Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems Coco Fusco The Apple ofAdam's Eye (front), 1993, folding screen, pigment, and silk embroidery, 75 1/4" x 81 1!2"x 1 3/4", in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop, photo: Will Brown. I visited Carrie Mae Weems' installation in the Museum of Modern Art's project room twice before sitting down to write about it Without having planned to do so, I experienced the work under radically different conditions that demonstrated the extent to which that institution and black art within it are still deeply implicated in this country's racial divide. One's position in relation to that schism still determines how the image ofAfrica will signify, how it will resonate, and as a result, what an environment such as Weems' will conjure to the one who views it My first visit was on opening night. Surrounded by a majority black crowd, I followed the onlookers around the space, watching each person as they attentively read the texts and studied the photographs of African dwellings and sculptures representing gender archetypes. Weems pulled a characteristic move and invited musicians, a singer and a poet to perform , which elicited immediate physical and vocal responses from the visitors, and lent a sense of ritual to the place. Against the classical modernist bent of isolating artforms and compelling viewers to absorb "pure" genres in contemplative silence, Weems offered a synesthetic and theatricalized encounter. lleft with a sense that the African images and objects had not only finally arrived, so to speak, at MoMA, but that Weems had succeeded in Africanizing the space in a distinctly American way, if only for a moment. When I returned several weeks later during the christmas holiday season, the museum was overrun with tourists stepping over each other to get to the Mondrian exhibit Inside Weems' installation, however, the atmosphere was hushed. Perplexed out of towners wandered in and out without blinking, some taking pictures of their children sitting on turn of the century wooden stool from Ghana, while hipper, younger downtown looking whites emerged one by one from behind Weems' screen, The Apple of Adam's Eye (1993), smugly acknowledging the piece's punchline. I could not help but wonder how accustomed they were to a sensibility that so deftly combines sultry beauty and biting wit. A quality of warmth, handsomeness and harmony envelops one upon entering Weems' space. Whereas placement in the conventional white cube would have stressed the images have been extracted and abstracted, Weems' layering of the photographs with texts, sculptures , patterned wallpaper, burnt orange walls and ceiling, created a sense of their being reconfigured into an environmental pattern and a symbolic field. Their being arranged in triptychs, an anagram-like circle around a square, or as mirror images meeting at two of the room's corners, suggested the enigmatic, punning and doubling compositions characteristic of dreamwork. The dominant themes in the installation, that of gender relations , their implication in the structuring of myths of origins, the impossibility of complete and eternal union between them, and the em!ZIJournal of Contemporary African Art· Spring 1996 The Shape ofThings, 1993, gelatin silver print. 20' x 20', courtesy of the artist and p.p.a.w., New York. status of Africa as a symbolic source of life and of cultural identity for its diasporic peoples, are enhanced by the dialogues that unfold between and among the works. Representations of archetypal male and female powers, He Had His Throne (1995) and She Had Her Keys to the Kingdom (1995), sit opposite each other at room's midway point, between one side that asserts female power, and the other that tells a story of her betrayal and punishment . At the onset, one encounters two pieces that celebrate feminine power and agency, stressing that Weems made her mark by tipping the scales to strike the balance between male and female she sees as fundamental to an Africanized world view. The first piece, opposite the entry, is the screen with a luminous image of a woman with her back coyly turned, a rich blue mantel draped over her shoulder. The embroidered golden words, retracing those of the Bible and Stevie Wonder, begin with a...