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Invisibility and black identity in the work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson

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Invisibility and black identity in the work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson

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Content INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INVISIBILITY AND BLACK IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF CARRIE MAE WEEMS AND LORNA SIMPSON by Colette Dartnall A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (Art History/Museum Studies) May 1997 ©1997 Colette Dartnall Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1384889 UMI Microform 1384889 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL U N IV ER S ITY RARK LOS ANGELES. C A LIFO R N IA 90007 T h is thesis, w ritten by _________Cole-f Tg- bfliCDOftLL __ under the direction o f h£JL— Thesis Com m ittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been p re- sented to and accepted by the D ean of The G raduate School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm en t of the requirements fo r the degree of April 29, 1997 Date. TH ESIS CO M M ITTEE Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents List of illustrations iii Introduction 1 I. Carrie Mae Weems 6 a. The subject made visible b. A critique of visible female representation c. Misrepresentation made visible d. Stereotype - confrontational tactics 6 14 16 17 II. Lorna Simpson 23 a. Subverting stereotype b. Simpson's use of masks c. The fragmented body d. Language 26 29 30 31 III. Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson 36 a. "Black experience" b. The gaze c. Staged/Unstaged 36 38 39 Conclusion 41 Select bibliography 43 Appendix A. 47 Appendix B. 49 Illustrations 50 ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. List of Illustrations 1. Carrie Mae Weems Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84 Mom at Work Silver print, 24 x 36 inches Page 51. 2. Carrie Mae Weems Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84 Van and Vera with Kids in the Kitchen Silver print, 8 1/2 x 13 inches Page 52. 3. Carrie Mae Weems Untitled (Kitchen Table Series), 1990 Untitled (Man Smoking) Silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches Page 53-54. 4. Carrie Mae Weems Untitled (Kitchen Table Series), 1990 Woman Standing Alone Silver print, 27 1/4 x 27 1/4 inches Page 55-56. 5. Carrie Mae Weems Untitled (Sea Island Series), 1991-92 Untitled (Boneyard) Polyptych, three silver prints and one text panel 20 x 20 inches each Page 57-58. 6. Carrie Mae Weems Ain't Jokin, 1987-88 Black Woman with Chicken Silver print, 20 x 16 inches Page 59. 7. Carrie Mae Weems Ain’t Jokin, 1987-88 Mirror, Mirror Silver print, 20 x 16 inches Page 60. 8. Carrie Mae Weems Ain't Jokin, 1987-88 A Child's Verse (In 1944 my father went to war) Silver print, 20 x 16 inches Page 61. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9. Carrie Mae Weems Ain't Jokin, 1987-88 What are the three things you cant' give a black person? Silver print, 20 x 16 inches Page 62. 10. Lorna Simpson Screen 1, 198 6 One wooden screen, gelatin silver prints mounted on panels 73 1/2 x 60 x 22 inches Page 63-64. 11. Lorna Simpson Twenty Questions (A Sampler), 1986 Four gelatin silver prints, six plastic plaques 24 inches in diameter each Page 65. 12. Lorna Simpson Stereo Styles, 1988 Ten dye diffusion (Polaroid) prints, ten plastic plaques 66 x 116 inches Page 66. 13. Lorna Simpson Queensize, 1991 Two gelatin silver prints, one plastic plaque 102 x 51 inches (overall) Page 67. 14. Lorna Simpson Dividing Lines, 1989 Two dye diffusion (Polaroid) prints, eight plastic plaques 57 x 71 inches Page 68. 15. Lorna Simpson Magdalena, 1992 Six dye diffusion (Polaroid) prints, two plastic plaques 63 x 78 inches Page 69. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16. Lorna Simpson Figure, 1991 One gelatin silver print, eight plastic plaques 73 x 82 1/2 inches (overall) Page 70. 17. Lorna Simpson Waterbearer, 1986 One gelatin silver print, one plastic plaque 41 3/4 x 79 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches Page 71. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those that haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids— and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination— indeed, everything and anything except me. (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.)1 This paper identifies the concept of invisibility as a crucial notion which continues to inform the work of black women artists. It reveals the problematics of invisibility and namelessness as central concerns in the works of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. This study posits that invisibility is an important part of African-American discourse with regard to issues of gender, sexuality, postmodernism, and popular culture. It examines the social, psychic, and political consequences of invisibility and looks specifically at work produced by Weems and Simpson to identify the terms of both visibility and structuring absence within the context of their work. This paper looks at Weems' and Simpson's variable uses of vernacular, the interplay of family history and regional identity, stereotyping, and humor as they relate to issues of black 1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Signet Books, 1947,) 7. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. female invisibility and namelessness. It looks at their application of the Brechtian strategy of deploying interruptive text in juxtaposition to the seductive effect of an image as a means by which to stop the projective eye of the gaze— identified as male and/or white. This study posits that Weems and Simpson manipulate their subjects and use text in a way which interrupts the notion of visual pleasure thereby creating a sense of what Laura Mulvey would refer to as "passionate detachment."2 This paper also identifies the problematics of feminist critique of the 1970s as devoid of the issue of race and looks at how race complicates those critiques. Weems' and Simpson's works deal with race as much as with gender. As such, their representations of "femininity" complicate the dynamics of fetishism, voyeurism, and (male) domination. While positing a (fetishized) visibility of the black female in contemporary American popular culture (e.g. in the entertainment industry) this paper identifies the terms of this visibility as limited to the arena of spectacle which does not compensate for the invisibility to which most black women have been subjected. 2 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis ed. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston: David R. Godine, 1984), 361-373. 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In order to more fully understand the ideology behind Weems' and Simpson's photographs we need to keep in mind that these works, although contemporary, carry a huge burden of history. The histories which provide a background for the work of these artists include: African diaspora strategy and systematic racism, the inscription of black experience into the kinds of artifacts seen in the Moynihan Report,3 historical representations, and the production of counter stereotype. Cornel West suggests that one response to the problematic of invisibility and namelessness in black culture, on the part of black artists, was to resist misrepresentations and fight for portrayals of "positive" images of monolithic and homogeneous black communities.4 However, according to West, this response contributed to a false sense of universalism and overlooked vast differences of class, gender, and sexual orientation giving rise to a recent significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists, associated with a new politics of difference. West suggests that the tendency of these critics and artists has been to 3 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington: US Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965). 4 Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds. (Massachusetts; The MIT Press, 1990), 26. 3 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dismiss the monolithic and homogeneous and to look towards multiplicity and heterogeneity, and to reject the abstract and universal for the tangible and particular. We are thereby challenged to confront complicated issues of cultural difference and identity— racial, ethnic, cultural, and sexual— in order to identify a continuing problematic with notions of invisibility and namelessness in contemporary art.5 This analysis begins with an a priori assumption that a body of work produced as representing the feminine body necessarily provokes a discussion of feminist problematics of a subject. While the white female body has been discussed throughout the course of art history in such a way as to position it as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing male gaze, the black body is also subject to such investigations. When first entered into representation as a subject of Western visual culture, the black female body was limited to a narrow range of representational possibilities (e.g. servant, sexual other, object of fantasy) . The images produced by Simpson and Weems deal centrally with the black female body in an attempt to refute the limits of representation. 5 Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, 19. 4 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In addressing the issue of the lack of visibility in artistic production, the artist Lorraine O'Grady has suggested that this notion is coupled with that of misrepresentation. "To name ourselves rather than be named we must first see ourselves. For some of us this will not be easy. So long unmirrored in our true selves, we may have forgotten how we look. Nevertheless, we can't theorize in a void, we must have evidence."6 O'Grady affirms that the act of "coming into representation" for black women is crucial in their efforts of establishing a voice yet difficult by virtue of the invisibility to which most black women have been subjected. During an extensive period of traditional western history, the subject of the black female was most often absent from visual culture and in rare instances when it was purportedly re-presented, it took the form of largely stock figures or stereotypes of fantasies viewed from a white male position. It then became crucial not only to bring "marginalized" people into representation but to do so in ways which explores their multifaceted experience in order to revise existing stereotypes and to place 6 Lorraine O'Grady,"Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven, eds. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.), 152-170. 5 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. alternative viewpoints on the agenda. As Weems and Simpson have attempted such revisitings, this paper looks specifically at their work as case studies.7 I. Carrie Mae Weems8 a. The subject made visible The limited portrayal of black Americans in Western visual culture often provokes a particular and almost belligerent character to its visibility due to the complex ways in which black people are rendered invisible and to the fraudulent myth of the United States as a homogenous, Anglo-Saxon culture. This somewhat aggressive nature seemingly manifests itself in the form of a hyper-visibility which Weems addresses in her work. Her subjects are confrontational, often looking directly out at the viewer, and many of Weems' images introduce the explicit and racist language of stereotype. 7 Simpson and Weems were specifically selected due to their relatively high visibility in the art world. Their works point to the inadequacies of language and photography to represent the experience of black women and as such they provoke critical responses which make them all the more visible. 8 See Appendix A for a brief synopsis of Weems' career. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In her series of works titled Family Pictures and Stories, 1978-84, Weems emphasizes the presence of her familial subjects, her community and her politics. She reveals a sense of intimacy with her subjects while subtly suggesting the oppression and prejudice of contemporary life. In Mom at Work (illustration #1) Weems represents her mother with arms outstretched, expressing a sense of joy while surrounded by the hardship of her environment— factory work. In Van and Vera with Kids in the Kitchen (illustration #2) an intimate family scene may also be made to suggest the hardship of family life, possibly that of a large low income family where no father is visibly present. Weems has identified this series as having been prompted, in part, by the Moynihan Report9 which situated the black family in a state of perpetual crisis and placed the blame for that crisis on black mothers. The photographs of this series are accompanied by audiotapes which recount this family's unedited stories. By means of these images and voices, Weems exposes her family's struggles and affections, and reveals a layered image of family relations. The strong sense of subjectivity suggested by these works, refutes a third person objectivity of "official" histories by constructing an alternative 9 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The cultural values of this report were highly debated. 7 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. history, a subjective one. These images question "official" and predominantly visible portrayals of black identity as well as the objective nature of documentary photographs, specifically that of black America by white photographers. Weems' Family Pictures and Stories Series contrasts to Aaron Siskind's Harlem Documents in that Weems' images are taken from within a community. Although Siskind's images may be powerful because they are considered objective, we are suspicious of them as artifacts due to their external character, produced by an "outsider." By representing a community of which Weems is a part, her works become personal documents. Her images make visible the stories behind the community they represent by identifying a subjective "alternative" history placed in contrast to "official" representations. Weems' artistic strategies consider the fragmented experience of contemporary "reality." Her images contest the visibility of accepted social "official" presentations in an attempt to render visible domestic intimacy, affection, and work through specificity of region, bodily pose, and familial relationships. In addition to challenging the concept of an "official" history, as a black woman artist, Weems also questions the notion of normative "woman" posited by white feminists in 8 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. studies of women's lives and experiences. Farah Jasmine Griffin suggests that in an effort to do so, some black women artists have chosen to use concrete experience as a basis for deconstructing the paradigms that construct them as object and Other.1 0 They use autobiography as a tool to resist negative constructions of others, thereby challenging and critiquing contemporary notions of "woman." Also, many black feminist critics, understand that, although they are important issues, race and gender do not suffice in illuminating hierarchies of domination, bell hooks, who has always stressed the importance of personal experience, asserts a strong awareness of the separation between public and private spheres as a founding condition of female oppression. According to hooks, the enforcement of a split between public and private is correlated to ongoing practices of domination by representing the private space as one of oppression and exploitation.1 1 Many black women photographers are taking on the task of challenging contemporary representations of black women. Weems challenges these constructions by asserting her subject position as a black woman and informing the viewer of her 10 Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Venus Rising: The Personal as Critical," in Personal Narratives: Women Photographers of Color (North Carolina: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1993), 5. 11 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 2. 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. perspective through a strong sense of subjectivity. She does so in ways which are not limited to representations of her personal life or family relations. In Untitled (Kitchen Table Series), 1990 (illustration #3), Weems tells a specific story including that of the relationship between an African-American woman and an African-American man whose intimate experience is familiar to a broad audience. Weems presents the image of a self- sufficient woman and a man whose anxiety derives from a fear of unemployment which would force him to relinquish the role of "head of the household." Although Weems presents an experience to which a large audience can easily relate, the work's narrative is most often attributed specifically to the artist's personal life. As such, this body of work has been recognized as autobiographical and has often been considered self- representational in that the woman in the image may very well be the artist herself. Artists who produce personal works, whether or not they are self-portraits, most often contend with having their works "explained" with simplistic reference to anecdotal details of their personal lives. Many critics find it difficult to surpass the personal details of the lives of women artists 10 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and to place them into the wider context of history. The tendency is to subjugate the works to the details of the artist's biography constructing them as mere responses to particular events in the artist's life, thereby diminishing the power of works which are considered personal by rejecting other possible meanings for them. This approach suggests that these artworks do not operate in wider contexts of signification such as politics, modernism, academic art practice and gendered discourses. Hence, Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) would be limited to an anecdotal portrayal of a personal experience in the life of Weems, thereby rending invisible other issues which it addresses such as gender, race and class. In addition to being subsumed within an anecdotal personal history, many of these works need to be situated at the complex intersection between the artist and a series of social and cultural discourses, thereby transcending simple autobiography. Since the 1970s, with the emergence of feminism and postmodernism, the autobiographical has been refigured as a site of conflicting social discourses and definitions, transcending the single dimension of being specific to the artist's individual experiences by referencing socially prescribed positions of women in our culture as well as 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. personal experiences.1 2 No matter how personal, portraiture cannot always be contained fully by a simple sense of autobiography. In addition to the representation of the so called "real" person pictured, portraiture often also involves the obverse, the representation of "types" explored in images of women in contemporary life, thereby revealing the constructive nature of these images and the provisional nature of their identifications refusing to allow fixity. As a result these images become more than simple personal documents. Weems' identity is an element of this work as is a reference to a "type," a community of which she is a part. The various functions of her work bring to the forefront a number of social issues, surpassing the simple recognition of personal experiences and attempting to reach a larger audience. Even though the precise placement of a small range of domestic props and subtle costumes changes and the repetition of staging and lighting in Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) develops feelings of familiarity and intimacy, Weems asks us to look not only beyond the individual experience but beyond race by bringing to the foreground a narrative wherein race, gender, and class identity converge 12 Questions of race and gender have been variously addressed by women as have the problematics of re- appropriation for those who explore their ethnicity and sexuality and claim their visibility while subverting notions of deviance. 12 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in order to disturb and deconstruct rudimentary theories of subjectivity. For example, the majority of the images produced by Weems are representative of a certain class which is identified in the vernacular of Weems' stories as well as in the lives of the persons she represents either in a staged-like setting as in Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) or within a seemingly impromptu background scene as in Mom at Work (Family Pictures and Stories). Weems identifies her subjects by class to recognize it as an element which shapes and informs her work and as a means by which to reference her subjects' social and political positions within society. Weems affirms the multifaceted nature of her work in an interview with bell hooks when she states, in reference to the Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) : "These images of black men and black women should speak on many levels, calling to mind in the viewer a range of issues and concerns."1 3 The work also poignantly raises less visible issues such as sexuality, intimacy, and domination. These concerns, although familiar, may not be recognized as such because of what Weems has identified as the frequent refusal of identification with concerns of black people by white viewers— "Black images can only stand for themselves and nothing more."1 4 This position contributes to the expanding 13 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995), 76. 1 4 Ibid. 13 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. discourse on invisibility based on a white viewer's lack of identification with the black community which Weems represents. It addresses the controversial notion which identifies the white body as universal and the black body as racialized. b. A critique of visible female representation Yet another important element of this body of work is seen in Weems' use of disjointed images and text as artistic strategy. Andrea Kirsh suggests that Weems employs this strategy in response to the sense of filmic unity which Mulvey attributes to the representation of women in Hollywood films. The images and texts in Weems' work are not synchronized, they do not coincide with one another. Although they form connections with community issues and they suggest a sense of narrative, the scenes which Weems depicts are disjointed and the personalities rarely speak to one another, thereby emphasizing a distance between its characters.1 5 Mulvey advocates making the apparatus visible as a means of creating what she calls "passionate detachment."16 Her use of this term is identified as the 15 Andrea Kirsh, "Carrie Mae Weems: Issues in Black, White and Color," in Carrie Mae Weems. (Washington, D.C.: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993), 27. 16 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," 361-373. 14 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. distancing of the viewer's immediate access to the female body by means of the intervention of the camera. In a parallel way, Weems uses such devices as text, confrontational gazes, and a sense of disjointed narrative to frustrate and interrupt visual pleasure. Weems also seems to respond to the problems in Mulvey's analysis of female representation in film which is often critiqued for its neglect of the issue of women of color. In this body of work, not only does Weems overturn the usual role of a black woman by functioning independently of white women, but she also engages the audience of the work by having her subject stare directly at the viewer. The black woman represented takes control of her space, and does not allow herself to become object of the gaze. Although we sense the subject's potential for vulnerability, in Woman Standing Alone (illustration #4) for example, Weems presents her protagonist straight on, thereby having her subject confront the viewer with her gaze. In the representation of this woman, Weems does not allow her subject to be effaced by the male gaze or outdated patriarchal assumptions. Weems asserts her subject's integrity, unlike Simpson who, as we shall see, resists the debasement of women via language and by veiling or otherwise turning the female figure away from the camera. 15 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. c. Misrepresentation made visible Weems attempts to address the fallacy behind the notion of photography as a "true" record, and recognizes its invasive nature. She does so specifically in her Untitled (Sea Island Series) , 1991-92 (illustration #5) . In this body of work Weems attempts a re-reading of the documentary tradition. She represents the empty, echoing spaces of plantations and native dwellings of the Sea Islands off Georgia and South Carolina. She also re-appropriates J.T. Zealy's daguerotype portraits of enslaved Africans, which were commissioned in 1850. Although these photographs are often viewed merely as ethnographic documentation, they are not documentary but highly fabricated works used to silence and oppress people of color. Weems enlarges and washes over Zealy's photographs with a blue tint, thereby attributing an opacity to these so called "documentary" images while highlighting the pain attributed to the archival images of "official" history, attempting to disrupt its complicit silences. Weems thereby asserts that photographs are not transparent reflections of reality, they are constructed images. In the accompanying texts, Weems traces the African derivation of the Gullah dialect spoken in the Sea Islands. She appropriates Gullah language as a metaphor for the 16 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. confiscation of a history and with it African-American people's claim to experience. In this work, Weems attempts to rectify the subjection of black people to white standards of imitation and the cultural colonization of black subjectivity by attempting to "give voice" to a culture often considered silent.1 7 d. Stereotype - confrontational tactics As part of the notion of invisibility, Weems' work also addresses the problematics set forth in the image of the black woman in popular culture. In Invisibility Blues, Michelle Wallace identifies this problematic as a paradox of the "all too present" black woman's face as fetishized object of the mass media and the entertainment and cultural industries in contrast to the "glaring absence" from the generation of interpretations of those images.1 8 Weems addresses this issue in her series titled Ain't Jokin, 1987- 88, when she adopts the look of highly posed commercial imagery of popular culture. With this series, Weems begins to explore racist humor and by juxtaposing a posed image 17 Amidst the representations of abandoned spaces in this series, Weems includes an image of herself in which she poses as a plantation worker. 18 Michelle Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (New York: Verso, 1990) 1-10. 17 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. with a specific text Weems also challenges the viewer's sense of stereotype.1 9 Weems' Ain't Jokin series offers different methods of making visible that which people try to suppress as real. This is done either through associative images, rhymes, or riddles. Her Ain't Jokin series inverts the authority of commercial imagery, thereby implying its visible quality. Weems' photographic re-presentations of degrading stereotypes of black men and women, as in her Ain't Jokin series, are extremely confrontational. In reiterating and re-presenting the racist stereotype, these works also partake in the strategy of mimicry. In reference to a colonial context, Homi Bhabha identifies mimicry as the representation of identity and meaning rearticulated as metonymy. He writes: As Lacan reminds us, mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically. . . . Mimicry, as the metonym of presence is, indeed, such an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse.2 0 19 Weems' work has elicited strong criticism from African American and liberal Anglo-American communities because of the racist content in her Ain't Jokin Series. 20 Homi Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (Spring 1984) 125-33. 18 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The strategies referenced here— the appropriation of stereotype and mimicry— have been characterized as distinctive modes of African American cultural resistance and survival. While certain artists counter degrading and racist imagery with "positive" depictions, Weems' confrontational reproduction of the racist stereotype suggests that she rejects the notion of what Abigail Solomon-Godeau calls "representational reparation"— the countering of degrading and racist imagery with "real" or "positive" depictions of black people. For example, in Black Woman with Chicken (illustration #6) although the text is simply a literal description of the image, it is troublesome because of its association with racist stereotype. However, Solomon-Godeau suggests that for this image, Weems specifically chooses to use an inviting image of a young girl and by giving the work this power through the woman's gaze the artist may be attributing a corrective quality to the work.2 1 Mirror, Mirror (illustration #7) on the other hand reflects internal racism within a black community. In Mirrorr Mirror the text plays a crucial role within the larger work. It portrays a black woman asking the familiar fairy tale 21 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Mistaken Identities Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 40. 19 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. question of who is fairest of all. Weems changes the wording to "finest” and suggests that the answer's source is a white fairy-looking woman who responds: "Snow White You Black Bitch, and Don’t You Forget It!!!" This work thus posits that the reflection of the black woman, is not a true reflection but a view of herself through the eyes of a white woman. Although the black woman seems to be holding the frame in a way which suggest that the white woman personifies her reflection, the later is seen beyond the boundaries of the mirror's frame which reaffirms the notion that this is not a true reflection of the black woman's beauty but of her position in society. On the other hand, hooks posits that in this work the so called fairy may be a personification of vain white women who compare themselves to their black counterparts in fear of being less "fine."2 2 In such works as A Child’s Verse (illustration #8) Weems represents a group of white men gathered together who share a common adversary— the black male. The central figure holds a stick tightly in his hands and mimics the aggressive gesture of a beating. Here, Weems makes visible violence of the Civil Rights era without using the blatant imagery of guns or uniforms. Instead, Weems relies on the familiarity of such abuses of power and the image's accompanying text which reads: "In 1944 my father went to war. Pulled a 22 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, 77. 20 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. trigger, shot a nigger, that was the end of the war." This text not only serves to challenge the viewer's sense of stereotype, it also renders uncomfortable its audience by virtue of the fact that the work is made to be seen in the context of art— possibly in a museum setting. In another group of works within her Ain't Jokin series, Weems undermines her subjects with the power of humor using racist jokes as sub-texts which accompany the images. With regard to the use of text in conjunction with images, Victor Burgin states: "The photographic image can carry a large number of different meanings, which generally are controlled by its juxtaposition with a verbal text."23 hooks concurs specifically in reference to Weems' work. In an interview with Weems, hooks states: "People may initially assume that these images are familiar, even ethnographic, but your use of the text displaces, subverts, and changes meaning."2 4 By using specific text, Weems gives her work its own context. The meanings of her images are thereby controlled by the text she chooses and by its language. 23 Victor Burgin, "Art, Common Sense, and Photography," Camerawork 3 (July 1976). This statement is based on the theory of semiotics originated by Saussure, where the relation of words to things is not natural but arbitrary and language is essentially a self-contained system of signs wherein each element is meaningless by itself and meaningful only by its differentiation from the other elements. 24 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, 84. 21 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Riddles are the most confrontational of the three modes Weems uses to expose stereotype in the series— images, rhymes, and riddles. The questions she poses as riddles are certainly not neutral. In a discussion on the subject of Pat Ward Williams' photographic work titled What you lookn' at?, 1992, Solomon-Godeau suggests that works such as these are made to act as confrontations and reproaches, collectively and variously made up of dismissals (refusing responsibility for the social production of racism) ; projections (of opinions of what black are presumed to be); and anger and resentment (projections of rage and anxiety on the other) .2 5 In What are the three things you can't give a black person? (illustration #9) Weems presents the work's audience with the confrontational portrait of a black man looking directly at the viewer framed by his low income home. Here again, Weems relies on a familiarity with the subject— in this case, black male subjectivity and a history of working class men— to reveal the full effect of her work. It is accompanied by the wording of its title and an answer to its almost unspeakable riddle which reads "A black eye, a fat lip and a job." Weems makes visible that which has been deemed invisible and forces the viewer to speak that which is unspeakable. In order for us to understand this man's 25 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Mistaken Identities, 34. 22 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. struggle, Weems asks us to empathize with him and to enter his world, one from which we are physically separated by virtue of a patio wall and chain link fence, imploring the viewer to ponder who is shut out. Engaging this dense structure of confrontations and reproaches Weems' work asks the viewer to interrupt habitual and often unconscious forms of perception. Weems thereby suggests that it is this excessive visibility which is the principal form in which black identity achieves public recognition. II. Lorna Simpson2 6 In contrast to the hyper-visibility of individuality in Weems' photographs, much of Simpson's work has been preoccupied with the discursive invisibility of black women. Representing her figures as headless, faceless, or turned away from the camera, Simpson addresses the effacement of black women while simultaneously establishing their presence. Simpson's resistance to conveying the image of a woman to the viewer is characteristic of her entire body of work, as is her use of elliptical and fragmentary words and phrases whose meaning and associations are subject to the viewer's interpretation. 26 See Appendix B for a brief synopsis of Simpson's career. 23 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Paramount to the predominant constructions of black identity are the domination and fetishization of the body, thereby significantly determining black self-consciousness and causing specular alienation. The conditions of visibility that determine how the female black subject is seen have been variously described in terms of alienation and social invisibility. This notion of visibility is characterized by the contradiction between being highly visible yet unrepresented, a condition of the paradox which asserts that one is most visible when most subjected. The work of Simpson reveals the constraints of power on the body, as the product of visibility by virtue of coercion, and attempts to free itself from that power's stranglehold revealing the precarious social position of the black female body. Simpson's refusal to reveal the face of her model mirrors the limits of the dominant representation of black women which engages in the politics of spectacle only to de-face black women as subjects.2 7 One of Simpson's first body of works which deals with the notions of visibility and invisibility is Screen, 1986. In Screen 1 (illustration #10) Simpson's use of a free-standing partition is clearly important in its function as a means of separation between a viewer and a subject, possibly 27 Beryl J. Wright and Saidiya V. Hartman eds., Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer (New York: Universe Publishing, 1992), 11-24. 24 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. obstructing a clear vision of the naked/truthful body/self. Mounted on this partition are three large black and white photographs. They are comprised of almost identical images of a seated black woman's lap and legs. Simpson often uses the repetition of an image to inflate that of a single figure into a collective persona. The image on the far right portion of the screen includes a boat which acts as a metaphor of displacement, a notion which is echoed in the texts accompanying the images. Under these photographs the text reads "Marie said she was from Montreal although." When looking for the rest of the message, the viewer finds it on the reverse of the screen. The text represents the self hoping to be shielded and screened by the partition. It stands alone and reads "She was from Haiti." This piece speaks to the notion of identity as an image presented to others as how we would like them to see us not as we truly are, thereby suggesting another dimension to the notion of mis-representation. Here, Marie has been given a new identity. She makes her true identity invisible to protect herself from that which makes her feel vulnerable, her class, race, and gender. In this series Simpson plays with the notion of back and front in her use of screens, referencing similar ideas to those she addresses in some of her other works where her figures turn away from the camera. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. However, here Simpson reveals a "back" or other side to her work on which she seemingly identifies her subject.2 8 a. Subverting stereotype Twenty Questions (A Sampler), 1986 (illustration #11), is one of many works by Simpson which addresses issues of identity and stereotype. In an interview with Deborah Willis, Simpson describes her take on the piece as follows: Twenty Questions is a piece based on the deduction game of the same name. The subject has a hidden identity: a woman with her back to the camera. The image is repeated four times, and below each one is a cliched description: is she pretty as a picture . . . or black as coal ... or sharp as a razor., etc. By presenting these cliches about women, I'm dealing with the language of stereotypes. I'm pointing to the fact that the wrong questions are so often asked, and this is why you don't know anything about this person. I intentionally sought to avoid presenting a "them and us" situation, them being a white audience. It is also a self description, because these stereotypes cross the boundaries of race and gender. It is not necessarily pointing a finger at any individual's ideologies but at the language of stereotypes. 28 Weems also used the structure of a screen in a work titled The Apple of Adam’s Eye, 1993, which retells the story of Adam and Eve. On one side of the screen the image of a female figure standing covered with a cloth is accompanied by a text which reads: "She'd always been the apple/of Adam's eye." On the screen's reverse the text offers a humorous retort. It reads: "Temptation my ass, desire has its place, and besides, they were both doomed from the start." Here, Weems uses the screen as a divide between the sexes. 26 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Stereotypes don't reveal anything about a woman or an experience anyway. So I am suggesting that cliches and assumptions should be discarded.2 9 Simpson identifies her images as collective projections not markers of independent expression. Simpson's notion of stereotype is often revealed in the highly charged elements which she brings into her visual configurations. They are highly coded symbols of racial identity, specifically one's identity with "blackness." Many of Simpson's works focus on the historical, cultural and physical characteristics of hair. She uses the curly- hair braid, for example, to suggest Afrocentric hairdos and mythical associations of hair and femininity while also bringing out associations with social forces, by virtue of the linguistic constructs of these works. Mery Knots, 1989 for example, contrasts a calendar's ordered and controlled character with the unruliness of memory. The connection hence established between the unruly image of hair and memory with the knot serves to also suggest a connection made between the hair and black women's resistance to established modes of representation. In describing Stereo Styles, 1988 (illustration #12), Simpson states: ''[It] deals with the assumptions and 29 Deborah Willis, Lorna Simpson (New York: D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers, 1991), 57-58. 27 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. stereotypes related to a woman's appearance, particularly black women. The way you wear your hair is supposed to say something about you, which is basically bull...I am dealing with stereotypes about appearance in that piece."3 0 In Stereo Styles, Simpson addresses the notion of commercial appropriation of Afrocentric hairstyles as fashion commodities. For Simpson, black hair has served as a sign for the body as well as a discursive prop. The following quote by Kobena Mercer addresses the framework in which black people's hair is perceived. If racism is conceived as an ideological code in which biological attributes are invested with societal values and meanings, then it is because our hair is perceived within this framework that it is burdened with a range of "negative" connotations....Within racism's bipolar codification of humans values, black people's hair has been historically devalued as the most visible sign of blackness, second only to skin.3 1 In this context, Mercer suggests that a black woman's hair serves as a negative sign of ethnicity. 30 Deborah Willis, Lorna Simpson, 58. 31 Kobena Mercer, "Black Hair/Style Politics," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West eds. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990), 249. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. b. Simpson's use of masks In 1991 Simpson began to use masks quite frequently, not as a means by which to conceal individual identity but to indirectly identify a collective one. Contrary to the Western custom of displaying African masks, Simpson chooses to represent the unfamiliar view of the inside of the mask, thereby hiding its decorated surface and unseating its conventional reception as a beautiful object. This method overturns the vantage point of the viewer. It also invites the viewer to see him or herself as a potential wearer thereby reasserting the importance of the experience of viewing and once again questioning what is made visible (see illustration #13, Queensize, 1991). As viewers, we are asked to reflect on our relationship to this icon of Africanness. Coco Fusco suggests that this image expresses what she calls the "diasporic dilemma— of being only able to apprehend one's relationship to origin symbolically only through self-conscious recollection and reconstruction.1 , 3 2 Simpson identifies this strategy as follows: It occurred to me that the modern fascination with African masks involved the front of a mask and its formal, geometric qualities. But the idea of contemplating the mask from behind brings the viewer closer to the cultural involvement that the mask represents. 32 Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York City: The New Press, 1995), 102. 29 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. It speaks of a participatory ritual or performance. But who is the performer and what is being performed? This idea got me interested in dealing with the backs of the masks. A lot of my previous works deal with different vantage points, like the back of a woman's head.3 3 Here, once again Simpson plays with the notion of back and front to create a sense of tension in her work in a way related to her earlier use of the screen and her representations of women frequently turned away from the camera. c. The fragmented body The staging of her fragmented bodies positioned on the picture plane against a neutral background emphasizes the presentational quality of Simpson's work dealing specifically with the notion of invisibility of black women artists. A number of artists mostly women or gay men frequently turned to representing the body in fragments perhaps in an attempt to belie the external force of what might appear to be an unyielding gaze.3 4 Simpson's work complicates the use 33 Deborah Willis, Lorna Simpson, 60. 34 Specifically viewed within the history of feminist and gay male uses of fragmented bodies which attempt to reject the male gaze, countless artists have produced fragmented bodies in their work, these include Louise 30 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the fragmented body as it was theorized well into the 1980s. Her work poses itself in relation to the structures not only of "viewing," per se, but of intersubjective engagement that places us in a social arena. Simpson's fragmented bodies appear to be fetishlike symbols of the unrepresentable. Fusco suggests that Simpson limits her representations to body parts so as not to have her subjects be "identified," denying "insight" into their character, and to negate the almost expected narrative of communal black experience.3 5 d. Language Simpson's faceless woman is often times seen as a nonentity. Whatever her age or appearance, within the decontextualized space in which she is represented, she is simply a graphic assertion of black femaleness. It is in great part Simpson's choice of text which motivates her work.3 6 In Dividing Lines, 1989 (illustration #14), for example, a plethora of uses for the word "lines" gives dimension to the image, stimulating a myriad of meanings ranging from the Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, Hannah Wilke, Kiki Smith, Annette Messager, and Faith Wilding. 35 Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, 97-102. 36 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Mistaken Identities, 40. 31 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. subject of economy ("line one's pocket," "red lining"— i.e. the banking practice of refusing mortgages in low income neighborhoods); to that which suggests defiance ("out of line," "line up"); to that which suggests being mislead ("same ol' line"); ending with the clearly racial ("color line.")3 7 No matter how intentionally ambiguous, Simpson's linguistic plays are always connected to the paradoxical presence/absence of her black model. The viewer is thereby directed to reflect upon the possible relations between an anonymous woman of color with the political, social, and even sexual associations of her texts.3 8 In the same way that the bodies she represents bear witness to history, so do Simpson's words. For example, In Magdalena, 1992 (illustration #15), a work consisting of three panels each comprised of two images, Simpson represents shoe boxes and shoes facing front (top) and back (bottom) . This work is in part about the notion of memory. The everyday objects, portrayed in clean and bare spaces as though documented, represent a trace of the dead when it was living. The text announces a memory "at her burial I stood under the tree next to her grave" and admits to the 37 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Mistaken Identities, 40. 38 Ibid. 32 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vagueness, distortion, and seeming insignificance of this memory with a second text which reads: "when I returned the tree was a distance from her marker." This work makes reference to a history of black female experience which is now vague, erased, or somewhat altered.3 9 Simpson's texts take the form of individual words attributed to single anonymous bodies that dare to interpret their own meanings, as opposed to explicitly autobiographical photographic narratives as seen in Weems' Family Pictures and Stories where Weems inserts her own narrative, her own relationship to her subjects resulting in a complex portrayal of black life that belies sociological descriptions.4 0 Simpson's choice of words and the way they are presented in juxtaposition with the image always emphasize their polysemous potential. They most often reference social conditions. Wallace sees these ambiguous statements as parallel to the black women's literary production of the 1970s and 1980s. She sees internal contradictions and 39 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, 100. 40 Carrie Mae Weems, "Family Stories," in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, Brian Wallis ed. (Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987) 33-42. 33 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. stress of multiplicity as modes of "radical negation" that illustrate attempts to address black female subjectivity.4 1 Simpson is taking a position on the subjectivity of the black female by refusing to give stable answers, direct messages or frontal views of her subjects (playing with presence of visibility and voice). She uses a word which implies a variety of meanings precisely in order to subvert any "natural" implication which may be alluded to in deciphering the focus of her work. As she represents a black woman devoid of personality or identity, in very much the same way, Simpson robes words of their specificity. In Figure, 1991 (illustration #16), Simpson represents her "figure" standing with her back to the viewer, wearing a simple black dress. Framing the bottom of the image, eight texts employ the word "figure" as a verb or adjective suggesting subjectivity, conjecture, and ambiguity. Here, Simpson simultaneously gives meaning and destabilizes it as we have seen her do in Dividing Lines. In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes suggests that nouns are presented as absolute quantities accompanied by all possible correlations. He writes: The Word is no longer guided in advance by the general intention of a socialized 41 Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory, 229. 34 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. discourse; the consumer of poetry, deprived of the guide of selective connections, encounters the Word frontally, and receives it as an absolute quantity, accompanied by all its possible associations. The Word, here, is encyclopaedic, it contains simultaneously all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state which is possible only in the dictionary or in poetry— places where the noun can live without its article— and is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications. The word here has a generic form; it is a category. Each poetic work is thus an unexpected object, a Pandora's box from which fly out all the potentialities of language; it is therefore produced and consumed with a peculiar curiosity, a kind of sacred relish.4 2 According to Barthes, in modern poetry the "zero degree" reverses the "natural" knowledge of things, turning each word into a Pandora's Box. In the same way, Simpson isolates individual figures and objects in order to enable their abstracted singularity to generate a myriad of meanings. This destabilization of meaning is a rhetorical strategy which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. identifies as a slave's trope, evolved out of an attempt to symbolically overturn his or her status as slave.43 Simpson also uses repetition and revision in her texts and images to retrace a 42 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1953), 48. 43 Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, 100. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. practice that Gates posits as quintessential to African American vernacular. III. Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson a. "Black Experience" Although Simpson and Weems focus on the issue of identity, it is identifying with their community and the society in which it exists which is central to their work not that of individual identity. The notion of individuality is minimized in their work focussing instead on the element of shared experience. As we have seen, Weems uses stereotype and even personal subject matter in a way which allows her to reach a larger audience. On the other hand, Simpson outwardly rejects any possible notion of identity by defacing her subjects. She also minimizes this sense of individuality by her repetitive use of these unidentified figures. Given that these works have some autobiographical relationship to the artist by virtue of the fact that they deal with the notion of black identity, a subject which Simpson and Weems personally associate with, there has been some suspicion as to whether these women are the subjects of their images. This notion has been only alluded to in writings on the work of Simpson and Weems. Even in an interview, Simpson references her models vaguely. She 36 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. states: "Usually, the availability of friends often contributes to my choice of models."4 4 Even though these women may not represent themselves within the frame of their photographs, their image as a lone black female figure is central to the nature of their work. Simpson's work refuses to represent any "common" black experience in a way which identifies it as such yet one can recognize in her work an effort to create a language of commonality by identifying shared conditions of black life. Both Simpson and Weems are concerned with the failure of representing black experience. Throughout their work, they attempt to represent the unrepresented, the invisible. Weems does so by confronting the viewer with images of black experience and mis-representation through stereotype. Simpson, on the other hand, refuses to portray the so-called black experience which she identifies as a univocal and homogenizing representation of black life and culture, instead she, in her words, "talk[s] about things that either don't get represented in black experience, don't get spoken about, are private issues, or a kind of common experience."4 5 Here, Simpson may be referring to a wide 44 Deborah Willis, Lorna Simpson, 58. 45 Beryl J. Wright and Saidiya V. Hartman eds., Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer, 65. 37 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. range of issues including race as a biological fact or accounts of memory and death. b. The gaze In the late 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, dominant art discourses theorized a structure of examining a work based on the power of the gaze as revealing the aggressively dualistic politics of self and other. Theories have suggested limited possibilities of how to handle the power of the gaze. Either the victim internalizes the gaze thereby making him or herself a passive effect of its force, the victim aggressively performs him or herself according to the very rules it has established; or the victim confuses its self-empowering effects by throwing the gaze back on the viewer and no longer allowing him or herself to be victim. It seems that in addition to Weems' occasional efforts of throwing the gaze back onto the viewer and Simpson's physical rejection of the gaze by turning her back or omitting any representation of face, these two succeed in stopping the "projective eye" through the Brechtian strategy of deploying interruptive text in juxtaposition to the seductive effect of the image.4 6 46 Griselda Pollock, "Screening the seventies; sexuality and representation in feminist practice— a Brechtian perspective," in Vision and Difference: 38 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. c. Staged/unstaged Weems and Simpson use the black female body as a locus of self-expression and self-revelation as well as a barrier to easy access or meaning. The choreography of these bodies is crucial in the reading of such works. It can be classified as either arranged/staged or seemingly "natural," although the simplicity of this classification can be misleading. The staged quality of certain works is an effect derived from the way some artists "enact" a situation or character thereby suggesting either a potentially real or a possibly assumed fictional role. When the bodies are made to take certain poses, the image is removed from the realm of traditional documentary photography, thereby partially rejecting documentary's intrinsic nature of representing "real life" by proposing a staged exploration. Simpson uses artifice to address certain issues in her work, hooks' illustrates this point in her reading of Simpson's Waterbearer, 1986 (illustration 17) . For this work, according to hooks, Simpson poses a woman with her back to those who cannot identify with her subjugated existence. By doing so, Simpson creates a separate space in which her subject exists, one where this lone black female is both Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 155-199. 39 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. self-defining and self-determining. It is through her pose that we see this woman as one who is refused a place of authority, a voice or face. However, it is also her pose which allows her to reclaim a place in history, to connect with those of her past and present which have been marginalized in much the same way.4 7 Simpson's C-ration, 1991, on the other hand, is undoubtedly an image contrived in form and composition. It's obvious use of staged lighting and its clean and exact framing of object and subject emphasize this staged aspect of the work while exposing a "natural" historical link between black femininity and domestic service. In her work, Simpson sometimes uses that which is identified most visibly as black identity to stand for black women. She reflects on the construction of black identity and race through her identification with things that connote "blackness" and chooses objects which are highly coded symbols of racial identity.4 8 The bare, monochromatic backgrounds of many of Simpson's works suggest a neutral environment, one outside any singular, lived experience, an imaginary, almost surrealistic environment which cannot 47 bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, 94-100. 48 Coco Fusco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, 101. 40 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. travel beyond language. Simpson adopts a grid format as a means by which to bring into question oppositional structures such as public/private, female/male, individual/collective, etc. Weems' work is somewhat ambiguous in its application of a staged or unstaged setting. At first glance her Untitled (Kitchen Table Series) seems natural in its anecdotal character. However, at further scrutiny the viewer becomes aware of the ambivalence as to whether the woman represented in the work is actually Weems and whether the character who portrays her significant other is truly one with whom she, the black woman represented, is involved. Also, the limited, almost dramatic lighting, the restricted use and precise placement of domestic props, and the barely noticeable shift in setting suggest a theatrical genre at the same time as it offers a sense of familiarity and intimacy which contrastingly suggests an unstaged and "natural" environment. On the other hand, in Weems' Ain’t Jokin series, the artist adopts the highly posed commercial imagery of popular culture, thereby emphasizing a staged setting. Simpson and Weems use photography to address issues of the construction of identity within the societal confines of racial difference. Both employ the representation of the 41 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. black female body as a site of cultural exploitation and as an opportunity for radical self-definition in opposition to invisibility. This exploration of self and image has lead to a discussion of issues of difference within the term 'woman1 with regard to race, ethnicity, gender, and class as it confronts stereotyping and proclaims self-defined presence. Weems and Simpson explore the meanings of these claims of difference as they address various aspects of identity— personal, social, psychic, and political— in their photographs. Although black women may be the object of a heightened (fetishized) visibility in contemporary American culture as in certain aspects of the entertainment or music industry, the terms of this visibility are limited to the arena of the spectacle. The mediated visibility of a few black women performers in no way compensates for the invisibility to which most women of color have been historically subjected, encompassing the erasure of black women from American culture and history. Despite the divergence of meanings and functions which each work incites, the representation of black identity in the work of Weems and Simpson commemorates this historical and discursive repression by means of a discursive invisibility of black women in Simpson's images and by means of a hyper-visibility of individuality in Weems' work. 42 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Select Bibliography Barden, Lane. "Hidden witness and Carrie Mae Weems reacts to Hidden witness at J. Paul Getty Museum," Artweek, June 1995. Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1953. Benner, Susan. "A Conversation with Carrie Mae Weems," Artweek, May 7, 1992. Bhabha, Homi. "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," October 28, Spring 1984. Broude, Norma and Mary D. Garrard. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994. Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994. Burgin, Victor. "Art, Common Sense, and Photography" Camerawork 3, July 1976. Canning, Susan. "Carrie Mae Weems: Projects," Art Papers, March-April 1996. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Signet Books, 1947. Ferguson, Russell, Martha Gever, Trihn T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds. Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990. Fusco, Coco, English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York City: The New Press, 1995. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1990. 43 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Golden, Thelma. Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. "Venus Rising: The Personal as Critical," in Personal Narratives: Women Photographers of Color. North Carolina: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1993. Heartney, Eleanor. "Carrie Mae Weems: P.P.O.W.," Artnews, February 1993. Hearney, Eleanor. "Figuring Absence," Art in America, December 1995. hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press, 1995. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989. hooks, bell. "Lorna Simpson: Waterbearer," Artforum, September 1993. Kirsh, Andrea. "Carrie Mae Weems: Issues in Black, White and Color,1 1 in Carrie Mae Weems. Washington D.C.: The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993. Linker, Kate. "Went Looking for America: Carrie Mae Weems," ArtForum, February 1993. Lippard, Lucy R. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art. New York: The New Press, 1995. Liss, Andrea. "Facing History," Afterimage, September- October 1995. Mercer, Kobena. "Black Hair/Style Politics," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trihn T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990. Meskimmon, Marsha. The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 44 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington: US Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning and Research, 1965. Mulvey, Laura, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, ed. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston: David R. Godine, 1984. O'Grady, Lorraine, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity" in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven, eds. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1991. Pollock, Griselda. "What's wrong with images of women?," Screen Education, Autumn 1977. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Reed, Calvin. "Carrie Mae Weems," ArtsMagazine, January 1991. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. "We Must First See Ourselves: Documentary Subversions in Contemporary African-American Women's Photography," in Personal Narratives: Nomen Photographers of Color. North Carolina: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1993. Sims, Lowery Stokes. "The Mirror, The Other: The Politics of Esthetics," ArtForum, March 1990 Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Nomen's Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Mistaken Identities. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. "Photography After Art Photography" in Art After Modernism. Brian Wallis, ed. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. Wallace, Michele. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. New York: Verso, 1990. Wallis, Brian, ed. Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1987. 45 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. West, Cornel. "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trihn T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West, eds. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1990. Willis, Deborah. Lorna Simpson. New York: D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers, 1991. Willis, Deborah, ed. Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography. New York: The New Press, 1994. Wright, Beryl J. and Saidiya V. Hartman, eds. Lorna Simpson: For the Sake of the Viewer. New York: Universe Publishing, 1992. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Appendix A. Carrie Mae Weems Biography Carrie Mae Weems was born in Oregon in 1953. At the age of 23, when she was given a camera as a gift, she began documenting the world which surrounded her. She immediately focused on her own community using the tradition of documentary photography which she quickly began to question as a means of describing the "other" and as a representation of "truth." She describes herself as an "image maker" and manipulates photographic conventions. A strong influence on her work was that of Roy DeCarava, a man committed to representing his own neighborhood. In Weems' portrayals of her community, she tells her story as a consciously political act without making an outright forceful statement. She uses different formats including that of the "snapshot" to emphasize her use of the personal in order to construct a history which questions that of third person "objective" officials. Weems' work has been exhibited in a number of gallery and museum shows including: "Currents: Carrie Mae Weems," at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Mass. (1991) and "Carrie Mae Weems," at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (1993). More recently her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in "Black Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," (1994) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in "Carrie Mae Weems: Projects," (1996). 48 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Appendix B. Lorna Simpson Biography Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been exhibited in a number of museums and gallery shows nationally and abroad. She was the first African- American woman whose work was exhibited in major exhibitions such as the 1990 Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art, New York's "Project" series in which she was the solo artist. Simpson literally and figuratively turns away from traditional art practices rooted in racist and sexist approaches to female imagery and "blackness." She creates counter-hegemonic images of black women challenging artistic stereotypes and disrupting colonizing representations by calling attention to black female identity. She investigates the notion of the subject's invisibility by creating images which do not represent full frontal views of the "subject" but specific body parts, or sideviews, even back views of their bodies. Simpson thereby rejects the concept of a fixed vision of black identity in the hopes that the viewer will look beyond gender and race to critically consider the identity of these subjects. 49 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustrations Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #1. 51 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #2. 52 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. It amazes m e that even i n th e midst o f a bunch o f crazy wild kids, m y sisters still manage to carry o n a half-way decent conversation. I ’m really impressed. Illustration #3. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #3 (continued) She’d been pickin em up and layin em down, moving to the next town for a while, needing a rest, some moss under her feet, plus a solid man who enjoyed a good fight with a brave woman. She needed a man who didn't mind her bodacious manner, varied talents, hard laughter, multiple opinions, and her hopes were getting slender. He had great big eyes like diamonds and his teeth shined just like gold, some reason a lot of women didn't want him, but he satisfied their souls. He needed a woman who didn't mind step ping down from the shade of the veranda, a woman capable of taking up the shaft of a plough and throwing down with him side by side. They met in the glistening twinkling crystal light of August/ September sky. They were both educated, corn-fed-healthy- Mississippi-stock folk. Both loved fried fish, greens, blues, jazz and Carmen Jones. He was an unhardened man of the world. She'd been around the block more than once herself, wasn't a tough cookie, but a full grown woman for sure. Looking her up, down, sideways he said, "So tell me baby, what do you know about this great big world of ours?" Smiling she said, "Not a damn thang sugar. I don't mind telling you my life's not been sheltered from the cold and I've not always seen the forest or smelled the coffee, played momma to more men than I care to remember. Consequently I've m ade several wrong turns, but with conviction I can tell you I'm nobody's fool. So a better question might be: what can you teach me?" He wasn't sure, confessing he didn't have a handle on this thing called life either. But he was definitely in a mood for love. Together they were falling for that ole black magic. In that moment it seemed a match m ade in heaven. They walked, not hand in hand, but rather side by side in the twinkle of August/September sky, looking sidelong at one another, thanking their lucky stars with fingers crossed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #4. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #4 (continued). She was working, making long money, becoming what he called 'bourgie'. he wasn't working and this was truly messing with his mind. He was starting to feel like a Black man wasn't supposed to have nothing, like some kind of conspiracy was being played out and he was the fall guy, like the mission was impossible, like it ain't a man's world, like just cause she was working and making so much dough, she was getting to where she didn't love him no mo, like he had bad luck, like he didn't have a dream, like he needed a night in Tunisia, like he needed to catch a freight train and ride, like if he felt tomorrow like he did today, come Sunday he'd pack up and make a get-away, like if he stayed, the kid would hate him for sure, like he just might have to contribute to the most confusing day in Harlem, like he had a tomb-stone disposition and a grave-yard mind. Like maybe a Black man just wasn't her kind. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #5. boneyard at»m r o o t <•*<« mo M od on jvd g rie M do* M «C W « *o*np« '*gMt tf*o 001* to g*C*y mo cue. a*M* m d tooon uteo &* mo aoeo****: m ould o« oucoa on m o s '* * * «*oo a crnttj ''o n • M od 0O**OA I »©>'•* by 0ou>*d mo cM d mo* mo oood oorton % body o» eoffm i* rtu w to o o ™ « a oortOA not boon « *od By "OOdao 3wt i .» » « .- it<« + i mo «*Ad ood oo orO 0un>*n mo mwrdo*#* if *•« •., »oi«oco. D u< tr>o t u i < n goo rvond wot o m>'o m o *om • .—-• fn * to *< of mo mu*do*od ono *« • « k« dnvo mo *i#>y» ”v>-» > moo •»« *wn non g»*or «o*onct ‘f 9*00*0 3>o **Ufang to too tamoono. moy <m o ttov .*»s «r i • fo« i m tnov •** ttm nortmg If a 90*000 » o t nno not not Mod n»* nmg m m«o oar'd “o * • • n't '« o m "•» grovo I get • Mock cot bono 190 * • m o fo »••** I fo t Jofwi Bio Cowqwoyo rm gorwio mot* M d i you 57 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #5 (continued). (detail) BONEYARD alarm clocks wake the dead on judgment day kerosene lamps light the path to glory the last cup, plate and spoon used by the departed should be placed on the grave keep a child safe from a dead person's spirit by passing the child over the dead person's body or coffin If you suspect that a person has been killed by hoodoo, put a cassava stick in the hand and he will punish the murderer. If he was killed by violence, put the stick in one hand and a knife and fork in the other. The spirit of the murdered one will first drive the slayer insane, and then kill him with great violence. If people die wishing to see someone, they will stay limp and warm for days. They are still waiting. If a person dies who has not had his fling in this world, he will turn on his face in his grave. I got a black cat bone I got a mojo tooth I got John the Conqueroo I'm gonna mess with you Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #6. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BLACK WOMAN WITH CHICKEN Reproduced w ith permission o f th e copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED, “MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO'S THE FINEST OF THEM ALL? THE MIRROR SAYS, "SNOW WHITE YOU BLACK BITCH, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!!” c r > o Illustration #7. Reproduced w ith permission o f th e copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IN 1944 MY FATHER WENT TO WAR. PULLED A TRIGGER, SHOT A NIGGER, THAT WAS THE END OF THE WAR. a child's verse C T i H - * Illustration #8. Illustration #9. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. G IV E A B LA C K PERSON? Illustration #10. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited Illustration #10 (continued) 64 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #12. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #13. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. le one’s pocket actor’s lines s a m e ol’ lin e out o f line Illustration #14. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. silver lining red lining line - ud color line Illustration #15. •B a » « J = E3gL 3 5 g h 1 » g « 2 4 ) V . - £ m £ ® a e S G Jjss « “ *J 0 0 *~.s f l B « K x-g s £ > h - o J ” * * > « J ■ 2 " . « <H*> ■-■8 2 £ I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #16. 70 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Illustration #17. Q LU 2 LU CL CL < X O C h - LU < > X oc LU X >- CQ O C < LU CL Q_ < CO Q LU Q LU v: co 5 t X LU ^ X <: t- < CO LU X CO >- O C o LU O C ZD O CJ O co O C Q o h- O Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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Creator Dartnall, Colette (author)

Core Title Invisibility and black identity in the work of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art History/Museum Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Art History,Black studies,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-11349

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Document Type Thesis

Rights Dartnall, Colette

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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