Carrie Mae Weems was the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The veteran film-maker and photographer is so famous over there that she appears as herself in Spike Lee’s Netflix adaptation of She’s Gotta Have It, and yet she is still scarcely known in Britain. The Barbican retrospective Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now – huge, historic, enthralling, ranging over 40 years of work – will surely change that.
It opens with a shock: a group of large abstract paintings, very beautiful, reminiscent of the New York school of male painters of the 1950s. Except that your eyes, and these works, deceive you. They are in fact photographs of American walls in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020. Protesters in Portland, Oregon, painted slogans on boarded-up buildings; the authorities painted over them with swathes of black, brown and grey. And so the cycle of cover-ups continues.
As a sequence, Painting the Town (2021) tacitly alludes to the exclusion of black people from history and art. But it also relates directly to the suppression of speech. And a very unusual and distinctive aspect of Weems’s art appears to be this tension between word and image.
Perhaps her most classic work is the photographic essay titled From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96). Thirty-three images of black Americans – many of them from a harrowing archive compiled in 1850 by a Harvard scientist to “prove” his theory that black people were an inferior race – are tinted blood red and overlaid with the artist’s words.
Some are pungently angry – A Negroid Type – others deeply tender. ‘‘You became the joker’s joke” is the lament written over a devastating picture of a black man on display as an “exhibit” to the public, alongside a clown who is laughing at him. A commemoration of the long-ago dead, without a voice, without any rights before the tyrannical camera, these works are a tremendous indictment of photography as itself a form of enslavement.
That sinister echo runs all through the show. It is there in Weems’s monochrome photographs of herself got up as a minstrel performing a vaudeville turn in black hat and white gloves, but each time with the head of a different African creature – zebra, elephant, ape – looming out of the shadowy past. It is there in the marvellous Constructing History series of 2008. For this, Weems worked with students at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia to re-enact tragic photographs from 20th-century history.
From the wake for Martin Luther King to the assassination of JFK and the moment before Benazir Bhutto is gunned down in her cavalcade, these scenes are instantly recognisable and yet as remote as nativity tableaux from our sense of what must really have happened. Photographs freeze, isolate, alienate, extracting a second from the chaotic continuity of human existence. All we can do is remember as best we may, and keep interrogating these overworn images.
The 70-year-old Weems was a dancer before she became a writer and artist. She herself appears regularly through the exhibition, a black-clad figure, sometimes with her back turned to us as if witnessing history, sometimes facing us in the Kitchen Table Series (1990) in which she narrates domestic drama against women’s experience across the globe.
She meets a man, they marry, a child is born. Everything seethes with passion, then tension – that of a woman oppressed by men (trying to study for night school, while he goes out boozing) and by race. The woman “ruined dinner parties with her insistent demand that everything… be viewed politically”. The images are trenchant, but so are the texts on the wall. Weems writes as well as Toni Morrison.
The latest work here is a vast seven-part film projecting along a sweeping curve. The Shape of Things (2021) takes in US history from the election of Donald Trump to the assault on the Capitol and all the way backwards to race riots, lynchings and slavery. It cuts from desperate scenes of migrants trying to escape poverty, tyranny and hunger to a recurrent trio of dancers moving in dark silhouette, costumed to imply different eras.
White racists force their shrieking way across the screen to the left, black protesters walk in the opposite direction, sometimes appearing frame by frame like the stop-motion figures in Eadweard Muybridge’s early photography. The music is harmonic, elegant, gentle, connecting every repetition to another.
Just as you are beginning to think the whole experience too gracefully choreographed, not to say high-production, up flashes a clown, a trained elephant, a performing ape. Never forget the circularity of human cruelty, to which the dancers are now becoming a Greek chorus, watching the endless cycle of the American circus.
The National Portrait Gallery’s show of Paul McCartney’s photographs is a time capsule exploding in more than 250 images taken on a 35mm Pentax. Most were forgotten in storage; none have been seen in public before. They cover the bare three months from December 1963 to February 1964 when the Beatles went from the Liverpool Empire to stupendous international glory.
Hats, cigs and taxis, the Fab Four fooling around, George Martin dapper with a cocktail – and yet the constant labour is intense. A touching itinerary has them in and out of Paris with just enough time to bus it to the Eiffel Tower before playing to screaming teens at night. Here are Cynthia Lennon, George’s mother, aunt and father, some awkward shots of Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher. But it is John who fascinates: so many psychological nuances, so many changes of appearance. Paul’s camera is so often upon him.
Enlargement (sometimes colossal) doesn’t always enhance. Some pictures, developed from surviving contact sheets, are too soft or blurred. But the show is joyful, hopeful, gregarious, comic, and it has an astounding shift. This comes when the Beatles depart for the US to hysteria at the airport, fans writing their love in the sand beneath Miami hotel windows, drinks by the pool and the industry closing in. The sensation goes global – and into the music of living colour.
Star ratings (out of five)
Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now ★★★★
Paul McCartney: Photographs 1963-4 ★★★★
• Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 3 September
• Paul McCartney: Photographs 1963-4 – Eyes of the Storm is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 1 October
