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Kara Walker at the Whitney Museum
- By News Hound
- Published 10/26/2007
- Art
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View all articles by News HoundKara Walker at the Whitney Museum
Kara Walker, whose eponymous show is subtitled 'My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love.' Her work is on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 3.
BY ARIELLA BUDICK
In the blistering art of Kara Walker, prim silhouettes wallow in crude sadism, pantomiming the tragic history of race relations in the United States. The 37-year-old African-American art star channels her rage into highly refined installations, films, drawings and paintings that reveal how the shadow of slavery still haunts American culture. Morbid and darkly funny, she delves into the ways blacks and whites alike have been traumatized and twisted by their cruel and mutually destructive history.
An unsettling and intense retrospective of Walker's work is now at the Whitney, inviting us to plunge with her into violence, bestiality and seething passions. She looks back with anger at life in the antebellum South - at the rape, torture, murder and suicide that underlay romantic fantasies of plantation life.
The piece that put her on the map in 1994 was a 13-by 50-foot mural called "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." That stark, black-and-white epic confronts the placid Technicolor vision of loyal darkies and dashing white masters. Walker's version takes place in a "Gone With the Wind" landscape of live oaks dripping with peat moss.
But her bleak fantasia fragments into vignettes of abusive sex. A dandy in a high-collared tunic flirts with a hoop-skirted belle - but his sword nearly skewers a slave boy who has taken his own aggression out on a turkey's neck, and an extra pair of legs emerges mysteriously from beneath the woman's skirts. Elsewhere, a pigtailed slave girl services a trouserless man, another woman (or the same?) stands, lifts a leg and drops a pair of babies. A scrawny, naked figure with a bloated penis hangs in the sky, a slave owner's nightmare of a black youth executed for his lust.
Walker seems as fascinated by these racist reveries as she is intent on piercing them. She fills her shadow plays with pickaninnies, mammies, Sambos, mandingos and Uncle Toms - the whole repertoire of nasty caricatures from the era of lynchings and blatant intimidation. By quoting these degrading stereotypes, Walker means to point up how insidiously they persist even now, perpetuated both within and without the black community. As Harvard cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1997, Walker seeks "to liberate our people from the residual, debilitating effects that the proliferation of those images undoubtedly has had upon the collective unconscious of the African-American people."
Controversial for colleagues
Some black artists have misread her parodic intentions. After she won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1997, the artist Betye Saar and Stony Brook University professor Howardena Pindell, both a generation older than Walker, accused her of using demeaning imagery to pander to white collectors. Saar demanded a boycott, charging Walker with "selling us down the river." Pindell accused her of "catering to the bestial fantasies about blacks created by white supremacy." Both called for positive, redeeming representations.
Walker, for her part, questioned the very notion of a positive black image: "Every image produced of 'us' is mediated - filtered through the grounds of years of misrepresentation, bitterness and suspicion," she scrawled on one of the beautifully illustrated diary pages on display at the Whitney. She doesn't think it's possible to mold new, untainted forms. We can only deconstruct those that already exist and uncover their ongoing corruption.
Her work is neither anti-black nor anti-white; it is broadly misanthropic. Both groups, as far as she is concerned, have forgone their claims to nobility or integrity. Walker scoffs at the notion of progress. To her, the distortions in self-image wrought by slavery's power relations have been completely internalized by both groups, which remain helpless in the face of history.
All the rhetoric swirling around Walker might suggest that her goals are mostly theoretical. Yet the experience of seeing her work couldn't be more visceral. Of course, politics is part of it, but the work feels personal, even autobiographical. It is a call to arms and a distress signal, a shriek of warning and despair.
"I want people to respond and to be aware that if a goody-two-shoes like me can have all of this going on her head, then nobody's safe," she said in 2000.
Unusual use of silhouettes
With the technique of the silhouette, which captures form and movement but banishes nuance, shading or facial expressions, Walker has found a way to place her wrath at a remove. It boils up, though, in the word works, such as the ferocious, unprintable "Letter From a Black Girl," which covers a whole wall at the Whitney. "Dear you hypocritical ... twerp," it begins, the prelude to a molten cascade of sarcasm and protest.
In a recent interview in The New Yorker, Walker discusses her own long-ago relationship with a white man she describes as "a sadist, a racist, a misogynist ... and, perhaps less credibly: Satan himself." That disturbingly confessional outburst resonates with her constant evocations of the sexual relationships between owner and slave that were a common feature of the plantation. In her inner life, she suggests, romance and racial politics can't be disentangled. They can only be reported on and analyzed in her furious art.
WHEN&WHERE: "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" through Feb. 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., Manhattan. For exhibition hours and admission prices call 800-WHITNEY (944-8639) or visit whitney.org.
Bounce back
BY ARIELLA BUDICK
In the blistering art of Kara Walker, prim silhouettes wallow in crude sadism, pantomiming the tragic history of race relations in the United States. The 37-year-old African-American art star channels her rage into highly refined installations, films, drawings and paintings that reveal how the shadow of slavery still haunts American culture. Morbid and darkly funny, she delves into the ways blacks and whites alike have been traumatized and twisted by their cruel and mutually destructive history.
An unsettling and intense retrospective of Walker's work is now at the Whitney, inviting us to plunge with her into violence, bestiality and seething passions. She looks back with anger at life in the antebellum South - at the rape, torture, murder and suicide that underlay romantic fantasies of plantation life.
The piece that put her on the map in 1994 was a 13-by 50-foot mural called "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." That stark, black-and-white epic confronts the placid Technicolor vision of loyal darkies and dashing white masters. Walker's version takes place in a "Gone With the Wind" landscape of live oaks dripping with peat moss.
But her bleak fantasia fragments into vignettes of abusive sex. A dandy in a high-collared tunic flirts with a hoop-skirted belle - but his sword nearly skewers a slave boy who has taken his own aggression out on a turkey's neck, and an extra pair of legs emerges mysteriously from beneath the woman's skirts. Elsewhere, a pigtailed slave girl services a trouserless man, another woman (or the same?) stands, lifts a leg and drops a pair of babies. A scrawny, naked figure with a bloated penis hangs in the sky, a slave owner's nightmare of a black youth executed for his lust.
Walker seems as fascinated by these racist reveries as she is intent on piercing them. She fills her shadow plays with pickaninnies, mammies, Sambos, mandingos and Uncle Toms - the whole repertoire of nasty caricatures from the era of lynchings and blatant intimidation. By quoting these degrading stereotypes, Walker means to point up how insidiously they persist even now, perpetuated both within and without the black community. As Harvard cultural critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote in 1997, Walker seeks "to liberate our people from the residual, debilitating effects that the proliferation of those images undoubtedly has had upon the collective unconscious of the African-American people."
Controversial for colleagues
Some black artists have misread her parodic intentions. After she won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1997, the artist Betye Saar and Stony Brook University professor Howardena Pindell, both a generation older than Walker, accused her of using demeaning imagery to pander to white collectors. Saar demanded a boycott, charging Walker with "selling us down the river." Pindell accused her of "catering to the bestial fantasies about blacks created by white supremacy." Both called for positive, redeeming representations.
Walker, for her part, questioned the very notion of a positive black image: "Every image produced of 'us' is mediated - filtered through the grounds of years of misrepresentation, bitterness and suspicion," she scrawled on one of the beautifully illustrated diary pages on display at the Whitney. She doesn't think it's possible to mold new, untainted forms. We can only deconstruct those that already exist and uncover their ongoing corruption.
Her work is neither anti-black nor anti-white; it is broadly misanthropic. Both groups, as far as she is concerned, have forgone their claims to nobility or integrity. Walker scoffs at the notion of progress. To her, the distortions in self-image wrought by slavery's power relations have been completely internalized by both groups, which remain helpless in the face of history.
All the rhetoric swirling around Walker might suggest that her goals are mostly theoretical. Yet the experience of seeing her work couldn't be more visceral. Of course, politics is part of it, but the work feels personal, even autobiographical. It is a call to arms and a distress signal, a shriek of warning and despair.
"I want people to respond and to be aware that if a goody-two-shoes like me can have all of this going on her head, then nobody's safe," she said in 2000.
Unusual use of silhouettes
With the technique of the silhouette, which captures form and movement but banishes nuance, shading or facial expressions, Walker has found a way to place her wrath at a remove. It boils up, though, in the word works, such as the ferocious, unprintable "Letter From a Black Girl," which covers a whole wall at the Whitney. "Dear you hypocritical ... twerp," it begins, the prelude to a molten cascade of sarcasm and protest.
In a recent interview in The New Yorker, Walker discusses her own long-ago relationship with a white man she describes as "a sadist, a racist, a misogynist ... and, perhaps less credibly: Satan himself." That disturbingly confessional outburst resonates with her constant evocations of the sexual relationships between owner and slave that were a common feature of the plantation. In her inner life, she suggests, romance and racial politics can't be disentangled. They can only be reported on and analyzed in her furious art.
WHEN&WHERE: "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" through Feb. 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., Manhattan. For exhibition hours and admission prices call 800-WHITNEY (944-8639) or visit whitney.org.
Bounce back
