Museum Review #2

The Carrie Mae Weems’ exhibition in the Guggenheim museum embodied her exuberant and combative nature, her personality and ideals trickled through every act of appropriation and social commentary. The exhibition as a whole was very impressive and explored an array of topics ranging from slavery to the facets of domestic relations and motherhood. “The Kitchen Table Series, 1990” was easily the most alluring part of her thirty years of photography and video for me. It seems as though she felt she had a responsibility to the women of her generation to release the restraints of the gender roles  and stereotypes she believed were forced on them, she took the concepts of motherhood, feminism, and monogamy and skewed them. Weems contorted these stereotypes to the point that it could be misinterpreted as forced, as though these weren't her natural inclinations as opposed to an obsessive and combative nature manifesting in one of many peculiar ways. However, that fact that a woman presenting with this opinionated of a personality can be misconstrued as obsessive and combative could be what she was trying to eliminate. She believed motherhood was forced upon women and very proudly admitted to having little to no conviction for motherhood because it took her away from her work. Weems did not remotely fit society’s mold of what a woman should be, she instead obliterated it, and in the remains she hoped to erect a movement and liberation for all women. Nonetheless, not many people, man or woman, would be comfortable with allowing their mate to “taste the exotic fruits produced in abundance by mother nature” as she so eloquently wrote it. I believe she employs photography as her main medium in place of painting or printing because the aesthetic interpretation is minimized and the focus shifts from the shallows of the work to the deeper meanings and essences. The depictions in “From Here I Saw What Happened and I  Cried, (1995-1996) would not have been as impactful if achieved by any other medium in my estimation because a photograph is as objective a medium can get. This allowed for her appropriation to take center stage and convey the true travesties of slavery as Weems casts a blood red veil over the pictures of her ancestors.  These men and women were chained, whipped, bloodied, bludgeoned, stripped of their history. Their lands were raped, pillaged, decimated. She allows the viewer to see how the once mighty have fallen with every picture and anecdote. Carrie Mae Weems did not believe in metaphor, she was as literal and forthright as can be. Her appropriated works mirrored her personality in their strength and command. This museum visit intrigued me much more than the trip to the Metropolitan and that very may well have been because when I left I felt as though I knew Carrie Mae Weems as a person. I felt as though we talked about the life and times over lunch, and we went dutch, of course.