Wie when someone always says the same thing and says it again and again, always differently. The eternal drama that never takes on dramatic form. For decades, the Afro-American artist Carrie Mae Weems has filtered the material of her photo series and installations from the experiences and memories of racist violence. And in visual reflections on Black identity, her work hasn’t gotten any more passionate, no more toxic, no more desperate. Not even smarter. Everything in her work is seen, considered, and shown equally intelligently.
The intimate everyday life at the kitchen table, the struggle for life on the street, the dispute over participation in public life, the forays through European history, the retreat to African roots, the fate of slaves, forced socialization in Western educational and cultural systems, the loneliness in the art world , the evocation of distant traditions, the dreams in the unforgettable poetry of one’s own language. Only there is no outcry, no gestures of protest, no Black Panther fist. Perhaps what is really disturbing about the extremely impressive work encounter in the Stuttgarter Kunstverein is that the sound so persistently remains below the pitch of the prosecution.
Young man with a hoodie on his head, dyed bluish so that he flickers like a gas light in the dark of the picture. Reproduced 39 times, from monumental to miniature, and distributed on the wall without any recognizable system. A strong image in the undecidability of appearance and disappearance. And you can make it even stronger when you read that the hoodie serves as a tried and tested clue in racial profiling for American cops, and the oddly ornamented wallpaper on which the images are scattered, after the endpaper from the first edition of George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God”. When the story appeared in 1932, the author faced massive hostilities and threats. He replied laconically: “You have to shock people tremendously to make them think seriously about their religion.”
Say a lot with little
Not every signal, not every allusion in Weem’s work is immediately understandable. The passion story of the Colored people lacks sensual immediacy in this country, where racist needs tend to dissolve in anti-Semitic sentiment. And yet you can usually get on the right track without help. When the artist stands in front of the awe-inspiring fronts of famous museums, alone, with her back to the viewer and looking up at the Louvre pyramid, at the Zwinger in Dresden, at the pillars of the British Museum in London, then the skeptical key question arises: “May me in there? As a black artist, am I part of the roster inside?” all by itself.
What is fascinating about the groups of works is their intellectual concentration, the economy of means, the secrecy that prevails in the exhibition despite the soundtracks from all possible corners of the installation. One strolls past the pictures of the “Kitchen-table” series like rehearsal photos for a Strindberg play. What wife and lover, wife and girlfriends, mother and daughter have together does not need subtitles. The stories about it come naturally. And the interspersed pieces of text are actually dispensable, especially since their lyrical drive sometimes has something effortful. Even the meager place – table, chairs, lamp – is a suggestive stage on which the figures seem to remain in their frozen movements until a relationship is established between them. In the aesthetic principle, these scenographies are related to painting. It is precisely here that the artistic roots and artistic primacy of this work become clear, which only gives the political message all the more weight.
Sometimes the work can also shine in wonderfully artificial museum light. So, when the laconic photo series “And 22 Million Very Tired And Very Angry People” presents its objects from the history of the revolution in a paratactical series like heroic props, along with “Hammer” and “Sickle” and a sheet of music from the gospel “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” a rolling pin also makes an appearance – with clear signs of wear and the useful instructions for use: “By Any Means Necessary”.
Staged argument
Nothing is spontaneous, nothing that hasn’t been carefully considered, precisely arranged, or made into an image according to a meticulous script. Here the word attitude regains the old connotation of a composure that accompanies the anger and outrage at racist injustice with deliberation. Documentation is not promised. Anyone who doesn’t want to get involved with the artist’s staging way of argumentation may be lost for Carrie Mae West. All of her work is at the same time a strict form that keeps things at a thoughtful distance. There is a refinement and elegance in the rebellion that is almost as frightening as the terrorist theme, which is constantly revived in the exhibition, which is set up without any leading line.
The works also lack the relentlessness of Cancel Culture, the ruthlessness with which cultural history is supposed to be rewritten as a white trail of triumph. It is not at all certain whether the radical elites of a “black visual thinking” are not again discovering a betrayal of their own cause in the thoughtful design of these works. Even the four gigantic male-female nudes with the letters A, T, G and C on the black and white backs are not really suitable as emancipation accelerators. One learns that the initials correspond to the four nucleobases from which human DNA is formed. But with the possible conclusions you are completely on your own. Both are conceivable: that “race” is biochemically determined or not, and that there has never been or will be anything other than a social construction or fiction, with which the victorious civilization explains its supposedly natural superiority.
Questions and problems of universal concern, raised and designed primarily from an American, Afro-American perspective. Europe offers less perspective, which really doesn’t mean that the old continent is above its genuine racism. It is only logical that Carrie Mae Weems, who also lived in Berlin for a while, worked on the Holocaust memorial there. It is – at least in the exhibition – the only photo and video work that takes place in a German setting, in the narrow aisles between the concrete blocks that remind us of the millions of Jews exterminated.
Of a racism mind you, in front of whose bureaucratic perfection the assault of the white US police officer on the black suspect must appear like an officially sanctioned freak out. Also here and now no song of lamentation. Most cautious approach. The artist dances between the steles like a shadow creature, which is not the worst reaction given the tourist boredom that one experiences there. That is the great opportunity when someone always says the same thing, that they can always say it in new, different ways.
Carrie Mae Weems. The Evidence of Things Not Seen. Until July 10th at the Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart