Carrie Mae Weems: “The Kitchen Table Series”
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Episode #138: Filmed in her Syracuse studio, artist Carrie Mae Weems discusses the impetus for her work “The Kitchen Table Series” (1990), a photographic investigation of a single domestic space in which the artist staged scenes of “the battle around the family” between women and men, friends and lovers, parents and children.
Carrie Mae Weems’s vibrant explorations of photography, video, and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms—social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait, and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics, and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans for more than a century.
Carrie Mae Weems is featured in the Season 5 (2009) episode Compassion of the Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS. Watch full episodes online for free via PBS Video or Hulu, as a paid download via iTunes (link opens application), or as part of a Netflix streaming subscription.
CREDITS | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Catherine Tatge. Camera: Joel Shapiro. Sound: Roger Phenix. Editor: Joaquin Perez. Artwork Courtesy: Jack Shainman Gallery & Carrie Mae Weems. Special Thanks: Elvira Dyangani Ose. Video: © 2011, Art21, Inc. All rights reserved.
Carrie Mae Weems. “Untitled,” from Kitchen Table Series,1989–90. Set of 20 gelatin-silver prints, 28 1/4 x 28 1/4 inches each. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Lives and Works in Berlin | Absalon at Kunst-Werke
Absalon, "Modèles des cellules habitables," 1991 Photo: Ethan Hayes-Chute.
It was back in 2005 when I first encountered the work of Absalon at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof in a exhibition called Fast Nichts – Minimal Artworks from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection (fast nichts means “almost nothing” in German). In many ways, if you’ve been to Dia: Beacon, you’ve seen a good portion of Fast Nichts — works by Carl Andre, Blinky Palermo, Bruce Nauman, and so forth. One of the (admittedly numerous) exceptions to the above claim is the work of Absalon. Somewhere in my digital archive, I still have a few the photos I took of his work, Cellule No. 2 (Protoype) (1992). While wandering through the vast halls of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s Reickhallen, I was immediately taken by the human-scale (but still quite small), white igloo-like structure that essentially has no more room than that which one might need to live. The house, or cell, or cellule, not larger than two queen-sized beds put side-by-side, consists of a desk or table, a sleeping area that is rather tomb-like, and an small stall that features a prototypical shower/toilet combination.
Absalon, "Cellule No.2.," 1992 Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, ausgestellt 2005 in den Rieckhallen © Estate of Absalon Foto: Roman März.
The outer shape of the structure dictates the inner, and vice-versa; odd bump-outs encompass the variously-purposed areas; a visitor must most-often hunch to access some areas of the Cellule, and certainly a museum guest must not attempt to bring their backpack, or a friend, inside with them. No conjugal visits in these cell(ule)s. This same piece was also exhibited again recently as part of the extended exhibition of the Bruce Nauman’s Dream Passage exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in 2010, along with Absalon’s short video work Bruits (1993), in which the artist screams at the camera until he no can no longer, his voice temporarily ruined. Installed at the Hamburger Bahnhof, or probably anywhere else for that matter, you can hear his pained screams much sooner than you find out what they are coming from. Certainly, most of Abalon’s other works are much much quieter in every way.
See You in Seattle
The Art21 Education and Public Programs team is flying to Seattle this Thursday for the annual National Art Education Association conference March 17-20. We will be bringing season 4 artist Mark Dion and, um… serving lemonade! Join us for one or more of the events below:
Friday, March 18th:
8:30– 10:00am – Mark Dion Keynote Address
10:00-11:30am – NAEA Film Salon featuring William Kentridge: Anything is Possible
11:00am-1:00pm – Art21 in Context- An Off-Site Workshop at the Seattle Art Museum
2:00-4:00pm- Art21 Lemonade Stand w/ Mark Dion
Saturday, March 19th:
10:00-11:05am – NAEA Film Salon featuring Art21 Season 5: Systems (includes interviews with artists John Baldessari, Kimsooja, Allan McCollum, and Julie Mehretu)
11:00am-12:00pm – Mark Dion at the Olympic Sculpture Park
10:00am-4:00pm – Experience Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium at The Olympic Sculpture Park
5:00-6:00pm – SuperSession with Mark Dion, Vivarium docents, museum & classroom educators
Sunday, March 20th:
11:00am-12:00pm – Art21 Educators—Contemporary Artists, Films, and Flips in the Classroom
It should be a fun and festive few days. Stop by and say hello. Hope to see you there!
5 Questions with Colectivo Situaciones
“Justice and Punishment”: The symbol of the escrache of HIJOS. Courtesy Colectivo Situaciones.
* This interview has been translated and co-edited by Brian Whitener.
I first heard about Colectivo Situaciones about a year ago, when I received a publication in the mail titled Genocide in the Neighborhood, edited by the scholar and poet Brian Whitener and translated by Whitener, Daniel Borzutsky, and Fernando Fuentes . This book, published by Chain Links and available through Small Press Distribution in Oakland, focuses on three organizations that emerged during the mid-90s and early 2000s in Argentina: Colectivo Situaciones, HIJOS [Children for Identity and Justice against Forgetting and Silence], and Mesa de Escrache. Though a series of conversation and interview transcriptions as well as collaboratively written documents, Genocide in the Neighborhood tells a story of how these groups came to work with various neighborhood communities throughout Argentina in the interest of bringing the crimes of both the Argentine dictatorship (1973-1983) and subsequent governments that granted immunity to many who had committed crimes against humanity during this period to light. As the children of the “disappeared,” those who were executed for their political sympathies during the dictatorship, Colectivo Situaciones and their colleagues have sought a kind of justice through a social practice that emerges through their efforts: the escrache. As Whitener writes extensively of the escrache, a ritual performance situated within specific communities that attempts to exact alternative forms of justice in the interest of community building and healing:
Like all truly innovative practices, what the escrache is is rather difficult to define; it’s something between a march, an action or happening, and a public shaming. The escraches are a transformation of traditional forms of protest and were developed as a means to address two problems. The first was the problem of “impunity” [the granting of legal immunity to criminals of the dictatorship]; the second was the loss or suppression of historical memory that this legal reality created.
The escrache, then, as a practice looks like this: HIJOS selects someone who, during the dictatorship was responsible for or complicit with the torture and murder of people, to be escrached. When they first started, HIJOS targeted high-ranking members of the dictatorship, who primarily lived in the center of Buenos Aires. Later, a decision was made to escrache lower ranking members in part to begin to work in other parts of the city, but also to demonstrate that members of the dictatorship were living as if nothing had happened. Once a genocidist is decided upon, a date for the escrache is fixed and members of HIJOS and other related organizations spend months working in the neighborhood where this person lives. They work with neighborhood organizations and go door-to-door to discuss with individual residents and families what that person did and the need for denouncing it. They also discuss the theory and practice of the escraches. Next come months of flyering in order to invite and secure participation of the residents of the neighborhood in the march, which is part of the culminating action of the escrache. The march leads the neighbors to the criminal’s home, where there are theater performances and a symbolic ‘painting’ of the house. This ‘painting’ usually involves throwing paint ‘bombs’ or balloons at the building in order to mark it as the genocidist’s place of residence. The idea is to once again transform the space of the neighborhood, to make visible that genocidists still walk free.
As Whitener goes on to say in his introduction to Genocide in the Neighborhood, the organization of such public and communally immanent rituals, while it takes on aspects of the “happening” or “situation,” is in the service of exploring inter-actions and relations within specific communities that may help to transform those communities positively, towards productive expressions of political and juridical power. Where the state judiciary has failed the people of Argentina (much as our own public officials now fail us in the US), Colectivo Situaciones and their affiliates seek forms of justice and politics that are not a priori but rather are conceived through a rigorous and extensive social process. The result is a practice of “social protagonism” and the construction of “plane[s] of social transversality,” a space in which individuals and groups can explore forms of subjectivity and potentiality autonomous to the seeking of state power. In the wake of Colectivo Situaciones, one can start to imagine how art and performance can serve politics through commitments to the local, particular, and relational — which is to say, through a commitment to working with the people whom their art would be for, whom it would serve.
Open Enrollment | To Pick a Topic
With the taught portion of my Courtauld MA degree in Art History concluded (the final exam completed last week), it’s now time to start thinking of dissertation topics and plunge into the final 10,000 words and final three months of my graduate degree. With this last stage at hand, I have had much time to reflect and wish to consider the importance and utility of the topics selected for papers and presentations in the field of Art History. Are these expositions merely personal intellectual indulgences? Is intellectual exploration more useful when placed within the cannon of academic thought around a specific topic? Is practicality/applicability even a valid consideration? These are questions that always seem to creep into my mind whenever I embark on a new scholarly endeavour bridging my love of art and writing within the discipline of Art History.
Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze, 1876.
Over the past five and a half months, I’ve written two extended essays and given three presentations on different topics. My first presentation was more of an assignment working with a set bibliography and a given work of art: I compared Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Auguste Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (1876). The resulting presentation unfolded the complexities of sculptural practice (modeling, replicating, founding) in light of ideas of reproduction/copy. Considered in a nineteenth-century context, ideas of the original and the copy were not at all straightforward, as emulation was an acceptable (and indeed commonplace) exercise for artists. Concepts of authorship remain clouded even today, as the debate continues.
Clement Meadmore’s "Split Ring," 1969, with William Leonard, then director of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Don Lippincott, and Roxanne Everett, in the field at Lippincott, Inc. (One of an edition of two. Cor-Ten steel. 11'6" x 11'6" x 11'. Portland Art Museum, OR. Art © Meadmore Sculptures, LLC / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by George Tassian, from the catalog Monumental Art, courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH.)
It’s not often that so many of my interests come together in a single book, but the arrival of LARGE SCALE: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s, which was published last fall by Princeton Architectural Press, marks such an occasion. As an art conservator, I’m very interested in from what and how contemporary art is made because it informs us on how to properly care for it. I also have a ongoing interest in documenting the creation and display of public artworks. As a definitive resource, LARGE SCALE brings all of this together. To find out more about the context of this book, I spoke with its author, Jonathan D. Lippincott.
Jonathan was born the year after the first sculptures were made at Lippincott, and grew up watching the work taking place there. Since 1994, he has worked at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he is the design manager. He has also worked independently as art director and designer for a range of illustrated books about architecture, landscape, and fine art.
Jonathan Lippincott, age six, speaking with Claes Oldenburg at Lippincott, Inc. in September, 1973. His parents, Jonny and Don Lippincott, look on. Photograph copyright Roxanne Everett/Lippincott’s LLC; used with permission.
Richard McCoy: In the Preface, you position LARGE SCALE as an historical document about the fabrication of some of the most important sculptures of the era, and make the point that the process of fabrication is often overlooked in art monographs. Will you talk about how you put this book together from Lippincott, Inc’s archive?
Jonathan Lippincott: In putting together this book, I was working primarily from the photographs taken by Roxanne Everett, who was my father, Don Lippincott’s, first business partner. She and my father dreamed up Lippincott, Inc. together in the mid-1960s.
Right from the beginning, she felt it was important to document the art as it was being made and the collaborative aspects of the fabrication process, in part so they could show other people what they were doing, but also because this was a new idea–to have an industrial fabrication shop dedicated exclusively to working with artists to create sculpture.
New guest blogger: Joe Grimm
Thanks to Lindsay Lawson for her thoughtful posts. Up next is Joe Grimm. Joe (b. 1978, Safety Harbor, FL) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with light and sound. In his performances, sculptures, videos, and constructed situations, he appropriates material from enlightenment-era metaphysics, contemporary pop music, and the troubled legacy of minimalism — insisting always on the centrality of sheer sensory pleasure. Grimm studied philosophy at Yale University before receiving a graduate degree in experimental music composition at Brown University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown at institutions such as CAPC Bordeaux, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Bezalel Gallery in Tel Aviv, and MCA Chicago.
The Complexity of the Do-Over
A newborn macaque imitates tongue protrusion. Photo from Evolution of Neonatal Imitation.
There is something strangely satisfying about the act of repeating. Perhaps this is because as children we begin our lives mimicking adults to learn language and behaviors that are essential to succeeding as a human. In these early years, many of us pleaded to hear the same stories over and over again, establishing power, through recognition and memorization, over the printed words we could not yet read for ourselves. This comfort in taking the road more traveled does not entirely leave us as we mature. As adults, most of us appreciate some form of structure in our lives in which we can expect certain outcomes. I, for one, have been known to consistently follow the same routes to minimize the stresses of driving in Los Angeles. This kind of behavior simultaneously reinforces two opposing mental processes: the mindless repetition of and conversely, the deeper understanding of something already learned.
This human repeat tendency has not gone unnoticed by moviemakers and its implementation has many names: remake, reinterpretation, do-over, reboot, cover, shot-for-shot, reimagining. At its worst, the remake is attractive simply because it is easy for both the creator and the audience. The initial work has been completed, judged, and perhaps passed the test of time. Many remakes are considered lesser accomplishments than their originals (e.g. Psycho, The Karate Kid, Godzilla, Planet of the Apes, The Wicker Man), but even those that fail to impress have succeeded in adding another layer to the stories they reinterpret by showing us a parallel universe where things could have happened another, perhaps less cinematically viable, way.
Ever watch a three month old baby stare into a mirror for the first time? Its face is an expression of pure awe and confusion. What is the thing in the mirror? Why isn’t it like me (three dimensional)? Over time, of course, that curiosity turns into fascination at the stage when the child learns that the image he sees is himself… or, at least, the image of himself. That recognition may seem trite but it is a critical site in the individual’s subjectivity-formation. At this level there is still much play and experimentation as he learns how to be and how to identify himself in relation to others.
How we self-identify relative to others is a key issue of exploration for Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum. Lum’s retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery involves several installations using mirrors as well as riffs on public signage that create what he refers to as “triangulation”: a visitor is always projecting his or her own identity onto characters on a sign or poster. A kind of looped communication occurs between expectations, projection/reflections, and identification. These works by Lum are focused on issues of identity, evoking empathy at the same time as alienation.
Installation view from Ken Lum's "Photo-Mirror" series. Photo: Raji Sohal
Installation view from Ken Lum's "Photo-Mirror" series. Courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery.
In the Photo-Mirror series Lum began in 1997, the viewer walks into a room where personal-use mirrors hang. Wedged on the inside edge of each mirror’s frame, photos of random people and scenes stick out — strangers smiling in seventies school studio portraits, eighties birthday shots, and scenes of backyards and beautiful sunsets that belong on postcards. As the viewer amusingly looks at his own reflection in the mirror, his face is quite literally framed by the small photos of other people looking back at him. A series of reflections in a room of mirrors could go on forever. We get the metaphor. But here, also, art gets to perform its occasional magic by debunking common sense, replacing it instead with what Gilles Deleuze prefers to call “good sense.” Good sense, as opposed to common sense, is where “difference exists at the origin of individuation,” and the subject’s sense of what is is defined by the process of prediction, rather than recognition. I don’t actually recognize the smiling faces in the portraits but they are ubiquitous nonetheless. Unrecognizable but familiar. I’ve got the same (but different) photos in my roster of old photo albums at home.
Weekly Roundup
Janine Antoni, "Caryatid (Terra Cotta Amphora)," 2003. Photograph and broken vessel installation. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
In this roundup (with a few exceptions), it’s a week to honor women with exhibitions, events, and articles highlighting the work of several female artists.
- Janine Antoni, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, among others, are a part of Heroines, a “comprehensive survey of the depiction of women as the protagonists of key roles and as manifestations of the gender identity crisis in western art”at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Fundación Caja Madrid in Spain. In each section the voices of one or more great women artists respond to the images created by their illustrious male colleagues. The exhibition is on view until June 5.
- Carrie Mae Weems, Janine Antoni, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Shahzia Sikander, Nancy Spero, Collier Schorr and more are featured in a 7-part editorial series on women artists and writers who chart out, cross, or strive to level the “homosocal divide” on the Huffington Post. XX Chromosocial: Women Artists Cross The Homosocial Divide by G. Roger Denson is a critique of patriarchy that analyzes art by women who make a “seemingly hard biological fact like gender appear as a pliable and transposable tool of the individual will.”
- Laylah Ali will lecture on the art of Joseph Beuys as part of the Artists on Artists Lecture Series at Dia:Chelsea (NYC). The event will take place on March 21.
