Art Rookie: In and Around the Kitchen Table - Domesticity in Carrie Mae Weems
Within the field of visual art, the ‘domestic’ is often used to highlight the universal experiences of human emotion as it relates to our private, romantic, and family life. In other depictions, it is a site where gendering takes place, and the complicated dynamics of home life for women are revealed. These notions of the home underscored a group exhibition staged at the Museum of Modern Art in 1991 titled Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. The exhibition largely featured photographs of scenes from American domestic life in the 1980s and signalled the era’s political and social conservatism spearheaded by American President Ronald Reagan that focus on focussed on the significance of the traditional American family and a return to “good American values”.
In a contemporary reading of the show, Sara Knelman identified the subtle resentment of these codes of domesticity, motherhood and gendered labour that sustain family life in the work of women photographers such as Tina Barney and Mary Frey. However, these representations of domestic life and the literature that accompanied them did not challenge the expectations placed on women and the structures of the patriarchal society that sustain these sexual divisions in any substantial way. This tendency to focus on the emotive experiences of the domestic space rather than the cultural and contextual frameworks that shape it is common in discussions of the ‘domestic’ and the ‘home’. American artist Carrie Mae Weems whose landmark The Kitchen Table Series (1989) was also part of the Pleasures and Terrors show, offers an alternative perspective of the home.
The photography series created between 1989-1990 was prompted by Weems’s desire to move beyond the limits of domestic tradition and, through her practice, discover new frameworks for monogamy, motherhood, and familial structures. While I have been thinking deeply about ideas of the domestic in my writing and have spent too many hours sitting with the series, trying to decipher her genius, I continued to marvel when I managed to see the work in person at the Barbican as part of an incredible retrospective of her work titled Carrie Mae Weems: Reflections for Now. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, seeing the photographs spread over two rooms, like much of her other work, has left a lasting mark on my personhood.
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Moving through the gallery space, we can see how by using the kitchen as a stage, Weems constructs a photographic tableau made up of 20 gelatin silver prints and 14 text panels that follows a female protagonist, played by herself, coming into her own through the intimate relationships she shares with her lover, her mother, her friends and perhaps most importantly herself. Each of the 20 photographs from the series is shot from the same position at one end of the kitchen table, while the characters that make up the frame are situated at the other.
The careful positioning of Weems’s camera suggests that she is inviting the viewer to be a guest at the table, allowing us to occupy the role of spectator and participant. The use of the kitchen table extends beyond its practical function as a piece of furniture; instead, seen as a symbolic signifier of the domestic sphere and a surface that facilitates our familial and romantic bonds. As Adrienne Edwards observes in the monograph dedicated to this work, “The table’s symbolic significance is a direct reference to the structures that shape and reinforce the intersection of the concepts of race, gender, and class that are at the centre of Weems’s art”.
“Weems was not only introducing her own subjectivity into public consciousness through representation but creating work that bell hooks states are ‘counterhegemonic’ in the way it challenges conventional perceptions of Blackness.”
While at first glance, the physical setting of all 20 photographs may appear to look the same: a room with a wooden table and a single hanging light illuminating the frame. The consistencies end there as different props in the form of wall hangings, political ephemera, and tableware illustrate each different photograph. Weems’s cast of characters disappear, reappear and take on different positions in accordance with the domestic setting, guiding us through the story of the fictional protagonist in the process. In her essay "Sisterhood: Locating the Photography of Carrie Mae Weems, with Black Feminist Discourse”, Taylor Fama Ndiaye points out how Weems’s meticulously staged interior shots and the props that make up each different frame indicate the various roles embodied by the subjects and map out “an autobiographical landscape of social experience in domesticity.”
Using the domestic site as a studio was remarkably productive for Weems as it decentralised the subject of race within her work, shifting the focus to broader, universal themes of desire, power, intimacy, and the pursuit of finding oneself. In an interview with the cultural theorist bell hooks, Weems expressed how The Kitchen Table Series emerged out of a desire to use Black subjects to represent universal concerns. By deploying a domestic site as the metaphorical stage, Weems was making an intervention within the history of photography that challenges traditional representations of Black women. Here, Weems was not only introducing her own subjectivity into public consciousness through representation but creating work that bell hooks states are ‘counterhegemonic’ in the way it challenges conventional perceptions of Blackness.
Discussions of domesticity and, consequentially, the politics of gender and intimacy have become central to art historical scholarship surrounding The Kitchen Table Series. While this may seem like a slightly obvious conclusion, given that the very name of the series alludes to the subject of the home, focusing on the ‘domestic’ allows scholars to critically investigate how spaces, both public and private, are linked to the construction of one’s identity.
What is lacking, however, is an analysis of the series that goes beyond the emotional and metaphorical connotations of the home and considers the external socio-economic stakes of the domestic. In her essay “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance”, Bell Hooks is attentive to the entanglement of the public and private spheres citing the homeplace as “fragile and tenuous” but having a “radical political dimension” where Black Americans would historically resist the culture of white supremacy.
She further states that this radical quality of the home is forgotten as more and more Black communities begin to assimilate and reflect bourgeois norms of domesticity that see the home as politically neutral. Echoing these sentiments, she shares that the “liberatory struggle has been seriously undermined by contemporary efforts to change that subversive homeplace into a site of patriarchal domination of black women by black men, where we abuse one another for not conforming to sexist norms. This shift in perspective, where homeplace is not viewed as a political site, has had a negative impact on the construction of black female identity and political consciousness.”
Weems’ intimate and complex depiction of the domestic challenges these white bourgeois norms, opening a dialogue on the possibilities of the private sphere as articulated by hooks and reflecting on how the home is not separate from the public world but constructed through it.
Words: Zara Aftab
