Carrie Mae Weems, "And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People"
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AND 22 MILLION VERY TIRED AND VERY ANGRY PEOPLE CARRIE MAE WEEMS Carrie Mae Weems' installation And 22 Million Very Tired and WorkSpace Very Angry People sets up a visual and textual polyphony in the space of the ten-by-twelve foot gall ery, a fugue of dissident February 16-Apri17, 1991 positions directed against oppression. Where Weems' earlier work has dealt specifically with complexities of African-Ameri- The New Museum of can experience and culture, this new work situates itself in a Contemporary Art, New York shared ground of suffering that cuts across racial boundaries: suffering associated with I say now, if the wh ite folk class. By way of evocative, fight for thyself, and the iconic images appearing in a Black folk fight for thyself, series of photographs, and we gonna crumble apart .. contending voices material- There's whites that suffer, ized as text on banners that, there's Indian people that suspended from the ceiling, suffer, there's Mexican reach toward the floor, American people that suffer, the install ation addresses there's Chinese people that itself to the question of suffer, and I'm perfectly willing coll ective action. to make this country Fifteen framed large format what it have to be . Polaroid photographs circle We gonna have to fight the space. Weems' first these battles together. works in color, each presents Fannie Lou Hamer an object rich in associative references, isolated against Every individual is not only the and yet emerging from a synthesis of contemporary monochromatic ground. relationships, [s/]he is also a The restricted color range summary of the entire past. of the photographs is domi- It may be objected that what nated by sepia, the warm each individual can change is brown color of their very little. This is true up to a common ground, and helps point. But since each person to open the historical scope can join others who want the and register of the install a- same changes [s/]he can tion. At the same time, it multiply [her/]himself an suggests the skin color litany imposing number of times. that forms the textual com- If the change desired is ponent of a suite of portraits "rational, " historically possible, of young African-Americans then even a very rad ical in Weems' book THEN change can be achieved, one WHAT? Photographs and that did not seem possible A Hot Spot In A Corrupt World Folklore: "DEEP BLACK, at first sight. ASHY BLACK, PALE Antonio Gramsci BLACK, JET BLACK, PITCH BLACK, DEAD BLACK, Carrie Mae Weems, "A Hot Spot In BLUE BLACK, PURPLE BLACK, CHOCOLATE-BROWN, COF- A Corrupt World" from FEE, SEALSKIN-BROWN, DEEP BROWN, HONEY BROWN, And 22 Million Very Tired and Very RED BROWN, DEEP YELLA BROWN, CHOCOLATE, HIGH- Angry People, 1991 , BROWN, LOW-BROWN, VELVET BROWN, BRONZE, GIN- Polaroid print with text on matting. GERBREAD, LIGHT BROWN, TAN, OLIVE, COPPER, PINK, Courtesy ofP.P.O.W. BANANA, CREAM, ORANGE, HIGH YALLA, LEMON. OH, AND YEAH CARAMEL. " Across each photographic image, a short text appears, a relief. Each banner bears a silk-screened text, whose sources "caption" that plays with the device of captioning to add depth range from Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, and Antonio as well as the texture of diversity, both tonal and referential, to Gramsci, to Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, and Ntozake the range of associations. An old manual typewriter, with blank Shange. Each addresses, from a specific position shaped by paper rolled in and ready, is somewhat anachronistically historical circumstance, the question of effecting change at labelled "An Informational System," and points to Weems' own once within and against those circumstances. Luisah Teish methodology here- from a limited set of symbols, an array of offers instructions for a hex: ''Theory is important, it assists in meanings waits to be generated. It also indicates ideas of hand- grounding one's philosophical principles. But in the face of the made revolution, of the efficacy of individual actions within a enemy one needs to shore up one's courage. Follow these monolithic system, and of the possibility of individual actions procedures .... " While embracing the role of theory in formu- linking up with others in a larger struggle, that are the lating and, to an extent, fomenting action against oppression, installation's main themes. "By Any Means Necessary," deadpan Weems' installation places theory on a par with other forms of in its irony and yet dead serious, offers an ordinary rolling pin nourishment, other tools, from "A Dagger" to "A Cool Drink of to suggest that even tools of subjugation can become instru- Water," the latter of which might describe the formal elegance ments of resistance, dependant only on mobilizing the user's which balances the work's hot content. At one level, lettered initiative and powers of creative reinterpretation. across the free-floating banners that brush the viewer's body as Taken together, the "captioned" photographs establish an he or she traverses the space, the texts form a landscape of lan- atmosphere of volatile stillness, complicated by Weems' charac- guage and thought through which diverse images appear. Ex- teristic wit and the sense of an historical "moment" that sweeps tending into a larger discussion the exchange between folkloric forward from the nineteenth century. "A Hot Day" shows an old- narratives and photographic images of Weems' previous work, fashioned rotary fan, evincing conditions when the common this installation more specifically spatializes and spells out ideas folk might grow restless and the ruling class a bit uneasy, inherent in her American Icon series, which deal with the conditions that recall, among others, the antebellum south, the ideology embedded in ordinary domestic objects. Detroit and Watts riots of the 1960s, and summer in the inner With this, images of the present are also engaged, carried as city today. "A Hot Spot In A Corrupt World" presents just that: a inevitable if invisible baggage into the gallery by each viewer. At globe on which the reflected source light is gathered in a single this writing, it is images of war as a relentless mini-series, shot point that obliterates a portion of the image- a hot spot in on exotic location, a spectacle of technological prowess that technical photographic terms- situated on the western coast gives the lie to Western discourses of development, diplomacy, of north Africa. While the musket held by the black man in the and progress. And 22 Million Very Tired and Very Angry People cropped image "An Armed Man," together with his attire, returns the space of consideration and historical depth to the suggest the period of the Civil War, the image of "A Veiled exigencies of the present, space and depth banished by Woman," her sheer black veil held aloft to shield her face, purveyors of our daily information. Weems' emphasis in this conjures up the memory of the Algerian War against French work on the insidious alliance of class loyalty with racial bias colonial occupation, and the explosive, influential film about puts a finger on the pulse of the current conflict: despite that war, The Battle of Algiers. Ali the tools necessary to revolu- familiar invocations of our national interest in the war in the tionary action are laid out: "A Little Black Magic," a small and Persian Gulf, it would seem that securing cross-national class talismanic piece of African statuary, joins with "Some Theory," relations has taken precedence over all domestic considera- an unidentified book standing ready to be read; "A Hammer" tions, just at the point that growing communities of color have and "A Sickle" meet up with "A Bell To Ring"- specifically, a begun to affirm their share in the population of the U.S. small liberty bell -and "A Song To Sing" to set in motion at Laura Trippi, Curator once the strains of the Communist anthem, "The Internation- ale," and Pete Seeger's '50s- era anthem of left-leaning Ameri- CARRIE MAE WEEMS was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. She has can idealism, "If I Had a Hammer." The liberatory impulse recently had one-person shows at P.P.O.W. in New York, CEPA Gallery behind the two superpowers is thus summoned up, and rever- in Buffalo, and the ICA in Boston. Her book THEN WHAT? Photographs berates in tune with a world order recently and rapidly unravel- and Folklore was published by CEPA in 1990. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and teaches at Hampshire College. ing. "A Precise Moment In Time," showing a simple alarm clock, stretches taut the sense of struggle slowly gathering momentum. Down the center of the gallery, white silk-like banners lead in an opening, alternating file toward the back wall, where "AND 22 MILLION VERY TIRED AND VERY ANGRY PEOPLE"- picking up where the Seeger song leaves off- is written out in . FREE CONDOMS INSIDE In 1987, the late William Olander, then curator at The New Museum, invited ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, to create an installation in the Museum's Broadway Window. The result was Let the Record Show ... , a work which employed forms ranging from an electronic display board to photo blow-ups and mock tombstones to chronicle the rise of the AIDS crisis and reveal its political dimen- sions-that is, its basis as a crisis within the repressive, and aggressively homophobic, rhetoric of the conservative right, and the financial and legislative resources that this rhetoric commands. Another outcome was the formation of the AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury from the members of ACT UP who conceived and produced the installation. An arts group whose target audience lies largely outside the artworld, Gran Fury has gone on to produce a series of public art projects that call attention to the ways in which public policy and public opinion concerning AIDS are shaped by exclu- sionist values.