Race
From CT4CT: Creative Tools for Critical Times
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Projects
It would be nice to do something political
Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens' It would be nice to do something political (2002-2007) was originally produced in 2002 and was shown in various cities including Venice during the 2007 Biennale. Taking the form of a billboard advertisement behind a larger store front window, the piece features glossy portraits of the artists posing seductively. Less apparent is the ongoing presence of an African-immigrant worker continuously cleaning the glass. The work can be understood as a commentary on contemporary European life and immigration policies where former colonial subjects who are lucky enough to be granted residence in the old world are required to continue serving their European masters by doing the manual labor jobs that no else wants to do.
According to Goksøyr & Martens:
It would be nice to do something political is a performance presented in a window display. Goksøyr & Martens is exhibiting a single poster, which has the same dimensions as the window, and is mounted directly behind the plate glass. The poster shows a close-up on Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens. The artists are depicted in conversation, with the following dialogue printed on the photograph; Goksøyr: "It would be nice to do something important." Martens: "Something political?" Outside a window cleaner is located. This is a man originally from an African country. He is cleaning the window continuously each day throughout the duration of the exhibition.
See also:
- Goksøyr & Martens
- Lacanian Ink: Toril Goksøyr and Camilla Martens
- Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Mining The Museum
In 2003 Fred Wilson was invited to transform the Maryland Historical Society's museum in Baltimore. Making use of the artwork at hand, Wilson acted as a curator illuminating the latent institutional racism existing within today's museums through manipulating the order and arrangement of the art. He strategically juxtaposed specific artifacts next to one another to challenge peoples perceptions of the artifacts' meaning. He previously had completed similar works creating "mock museums" during the 1980's which highlighted museums reinforcement of racist behaviors. Wilson also worked as a free lance museum educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Crafts Museum as well as the Natural History Museum.
According to Judith E. Stein:
Given the run of the venerable museum, Wilson acted as an artist/curator, using the collection's historical artifacts as his raw materials. His purpose was to raise our awareness of institutionalized racism, making visible the subtle and insidious ways these attitudes affect the decisions museums make about what to collect and how to display it...By titling his installation "Mining the Museum," the artist sowed a three-way pun: excavating the collections to extract the covert presence of racial minorities; planting emotionally explosive historical material to raise consciousness and effect institutional change; and, finding reflections of himself within the museum.
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 [1]. 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:
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:
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 [2]:
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 [3]:
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 [4]:
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
Speak of Me as I Am
Fred Wilson's Speak of Me as I Am was created specifically for the 2003 Venice Biennale. The work included a Senegalese vendor selling faux designer handbags created by Wilson, carved wooden "blackamoors", a 7 minute clip of othello looped backwards, and a black, 17th Century glass Chandelier.
According to Barbara Pollack:
"It's one thing if you are doing an exhibition somewhere in Europe," says Wilson, "It's another whole thing if you are doing an exhibition where the pavilion says right across the outside 'The United States of America.' " For Venice, Wilson created a mini-museum in one of the pavilion's four rooms with works by Tiepolo and others loaned by local Old Master dealers, and mannequins depicting figures from more famous paintings in the Academe, all featuring black characters from the 14th through the 16th centuries. Arias from Verdi's Otello drift in from an adjoining room, where four monitors play footage of staged performances of the opera. Wilson is intrigued by the predominance of black fictional characters that have filtered into European art, due primarily to the cosmopolitan culture of Venice in this period. Yet, like Othello—perhaps the most famous black character in Western literature, but too often played by white performers in blackface—the darker-skinned residents of this region are still treated as intruders, a specious stereotype that re-emerged in the recent Italian elections.
According to Wikipedia
Fred Wilson, an African-American sculptor, displayed an installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale that incorporated blackamoors. Wilson placed wooden blackamoors carrying acetylene torches and fire extinguishers. Wilson noted that such figures are so common in Venice that few people notice them. He said,"They are in hotels everywhere in Venice...which is great, because all of a sudden you see them everywhere. I wanted it to be visible, this whole world which sort of just blew up for me."
