An aesthetic battle took place in Portland in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder. Demonstrators painted their slogans across the hoardings of boarded-up local businesses, but authorities daubed them over; political messages were replaced with black and brown splodges of colour. Intent and meaning were swapped for abstract nothingness.
It’s a conflict that neatly sums up American artist Carrie Mae Weems’s whole process, and her photos of those painted hoardings open this big retrospective at the Barbican. They could be works of peak abstract expressionism, like lost paintings by Clyfford Still or Barnett Newman. But hidden in them is a whole history of struggle and oppression. They’re incredible things: razor sharp, clever, beautiful, angry.
That's Weems’s thing, a contemporary Black aesthetic that weds visual intent with political intensity. She reframes and recolours nineteenth century daguerreotypes of slaves, she dances in the Berlin Holocaust memorial, restages political assassinations, takes photos of a hammer, a sickle, a clock, a globe. Everything, in her hands, has the power to embody a political idea, to fight against oppression, racism and colonialism.
She imagines the kitchen table as a place of political upheaval
One installation acts as a tribute to Black Power movements. It’s lined with images of police brutality and revolutionary intellectuals like Fred Hampton and Bobby Seale. You feel like you’re in a space where history happened, where rights were fought for.
Her most iconic series uses just a kitchen table. Weems acts as the central figure in these photos, she’s a doting mother, an ecstatic lover, a tired friend, an eager agitator. She imagines the kitchen table as a place of political upheaval, where gender and society roles can be twisted, relationships can be undermined.
Downstairs, her more extravagant film pieces work less well. She dresses as a ringmaster, wears animal masks, uses archival footage and films women in the rain to explore the troubled history of American democracy and Trump rallies. It’s just a little overblown and self-indulgent, a bit bloated. The meaning gets muddied, the aesthetic gets murky.
She also only views the world through the prism of American history and civil rights, which makes sense when talking about America, but when she takes pictures of herself in front of famous buildings in Rome, or the Guggenheim in Bilbao, you just lose sight of what her point is.
So it’s not all good, but when it is good, it’s brilliant. The anger in Weems’s work is quiet and seething. It’s not a violent outburst, a fit of temper, it’s a long, slow build up of ire. She doesn’t express it with fists or volume, she expresses it instead with beauty, and that might just be even more powerful.
