing in front of a David Wojnarowicz photograph, Untitled (Buffalo) (plate
2.25).
5 Jeanne Zeidler, “A View from Hampton University Museum,” in Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project, ed. Vivian Patterson, exh. cat. (New York: Aperture; William- stown: Williams College Museum of Art, 2000), 77.
6 See Wayne Modest, “The Affective Photograph: Museums and the Emotional Afterlife of Colonial Photography,” in Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid Lien (London: Routledge, 2016), 21-42.
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”:
LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS
icent reform, of the transformation of the otherwise “uncivilizable” into fully human persons capable of telling right from wrong. They are the New England schoolteachers who are celebrated in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and they are also the army colonels (such as Armstrong himself) who supervised African American soldiers and Native Americans in captivity.
That this is the story of the later nineteenth century, and not, say, theft of land, resources, and spirit on a grand scale, is due to the tremendous ideo¬ logical work of sentiment and domesticity. Here photography does not only reflect, in keeping with the indexical claim to record objectively only what is captured by the photographer’s lens. Rather, photography is a consolidating engine of sentiment, of the process by which conquest is transmuted into beneficence and the conquered are taught to express gratitude for being res¬ cued. Laura Wexler’s conceptualization offender vio¬ lence” — a term that she takes from Armstrong’s own description of his work at Hampton — is very helpful here.7 Johnston’s photographs of the Hampton cam¬ pus and of US marines in the Pacific in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, as well as the “Miss¬ ing Links” photographs of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair by Emme and Mayme Gerhard (fig. 1) who had a studio in St. Louis, become, for Wexler, a powerful demonstration of the work of sentiment: “Acting as the visual equivalent of ventriloquists, tum-of-the- century white women photographers in the United States found they could have satisfying careers if they used their photographs to mirror and enlarge the white man’s image of himself as custodian of civiliza¬ tion just as the white mistresses of their mothers’ gen¬ eration had used softened tones to amplify his voice.”8
Looking at photographs of newly arrived Native American students at Hampton, or of Filipinos forced to turn themselves inside out in booths at the World’s Fair, the presumed purveyor of such images comes to know her normality as a white middle-class US subject whose time is ahead of, rather than shared with, the subjects of such photographs. The sheer pro¬ liferation of such images, in tandem with other genres such as the novel and books of conduct, reinforces the non-coeval status of those deemed to be “outside the magic circle of nineteenth-century domesticity.”5 The very presence of these images transforms the abode into a respectable home.
But it is not white consolidation in the context of black abjection that Weems’s sorrow song mourns, even if this critique is also implied. Non¬ whites, too, look at photographs to reassure themselves that they fall within this “magic circle,” and that by looking they can become subject rather than object. Photographs by Johnston, the Gerhards, and others confirm their difference from a purportedly savage “other” by depicting either this “other,” or the respectably clothed and posed nonwhite (or not-yet-fully-white) sub¬
1. Emme Gerhard (1872-1346) and Mayme Gerhard (1876-1955), The Missing Link #1, c. 1904. Color film copy transparency, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-USZC4-11488.
ject on the road to full humanity.
Stuart Hall, for example, describes his grandmother’s front room:
Every comer of my grandmother’s front room was loaded with photographs of family, friends and relations. I remember a centre table covered with lace crochet that she had made, but you couldn’t put a glass down on the table because it was crammed with these photographs, frame after frame, of for¬ mal self-representations of older relatives, of young people getting married and first bom babies. There was something very “Victorian” about all this, which is mainly about pack¬ ing out a space with objects. That in turn had probably been influenced by Britain’s role as the marketplace of the world, connected by trade to the far flung corners of its colonial world, the centre of this cornuco¬ pia of commodities and goods which somehow also circulated from one colony to another and with the Victorian period as the high water¬ mark of the practice of collecting things and cramming them together in a display space — the aesthetics of brie a brae.10
For Hall, his grandmother’s living room in colo¬ nial Jamaica in the 1940s becomes a way to understand Jamaican respectability as deeply entangled with Eng- lishness, and thus to resist notions of a pure, unmarked Caribbean “authenticity”: “To what could it be ‘authen¬ tic’ when so much of Caribbean culture is precisely this amalgam of traditions, modifications, borrowing, adaptations, resistances, transcriptions, translations and appropriations, locked in an unequal relationship? The front room represents precisely a creative cultural act or form of that doubly-inscribed, hybrid or creo- lized kind.”* 11
I understand Weems’s work as an attempt to lin¬ ger with the consequences of such historical entan¬ glements. Her sorrow songs are an indictment of the suggestion that the enslaved and captive subjects and their descendants who are in such photographs, or who are looking at them, do not already have innate humanity, that this must somehow be inculcated and developed by the strenuous effort of institutions such as Hampton. While Johnston’s photographs may well have had an afterlife in a loving relative’s album or sitting room, they were commissioned by Hampton’s principal, Hollis Burke Frissell, to do the work of similar pho¬ tographs commissioned by Tuskegee’s principal, Booker T. Washington, and by W. E. B. Du Bois: to demonstrate Native American and African American emergence from moral and cultural debasement under the tutelage of their Talented Tenth instructors and of kindly Northern white patrons. Images in The Hampton Project such as the juxtaposed before-and-after photographs of Native American students (plates 2.4-5), the photograph of Hampton’s
7 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age ofU.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 52, 108.
8 Wexler, 92.
9 Wexler, 66-67.
10 Stuart Hall, “The West Indian Front Room,” in The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, ed. Michael McMillan (London: Black Dog, 2009), 18-19.
11 Hall, 19.
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”:
LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS
r
president with his family (plate 2.3), and a photograph of Native Americans (plate 2.23) being baptized at a river,12 are all placed in dialogue with — some¬ times inscribed by — text, as well as by audio commentaries that probe the underlying premise of these projects, and that register the assault on per- sonhood: “With your missionary might / You extended the hand of grace / Reaching down & snatching me / Up and out of myself.”
In critiquing such ideological assumptions, Weems’s artistic practice is in conversation with the fictional protagonists of Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, and Ralph Ellison’s 1952 Invisible Man; they find the historically black institutions in which they are studying or teaching to be preten¬ tious, hypocritical, and deeply ashamed of African Americans who have not had a formal education, and whose homes on the edge of the premises are considered the embarrassing foil against which the students’ progress is being measured. Ellison’s unnamed pro¬ tagonist wonders if the statue of the school’s founder depicts a veil being lifted from a stu¬ dent’s eyes, or more securely placed over them.
This casts the ideological and cultural work of such institutions as harmful, when we are taught to see it not only as benevolent, but as discontinuous from the violence of conquest.
Such violence that is not always understood to be violent is fixed in photographs such as that of the Oba of Benin (Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, who ruled Benin from 1888 to 1897), captured in the British “Punitive Expedition” of 1897, and of members of that expedition posed with the bronzes and other artifacts now housed in museums across the global North (fig. 2).
The very space of the museum is meant to inculcate gratitude for the opportunity to view these objects in an environment of aes¬ thetic pleasure. Weems’s exhibition refers to museum vaults “crammed... with your baskets and beads and bones,” underscoring this insti¬ tutional violence. Among the images in her Hampton Project is a photograph of a Ku Klux Klan parade float (plate 2.18), and another of water cannons turned on civil rights demon¬ strators in the 1960s (plate 2.24) that is juxta¬ posed with the photograph of the baptism of
Native Americans make explicit the connection between those events and processes that we are willing to name as violent, and others, such as museum acquisitions and religious and cultural “conversions,” that we are not. In addition, Weems insists that the violence continues after Johnston’s era: we are urged to connect more recent and familiar images to Johnston’s histori¬ cal moment of the turn of the twentieth century.
I read Weems, as well as Larsen and Ellison before her, as showing us how violence operates in its intimate contours. Think of the “magic circle of domesticity” implied by one photograph in the exhibition, Hampton Grad¬ uate at Home (plate 2.7), and the way in which a companion photograph, Old Folks at Home (plate 2.6) is meant to be read as existing outside of this
Benin Expedition, 1897. Gelatin silver print, 6.5 : British Museum, London, A£,Ay^.iy
circle. But I am also thinking about the narrative of affinity and familiar¬ ity that seems to be at work in Hampton University Museum’s objection to Weems’s decision to sing her sorrow song for “Black and Indian alike.” Speaking for the institution, director Jeanne Zeidler describes the genesis of the project, originally conceived of as a two-part exhibition: “The first part would present a selection of Johnston’s work; the second would be the work of a contemporary African American or American Indian female photog¬ rapher.... The Williams College Museum of Art chose Carrie Mae Weems as that photographer. Our suggestion that an American Indian photographer be included as well, because of Hampton’s history and the fact that the current student body includes people of both heritages was rejected.”13 I read this to mean that Hampton coded Weems as not only representative of one “side,” but as incapable of doing justice to a project that required rep¬ resentation by and of two sides. The implica¬ tion seems to be that an African American was not qualified to speak for Native Americans, especially if that speaking for was a critique of the institution.14 Zeidler argues further that the photographs in Weems’s exhibit do not use the names of students and staff, and thus commit the violence of generalization and anonymity. Zeidler restores some individuals and their histories: “Frank Dean Banks, Hamp¬ ton class of 1876, at home with his family,” his son Leonard, bookkeeper and then Hampton Institute dentist, and “Louis Firetail (Sioux, Crow Creek) photographed that same year wearing tribal clothing, standing in front of Jane Worcester’s class in American history.”13 Here, Zeidler attaches names and contexts to the photographs that Weems has used (Weems does use names in the textual and audio com¬ ponents of the exhibition, but not to identify persons within a photograph) and this is surely a powerful objection, on the face of it; with¬ out such frames of reference, Zeidler asks, are these members of our institutional family not reduced to anthropological objects?
But is the intimacy implied by the knowl¬ edge of names of students and administra¬ tors, and the identification of students’ tribal nations, necessarily incompatible with complicity? I think that Weems’s work exposes the myth that intimacy and familiarity are inherently good for us. (After all, the Southern plantocracy always accused the North of being cold, and cast plantation life as familial.) When Weems’s exhibition shows traditional Indian masks alongside children playing with cardboard masks, or when we hear Weems’s audio for The Hampton Project intone the words, “Before the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves, and the Cleveland Indians,” we are asked to reflect on the violence of the sporting events and other rituals that constitute the quotidian rhythms and deep attachments of our lives. I have often wondered if part of Hampton’s implicit objection to Weems’s work was that her betrayal, as an African American artist mounting
12 This is not a Johnston photograph but an 1875 image of the baptism of the Shivwits Band of Paiutes by Daniel D. McArthur and Augustus P. Hardy.
13 Zeidler, “View from Hampton,” 76.
14 Ironically, Weems identifies her paternal grandfather as part Native American.
15 Zeidler, “View from Hampton,” 77.
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”:
LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS
an objection to African American institutional values, was intensified by the context of geography. Even if Hampton University collaborated with Wil¬ liams College in the original conception of the project, her criticism could well have been perceived in terms of a Southern institution being chastised by Northern liberalism. Indeed, Williams’s historical ties to Hampton, by way of Armstrong, could underscore this impression of perceived North¬ ern paternalism, and it is certainly the case that Hampton, Tuskegee, and other institutions were sponsored by and thus answerable to the Northern personnel who sat on their boards of trustees. Not just individuals such as Armstrong and (West Virginia-born and New York-raised) Johnston, but the institutional histories of Williams College and of Northern elite institutions more generally, are steeped in histories of conquest even as they have histor¬ ically been understood as morally superior to the slaveholding South. This has been the revelation of Craig Steven Wilder’s recent work — that Northern educational institutions were not only financially and ideologically mired in enslavement, but were culturally so, as well, in their daily operations.16 It should not be possible to read Weems’s work, or its affiliation with Williams in 2000, as in any way an indictment of Southern institutions or HCBUs to the relative benefit or praise of Northern institutions.
In addition to their entanglement with Southern histories of enslave¬ ment, New England institutions should also be viewed in the context of the regional process by which Native Americans were “disappeared” in the old¬ est sermons, fiction, poetry, and other rhetorical maneuvers of the republic. As Jean M. O’Brien has put it, with their “narration of Indian extinction,” “non-Indians actively produced their own modernity by denying modernity to Indians.”17 If Hampton is one trajectory of these histories of conquest, we must name the place where we are standing to view this exhibition in 2018 as another: New England rather than Ndakinna, the Abenaki word for that place “to which we belong,” or Wopanaak/Wabanaki, “the land where the sun is born every day.”18 When non-Indian New Englanders termed “rebellions” the “ongoing, multifaceted Indigenous resistance, led by an uncontainable network of Indigenous leaders and families,” they contained ideologically what was being achieved militarily across the country.1? In addition, the work of disappearance involved legal determinations of purity; proximity to blackness, for example, could undercut claims to Indian purity. The ulti¬ mate beneficiary, however, was a colonizing regime that wished to deny Indian claims to anything at all. This returns us to questions raised by Hampton about their perception of Weems’s work as “placing all Hampton African American students and all Hampton American Indian students in homogeneous groups so as to make generalizations about them.”20 In raising issues of homogeneity, Hampton poses issues of authenticity and purity, of proximity and relationality, that are worth pausing to tease out by sitting still with one of the photographs.
In Johnston’s A Class in American History (plate 2.13), fifteen Hampton
students sit or stand in a classroom turned toward another member of the class whom Jeanne Zeidler’s essay allows us to identify as Louis Firetail (Sioux, Crow Creek), and who is dressed in what I would describe as tra¬ ditional and ceremonial Native American dress. A stuffed American eagle, and a Frederic Remington painting of troops riding off to conquer Native American people in the West, help to frame, as it were, the students’ stiffly collared poses as they regard their classmate, who is dressed in full (Sioux, Crow Creek?) regalia, his own gaze turned away from them.
In a brilliant discussion of this photograph, Judith Fryer Davidov attends to the ‘Visual triangle” formed by Firetail at the head of the class, by the eagle and Remington’s painting, and by a portrait of a young man dressed in a starched collar, coat and tie entitled “John Wizi, Sioux, 1899” (also by Johnston and not included in Weems’s exhibit) whom Davidov identifies as the same student. These images together are meant to suggest both that his “savageness has been tamed” and that this indicates “the benefits as well as the totality of the transformation effected by Hampton.” Wexler, reading the same photograph, alerts us to the “ambiguity” of Louis Firetail, who is at once fully available to be objectified, but who also manages to “[outwit] the camera.”21 1 am very interested in taking up Weems’s invitation to think about what it means for “Black and Indian alike” to be convened in the same room. To riff on Ellison’s question: Are they lucky to be in the room, rescued from the company of the Great Unwashed, or are they trapped, mutually unable to escape? If their classmate’s dress can be saluted as noble, it is at the terrible cost of now being understood as merely ceremonial: in performing his “last”-ness, according to the ideology of benign conquest, he is allowed to solicit admiration and even nostalgia. What has been lost can be given retrospective value now that it has been conquered. In a related though not identical way, photographs such as Hampton Graduate at Home (plate 2.7) and Old Folks at Home (plate 2.6), juxtaposed with each other, can reinforce this sense of a temporal difference: with the latter as a past that must necessar¬ ily give way to the future represented by the former. I say “related though not identical” because I agree with Davidov that the presumed “pastness” of a Native American student in ceremonial regalia is not accorded the same cultural value as the pastness in Old Folks at Home. Davidov notes, “I find more troubling the far larger number of African American students who, as citizens in training, gaze upon the otherness of the Indian, whose history is now ennobled in contradistinction to their own, which must be forgotten.”22 At the same time, the dubious benefit to Native American students of this ascribed superiority is to be similarly constrained — to sit side by side with those whose specific conquest was enslavement. All of the students are being trained to wait patiently and submissively for a future in different modes of servitude.23 With Dipesh Chakrabarty we might view this classroom as the “imaginary waiting room of history” as proposed by John Stuart Mill and other proponents of gradualism, for colonized subjects to cool their heels,
16 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
17 Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxi, xxiii.
18 Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 8.
19 Brooks, 8.
20 Zeidler, “View from Hampton,” 77.
21 Judith Fryer Davidov, “Containment and Excess: Representing African Americans,” in Women’s Camera Work: Self /Body /Other in American Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 172; Wexler, Tender Violence , 170-71. Note that Davidov is discussing the photograph in relation to the 1996 MoMA exhibit and related catalogue The Hampton Album edited by Lincoln Kirstein. I am aware of the irony of Davidov’s definitive identification of the student standing at the head of the class as John Wizi, son of Chief Wizi of Crow Creek, South Dakota, while Zeidler identifies him as Firetail in the context of appearing to rebuke Weems for not being interested in identifying individuals by name. Perhaps the point is that Firetail and Wizi are understood to be the same person.
22 Davidov, “Containment and Excess,” 172.
23 On modes of servitude and subjection see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”:
LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS
since “some people were to arrive earlier than others. That was what histori- cist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized to wait.”24
Waiting in that room together in the full consciousness of being keenly observed, regarding each other or averting their gazes, these students of his¬ tory remind us of the forcible relocation and dislocation of groups kept apart or brought together in order to guarantee the best conditions of accumula¬ tion and order; one group conceptualized as insubordinate, transient, cap¬ tive, in relation to the other’s alleged free and industrious endurance, and the enforced labor of both guaranteeing the privacy and virtue of the middle class domesticity that they themselves were denied. Describing this process in relation to Chinese and African laborers in the nineteenth century, Lisa Lowe reminds us to train our eyes on the value of the contiguity of differ¬ ent groups for colonial management. She also reminds us to attend to the often unremarked evidence of “intimacies as cross-racial alliance,”25 intimacies unremarked but ironically evident in an otherwise puzzling law banning con¬ gress between these groups, or belated legislation in the wake of an outbreak of a jointly planned uprising. Lowe also cautions against reproducing the very terms of equality and freedom that have been undergirded by these tenderly violent processes of conquest, when we move too quickly to affirm, to “recover and recuperate,” urging that we make space for mourning: “There is an ethics and politics in struggling to comprehend the particular loss of the intimacies of four continents, to engage slavery, genocide, indenture, and liberalism as a conjunction, as an actively acknowledged loss within the present.”26 It is in this space that I can hear Weems’s sorrow song.
I want to think about these students of history going off into a future after Hampton, having regarded each other in that room. What would their proximity to each other in that room mean, later on? Since students from the English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Central America, and the African continent attended Hampton and Tuskegee, then it is possible that some of them are in the room.25 When Robert R. Moton visited Jamaica in 1916 as the newly installed president of Tuskegee after Booker T. Washing¬ ton’s death, he was hosted by members of the colony’s middle class, whom he had earlier taught at Hampton as the dean of students. As I have argued elsewhere, the “conformist” education of historically black institutions that was criticized at the turn of the century by W. E. B. Du Bois and others, and that was, as we have seen, later criticized by novelists, provided good training for functioning in a colonial society.28 Moton was welcomed by a constituency that might have chafed under white colonial rule, but that constituted an emerging body of lighter- and darker-skinned professionals and business people who could welcome and toast the new president, much to the chagrin of Marcus Garvey, who had hoped to demonstrate his dias- poric credentials.
One difficult conclusion to draw here is that shared blackness in a Southern educational institution fostered diasporic ties that facilitated and strengthened (rather than transcended) contexts of colonialism and impe¬ rialism. Imagining Caribbean subjects in Johnston’s history room alerts us
to the intraracial contexts of the proximities that we have just been dis¬ cussing with regard to African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Just as photographs of young African men and women attend¬ ing mission schools were shared in global circuits as proof of the goodwill of religious, educational, and administrative prongs of the imperial project, we must imagine that Johnston’s photographs of students at Hampton were viewed by congregations, students, and administrators all over the world. These photographs were taken at a moment of important imperial shifts, such as the Boer and the Spanish- American Wars.
Poised as they are to reenter these national and global currents upon graduation, occupying various positions along a continuum of servitude and power, we also see the students in that American history classroom sitting and standing still alongside one another: as (possibly) Haitians and Crow Creek and South Carolinians and South Africans alike. What can their tense postures communicate to us, besides rigidity, confinement, assimilation, respectability? Tina M. Campt urges us to regard such pos¬ tures in terms of “effortful placement,” as “responses (rather than submission) to colonization” as “depictions of stasis rather than stillness” or “motionless¬ ness” that produce “an effortful equilibrium achieved through a labored bal¬ ancing of opposing forces and flows.”25 If the students in A Class in American History are not free (including freedom from the intrusion of the gaze that wants to use them to prove the morality of conquest), they are also more than the stilled, arrested subjects offered to us as visual objects.
For one thing, we can surmise that they experience stillness together, and have the opportunity to regard each other. What might they teach us about sitting still and regarding each other in the midst of catastrophe? The Canadian First Nations (Mississauga Nishnaabeg), activist Leanne Betasa- mosake Simpson asks: “How do I recognize my relations? How am I recog¬ nized? What if the driving force in Indigenous politics is self-recognition rather than a continual race around the hamster wheel of settler colonial recognition?”50 What if there are circuits of regard to which Johnston has no access, and to which we also, since Johnston is our mediator, have no access? This is always the complication of advocacy, of a speaking for the other that is particularly attached to the realism of photography.
Weems’s use of second- and first-person registers in her inscriptions on photographs and in the installation’s ambient audio, holds out the promise of rerouting the script of speaking for the other, since she is standing in the legacy of that classroom. This is a realignment, a fiddling with the circuit of recognition: cutting through the politics of assimilation and recognition that re-scripted “you” as paragon of virtue in captivity, I look back and see you differently. I root myself in the present in the seeing of you in the past. I link my thriving in the present to your mighty struggle: “Against the wind... and against the odds,” as Weems’s text puts it. Drawing strength from her regard of them regarding each other, Weems questions the distributive jus¬ tice of “reserved land, peanuts, and twenty acres and a mule.”
But it is still photographs that are being utilized to do this work, and
24 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
25 Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies ofFour Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History , ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 203.
26 Lowe, 207.
27 See Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and Faith Smith, “Good Enough for Booker T to Kiss: Hampton, Tuskegee, and Caribbean Self-Fashioning,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013), https:// escholarship.org/uc/ item/ 2jxoz2xq.
28 Smith, “Good Enough.”
29 Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 51-52.
30 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 258.
23
“AND FOR YOU I PLAYED A SORROW SONG”:
LOOKING AT FRANCES JOHNSTON’S PHOTOGRAPHS WITH CARRIE MAE WEEMS
primarily Johnston’s photographs, at that. Challenging representation always threatens to reproduce it, as Shawn Michelle Smith has proposed with regards to Du Bois’s use of photographs of Georgia’s Talented Tenth to respond to depictions of African Americans that implied criminality.31
Weems negotiates the risks of repetition and complicity that are part of the history of violence wrought by the camera by transforming the appro¬ priated photographs: enlarging and reproducing them on canvas or on sus¬ pended diaphanous muslin panels. These transformations supplement the powerful lament that catalogues the harms done and that also salutes the harmed for their courage: “Against the wind I saw your quest for more.” Larger than life, the cloth panels, together with the sound of Weem’s incan- tatory voice, promise a spectral intervention, a disruption of photography’s power to fix, and of Johnston’s visual legacy. Visitors entering the exhibi¬ tion experience the photographs as transparent layers through which we can see and make connections to other images — depending on how they are arranged in relation to each other — but also through which we must pass, working through the experience (fig. 3).
Weems has said of this project: “By moving into and through the work, I wanted to give the viewer permission to invade the work of art, to invade histoiy, and thereby claim it as one’s own; to feel that one is a part of his¬ tory and, therefore, one makes history.
In this way, the viewer is transformed from audience to participant/observ- er.”3Z As with other projects, Weems engages the archival legacy by enlarg¬ ing, adding words, marking up a sur¬ face; she distorts as a way of drawing attention to archival distortion, of making explicit the ways in which the “originals” were never innocent repre¬ sentations of a given reality.
One last scenario of “Black and Indian alike.” In a poignant recollec¬ tion of the impact of Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” on the listeners in the world of her childhood in Zimba¬ bwe, Tsitsi Ella Jaji theorizes the promise and limits of a diasporic affinity that is tethered to historical amnesia. Whether they were so named because they were identified visually with buffalo, or because they were pressed into the service of destroying buffalo and thus the food supply of Native Ameri¬ cans at the zenith of the extermination and relocation of Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, these “dreadlocked Rastas in the heart of America” are brave and erect in the music video that accompanies Marley’s 1983 song. The Jamaican singer celebrates these African American soldiers as a symbol of courage and resistance, a gesture of diasporic solidarity that occludes their terrible conscription into the project of Indigenous upheaval, and later in the hispanophone Caribbean when many of these cavalrymen
were assigned to serve in Puerto Rico and Cuba in the Spanish-Ameri- can War. Jaji notes that Marley’s song and its celebration in her childhood “stopped short of a full accounting for the continuing structures of coercion and ambivalences of national belonging for African Americans in the nine¬ teenth century.”33
We could add that, as with many who have looked at Frances Johnston’s Hampton photographs, we are seduced by the postures of striving and achievement, living as we still are in contexts of black surveillance and pre¬ mature death. I understand Weems’s sorrow song to be part of an unfinished project of acknowledging this longing for what appear to be images of suc¬ cessful and desirable striving. But I also read her as enjoining us to refuse, with her, the invitation to justify conquest as the necessary condition of success and recognition. If the students in Johnston’s photographs and their families have fallen “from a great height,” this places a value on their cultural origins and personhood that is called into question by the colonial assump¬ tions of Hampton, Williams, and other institutions, whereby Hampton’s students and their communities needed to be rescued from such origins.
Weems mourns the loss of these tra¬ ditions, but perhaps even more so the ways in which we continue to be grateful for the trinkets traded in exchange. Weems inserts herself in the frame of a photograph, as she has done in other projects, so that we see her, for example, looking at the demise of the buffalo in David Wojn- arowicz’s photograph (plate 2.25). Reading these now in multiple lay¬ ers — Native American decimation, Native American and African Amer¬ ican ideological labor at Hamp¬ ton, Wojnarowicz’s meditation on the devastation wrought by AIDS, diasporic communities’ unwitting celebration of Native American annihilation — we can hear Weems inviting all of us to stand with her and bear witness: “From a great height I saw you falling.” We are asked to join her in what she calls a “full accounting,” as she refuses to be corralled into the etiquette of segregated mourning.
31 Smith argues: “Du Bois’ 1900 Georgia Negro photographs present contemporary viewers with a startling surprise. [They] present closely cropped, paired portraits of young men and women, one image frontal, the other in profile.. .many pair a direct frontal position with a hard profile, resembling unmistakably the photographic archives of early race scientists, as if Du Bois’ albums are haunted by those forms.” Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 44. Leigh Raiford makes a similar point about the use of lynching photographs to do the work of anti-lynching: “The deployment of similar, and at times the same photographs for such radically different purposes in the same historical moment reveals a crisis of representation.” Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 17.
32 Denise Ramzy and Katherine Fogg, “Interview: Carrie Mae Weems,” in Patterson, Hampton Project, 79.
33 Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2.
24
AIN’T JOKIN’:
UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
Rhonda D. Frederick and Leigh Patel
Funny “ha-ha,” or funny “strange”?
This is a story within a story; how to enter this history, what to show, what to say, what to feel. It was a creation myth, how things came to be as they are. In this constructed place, our classroom, we revisit the past. The students examine the facts and will participate in the construction of history, a history that has been told to them by others. But now, with their own bodies, they engage their own dark terrain, their own winter.
— Carrie Mae Weems1
Now that Afro-American artistic presence has been “dis¬ covered” actually to exist, now that serious scholarship has moved from silencing the witnesses and erasing their mean¬ ingful place in and contribution to American culture, it is no longer acceptable to imagine us and imagine for us. We have always been imagining ourselves.... We are the subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience and, in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come into contact. We are not, in fact, “other.” We are choices.
— Toni Morrison2 3
INTRODUCTION
The art of Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day unsettles the rela¬ tionship between who sees and who is seen. Their respective works desta¬ bilize the positions traditionally assigned to the subject (voyeur), his or her object, and the well-patterned power relations between them, offering no clear lessons or resolutions. Both artists’ powerful work establishes a black authorial presence and power, mobilized against the negative imprints that whiteness has etched onto blackness. A white-centered voice, threaded through global anti-black discourse, presumes to speak of, about, and for
black peoples; still, in encountering the art of Weems and Gonzales-Day, one hears the complex, transgressive voice of blackness. Acknowledg¬ ing that language and visual symbols are used and interpreted for myriad purposes, we (Rhonda D. Frederick, scholar of literature, and Leigh Patel, scholar of education) are specifically concerned with when they are used to uphold, solidify, and perpetuate anti-blackness. Students respond to these artists’ images in complex ways, but Weems’s and Gonzales-Day’s destabi¬ lizing practices ask that particular attention be paid to the seeing self Thus at the heart of our investigation is a critical investment in unsettling com¬ monly used viewing strategies to invite discourses on how we are with each other, beyond well-worn patterns of object and voyeur.
Because our pedagogical work is rooted in dialogue and exchange (both inside and outside the classroom), we developed our arguments in con¬ versation with each other, and approximate that format in this essay. We share here what we have learned from classroom practices using visual texts (specifically Weems’s Ain’t Jokin’ [plates 10.1-6] and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried [plates 3.1-33] and Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings ’>). The impact of these works is manifold: they unsettle all too well-worn white-centered vocalizations and annotations of black life, and upend white supremacy’s traditional roles of subject and object, author and text. Both Weems’s and Gonzales-Day’s images demand a reordering of such durable power relations, provoking discomfort, defensiveness, and confusion in viewers, including our students. Ultimately, this reordering reshapes how students interact with blackness; once they can see that — though blackness has been inscribed by whiteness — it always had authorial power unto itself As educators, we found that our communications via phone, in person, and over email kept returning to several key problems: how does voyeurism per¬ petuate traditional power relations; how do certain visual artists engage these relations in radical ways; and what pedagogical tools unsettle and rearrange the affective ways learners are with and relate to each other. In what follows, we piece together our respective pedagogical approaches and reflections on using visual art in the classroom to purposefully upend the
1 Carrie Mae Weems in Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (digital video, 2008). See plate 1.10.
2 Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan, Oct. 7, 1988, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/rn/morrison90.pdf, 133.
3 Ken Gonzales-Day, “Erased Lynchings J Ken Gonzales-Day, accessed Apr. 4, 2018, http://kengonzalesday.eom/erased-lynehings/.AlthoughGonzales-Dayidentifies himself as Mexican American and recognizes that the victims of lynching included various dispossessed peoples, in the work discussed here, he prioritizes the silenced spectacle of black suffering.
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
prevailing and normalized dictates of who can see and who can only be seen, of whose pain is the object of voyeuristic pleasure.
I. OUR MOTIVATIONS FOR BUILDING A PEDAGOGICAL INTERVENTION INTO THE NORMALIZED VOYEURISM OF BLACK SUFFERING
RHONDA D. FREDERICK: On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin was murdered. The police neither protected nor served him, and his mur¬ derer faced no just consequence.4 The fallout after the trial made it clear to me that none of those involved in his murder, or the arrest and trial of his murderer, saw him as a human being, as someone who could (or could justifiably) respond to a stranger stalking him in the night. Instead, Trayvon Martin embodied threat, danger, crime, and violence. Trying to make sense of this, or to delay the manifestly obvious injustice being perpetrated, I shifted my attention to grammar. Honing in on the words “threat,” “danger,” “crime,” “violence,” I noticed they were all functioning as nouns rather than as adjectives that modified a noun (“a word... used to identify any of a class of people”). But Trayvon Martin, in the eyes of his murderer and the crimi¬ nal justice system, could not be a noun (a subject, an agent): this is clear in the behaviors of the police who balked at arresting the perpetrator, of the prosecutors who overcharged as a strategy to not charge, or the behaviors of the jury who did not consider that Martin could respond to a stalker by standing his ground. The verdict indicated that, in the fullness of the jury’s gaze, Trayvon Martin could not have felt fear in a situation where reason¬ able people would be afraid. Their gaze marked him as “other than” and unworthy of considerations that we often extend to (white) teenaged boys: innocence, bravado, “boys will be boys.”5
These grammatical musings unhinged me: for weeks after the verdict I could not leave my house. I did not trust myself around anyone because I was terrified that I would confront the gaze that condemned a seven- teen-year-old boy. I was just as terrified that I would not witness the same terror and rage that I felt. Five years later, I have not recovered from what Martin’s murder and the jury’s judgment revealed.
Who I am after the decision that transubstantiated Trayvon Martin into threat, danger, crime, violence is dramatically different from who I was before, and this new me was faced with a potentially debilitating problem: Could I continue to teach black literature at my majority white university as I had before? How could I teach students that engaging with diasporic black people and experiences imagined by black authors could be as enliv¬ ening as I once believed it could be? Before April 2013, I worked hard to develop a teaching self that was an impartial guide, committed to helping students reach their intellectual heights. I believed that I was supposed to be an objective guide and that I was such a guide, but lurking in my memory whenever I graded papers was one paper in which a student wrote that US “slavery [began as] a benign system of free labor.” When I read that phrase,
my objective-teacher-self registered a failure: this self failed to teach the student how to read carefully. Now, when I recall that phrase, I remember how much the words — and the implication of them — wounded me: intellec¬ tually, affectively, and physically.6 My still visceral response to the memory of that student paper, and the profound feelings aroused by Trayvon Mar¬ tin’s murder and the trial that vindicated his murderer, make it very clear that I never had — and could not have — a separation of selves: I was always myriad selves in the classroom. Realizing that I could not leave the trauma of the murder of young, black Trayvon Martin outside of that space, I had to learn how to be my self, and to teach black literature, in productively transformative ways.7
My pedagogy at my predominantly white institution was grounded by depictions of complexly imagined black people, black life, black experience, and I believed that this grounding could challenge the kind of unseeing, stereotyping, and negativity that led to Trayvon Martin’s death. I believed that nuanced teaching and learning about blackness could provide students with critical skills and tools that could lead them to think differently about the most durable anti-black narratives both within and outside of the uni¬ versity. This pedagogy, I believed, could chip away at anti-black stereotypes. After Martin’s murder and the trial that left him convicted, I lost faith in that perspective. Instead of focusing on the one who is stereotyped, I now want to focus on the one who stereotypes.
The verdict made me see what I could not see before: there is something seriously wrong if black humanity had to be taught. I could not escape the belief that presenting complexly imagined black people in my classrooms, and believing this presentation helped counter simplistic representations, was somehow complicit in affirming anti-black narratives that made my kind of teaching necessary. In other words, dominant narratives commonly reject the full meaning of black humanity and I taught my classes as if that rejection was reasonable. The implication of the acquittal of Trayvon Mar¬ tin’s murderer indicated that my approach was insufficient. If even one stu¬ dent could describe chattel slavery as “a benign system,” perhaps I needed something more than literary representations of the suffering and endur¬ ance of black subjects to break through the violent structures of power that designated them as objects, as property. I needed a new pedagogy.
LEIGH PATEL: One of the first spaces in which I incorporated visual art that sought to unsettle white voyeurism was in a qualitative research methods course. Qualitative research, with its history in anthropology, is well steeped in researching the “other,” as noted in the opening quotation by Morrison. In fact, without the creation of the other, the researcher and her inquiries have a questionable existence. The qualitative research class discussed here was multiracial and multiethnic, bringing together aspiring scholars from doctoral programs in education, social work, and sociology. Some came from communities that have been the subject of research and some came from communities whose members have traditionally held the
4 Trayvon Benjamin Martin was murdered on the night of February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida; he was seventeen years old. I honor Trayvon Martin by not speaking the name of his murderer. No charges were filed for over two months because police originally claimed that no crime was committed. On April 11, 2012 charges for second degree murder were filed; there has been some debate about whether this charge was appropriate. On July 13, 2013, the jury declared the murderer of Trayvon Martin not guilty. See “Trayvon Martin Shooting Fast Facts,” CNN, updated Feb. 8, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/05/us/trayv0n-martin-sh00ting-fast-facts/index.html.
5 I do not condone this phrase nor its implications, but draw attention to what is acceptable for white boys (white male rapist sentenced to six months’ jail time for raping an unconscious woman) that is unacceptable for black boys. See Ashley Fantz, “Outrage over 6-Month Sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford Rape Case,” CNN, updated June 7, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/06/us/sexual-assault-brock-turner-stanford/index.html.
6 The student misrepresented Daniel Littlefield’s assessment: “Slavery as it existed in the colonial period was not the same institution as developed in the nineteenth cen¬ tury or even the same in the eighteenth as in the seventeenth century” (202). See Daniel Littlefield, “Colonial and Revolutionaiy United States,” in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 201-26.
7 Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, which is focused on works by Weems that I have used in the classroom, it should be noted here that Weems’s All the Boys and Usual Suspects (plates 11.1-4, 12.1-9) also respond to the death of Trayvon Martin and others, suggesting further pedagogical experiments to be made.
26
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
role of researcher. Much of qualitative research uses up-close, textured data, specifically what people say and do, and then applies broader theoretical analyses. This sequencing and framing has meant that the analysis applied by the researcher, usually an outsider in relation to what is being researched, draws from published, mostly Eurocentric theories. The field itself can and often does imbue whiteness with the ability to voice for and annotate “the other.” Christina Sharpe deftly uses the verb “annotate” in her indictment of yet another well-received young white sociologist’s decoding of black male behavior.8 The related effect of some white auteurs, sometimes as research¬ ers, sometimes as artists, having free rein to annotate black life is that, as Sylvia Wynter writes, it becomes narratively impossible in those social tra¬ ditions.9 This connects directly to what you say about the extralegal murder of Trayvon Martin. Nowhere in the myriad accounts of him and his murder was his agency and selfhood recognized. He and his life had become narra¬ tively impossible because of the white annotation of black death. Wynter’s core project about who is narratively possible or impossible corresponds directly to the question of who can be, at core, human, and who has been cast as the underside of humanity.
It. BECAUSE NEITHER ART NOR PEDAGOGY IS STATIC, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE USE THE VISUAL ART OF WEEMS AND GONZALES-DAY TO INTERVENE AGAINST THE FIXED STRUCTURES OF VOYEURISM
RDF: Yes, Wynter and Sharpe speak directly to the place blackness occupies — outside of and inside our classrooms, so much so that I found it difficult to imagine a way of teaching that was not wholly circumscribed by dominant anti-black narratives. I obviously needed a new approach, one that could model a way to imagine that encourages students to consider, as Carrie Mae Weems puts it, “how things came to be as they are.” If, as I said previously, depicting complexly imagined black experience affirms domi¬ nant — and the dominance of— narratives of anti-blackness, then I need to ask different questions. And I need my teaching to ask different questions.
What ifj rather than offering students complex “things” to see, this new pedagogy could offer them a way to examine how and why students see as they see? What if this teaching could offer students strategies that challenge familiar whites-as-“subjects”/blacks-as-“objects” tropes? What would this kind of reconceptualization look like?
I chart my pedagogical evolution — from representations of complexly imagined blackness, to critical attention, to how and why student-view¬ ers see as they see— through my approaches to two visual art projects by Carrie Mae Weems: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, which I taught in 2011/12, and Ain’t Jokin’, which I taught in 2016/17. The way I taught the former best exemplifies my investment in depicting complexly imagined blackness that critically reengaged with dominant narratives of anti-blackness. Teaching Ain’t Jokin’ five years later marks my shift toward student-viewers as self-consciously seeing subjects.
LP: Yes! I also connect with the heavy lifting required, without anything close to an established path, in order to rearrange how we actually see our¬ selves in the work we do, and more so, how we do the work to remake how we literally live, with each other. Our social locations are all touched by
historical forces, and that is part of what both Weems and Gonzales-Day sample and remix in their art. But we also have agency, and in some cases we have the opportunity and will to rearrange how we function within these complicated semiotic histories and contemporary realities. In retrospect, I think that this kind of unsettling and rearranging is what I was hoping for by using visual art in a research methods course. It yanked all of us out of algorithms of how to do this or that kind of research project. I was seeking a pedagogy, in essence, to humanize the science of knowledge building.
RDF: You so nicely articulate what I was struggling with: the relation¬ ship between my self, my social contexts, and my work. My ideas about blackness are threaded through each of these. I was unsettled after Martin’s murder. . .and struggled with how to live with it. Part of this struggle included thinking back on what I taught before, and how I might teach it again, in the future. In the fall of 2012 From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried was aprimary “text” in Narratives of Slavery,10 a core literature class for first year students. I prepared for this lesson by researching Weems’s biography, her choice of materials, and (as much as I could discern) her hopes and inten¬ tions for the piece. I learned that in 1995 the Getty Museum commissioned Weems to create a work based on its archive of nineteenth-century photo¬ graphs of black people. Weems added some contemporary images to those in the Getty archive, and created a narrative that she etched into the glass that lay over each piece in the entire sequence. The resulting series of images visualizes US racial history as envisioned by Nobosodru, a young Mangbetu woman.* 11 Her right-facing profile opens the installation and her left-facing profile appears at the end. These two images are also distinct because of their color (tinted blue when all of the other images are overlaid with red) and because the piece’s title is etched across the bottom of both images: on the first, “From here I saw what happened” and on the last, “And I cried.”
After inviting my students to share their initial responses to From Here I Saw What Happened, I drew their attention to the way the images of the Mangbetu woman frame the entire piece, creating a context that “sees” the intervening images both through and as Nobosodru. Students were then able to perceive what those images “look like” from this different perspective.
In many ways, viewers are called to witness the seeing in From Here I Saw What Happened, a truth that its framing establishes. Nobosodru as well as Weems herself govern student-viewers’ perceptions of the sequence’s narra¬ tive. This jointly female and black perspective is, critically, “in conversation” with and responds to the Getty Museum’s archive. Immediately after Nobo- sodru’s opening image are four nineteenth-century ethnographic images that were not only intended to define African archetypes but also to deter¬ mine how they were and were supposed to be seen (plates 3.2-5). Guided by Nobosodru’s witnessing and Weems’s assertive vision, student-viewers were invited to see blackness differently, both as Weems and Nobosodru see it and in the context of the dominant ways of seeing to which the piece responds.
The deliberateness of the series’ black-and-female lens is vital: contem¬ porary student-viewers situate Nobosodru in the past, and they perceive her seeing into and through the future (“From here I saw what happened”). With the sequence of images so framed, student-viewers considered Nobo¬ sodru’s “and I cried” in myriad ways — as tears of joy, sadness, pain, regret,
8 See Christina Sharpe, “Black Life, Annotated,” New Inquiry, Aug. 8, 2014, https://thenewinquiry.com/black-life-annotated/.
9 Sylvia Wynter, No Humans Involved, On the Blackness of BLACKNUSS (1994; Hudson: Moor’s Head Press, 2015).
10 Featuring film, visual art, and popular fiction, Narratives of Slaveiy explores histories and legacies of slavery in the United States. In addition to looking at narratives of slavery in this range of creative forms, the class plays with the definition of “slavery” to imagine how the institution allows us to think differently — and more critically — about drug dealing, gender oppression, history, and intra-/interracial relationships.
11 This image was originally part of a 1925 collection of ethnographic photographs that documented, among other things, the Mangbetu cultural practice of skull elongation.
27
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
and laughing-to-keep-from-crying. They could also begin to understand that her affective response was complicated by her being forced to see as she was “supposed” to see, despite the fact that she sees differently. Her emotional response to her seeing is simultaneously critical and assessing, and no one is exclusive of the other.
So armed, student-viewers encounter the first four red-tinged images, ones intended to be — not to represent — “‘pure,’ unmiscegenated examples of the [black] race.”12 As Christina Sharpe argues, the four daguerreotypes Weems selected from a series commissioned by Louis Agassiz in 1850 “are meant to reveal what blackness looks like and how to look at blackness” and they “are meant to make visible separate development and separate species.”13 Yet positioned under the witnessing gaze of Nobosodru and seen through the red overlay and critical commentary added by the artist, these images are re-seen, their original function changed. Acting as viewer, Sharpe re-sees “the daguerreotypes [as] of Renty (Congo) and Jack (Guinea), the Africa-born men, and the ‘country-bom’ daughters Delia and Drana,”14 not as evolutionarily stunted African archetypes. Sharpe’s seeing differently responds to Nobosodru’s affective coloring of the images in the series when she writes that she was struck when she first saw these images, a word choice that is physical and emotional: “I was struck on first seeing those daguerre¬ otypes of Jack, Delia, Renty, and Drana, as I was by my encounter with a photograph taken 160 years later.”1’ Sharpe’s emotional response is certainly heightened by Weems’s visual and textual framing of these images, by the affective red tint, producing an experience that leads her to ask different questions: “Given that the law of slavery was partus sequitur ventrem, one might ask why it is fathers and daughters who are photographed here and not fathers and sons, mothers and sons, or the mothers (through whom slavery legally passes) and the daughters through whom, if they give birth, it will also pass?”16
These first four images witnessed by Nobosodru, but arguably all of the intervening images, corroborate and implicate viewers in a certain already established way of knowing — how to see blackness/the only way to look at black¬ ness. Weems’s aesthetic and affective choices put both the knowing and dis¬ seminating of this lesson — one that is always in process: a given and giving, known and knowing, taught and teaching of black people — in conversa¬ tion with another kind of knowledge: how black and female people look/ re-look/look again at “how to look at blackness.” Student-viewers learn to “read” the artist’s choice of the red overlay as communicating resonance, rage, strength, power, vitality, and engagement with the racist narrative that Agassiz made dominant. Student-viewers can see the photographs in this primary source as palimpsests, images cast under Agassiz’s direction and then recast by Weems and Nobosodru.
LP: Palimpsests are so powerful; they are everywhere, but the trick is in seeing their layers, and respectively, seeing how our vision is never direct but always overlaid with the influence of various texts and readings. What transpired for your students given this opportunity to explore those layers, some of which confronted and interrupted normalized voyeurism?
RDF: While the skills they gained through this process were significant, and generated material for rich class discussion, I found that student-view¬ ers replicated an Agassiz-like relationship to blackness: they gazed upon blackness from the outside, even as they ascertained the meaningful lay¬
ers that intervene in this unidirectional seeing. It was still difficult to get student-viewers to “see” or unpack the direction of their gaze: as viewing subject examining the viewed object. Though now more complicated, their relationship to the images collected in From Here I Saw What Happened remained voyeuristic.
Weems’s introduction of Nobosodru’s framing role and affective nar¬ ratives challenges dominant ways of seeing by casting/recasting the black woman as one who sees, as one who sees affectively, and as one aware of the meanings that became attached to blackness and became durable. The images that Weems transformed took on the tradition of ethnographic photographs of black people as well as the more popular anti-black ste¬ reotypes that reinforce the ideology behind that racially biased “science.” I presented student-viewers with the idea that a consequence of Weems’s artistic choices is that blackness is “seen” differently.
But returning to this 2012 lesson plan for From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, I could not shake the notion that what I was asking my students to do was look at black women (Weems, Nobosodru) looking/looking again at black people, and attend to and remain aware of how each “she” did her looking. I did ask them to put this process of “looking at” and “looking at how” in critical conversation with dominant anti-black narratives. Yet I did not pay enough attention to how the direction of their gaze, as largely white and affluent viewers of images of black people, affirmed the norms of unidirectional perspective. Students’ habits of seeing, even if they became more sophisticated, were still not reciprocal.
When I consider this 2012 lesson from the perspective of who I have become after Trayvon Martin’s murder, and thinking through the concept of voyeurism (as you describe it, Leigh), I want to consider who student-view¬ ers are, what they see, and why they see what they see, and why they see as they see. These musings lead to considerations of strategies for teaching not only From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, but also other works in Weems’s oeuvre. And, since the mere depiction of imaginable and complex blackness is no longer enough, I also want to think through what students can take away from these encounters with visual material.
LP: Yes, ultimately, we are talking about what students, people, more broadly, can redo and remake about themselves and how they are with the world. Each of our disciplines has its own harmful traditions to unearth, to decode in the palimpsests. Qualitative research is replete with annotation and retelling, acts that are in and of themselves, justified. Though when those in long-standing social positions of power are the ones to annotate and retell others’ stories, research can become an unseemly and exploitive act. Although I wanted my students to become responsible researchers, I more fundamentally wanted them to be answerable to the forces of his¬ torical power relations from which no one is immune. I wanted them to trouble the idea that they could be comfortably apprenticed into a knowl¬ edge production project that has long labeled Indigenous people as savage in order to treat them savagely, labeled black people as criminal to treat them criminally, and labeled Asian and Latino people as liminal to threaten their humanity carelessly.
RDF: Yes, I hear what you are saying. When we are not thoughtful or conscious about how these kinds of power relations operate, it is really easy
12 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 43.
13 Sharpe, 43.
14 Sharpe, 43.
15 Sharpe, 44; emphasis added.
16 Sharpe, 43.
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
to duplicate them.
LP: Right, and to ask my students to trouble this unthinking kind of duplication, I shared photographs from an installation by Ken Gonzales-Day, entitled Erased Lynchings. In this series, Gonzales-Day literally erases the vic¬ tims and foregrounds celebrants at the lynchings of black Americans, Indig¬ enous, Mexican, and Chinese peoples in the twentieth century. In this class, we viewed portions of the installation that made prominent the lynchers of black Americans. The effect, for the viewers, is that their gaze must more steadily attend to the celebration of vio¬ lence, instead of experiencing the deliberate human pain caused by that violence. In East First Street, a black-and-white postcard of the lynching of a black man has been altered so that the viewer sees a tree lit up at night, many white men wearing fedoras facing the tree, and a few white people turning to look at the photographer (fig. 1). Several onlook¬ ers are blurred, perhaps to suggest that there was motion and noise in that setting of hor¬ ror. The lynching was a social event. A social horror show.
Gonzales-Day interrupts what Abigail Solomon-Godeau describes as the double victimization of first physical objectifi¬ cation and then semiotic objectification through photography.1? Similar to the way Weems’s Ain’t Jokin’ shifts our attention from racist stereotypes to those who find entertainment in such representations, the Erased Lynchings series interrupts the famil¬ iar focal point of these photos, the lynched human being, and makes those who have pursued, completed, and feted the lynching the object of our uncomfortable gaze. This reordering of things destabilizes patterns of who can speak for and depict whom, in addition to exposing affects that are back¬ grounded when the pornography of black people’s pain is ubiquitous. In other words, this simple erasure of the object of lynching brings into focus a new object, one that is rarely made into an object of inquiry: the all-too-familiar white lust for lynching vio¬ lence. More simply put, white violence is the object of inquiry, rather than a revulsion at the horrors of, allegedly, violence from the past.
In the class session when we collectively viewed Gonzales-Day’s work, there was a palpable silence. When I asked for reactions and thoughts, the first student to contribute was a young black woman who said that she had never seen an image that so powerfully alleviated her typical burden in dis¬ cussions oflynching and racial terrorism. She explained that in her courses at Boston College, a predominantly white university, she was consistently, implicitly asked to speak on behalf of “The Black Experience” (emphasizing each word with sarcasm in her voice) while at the same time not doing so
in a way that might upset her white classmates or white professors. These images, she said, flipped the table upside down. This moment in the dis¬ cussion was not necessarily an easeful one, for this student or anyone else. Being able to speak from a non-ob jectified position, the student was also rather tentative in this new experience in what had been a white-dominated educational experience for her. In several different sections of this course, this reaction was consistent among many black women and other students of color. There was a complicated mix of relief and discomfort in exercising a new authoritative voice in the classroom space, and yet still an acute awareness of being closely watched by white peers while sharing their reactions.
Of course, white students also had var¬ ied reactions. Many times they were able to comment intellectually on the “alterna¬ tive” approach that Gonzales-Day used in the series. More challenging for many of them was what this alteration meant for them as aspiring researchers, particularly given the extractive patterns that Western social science has created in communities of color. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in the introductory pages to her highly influential book, Decolonizing Methodologies, research is in fact a rather dirty word to many Indige¬ nous communities.18 In a classroom conver¬ sation about the ongoing extractive nature of university-based research in communities that have been made to be and then labeled “at-risk,” as if the riskiness is unto the com¬ munities themselves, one white student commented, “Ok, I understand the history, but what are we supposed to do with it?” Her affect was also one of discomfort, but that discomfort was coupled with a desire to escape it. Of note is that this student also made reference to research harm in the past. As with the Erased Lynchings series, but even more so with lynching photographs that are more familiar to students, the past is often indexed in order to feel the less complex and intense emotions that come with distance, a seductive move “forward” and away from those scenes of violence and complicity. This student’s question contained all of that chronology — an unseemly past that is relegated to the past and an imperative to move forward to our allegedly more harmonious present. At the moment of the student’s question, “What are we supposed to do with it?” we were discussing the work of an Indigenous woman (Smith) who had carefully catalogued the violence done to Indigenous peoples in the name of research. I responded to the student that it was perhaps an inappropriate expectation that the author also take responsibility for sketching out new, productive ways for white researchers to “move forward.” As I continued to reflect on this class session, though, I saw this student’s question as an incom-
17 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 113-50.
18 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2013), 8.
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
plete part of what could be a reordering of ontology. Instead of asking “what are we [purportedly white researchers and white people] supposed to do with [this history],” we should be asking how can we be differently with ourselves and each other. This, fundamentally, is the goal of any pedagogical engage¬ ment I have designed for my students, using the histories and ongoing logics of how whiteness creates itself through the denoting and denigration of the other. And the incorporation of the works of visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Ken Gonzales-Day helps me approach those pedagogical goals.
III. USE OF VISUAL ART AS A VEHICLE FOR UNSETTLING VOYEURISM
RDF: The way you describe Gonzales-Day’s work, the way it disrupts what we typically see when we look at photographs of murdered black, brown, and yellow people. It is pro¬ foundly disruptive; I did not know where to go after the disruption.
I felt similarly unsettled when I saw Ain’t Jokin’ on Carrie Mae Weems’s website.15 But when encountered in a museum, some of the pieces in this same collection are interactive: view¬ ers see a photograph with a caption in the form of a riddle, and then they must slide open a panel riddle’s “answer.” For example, a pho¬ tograph of a respectable-looking, middle-aged black man (plate bears the caption “What are the three things you can’t give a black person?” and the response uncovered by the viewer reads, “A black eye, a fat lip and a job!” By sliding open the panel, museum viewers become complicit in the caption’s racist joke and anti-black stereotypes as well as in the histories that gave rise to and the identities enabled by them. In my classroom, however, images in Ain’t Jokin’ do not have sliding panels, and I found that student-viewers were unfamiliar with the anti-black stereotypes Weems was challenging. So I was faced with the problem of how the lessons of the museum installation could be taught in the classroom.
LP: This is a fantastic point. No pedagogical framing or piece of visual art alone can inspire a reordering of how we are with normalized anti-black violence. And, moreover, we are interacting with these works of art in spe¬ cific classroom spaces, with specific people, at specific moments. How did that interaction of artifact, setting, and participants come together, and not come together, in your class?
RDF: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried encourages stu¬
dent-viewers to consider Weems’s artistic inclusions and framing, Nobo- sodru’s affective and critical response to what she sees, and to see each piece in the installation as palimpsest (each image seen through the meanings and intentions of the artist and the frame). But I did not think the same approach was appropriate for Ain’t Jokin’.
I incorporated Ain’t Jokin’ in a course for first year students entitled Nar¬ rating Black Intimacies (spring 2017). The syllabus was organized around four themes (GRAY, WHITE, BLACK, BACK TO GRAY) with the expec¬ tation that what students learned in previous sections would assist their learning in subsequent ones. Our readings began with essays that under¬ scored ambiguities in early US racial categories and the evolution of these categories into more rigid forms (GRAY). The next section emphasized the need for/uses of these rigid racial cat¬ egories, demonstrating how whiteness is constituted by and because of par¬ ticular representations of blackness (WHITE).” These readings prepared for the introduction of Ain’t Jokin’ in the third section (BLACK). This the¬ matic organization helped students embrace the idea that if racial cate¬ gories are fluid, subject to historical, geographical, and social contexts, then what they perceive as normal and fixed in the twenty-first-century US might be unsettled.
LP: Were those racial categories unsettled? I am positive that part of the engagement that Weems and Gon¬ zales-Day desire, and perhaps we as educators desire, is to unsettle what is problematically settled and normal¬ ized. Unsettling does not have a set result, which also challenges us, as the designers of the pedagogical space, to be in action and reaction to what is unsettled and remixed.
RDF: I think it did rock them. I wanted this kind of mix: emotional and intellectual thinking/rethinking as we moved into the BLACK sec¬ tion of the class, since it was dedicated to investigations of how blackness functions in contexts of anti-blackness.21 By examining the ways in which blacks (writers, artists, and characters in fiction) internalized, reproduced, and challenged dominant narratives of blackness that manifest intra- and interracially, this section “demonstrated the intricacies of racial categories and how blackness is ‘done,’ ‘undone,’ and ‘redone.’” I originally wanted stu¬ dents to observe the photographs in Ain’t Jokin’ as examples of a black artist responding to and reframing objectified blackness, but I did not want to impose my way of seeing Ain’t Jokin’ onto students, nor did I want my white students to “see” as if they were black people. Doing so, I thought, would
2a. What do you see?
19 Carrie Mae Weems, “Ain’t Jokin’ , 1987-1988,” Carrie Mae Weems, accessed Apr. 6, 2018, http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/aint-jokin.html.
20 In the GRAY section, we read Littlefield, “Colonial and Revolutionary United States,” Brent Staples, “Editorial Observer: The Shifting Meanings of ‘Black’ and ‘White,’” New York Times, Nov. 11, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/15/opinion/editorial-observer-the-shifting-meanings-of-black-and-white.html, Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008). In the WHITE section we read Flanneiy O’Connor, “The Artificial Nigger,” in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), James Baldwin, “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), and Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999).
21 Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975), Stacey Patton, “Who’s Afraid of Black Sexuality” (2012), and Weems’s Ain’t Jokin’ composed the BLACK part of our class.
30
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
overemphasize the gazed-upon object and cast/recast student-viewers as voyeurs and position the seeing subject as safely removed from any respon¬ sibility in the process of seeing/interpreting the images.
However, without the sliding panels or punch lines and with little famil¬ iarity with some of the stereotypes referenced in Ain’t Jokin’, it was less visi¬ ble/instructive for my students than From Here I Saw What Happened. While I could provide the genealogy of the stereotypes behind Black Woman with Chicken (plate 10.3) and Black Man Holding Watermelon (plate 10.4),“ I still did not know how to recreate the interactive aspect of the museum installation, the impact of which sparked my pedagogical imagination.
Rather than lecture to the class about anti-black stereotypes and jokes, a strategy that would leave them at a safe and comfortable distance from the real impact of these racist manifesta¬ tions, I preferred to lay bare students’ immediate affective experience of Ain’t Jokin’, starting with their bewilderment over the jokes and the stereotypes. If student-viewers are unaware of the fried chicken stereotype, how might that image be seen and interpreted? Or, put another way, could I devise a lesson plan that approximated the experience of the museum installation of Ain’t Jokin’, making students aware of the processes through which they see the photographs and read the captions?
LP: This brings up a delicate but significant point. The classroom is drastically different than a museum or gallery. Museum educators design pro¬ grams to accompany installations, but they do not have ongoing interactions with a set group of people, typically. In the university setting, we are working together for a certain number of class sessions, so we have both more oppor¬ tunities and different constraints on what we can do. We are also shaped 2b. WHYdoyot
by a higher education culture that expects outcomes, and unsettling is not prescriptive.
RDF: Absolutely, I hear you. But can we work toward a pedagogical approach that would unsettle a unidirectional gaze, shifting the focus from viewers taking in an obscure, captioned image (black object) toward a con¬ templation of what and why they see what they see? Ultimately, I wanted this lesson to put students’ unsettled gaze in conversation with dominant anti-black narratives, a process that might allow the former to assess how and why racist stereotypes became normalized. I hoped this shift would disrupt familiar hierarchies (white/black, actor/acted upon), and highlight seeing as aprocess that did more than interpret specific image/text pairings. As you just said, Leigh, I think this lesson could foreground how viewers
become implicated in durable, racist narratives and become thoughtful about how they are implicated. Ultimately, I was invested in teaching Ain’t Jokin’ to Boston College students in a way that would make them conscious of self in relation to anti-black narratives, a pedagogical approach enabled by the work of Weems, a “brown woman taking brown photographs.”23
I devised an in-class exercise that encouraged students to look closely and to render their seeing as a list of nouns and adjectives. I used the black- and-white photograph that was paired with the caption “black woman with chicken” (plate 10.3). I replaced the caption with two questions, and cut- and-pasted the same image onto two eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheets of paper. The first sheet included the question “What do you see?” (fig. 2a) with the image, and the second used the same image with a different ques¬ tion: “WHY do you see what you see?” (fig. 2b).
LP: So, the question of “WHY do what you see?” is, in and of itself, a palimpsest prompt. Palimp¬ sests, as we have both said, are hard to approximate if basic recognition is not there.
RDF: Yes, I think so. My Ain’t Jokin’ lesson was not only intended to introduce undergraduate students to the attentive reading of visual forms, but also to encourage them to process critically the dissonance that the pho¬ tograph/text pairs evoked. As Weems originally composed these works, a museum viewer might experience the dissonance between the image of a figure delicately holding a piece of chicken and the caption’s association of blackness with a certain crude¬ ness. In the classroom encounter with this work, students unfamiliar with the referenced stereotype could still experience dissonances that could be unpacked, whether that dissonance stemmed from lack of knowledge (of jokes, stereotypes) or from inattention to normalized racial hierarchies/ binaries (white superiority/black inferiority). I hoped to guide students to engage with form and content, and teaching black creative works to stu¬ dents at Boston College, I expected them to become self-conscious about the viewing process: how they felt and thought about their relationships to blackness. Framing From Here I Saw What Happened through Nobosod- ru’s perspective encouraged viewers to empathize with her and her view (and, perhaps, feel authorized by this empathy); with Ain’t Jokin’, I wanted to worry this kind of connection by foregrounding less conscious processes.
The first step in this process was “simple knowledge”: students were given time to conduct “basic identification of the subject or elements in
22 There is history behind associations of black people with fried chicken and watermelon discussed in an NPR article. In it, Claire Schmidt “said like watermelon, that other food that’s been a mainstay in racist depictions of blacks, chicken was also a good vehicle for racism because of the way people eat it.. ..‘It’s a food you eat with your hands, and therefore it’s dirty.’ ‘Table manners are a way of determining who is worthy of respect or not.’” But significant questions derived from this history: if the association between black people and fried chicken was created, and made negative, then can we also see race and gender as “made”? And, if so made, then what purpose does this making serve? Who does this making serve? See Gene Demby, “Where Did That Fried Chicken Stereotype Come From?,” NPR, May 22, 2013, https://www.npr .org/sections/codeswitch/2013/05/22/186087397/where-did-that-fried-chicken-stereotype-come-from.
23 Charmaine Picard, “A Q&A with Carrie Mae Weems,” Modem Painters 26, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 67.
AIN’T JOKIN’ : UNSETTLING VOYEURISM THROUGH ART AND AFFECT
a photograph, work of art, or graphic.”24 With regard to fig. 2a, the most common words students used to describe the image were: black-and-white photograph, young, woman, black, texture of hair, sweater, holding chicken leg, holding fried chicken leg. Other responses qualified and elaborated these observations: color of the young woman’s skin (light), texture of her hair (straight, straight-ish, wavy), sweater (baggy), the young woman looked directly into the camera, the position of her hand(s), angle of her head as well as chicken leg, starkness of image (nothing to distract), light from the right.
Reviewing their listed responses to “what do you see?,” I noticed how certain they seemed to be about what they saw, and their confidence in the language they used to describe it.
The class discussed their lists until a consensus, as represented by the above list, was achieved. I then passed out the second sheet, and asked stu¬ dents to consider the question intently: “WHY do you see what you see?” I found that students had some difficulty in conceptualizing this question, so I provided a clarifying question: “WHY is the figure in the photograph ‘woman’?”
LP: This is a fantastic question and gets to the heart of that durability of race as a construct. To name this person as a woman, and moreover, as a black woman is one thing. To articulate how we made those identifications prompts a reckoning with the amateur biology, as Dorothy E. Roberts has put it, that has relaunched race and gender as biological, immutable truths.25
RDF: I like the way you put that! I think you are right. This is how students responded to fig. 2b: black because... (skin color, shape of nose); woman because.. .(features, hairstyle, jewelry); young because... (texture of skin, hairstyle, no gray in hair); fried chicken because.. .(texture). In their introduction to visual literacy Melissa Thibault and David Walbert insist that “while accurate observation is important, understanding what we see and comprehending visual relationships are at least as important.”26 I wanted the question on fig. 2b to assess this understanding by unsettling what students perceived as innate and obvious (determined by their confi¬ dence in adjectives for fig. 2a). And then I asked them: since the image was black and white, and the color of skin is literally a shade of gray, and the most obvious markers of femaleness are absent, how do you “see” black and woman? What, exactly, are you seeing?25 1 wanted the students to recognize how much their contexts (raced, classed, gendered; historical and social) determine what they see.
By consciously recognizing the subject of “black woman with chicken” as black and woman, the class considered what work race and gender do in the observation of this image, and for whom.
CONCLUSION: UNSETTLING AIN’T NO JOKE!
The work of unsettling what has been presented to us, from our first days, as settled is no small task. Our relationship to each other, the land, the histories we have been told, our relationship to ourselves, and ultimately how we see ourselves are all up for grabs when we truly unsettle who gets to look and who can only be viewed. A common goal of our different ped¬ agogies and of the work of Weems and Gonzales-Day is to unsettle how whiteness has created otherness in order to have whiteness be a legitimate
social location. These two artists go about this work with different kinds of agency in their own artistic frames and what they put in those frames. Across our different pedagogical spaces of a core literature class and an advanced research methods course, we also provided different prompts to our students. Yet there is a common thread that joins the pedagogical and artistic practices discussed in this essay: the desire to unsettle and reorder our ways of being with each other, so that we may imagine new ways to be together.
One challenge that we discussed was the fact that reordering how we are with ourselves, altering our ontologies, cannot be predetermined through a lesson plan and certainly not measured through an end-of-semester course evaluation. We imagine that Weems and Gonzales-Day might also share a healthy detachment from the “outcome” of their viewers’ experiences. Their work seeks to unsettle, perhaps, with the brave stance that we cannot delineate how things will reorder themselves. As educators, as intellectuals, we take up this work in our classroom spaces but we are strengthened by reminding each other that despite what the semester structure and routine may convey to us, the durability of racial and gender stereotypes cannot be undone in one fell swoop.
24 Melissa Thibault and David Walbert, “Reading Images: An Introduction to Visual Literacy,” Learn NC, accessed Mar. 7, 2018, https://www.oercommons.org/courses /reading-images-an-introduction-to-visual-literacy/view.
25 Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).
26 Thibault and Walbert, “Reading Images.”
27 6 Photographers, 1 Man, 6 Perspectives is a great video that depicts how much preconceived notions inform what we see. See Michael Zhang, “6 Photographers Asked to Shoot Portraits of 1 Man.. .with a Twist,” PetaPixel, Nov. 4, 2015, https://petapixel.c0m/2015/11/04/6-ph0t0graphers-asked-t0-sh00t-p0rtraits-0f-1-man-with-a-twist/.
SCREENED MEMORIES, A CHOREOGRAPHY OF GRACE: THE VIDEO ART OF CARRIE MAE WEEMS
Stephen Pfohl
“You write something not because you have the answer,” muses Carrie Mae Weems. “You write something because you know you need to work through it.”1 In this essay, I endeavor to work through aspects of Weems’s video art, moving pictures situated at the crossroads of aesthetic pleasure and global struggles for justice. A critically acclaimed photographer, Weems has over the last fifteen years also worked extensively in the medium of moving pictures, producing videos that mash up iconic cultural imagery with elements of dance theater. Weems began to work with video in 2003 with the production of Coming Up for Air, a series of visual-textual medi¬ tations on the complexity of human relationships — troubled interac¬ tions between siblings; tensions between a white male slave owner and the women, white and black, in his antebellum life; an ode to a beloved father, memories of whom travel across time on wings of a sliding trombone; the passion of lovers undone by the violent hand of the state. As Kathryn E. Delmez observes, “The influence of Chris Marker, Maya Deren, and Federico Fellini can be seen through her... nonlinear assemblage of poetic scenes that create a dream-like sense of fan t asy. . . .Typ i c al ly, there is a musical score and sometimes there is a poetic narrative recited by the artist in her deep and controlled voice.”2
Whether as stand-alone visual works, elements of site-specific instal¬ lations, or aspects of live performance, Weems’s videos challenge us to reckon — intellectually and in the flesh — with haunting screened memories, each rooted in wintry circuits of power, while yearning for spring and the lush revolutionary heat of summer. Reflecting on aesthetic-political prac¬ tices at play in Weems’s video work, this essay begins with a meditation on
demands made by Weems’s moving pictures on the viewing audience (fig. 1).
I. WHAT DO WEEMS’S MOVING PICTURES WANT?
What do moving pictures want? What demands do they make on those who watch them? For several decades, theorists of film and video have answered these questions by reading cinematic images like a language — as coded, if largely unconscious, ideological texts. Accordingly, the “gaze” of the “viewing subject” was said to be structured by one’s location within entan¬ gled symbolic webs of power and desire. The viewer is called out — or inter¬ pellated — to identify with certain dramatis personae and narratives, but not with others. As productive as this critical approach has been, it is important to recognize that mov¬ ing pictures are never simply coded texts. In addition to being visual conduits of meaning, film and video are also suggestive technologies of fascination (or repulsion) that cap¬ tivate our senses in a haptic manner.
As representational filters, cinematic media channel viewers’ attention down narrowly defined optical corridors of meaning. They shape our ways of seeing and edit out competing interpretations of what appears on screen. But this is not the only thing that moving pictures do. Films and videos also carry viewers beyond the lonely limits of egoistic subjectivity into enchanting circuits of imaginary identification and conta¬ gious affect. This is to enter a suggestive visual web, a dreamy twilight zone of images in excess of everyday consciousness and the confines of language. The video art of Carrie Mae Weems operates in both realms at once. As crit¬ ical visual texts, Weems’s videos raise profound questions about the politics of memory-making and memory-loss. As entrancing visual choreographies, they transmit resonant (or dissonant) emotional vibrations. Weems’s mov-
1. Carrie Mae Weems, The Power of Your Vote, 2016 (video still).
1 “Art2i Exclusive: Grace Notes: Reflections for Now," YouTube video, 7:22, posted by Carrie Mae Weems, July 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watchTvJbP3TwJ539xE. Many of Weems’s videos and performances discussed in this essay are viewable on YouTube; citations will be given where available.
2 Kathryn E. Delmez, “Coming Up for Air , 2003-4; Italian Dreams , 2006; Afro-Chic , 2009,” in Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video , exh. cat. (Nashville: Frist Center for the Visual Arts; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 206.
33
SCREENED MEMORIES, A CHOREOGRAPHY OF GRACE: THE VIDEO ART OF CARRIE MAE WEEMS
ing pictures invite us to engage poetically with sensuous vectors of remem¬ brance, loss, and yearning. In keeping with her early work in street theater and training in dance, every gesture — every step on a treadmill, stride down Flatbush Avenue, stroll through a corridor, or subtle movement of a shoul¬ der, hip, hand, or eye — conjures up, not simply a story, but also vibrant waves of feelings. Three black women singers stand stage left before the audience. A large screen extends upward behind the performers. The singer in the middle wears a flowing, ankle-length white tunic, composed of many layers. In a sonorous plea for justice and healing, she demands a proper burial for her missing brothers. This is Past Tense, a 2016 performance by Weems and an ensemble of singers and musicians at the Onassis Festival Antigone Now in New York (fig. 2)1 This is a rite of remembrance, a refusal of fleeting comforts purchased by denial.
The singer’s long black hair is pulled behind her head. Perhaps she is an ancient goddess or a mythic heroine conjured up to grace the present. The two women accompanying the singer stand a step up on a riser behind her. The staging is construc¬ tivist, Brechtian, elegant but mini-
It reminds us that we too are part of the drama, and that our lives are also theatrical — ritual per¬ formances that repeat, transgress, or transform scripts enveloping us since birth, social scripts rooted in a contested history that is never ours alone. Call and response: haunted fields of history and the fascinated self. Weems’s videos direct attention to performances of meaning and emotion in the dramaturgy of daily life. The woman on the riser to the singer’s left is tall and wears a modest mid-length black dress. She is draped, head to knee, in a white headscarf or prayer cloth. The woman to the singer’s right is dressed in a long black gown. Her arms are bare. “Here I am again,” the singer declares, in an outpouring of verse that is both operatic and Pen¬ tecostal, resilient and soulful. “How did I get here? Played by all the rules. Then they changed.” Whose voice is this? “Lost here in the dark. I can’t see my foot to take a step.... It hurts so bad I can hardly breathe.”
These moving images prompt us to ask, “Whose voice is this?” Maybe it is a voice expelled from memory, a subterranean voice pushed to the mar¬ gins of consciousness? The singer repeats, with uncanny resonance, a phrase that is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. “I can hardly breathe.” Call and response: “I can hardly breathe.” Maybe this is Eric Gamer’s voice, choking, gasping for air. “I can hardly breathe. I can hardly breathe. I can hardly breathe.” Repetition and ritual: ritual and revolution: “How did I get here?... I can hardly breathe.” A mixed-media performance, Past Tense includes a remix of some of Weems’s most compelling video work to date. The same is true of Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, first staged at the Spoleto Festival in 2016, which also incorporates a video remix with Weems’s poetic recitation, dancers, singers, and poets performing.4 A documentary about Grace Notes entitled “Ami Exclusive: Grace Notes: Reflections for Now ” adds a further layer of scenes of the performers discussing the piece backstage
with Weems. In Past Tense, the thematic and aesthetic-political concerns of Grace Notes are replayed in a slightly different register. This makes reflection on these interrelated works an immersive entry point into the corpus of Weems’s video art. The following analysis will often move in and among several works simultaneously as they relate to each other dialogically.
These works want the viewers to ask questions: questions about how our troubled pasts overshadow the present, whitewashed questions pushed to the margins of memory, questions about how we have arrived together in this knotted space in time, and questions about what to do next. “Please hear my call.. ..Death has burned me raw. I need a healing, please” (Past Tense). A theatrical montage of storytelling and choreography, Weems’s video perfor¬ mances invite us to reckon critically with the official story that America tells about itself. This is a thick-skinned story, ritually cleansed of the fibers of lived history and shrouded in myth. As Weems suggests in her 2008 video Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, this is “a story within a story” — a racialized, capital-inten¬ sive, and masculine story, a story set in motion by the violent trade winds of The Black Atlantic ,5
Weems’s provocative videos reopen this contested tale. They also remind viewers of the performative character of all rituals of remem¬ brance and forgetting. Returning to Past Tense, we hear the following
Oh, my black brother.... Oh, oh, I love you.... They hurt me when they hurt you.... But I’m here for you, for¬ ever true.. ..So, let the killers know they can’t play us this way. Oh, these black bodies undone by the blue. But when we sing pain down, that’s how we make it through.
Mae Weems, Past Tense, 2016 (video still).
The singer’s voice is joined by plucky piano keys, a tense violin, and a chorus of snapping fingers. “They hurt me when they hurt you.... But I’m here for you, forever true.” Weems next appears center stage. She informs us that what we are witnessing is not a play but a series of ideas or concepts — a collage of visual, textual, and musical reflections on the story of Antigone. Why Antigone? The idea for this performance came, Weems explains, while she was working on a piece about the relationship between grace and the pursuit of democracy, a project inspired by President Obama’s moving ren¬ dition of “Amazing Grace” at a church service in Charleston, South Caro¬ lina, following a deadly outburst of white supremacist hate. Reflecting on a recent spate of police killings of unarmed blacks and why so many young US black men never reach age twenty-one, Weems declares in Grace Notes “the thing to me that is remarkable about our history, about who we are, about how we have conducted ourselves in the onslaught of history, has been to maintain the core of our dignity, our ability to still sort of evoke and offer and to give that generosity, to share it with others, is one of our greatest strengths. And to me, that is the ultimate call of grace.”
Later, looking back at Grace Notes: Reflections for Now in the Ami docu-
“Past Tense: Onassis Festival 2016 Antigone Now,” YouTube video, 35:28, posted by Carrie Mae Weems, July 11, 2017, bttps://www.youtube. com/watch ?v=7pouMju4yYM. Grace Notes: Reflections for Now was subsequently performed at Yale University in September 2016 and at the Kennedy Center in November 2017.
See plate 1.10. The reference here is to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
34
SCREENED MEMORIES, A CHOREOGRAPHY OF GRACE: THE VIDEO ART OF CARRIE MAE WEEMS
mentary Weems realized that it was, in truth, a contemporary version of the ancient tale of Antigone — “the story of a woman, a community, who’s trying to figure out how to bury her brother. And they are denying her the right to do that, because they’re denying that it has even happened or that warrants our attention. And she says ‘I’m going to bury him, I’m going to bury him, I am going to bury him right.’” In Past Tense she takes up the story of Antigone more explicitly. Antigone is sentenced to be buried alive for refusing King Creon’s edict against publicly mourning her brother, Polynices. Antigone’s brother was slain, as Weems tells the story, for rightly or wrongly resisting the inhumane imposition of impersonal state law. And following his death, the body of Polynices was to lay exposed until nature took its course. Antigone transgressed the king’s order by burying her brother, pledging allegiance to a higher law than that of the state — the law of the heart, a law demand¬ ing generous rituals of remembrance, reciprocity, and mutual recognition. Antigone’s punishment was tragic. It also symbolized a profound shift in the Northwestern imagination of what, as humans, we owe one another, instituting an “irreplace¬ able” loss of “reciprocal recogni¬ tion.”6 7 Weems pictures this loss, and its collective disavowal, as a wintry fall from grace. Repeatedly, in her videography, we see an image of a beautiful, young, black woman, in a beige silk kimono, gazing at snow falling on a cherry tree in full bloom (see plate 1.10). As Laurie Ann Far¬ rell describes the scene, “Turning clockwise like a metronome set to the reflective cadence of the piece, the stoic woman remains expres¬ sionless as she stands next to the cherry blossom tree in full bloom and surveys the falling snow.”? Why is snow falling on a blossoming tree? Should it not already be spring? And why is the woman wearing a kimono? This figure appears first in the video Constructing History, where she is paired sequentially with the image of a distraught Japanese woman in a kimono cradling another woman on the brink of death in the aftermath of a US nuclear attack. Weems’s voice on the audio explains:
In the 1940s, a startling thing happened — a bomb more powerful than life itself, was dropped on Japan. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. And we knew that the world was now completely, completely ours to destroy, and if left in the wrong hands, would be destroyed. Life gone in a moment in the flash, in the blink of an eye.
The video art of Carrie Mae Weems, like her photography, challenges us to reckon with troubling matters at the global intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality, excised from memory by the gatekeepers of official history. “A woman stands in the thaw of winter, the beginning of spring, reflecting, considering, imagining, contemplating the past, imagining the future,” we are told, as we contemplate the woman in the kimono in Con¬
structing History studying the blossoming tree covered with snow: “With one step she could be in the future in an instant, or in the past, or in the moment, the now. But to get to the now, to this moment, she needs to look back over the landscape of memory. Lost in memory, the woman faces a history, a history with a story that has been told a thousand times before. If you look on the horizon, here and there, first seen, now hidden, are little sightings of hope or dreams, of memories. If you look closely, through the corridors of time, even within the horror, one could see the fluttering wings of doves, wings like time, batting out beats of hope. Hope was the thing missed, the thing hoped for. You could almost taste it, but it was just out of reach, just above your head.”
In commenting on Constructing History, critics have interpreted the young woman gazing at the snow-covered tree as a figurative “everywoman,” a guide to the video’s central concerns. Elsewhere, Weems bestows the role of guide on a teacher in the constructed space of a classroom, the video’s primary setting. “She tells the students that the bright lights of history are now shining down on them, on them, on her, on them and us together. And now all things are unavoidable. Per¬ haps in shame we’ll turn away, but the crime remains. The age of inno¬ cence has passed, and you are now responsible for your own future.” Hearing these words sends the stu¬ dents into a fugue state. Dazed by uncertainty, they twist, turn, and stagger about in a cloud of mist. “But now, with their own bodies,” Weems informs us, “they engage their own dark terrain, their own winter.” After watching Construct¬ ing History, I wonder if learning to dance through disorientation might be a requisite step in remaking the dominant choreography of history.
In Grace Notes, the teacher’s words morph into Antigone’s, as Weems performs a twenty-first-century version of Sophocles’s tale. Weems’s engage¬ ment with Antigone puts her art in conversation with the critical thought of philosopher Judith Butler. Like Weems, Butler re-spins Antigone’s ancient tale as a contemporary political allegory. Reflecting on “dehumanization” brought about by the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Butler asks, “What is the relation between the violence by which these ungrievable lives were lost and the prohibition on their public grievability? Are the violence and the prohibition [on discourse] both permutations of the same violence?”8 9 Butler here “injects into contemporary public debate something that was thought to have been lost forever” — the “shameless impurity” of Antigone, “who, in the end, preferred death to irresponsibility, the unrequited passion of love to self-preservation.”? Weems does something similar. In Past Tense and Grace Notes, she makes discerning connections between Antigone’s story and the Black Lives Matter movement today (fig. 3). Weems announces in Past Tense, “the country was slowly, persistently changing. Traditions were dying and colliding. Demographics were shifting. The evidence and the anger were
6 Victoria I. Burke, “The Substance of Ethical Recognition: Hegel’s Antigone and the Irreplaceability of the Brother,” New German Critique 40, no. 1 (118) (Winter 2013): 27, 8.
7 Laurie Ann Farrell, “An Opus: Carrie Mae Weems,” in Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, exh. cat. (Savannah: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2009), n.p.
8 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 36.
9 Arthur Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hoyles, Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 29-30.
35
SCREENED MEMORIES, A CHOREOGRAPHY OF GRACE: THE VIDEO ART OF CARRIE MAE WEEMS
everywhere. It was so strong, you could taste it.”
Weems provides a poetic snapshot of a nation divided by mutual accu¬ sations of blame. As she speaks from her lectern in Past Tense , a sepia-toned photograph of the artist herself appears on screen, an image made for the 1998 installation, Ritual and Revolution. Standing between rows of ancient stone columns, Weems wears a long gown, composed of plunging layers, with a river of gauze cascading off her right shoulder. Her eyes are closed and her head is tilted in reflection, or, perhaps, prayer. Her hair is laced with flowers and a large white blossom adorns a skirt gathered at her waist. Critics have interpreted this image in various ways — Weems as Queen of the May, a pagan symbol of rebirth and hope; as a symbol of International Workers’ Day, celebrated on May 1; or as Black Athena, a visual icon of the African origins of all human life.10 In Past Tense, Weems gathers all of these associations in the image of Antigone, a visual conduit for countering his¬ torical amnesia.
Weems’s recitation evokes the divisive landscape of contemporary Amer¬ ica: “Tongues were wagging, fingers were pointing here, there, and everywhere, blaming you, blaming me, blaming them, blaming us. But trapped by forces beyond their control, white men... are disaffected and disen¬ franchised” and “black men... are disaffected and dying.” In the eyes of the state, observes Weems, both groups are “devoid of power. And, yet, blinded by rage and by historical circumstances, they each blamed the other.” Weems’s concern with trou¬ bled relations between disadvantaged whites and blacks links her art to the critical sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois.
In Black Reconstruction in America,* 11 Du Bois provides a glimpse into the racial- ized economy of the US South in the aftermath of the Civil War and the eman¬ cipation of enslaved Africans. Why, he asks, did dirt-poor Southern whites refuse to ally themselves with impoverished former slaves? Were both groups of “free” laborers not condemned to grovel at the bottom of a low-wage capi¬ talist marketplace? If so, why did they not join together in hopes of collectively enhancing their economic well-being?
According to Du Bois, the reason was clear — in exchange for submit¬ ting to an economic system that paid them poorly, low-income whites were offered “psychological” compensation — a “wage” of whiteness that “drove a wedge between the white and black workers.”12 Regardless of class, whites were “given public deference and titles of courtesy,” and also access to pub¬ lic-sector employment, the best available schools, police protection, and even flattering stories about themselves in newspapers that ignored blacks except when writing about matters of “crime and ridicule.” In this, the “po¬ litical success” of the “doctrine of racial separation” exceeded its economic results.13 Pairing economic hardship with rites of public degradation and an
omnipresent fear of white terror, Reconstruction was a precarious time for African Americans. As such, wrote Du Bois, following Emancipation, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”14
Inspired by Du Bois, Weems examines the survival in the present of such ritually orchestrated divisions between poor whites and blacks. Visually, this story is retold in Cornered, a short video juxtaposing split-screen docu¬ mentary footage of embattled whites pointing vicious fingers at children of a darker hue riding school buses, with poignant images of blacks protesting the 1963 murder of children in Birmingham, Alabama.'5 What pits these two groups against each other so fiercely? Set to the somber tones of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (music also used in Constructing History), Cornered invites careful visual attention to gestures of seething white rage and the steely resilience of blacks struggling for survival, dignity, and justice (fig. 4).
Several images used in Cornered reappear in Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me: A Story in 5 Parts (plate 7) and also in several of Weems’s live performances and lectures. In all of these iterations what do Carrie Mae Weems’s moving pic¬ tures want from those who watch them? This much is clear — Weems’s videos call upon us to reckon imaginatively with a violent historical past that warps our present relationships and limits our chances of together cre¬ ating an equitable, beautiful, and sustainable future.
II. DU BOIS IN CHINA
In February 1959 Dr. William E. B. Du Bois, sociologist, writer, activist, editor, and founder of the NAACP and the influential Pan-Africanist movement, along with his wife, the writer Shirley Graham, visited China at the invitation of the Chinese Peace Committee. The couple was greeted at the airport by Kuo Mo-Jo, minister of culture, and other Chinese dignitaries, including Madame Li Te-ch’uan, minister of health, and their visit was documented in a film made by the Central News and Documentary Films Studio of the People’s Republic. In addition to coverage of Du Bois and Graham meet¬ ing with Premier Zhou Enlai, we see Du Bois addressing over a thousand professors and students gathered to celebrate the sociologist’s ninety-first birthday (fig. 5).
As a sociologist, I find it striking to see Du Bois, a “scholar denied” in the US, greeted by such a large and enthusiastic Chinese audience.16 A dig¬ itized version of this film, Du Bois in China, was posted in October 2015 on YouTube by Carrie Mae Weems.'7 Du Bois in China was not made by Weems but her hosting of the film online reflects the numerous affinities between her art and Du Bois’s critical sociology. In addition to examining historical divisions between the black and white working classes, each also complicates the legacy of Marx by refashioning critiques of capitalism to
10 Kerry Cardoza, “Carrie Mae Weems Reshapes History in Her Image at the Block Museum,” Chicago Reader: Arts and Culture, Sept. 26, 2017, https://www.chicagoreader .com/chicago/carrie-mae-weems-ritual-revolution-block-museum/Content?oid=3i343359.
11 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; New York: Atheneum, 1992).
12 Du Bois, 701.
13 Du Bois, 700.
14 Du Bois, 30.
15 “ Cornered ,” YouTube video, 3:44, posted by Carrie Mae Weems, Feb. 1, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RotSnqXQmy8.
16 Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of American Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
17 “Du Bois in China," YouTube video, 3:15, posted by Carrie Mae Weems, Oct. 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watclAfePiowojxaOSE.
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SCREENED MEMORIES, A CHOREOGRAPHY OF GRACE: THE VIDEO ART OF CARRIE MAE WEEMS
better grapple with the vicious materiality of colonialism and the violent enforcing of the color line.18 Both Weems and Du Bois call attention to the transnational character of racialized formations of power and the global roots of racialized violence.
These themes are already evident in several photographic series that pre¬ cede Weems’s turn to video work. And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People, for example, contains an image of a tilted globe and the words, “A