Episode 50: Carrie Mae Weems’ “Not Manet’s Type” (1997)

This is The Lonely Palette, the podcast that returns art history to the masses, one object at a time. I’m Tamar Avishai.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: I think this idea of unrequited love is really a very intense part of the work.  I’m always questioning what’s been left in and what’s been left out.  And so then, how to reframe, how to reposition, and how to insert, for the first time, a body that has not often been there, or to pull forward a body that rests in the background.  This historical body has not been, for the most part, the subject of these great painters.  It is not a part of their imagination, it is not a part of their fantasy.  But, of course, art has a great deal to do with imagining the unimaginable. 

So I exist outside of their fantasy.  I’m not a part of that.  And so, I have to make my own.  I have to make my own way.  And build the kinds of images that I feel need to be built in relationship to some of the greatest artists that I know.  That I have to wrestle with these ideas and that I have to build images that don’t exist in any other way, or have not been made yet by anybody else.  That I am responsible, in other words, for my own construction, for my own making, for my own cultural production.  That I can’t rely on these artists as much as I love these artists.  And that they have disappointed me greatly.  As much as I love them, I revere them, I’m also very, very disappointed in their engagement of the historical body of the Black self, of the Black body, of the Black imagination.

Episode 50: Carrie Mae Weems’ “Not Manet’s Type” from 1997.

Here’s a fairly obvious piece of advice: never check your Facebook notifications right before going to sleep.  It’s a mistake we’ve all made, and the last time I made it myself, before I finally starting putting my phone in another room before bed, I paid dearly for it.  That innocuous little red dot on my podcast page.  That absentminded little tap.  This is about your episode on Gauguin, the message read.  I’m disgusted with you.  You know he raped children, right?

I went to sleep, or tried to, with my heart racing.  I mean, yes.  I did know he raped prepubescent girls.  He did a lot of really morally reprehensible things, and sexual violence, both explicit and intrinsic, is rampant in his work.  But I also know that his work – in the context of the art historical canon I was taught, and which I make my career from – mattered.  And finding that balance, that separating of artist from art, player from game, flawed individual thread from broader historical tapestry, is one of the most challenging things that I do.  I spent all night chewing on this, turning it over in my brain, how I thought I’d actually addressed what a piece of shit he was as a human being, yet why we still talk about his work as a painter, when, the next morning, I got another message from the same person, who said, well, I just finished the episode.  You do talk about the child raping thing.  Sorry to have bothered you. 

I mean, okay.  Let that be a lesson to everyone to actually finish the episode, or the article, or any piece of criticism before depriving the writer a night of sleep.  But I wrote back to her immediately, saying, no, thank you for bothering me.  Because I’m genuinely bothered.  I want to hide behind the excuse that the reason I didn’t think twice about writing an episode on Gauguin is because he’s a brick in the wall of the canon that I was taught, as though art history itself is a castle, already built, and it’s my job to offer tours.  I’ve never thought of myself as a bricklayer, and certainly not a brick smasher, of the Eurocentric patriarchy or anything else.  I didn’t look down at my own two feet and consider my own responsibility when it comes to where the art history I was taught goes from this point onwards.  That’s the thing about heard and unheard voices, I wrote back furiously – when you’re a student, you can only learn what is already heard, and you don’t know what you don’t know when it comes to unearthing the others.  I don’t want Gauguin to disappear because I know he painted some truly beautiful paintings and he’s part of a really interesting story.  But I know there are other stories too, and the fact of the matter is, when his painting is taking up an entire wall at a museum, as this enormous painting currently does, other paintings aren’t.  But I don’t know what to do about it.  Because I know my own innate proclivities, how I like to follow directions, and bake, and cross stitch, and seeking safe harbor in the canon I was taught.  But I also recognize that I’m not a student anymore.  I have a platform, and, quite literally, a voice of my own.  That means looking critically at everything, including both what I was taught and what I wasn’t. 

Admittedly, this is a lot to unload to a stranger into a chat bubble on Facebook, and I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that the same person who would fire off this kind of message never wrote back.  On the internet, of course, nobody knows you’re a dog.  But, obnoxious though her tactics may have been, I’m grateful for her.  Because it made me begin to grapple with this stuff, long ahead of this past summer, when art history, and art museums, started to question their roles in inadvertently or even quite explicitly championing a canon that, simply by virtue of its existence, keeps a lot of voices out.  It was a much-needed push out of the castle, over the moat, down a long, less-traveled path peppered with houses of all shapes and sizes, and into one of them, where the photographer Carrie Mae Weems is sitting at her kitchen table, looking up at me as though to ask, well, what took you so long?

And it’s at this table that Weems holds court, turning her camera and her gimlet eye on both herself and the world around her.  Weems was born in Portland, Oregon in 1953, and has spent her career not only as a trained artist but also as a union and community organizer with an emphasis on social activism, and, in her work, tremendously nuanced storytelling and probing self-examination.  She is often her own model, but her photos of herself are rarely self-portraits.  Instead, her body plays different roles, like a dress form waiting to be clothed.  She then integrates these roles into the world around her, with the explicit aim of recalibrating and challenging our assumptions about Black women in art.  And you would think that an undertaking this mighty wouldn’t result in work that’s so quiet, so normal.  But this is what we see when we look at Weems’ work: normalcy.  Girls with crowns of flowers braided into their hair lying in the summer grass; a family’s galaxy orbiting around the kitchen table; a marriage’s entire conversation embedded in a caught glance; the graceful curves of a woman’s shoulder blades.  The stuff of beautiful, ephemeral, and emotionally-complex photos of the human experience.  And it makes us ask ourselves, well, what did we expect?  Did we really think Black girls and women, marriages and kitchen tables, would photograph so differently?  Why does the depiction of Black complexity feel so revolutionary?

But this question comes as no real surprise to anyone who has spent time in the Western art historical canon.  Weems’ work does feel revolutionary, because by and large, there’s not a lot of interest in the complexity of the Black experience in our college art history textbooks, and certainly not before the middle of the 20th century.  To be sure, there are depictions of Black men and women – more women than men, of course, because, you know, art – but they’re few and far between, and almost entirely relegated to a supporting role, where their skin tone is used explicitly as a shorthand, a metaphor.  When they’re actually acknowledged, Black bodies are exotic novelties and noble savages, like we see in 19th century French Orientalist paintings; or they’re symbols of victimhood, like we saw in episode 18 on “The Slave Ship,” when Turner, an ardent abolitionist, emphasized the manacled hands and legs desperately reaching up from the water.  But even these examples are a rare focusing of the narrative lens.  Because the truth is that usually Black figures are not acknowledged at all.  Instead, they’re so often presented as a means of contrast, the darkness that illuminates lightness.  They quite literally make the whites whiter, with all the material and moral purity implied.

There are many, many examples of this.  A Black body in a European painting makes the conquerors appear more powerful, makes soft skin appear softer, makes the rich appear richer.  A slave tenderly washes her mistress’s creamy white back in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “The Bath” from around 1880.  A Black servant is part of the Dutch fantasy of wealth in Jan Steen’s “Fantasy Interior” from 1660.  But you have to think that Weems, when she chose to name her series, was taken with one Black figure in particular, who just happens to be in one of the most famous paintings on the planet, although you’d be hard-pressed to notice: Edouard Manet’s “Olympia” from 1863.  Olympia is a white woman, laid out on a bed, staring down her audience with half-lidded eyes, and ignoring the flowers proffered by a  desexualized mammy-figure behind her, who is practically the same color as the black cat on the bed, and the dark background.  And I should be clear, the white woman in this painting is not at all a picture of privilege.  On the contrary, the reason this painting is so famous in the first place is because this depiction of a naked-not-nude working-class prostitute, cheekily referencing a Renaissance painting of the goddess of love, created a ripple of uneasily familiar revulsion through French high society, and in the process, effectively ruined Manet’s career in the eyes of the Parisian art establishment.  They’re the privileged ones, who knew to be disgusted with her in their present moment, and, moreover, they became the privileged writers of art history who have elevated her ever since.  And this seems to be what Weems is pointing out: that while art history itself must confront a multitude of sins, there are two in particular that are represented by the two figures in this painting.  But while both art history and the museum world, have put a fair amount of energy into reckoning with the “woman problem” that the figure of Olympia represents, this intersection of womanness and blackness is a problem of its own.  Gallons upon gallons of ink have been spilled about Olympia’s sallow yellowish skin.  The Black woman in the background, meanwhile, simply fades into it.

From a technical perspective, this is not exactly an accident.  “Olympia” is a perhaps inadvertent, but prominent, example of how technique has served to erase Black figures from fine art.  European and American imagery was optimized for Caucasian skin.  From dark 17th century Dutch backgrounds to the popularization of photography the 19th century, not only was art ill-equipped to allow for darker skin tones to visually resonate in the same way as lighter skin, but it seemed to have little interest in figuring it out.  For example, any photography historian would be familiar with the Shirley Card, a 4-by-6-inch photo card of an ivory-skinned brunette, who happened to be Shirley Page, a company model.  The card was created by Kodak and disseminated to photo labs in the 1950s as a gold standard to make sure the equipment and lighting was properly set up; in other words, if your subject’s skin looked like Shirley’s, the photo was processed correctly.  Yet the inadvertent consequence of this clueless little card, which updated its models but never its nickname, let alone its skin tones, was that it set a gold standard for ideal beauty in photography as well, and left both amateur and professional photographers who wanted to capture darker skin scratching their heads, attempting to figure out the technical manipulation of light and contrast on their own.  And it makes you look at their photography differently as a result – take, for example, the famous Robert Frank photograph “Charleston, South Carolina” from 1955.  It’s an image of a Black nanny holding a white baby on a city sidewalk, a hugely recognizable photo purely for its delicate, enigmatic, and even cynical social implications, which, as you come to realize, are reinforced by the photo’s processing.  It’s so overexposed that the background is all but blown out, the baby is white as snow, and you see that this is technically necessary to bring out the many nuanced dark tones of the nanny’s face and hair.  So much of the photo’s detail is sacrificed in order to give this woman her full tonal spectrum.  And this, too, feels metaphorical, and makes you appreciate all the more how much history, both willful and accidental, is embedded in the revolutionary act of capturing a Black figure on film, from photography to video, from Charleston to Minneapolis.

And all of this, the canon, the shorthand, the erasure, the processing, is what Weems wants us to think about when we look at her photo series “Not Manet’s Type” from 1997.  The series is comprised of individually-framed photographs with text below, which work beautifully in a sequence and also manage to each stand alone, allowing for museums to acquire and exhibit them as single artworks, as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston does here.  The text embedded within full photo essay reads as follows:

“Standing on shaky ground, I posed myself for critical study but I was no longer certain of the questions to ask.

It was clear, I was not Manet’s type.  Picasso – who had a way with women – only used me, and Duchamp never even considered me.

But it could have been worse.  Imagine my fate if De Kooning had gotten hold of me.

I knew, not from memory, but from hope, that there were other models by which to live.

I took a tip from Frida, who from her bed painted incessantly – beautifully, while Diego scaled the scaffolds to the top of the world.”

Again, we’re confronted with the same Weemsian juxtaposition of mighty undertaking and quiet dignity, which, here, are represented by the text on the one hand and the imagery on the other.  These words feel at once embedded with the exquisite hurt of rejection and a revolutionary rejection of the status quo, that is, the entire art historical canon we’ve just talked about, and embodied by its most famous players: Picasso, Duchamp, Manet.  We’re hearing the story of a muse who has been cast aside, the insult atop the injury of being a muse in the first place, the frustration of being both over-looked at and overlooked.  And yet the image, the figure, who is Weems herself, is treated with extreme sensitivity.  She is beautifully captured in a series of geometric framing devices, a circular mirror within a square frame, a fish-eyed peephole into her private space, and presented so gently, her contours and contrasts treated with such loving care, it’s as if the artist is saying to the muse – who in the case are one – well, maybe Manet did overlook you, but he was wrong to, and I won’t.

And setting this series up as a response to Manet at all reinforces the importance of Weems’ use of the canon as a starting point.  This is not an artist in favor of throwing the whole thing out, of burning the past to the ground with the intention of starting over.  On the contrary, she’s saying that we need to acknowledge the canon as a means of understanding who was there but was quietly erased by indifference, who was violently removed, or who was never asked to join in the first place.  It’s for this reason that Weems has been referred to as “history’s ghost,” creating haunting tributes “not from memory, but from hope,” of people who not only existed outside the canon, but existed, obviously, with the same complex emotional interiors as anyone else who was allowed inside it. 

Of course, she’s not the only artist who invokes the canon as something to grapple with and destabilize.  Take the work of Kara Walker who borrows from the 18th century technique of silhouette to fill entire gallery walls with tableaus of grotesque perversions, which ironically speak to a much truer picture of the antebellum Black experience.  Or take Robert Colescott, who was cited as an influence for Walker and whom Weems sometimes collaborated with, and whose stated mission was to “interject blacks into art history” by taking known canonical paintings and defiantly reimagining them with cartoonish, contemporary Black figures, as he does in his painting “Les Demoiselles D’Alabama” from 1985, a play on Picasso’s infamous “Demoiselles D’Avignon” from 1907.  Both Walker and Colescott are just two fiery examples of so many artists who call out a canon for its destructive oversimplification of Black life, for its dehumanizing sins of omission.

But while Weems’ message is no less explicit, her avenue is less explosive.  She also explores opportunities to interject Blacks into art history, but perhaps with a greater affection for art history itself, for its deeper layers that are poignant and universal.  For example, she embraces the bucolic calm of an Impressionist landscape in her series May Days from 2004, photos of flower-strewn and elegant Black girls, and in doing so, to invites them back into the narrative, not to rage against their omission but to show that they too are entitled to the same moodiness and joy as any Impressionist subject matter.  To this end, “Not Manet’s Type” is not so much an indictment of Manet, Picasso, and Duchamp, but rather, as she said at the top of the episode, an expression of disappointment in them, in what they chose to overlook in their desire to explore and even exploit cultures foreign to them without truly understanding them, because they were too busy scaling scaffolds to the top of the world like Diego.  And she’s disappointed too in the art historians who declared them geniuses for it.  Where does that leave everyone else?  After all, we know so much about Picasso.  We could talk all day about his Rose period, about his way with women we know so little about, and particularly his way of putting African masks on them and mining his own erotic response to this manufactured exoticism.  In fact, we did talk about him, in episode 34.  So let’s not talk about him now.  Let’s instead talk about the woman in this photograph, and the story that Weems gives her the space to tell.

Again, it’s impossible to understand her without exploring the duality of being a muse – that is, both courting and resenting the gaze – and how this duality further plays into the intersection of womanness and Blackness that Weems is so skillful at depicting.  She seems to be saying that to focus this intently on a nude Black woman is a deliberate act of making what is usually invisible visible.  Of course, from the standpoint of a woman in art, visibility isn’t usually a problem, and Weems says as much, acknowledging that being looked at, being exploited, is no picnic either, as any woman who has gone through the gears of De Kooning’s gaze would attest.  But when we’re talking about invisibility, as this figure is, we’re really talking about rejection, an entirely different kind of indignity.  And it turns us uncomfortably inward, asking ourselves when it’s appropriate to admit that sometimes we do want to be looked at, to be Manet’s type.  We want to be seen as sexual, desirable human beings.  We just want to be seen at all.  And despite my skin color, I do say “we,” because this, specifically, is something that I relate to, and why this artwork resonates so deeply with me.  “We all relate to the reflections of ourselves,” Weems writes, and here, I do see myself reflected in these words, if not necessarily the image.  They take me back to my younger, fearful adolescent self, never Manet’s type or anyone else’s, and so profoundly sensitive to sexual rejection that I often preemptively hid myself away, not realizing that I was only perpetuating the cycle, or the enormous impact it had on the way I moved through the world, and often still do.  And it’s in, and perhaps only in, this deep moment of recognition that I gain the ability to extrapolate these feelings more broadly, more historically.  It’s what allows me to take a step back and appreciate the experiences I can’t actually relate to.  How the Shirley Cards have still always worked in my favor, whether I knew it or not.  That no detailed backgrounds were ever blown out to make me wholly visible.

A DECADE LATER, Weems followed “Not Manet’s Type” with another exploration of the canon, but this time, she focused on the role played by art museums.  And the result, the Museum Series from 2006, is one of the few times her use of herself in her work does actually feel like a self-portrait.  Because she depicts herself not as a muse, but as an artist: a Black artist, dressed in black, and undeniable against the white pillars of a series of recognizable museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  The images call to mind Anselm Kiefer’s Occupation series from episode 48, how small and ineffectual a figure can appear in the face of something unscalable – and if you’ve listened to our interview with the Guerrilla Girls, you know just how unbreachable the space between the museum collection and the public can feel – and yet also how this distance creates reverence, the deep desire for inclusion.  And it’s worth noting how differently this series reads today than it did even when it was created 15 years ago.  A crack of light in the dark cultural moment we’re currently in is that museums are trying incredibly hard to attempt a long overdue correction of a lack of representation of Black artists in their collections, of not taking Black audiences into account.  At the same time, though, in many museums, this happening too quickly, too thoughtlessly, which can result in bitterly divisive factions within the staff and, worse, clumsy and tokenizing exhibitions.  It’s ironic that Black artists like Weems are now being called upon to become the savior of collections that were historically defined by their omission.  And despite their honorable intentions, one wonders if this breakneck rush to “decolonize the museum” isn’t something that Weems might cock an eyebrow at.  This is not something that can be accomplished in the first months out of the castle, and attempting to do so only prolongs a narrative of oversimplification.  Whether the Black body in art is seen as something to ignore, revile, save, or exult, it’s still being treated as unequivocally one-dimensional. 

But not in Weems’ hands.  Never in Weems’ hands.  And again, it’s her determination to reintroduce nuance and complexity back into our experiencing of the Black figure in art that encourages us to see ourselves reflected from wherever we happen to be standing.  Her work is hard to not relate to.  And this is perhaps most evident “The Kitchen Table Series,” from 1990.  The series is also a response, this time to the Moynihan Report, a sociological document from 1965 that attempted, with ostensibly good intentions, to bolster civil rights legislation, but still made the reckless and insulting claim that Black families were less bonded to each other than white families.  And again, Weems doesn’t respond to this claim with anger, but instead with reality.  She chooses to depict her own family as loving, invested, irritable, normal, human.  The fixed camera creates a beautifully cinematic sensibility as it captures ephemeral interactions around the communal space of the kitchen table.  The only two constants from photo to photo are the pendent light above, and Weems herself, both acting as the sun around which her family orbits.  It’s breathtaking in its evocative, narrative beauty, and particularly in how Weems captures herself.  Only an artist so well-versed in roleplaying could so poignantly capture the myriad roles of a woman at home: mother and muse, wife and friend, desired and overlooked. 

And if you see yourself reflected in these images, or any of Weems’ photographs, it shouldn’t surprise you.  Let yourself be seen, or unsettled, or yes, even bothered.  But take the extended hand.  Engage with the work, and explore your response.  Find the warmth, the familiarity, in the reciprocity, the exchange.  Maybe this is how a historical canon stained with omission can expand and look forward into the future.  Not with memory, but with hope.

WEEMS: So there’s a great deal that the work actually has to teach you.  And that’s why I think it’s really important also to listen to others to not only, I come with my set of experience to the work, but you, as a seer, as audience, you bring another set of ideas to the work that is equally as important.  And it’s in that space, then, that a dialogue actually happens, and some learning takes place.  That you help me to discover the breadth of me, and I help you to discover the breadth of you.

CREDITS: 

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The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of Boston-centric, idea-driven podcasts.  And if you are, like I am, still decompressing from the election, may I draw your attention to a recent episode of Mark Christler’s The Constant on presidential bathtubs?  It’s not all about Taft, but, like, not not about Taft.  Go and listen for yourself at www.constantpodcast.com, or at www.hubspoke audio.org.