Kara Walker
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
Kara Walker (b. 1969) is primarily known for her room-size paper-cut silhouettes which confront the struggles for power--representational, racial, sexual, political power in U.S. culture, past and present.
This technique, which became popular among the French aristocracy of late 18th century and was later a pervasive feature of carnivals and fairs, marries high and low art to the 18th-century phenomenon of physiognomy, a pseudo-science claiming that one’s character and intelligence were inscribed on one's physical features. This reduction of human beings to their appearance presented Walker with a tool from which to deploy other characterizations found in the history of racial representation.
For Walker, the simplified details of a human form in the black cut-outs seem cartoonish, and resonate with racial stereotypes, reductions of actual human beings.
Holland Cotter of the New York Times [1] describes Walker's works as dances of violence and sexual power played out in delicate black and white, a dance that offers a biting critique of race relations:
History remains this weird, tragic vaudeville show, a free-for-all shootout with everyone gunning for every one else. Some people will object to this as too open-ended a view: art should give answers, yes or no, bring closure. Others will find Ms. Walker’s work too narrow: same themes, same images tweaked from piece to piece, show to show. . . In refusing conclusions, Ms. Walker draws an important one: The source and blame for racism lies with everyone, including herself. It seems we are addicted to it. We claim to hate living with it, but we cannot live without it.
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Artistic Projects
Slavery! Slavery!
Kara Walker's Slavery! Slavery! (1997) is an 85 foot-long, 360-degree panoramic installation of black silhouettes on a white wall. Curated by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the cyclorama, depicts representational tropes of the Antebellum South that are both racialized and sexualized.
The form itself also references this era the cyclorama is a proto-cinematic genre of painting that was popular in the 19th century. It invites visitors to move within the piece, setting the images into action and creating the illusion of depth and animation. Walker wanted to create a space where viewers felt they were part of the scene, a scene that had no beginning and no end. One may connect this un-ending narrative to the history of race in America, a history of struggle which seems fraught and never-ending.
According to Walker:
Slavery! Slavery! was the first time that I had a completely circular space to surround the viewer and kind of build a narrative that doesn't actually start on the left. I didn't want for it to be read from left to right like the pieces that were on a flat wall.
See also:
No Mere Words Can Adequately Reflect the Remorse This Negress Feels
Kara Walker's No Mere Words Can Adequately Reflect the Remorse This Negress Feels (1999) is a 65 foot-long piece exhibited at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California (now the California College of Art). With a grey background and mostly black silhouettes, it is a dark piece visually, as well as thematically. She describes it as a comment on a "deranged set of circumstances" concerning slavery, apartheid, lynchings, Jim Crow Laws, as well as the representational history of these circumstances [2]. But it is also about beauty and visuality; three figures on the left-hand side are blind and a group of white swans, symbols of beauty float in the center of the piece. The swans, however, have been decapitated and in their place rest the silhouettes of small, caricatures of African American heads.
According to UCLA's Hammer Museum:
Using paper cut-out silhouettes, Walker creates provocative narrative tableaux that explore the legacies of slavery, plantation life, African-American character stereotypes, and other related subjects. Walker’s life-sized figures are imbued with a fictive life of their own, their epic scale inviting comparison both to history painting and to the cyclorama, a nineteenth-century circular panoramic device that surrounded viewers with painted scenes of significant historical events.
See also:
Darkytown Rebellion
Kara Walker's Darkytown Rebellion (2001) is a room-sized piece that combines the artist's signature silhouettes with color light projections. Adding yet another kind of shadow to her work, as viewers pass through the space their own shadow is cast upon the vibrant light projections which in turn are layered upon the black and white silhouettes. This new level of dimensionality has been understood as further implicating the viewer in the images of the artwork.
Walker herself has commented on this new intervention in her work [3]:
I knew for a while that I wanted to make a piece that tried to engage the space a little bit more directly than the pieces that are just cut paper on the wall. And I had been using the overhead projectors as a kind of a shadow-play tool. Not really as a tool for making the work—they’re usually hand-drawn. But I wanted to activate the space in a way and have these overhead projectors serve as a kind of stand-in for the viewer, as observers. And my thinking about the overhead projectors connected with my thinking about painting as far as creating an illusion of depth, but in a very mundane, flat, almost didactic way.
See also:
- National Public Radio, "Kara Walker Rattles Art World Again"
- Minnesota Public Radio, "Kara Walker's art traces the color line"
My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
Kara Walker's exhibit My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at the Walker Art Museum (2007) and the Whitney Museum (2007-2008) was a full-scale survey of the artist's work. The retrospective spanned thirteen rooms and included drawings, paintings, light projections, writings, film animations, and signature black-paper silhouettes.
According to Christian Viveros-Fauné of the The Village Voice [4]:
Few exhibitions are as important as Walker's array of formal elegance and cruel imagery currently at the Whitney. An achievement on the scale of the great art dramas (think Guernica or the cultural reach of Mexican muralism), Walker's capacious art addresses everyone—young and old, black and white, guilty-feeling and not— as ultimately sinning and sinned against.
The exhibit opened with Walker's piece, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994). Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine describes the piece [5]:
From left to right, a genteel white couple bends to kiss; a pickaninny offers a headless chicken to a topless black girl who floats on her back in water; a severed head of a white man looks at a young black girl on her knees performing fellatio on a white boy; a black girl lifts her leg as two babies drop out of her; a white man performs analingus on a black servant. Rising above this rotten bog of cruelty and desire is a full moon and a black figure with a grotesquely swollen penis.
This carnival of grotesquely racialized sexuality speaks to the darkest recesses of the American imaginary and is rendered bearable by the cartoon simplicity of the silhouette medium--a medium that self-consciously comments on its own reduction.
See also:
- The Whitney, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
- Walker Art Museum's Companion to the Exhibit
- New York Magazine, An Explosion of Color, in Black and White
- The Village Voice, Kara Walker's Thrilling Whitney Retrospective
