Kara Walker (1969- ) is an American artist who, as she puts it in the title of one of her works, shows us “the Peculiar Institutions as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause”.
She uses silhouettes, cut pieces of black paper put on a white background, to make pictures. It was a common form of art in the 1800s, which she uses to make pictures about the 1800s! But instead of the safe, white middle-class pictures that silhouettes were used for back then, she makes those other pictures you never see: a white slave master running down a black girl to rape her, a white woman hanging from a tree after a slave uprising, the heads of the black people who died to keep a white woman pure, black girls giving head and so on.
Starting out with things like paper doll books meant for girls, she creates pictures of the sex and violence of the dark and sick history of race in America.
Many of us have certain pictures in our heads of the history of race in America: slave ships packed with black bodies, black men being sold as slaves, slaves working in the fields, black bodies hanging from trees and so on. But beyond that there are other pictures that we never see and those are the pictures that Walker creates.
Her blacks look like minstrel show stereotypes. She shows what sick things followed from seeing blacks as unseriously human as that.
Her work has been shown in top art museums, like the Guggenheim, Whitney and Modern Museum of Art in New York. In 1997 she won a MacArthur fellowship, one of those genius awards, the youngest person ever to get one. Her work once made the cover of the New Yorker. It seems she does not make white liberals uncomfortable with their own racism.
Sometimes, in fact, her pictures show the old days the way whites would like to imagine them: like half-naked black women with white men asking them for sex – the Jezebel stereotype, black women as sex animals.
Her pictures seem simple, yet the more you look the more you see: a knife held behind the back, a small white man in the hand of a black woman, a lantern held by a black boy hung from a tree – the boy is a lawn jockey, it turns out.
Walker:
A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected … that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.
She says that maybe her pictures look like they are about slave days of long ago, but for her they are a way to find out who she is and where she fits into the now of American history.
See also:
When her exhibit was shown at the Whitney Museum here in NYC back in October, I wrote a review on the onilne forum that accompanied the exhibition:
As an African-American man under 30, my personal reaction to Kara Walker’s work is one of absolute disgust. As this work ultimately has direct multiple effects on my life, I believe the Whitney should allow for my voice to be heard and to print this critique. To silence a simple blog comment, as you’ve done with my previous post, is to render me as one of Walker’s two-dimensional shadows, trapped within the nightmarish psychosis of white supremacist projections of blackness currently displayed on the Whitney’s walls, completely raped of any connection to the historical humanity of the slaves Walker absolutely betrays. In almost every review of her work, all mention of protest is characterized as the byproduct of a generation gap, between now-fusty ’60s era social politics and the balanced reason of today’s youth. Well, I am here to tell you that, unlike Allison Saar (Betye Saar’s daughter who supports the work), I personally believe Kara’s work carefully situates itself within the post-Civil Rights backlash against racial equality. It’s a trickbag, occasionally adopting the rhetoric of “exposing” stereotypes for the sake of social justice, while at the same time further perverting these stereotypes for the tacit amusement of the predominantly white art establishment.
Walker’s following is informed by several layers of conscious and subconscious reactions, aversions, collusions, interactions with her artwork. Her works offer many a somewhat safe vehicle to experience the grotesquery of American slavery while several comfortable notions of black humanity are left untouched. In a way, her works reaffirm the whiteness of her white spectators against the black projections of white-derived fantasy on the wall. Her pieces position a relationship between spectator and caricature, falsely presenting the spectre of white racial psychosis as the obscured truth for the authentic betrayed historical reality, the depths of which most Americans do not wish to fully confront given the lack of recognition in the relevance of the American slavery reparations movement! In the end, the pieces do not subvert white supremacist fantasies of blackness. The pieces allow for a sort of “ironic” front which offers a sort of pretend resistence but in fact submits to the hegemony of American race relations. A pretend compassion for the deeply Human suffering of blacks in America which informed Wolf Blitzer’s “so poor, so black” statement in the wake of Katrina. A conscious national narrative which posits the equality of opportunity but a subconscious that degrades black humanity as a justification for ongoing massive inequalities in incarceration, education and the workforce and the white privilege that results from being on the positive side of the equation. A subconscious brought into full view on the Harvard IAT test which states that most participants demonstrate a “moderate to strong preference for white over black.” Mostly informed by the continually perpetuating antebellum-era stereotypes Kara Walker depicts, but ultimately palliates for the white subconscious. Is this why her work is lauded as “not being preachy”?
As work like this becomes socially sanctioned by institutions of high culture such as the Whitney and artists such as Kara grow in clout, while it may have been temporarily taboo to display mammy dolls and lawn jockeys, it again becomes socially sanctioned to display art with “ironic” but blatent stereotypes in galleries, corporations, the homes of the social, cultural, economic and political elite.
Yes, art can be a form of resistence but Kara’s work is anything but. In fact, Walker professes a sort of love affair with white supremacy, both personally and in her work. After all, her show is entitled “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”. She has made statements such as “I believe the problem with racism in America is that we secretly enjoy it, where would we be without the ’struggle’” and “All black people in America want to be slaves a little bit”. She professes a masochistic submission to white men in the “Notes of a Negress” accompanying the work “Why I Like White Boys”. As Holland Carter of the New York Times wrote in 2003: “Her blacks don’t resist aggression, or at least not in obvious ways. They seem to give in to it, let themselves be abjectly used, often by one another.” If this is resistence, please tell me when I’m dead. Kara’s work panders to a covert liberal racism which adopts fashionable social posturing but lacks any sort of progressive substance. And even among well-intentioned white liberals, whiteness (which by origin and definition is synonymous with the ideology of white supremacy and is naturally defined in opposition to “blackness”) remains in the center of their identities and social experience. As well-intentioned Helen was in her social politics, when the Klan made her put mud on her face I can’t help but wonder whether some of the shame was in temporarily internalizing not so much the humiliation of having to put mud on her face but rather having to temprarily internalize any degradation she might have subconsciously believed to be inherent in the idea of blackness alone. The fact that most Americans show this internalization of racialist beliefs is demonstrated on the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT). In reality, noone who can identify with the experience of being white in America can truly claim to be colorblind as his or her identity is built on the ontological opposite. And even for the most well-meaning white liberal, Kara’s work panders to this subconscious. As this white supremacist subconscious is deeply rooted in all Americans, Walker’s work does not subvert the white supremacist imagination of blackness but rather re-presents it in the tangible here-and-now, bows to its hegomonic force and makes offerings of eagerly copulating slavewomen, debased pickaninnies and confused buckcoons.
I have a problem with Walker’s so-called irony. Is irony a copout? Esp. when the irony is positioned on the authenticity of white supremacy (”irony” caters to an open reading by all racial ideologies) and within the compliance of black women in their continued rape by slavemasters?
Walker’s work disturbs me because while it does present a horrifying, grotesque, epic vision of this country’s foundation it simultaneously hints that it is all ok, that blacks are just as complicit as whites and that these horrors were somehow, in part, self-extracted. She presents this racialized psychosexual fantasy as an obscured reality /shadows on the wall/, as the (subhuman) raw material blacks are truly made of.
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Correction: Back in October 2007.
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Thanks for your interesting comment.
I did not catch her at the Whitney but I did see a video of it. What struck me was that she was the only black person there. Even for the Whitney that is odd.
Her quick embrace by Time magazine, top art museums and the MacArthur Foundation all support your point: if she truly did challenge their white racism then they would be outraged by her, not passing out fellowships and space in their magazines and museums! Whites get upset when you challenge their racism.
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One picture of hers that unsettled me, not currently shown above: It shows a half-naked black woman standing under a tree with a white man pretty much asking her for sex:
What does she say about that picture?
(I have since gone back and worked that picture into the post.)
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what i love about the simplicity is the emotion that comes out of it…the silhouettes are purely symbolic of the missing faces of black…excuse me american history…genius
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Let’s not forget Hollywood as well. Hollywood and the media in general play a major role in the denigration of Blacks in America. For example, Halle Berry. Ms. Berry gets awarded for demeaning portrayal of Black women and received an award for it(Monster’s Ball). The mostly white critics gave rave reviews while Black reviewers were marginalized in the media.
Kara Walker’s work is very disturbing to me as a Black woman and, frankly, blatantly racist/sexist. That’s why her work is so popular with white art patrons because they like the fantasy of Black otherness. Just as consumers of hip hop are suburban whites, so are art patrons.
She’s no different from sellout hip hop musicians and Black Hollywood stars who sell out our race in order to make a fast buck on feeding white supremacist fantasies of Blackness.
La Reyna
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That is a good way of putting it, but I think she is more than simply a Rented Negro, though that is certainly part of it. Some of her pictures are straight-out racist stereotypes, like #3 (black women as sex animals), but some are not (like #1, the white woman who cuts off the heads of black people). LaSmartOne made a good point about internalized racism.
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Interesting. Of course, rather than “feeding white supremacist fantasies”, Walker appears to project her own (and certain blacks’) obsession with race onto the white audience.
It’s also possible that her work contains a critique of such obsessive projection.
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Don’t even start with that nonsense nonserviam. Where do white people like yourself come from, searching out black blogs and forums just to dismiss our experiences. You people are always there.
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Le roi s’amuse.
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Cute.
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I feel like some of the above reviews seem to miss the point. What Ms. Walker is doing with her art is evoking scenes from Americas past, she is simply telling the truth. While her work maybe provocative and perhaps even nerve hitting, it is real. And I believe the work stands in sharp contrast, and even in protest
of the commercialization of black pathos (i.e,modern hip-hop) it is a reminder of where we came from and how far we have left to go .
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There is nothing “real” or revolutionary about Walker. She is putting hyperbolic images of black bodies in pain on display for white audiences. There has always been a huge market for that kind of demented crap and she is just one of the latest in a long string of Americans–black and white–to cash in on it.
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I know her work is jarring and unsettling but i have just been intrigued for years by her art. The most recent piece in the Domino sugar factory of the sphinx that looks like a mammy is kind of crazy. The whole piece is made of sugar. Her using sugar as her medium is interesting. Her silhouettes of different scenes from plantation life might be disturbing for some. I think her work is controversial. Some of it is for shock value i think, I asked for a post on her. And i was surprised to see a post. She is not everyone’s cup of tea for sure. It’s not a pretty still life with a bowl of fruit.
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I have often wondered what whites think of her art?
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I must have seen some of the incidental pictures stuck in here, I know I read the 2nd article that came up on this blog today that had been tangentially referred to but I didn’t ever really recognize the source and certainly have never really been exposed to ms walker’s art before to the degree where I recognized and studied it. This is the stuff graduate level papers are made of; ie to really look in to this and I shall, but I’m not going to gloss over it and make some type of off the cuff comment. that ish is deep. and I would caution anyone from putting their projections of what they think about her personal life on top of the art —
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Commenter John Burton made a very eloquent and astute comment.
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