"Meet the Season 5 Artist: Carrie Mae Weems" Art 21

Check out PBS Art 21 series "Meet the Season 5 Artist: Carrie Mae Weems."
http://blog.art21.org/2009/07/09/meet-the-season-5-artist-carrie-mae-weems/
A brief interview I had with Art 21 will be included in the Season 5 episode Compassion, premiering on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 10pm (ET) on PBS (check local listings).

Last fall, I had an opportunity to be involved with Carrie Mae Weem's project - Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008). I reenacted a role of busboy Juan Romero, witness to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination (1968), emulating the photo by Boris Yaro as well as Tomoko Uemura in her bath, Minamata, Japan, emulating W. Eugene Smith's photograph. This project became a critical impetus of transition in my evolving work. A permission to perform, to disguise, to express, to be vulnerable on a stage was almost like an ecstasy for me. Instead of a second-hand visual experience through paintings or sculptures, I started to see a potential of using my own body as an immediate language, access to the audience. Also the 'stage' felt the most secure, safest place for me to explore the ideas and emotions.

As I was physically researching and re-enacting, trying to imagine the historical events in America that I never felt close enough to feel related... I felt so much more invited into American history and people. It seemed as a privilege to be a part of the project which was drawing connecting dots between current status of nation and the past traumas and deaths that altered the history.

On the subject of compassion in art, Weems says about her own life and process (in the forthcoming Season 5 book):

There are ideas about compassion—what you sacrifice for compassion, what you give up, what you choose not to live with so that you can express that. But we all sacrifice something for our compassion in some way. We’re giving up something so that something else larger can happen, so that something bigger than you can take place. Sometimes we sacrifice our families. Sometimes we sacrifice other levels of interpersonal communication so that we have that larger relationship with questions that move and shape the world.

And so (and I don’t think that I’m being naïve or sentimental or dramatic about it) I think that I’ve sacrificed an enormous amount of interpersonal comfort to pursue aspects of compassion, to pursue them, to look at them and to say, “Yes, I will step up to this. I want this too. And if I want this in this time, in this moment, then certain things have to be sacrificed (because I don’t know how to do it all).” Sometimes you sacrifice too much. You find yourself out on a limb and not knowing really quite how to get back down the tree. But it’s the space that you’re in because you have taken the risk. I’m not unaware of the sacrifices and, at times, whom your compassion hurts. It’s not all moving in one direction. It’s complicated, as the work is complicated.