At Any Age, Walker Still Packs a Punch

On Wednesday, a docent from the Whitney Museum of American Art spoke to a group of wide-eyed high-school students at the new Kara Walker show. They were in front of the piece Gone; An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, which contains Walker’s signature shocking imagery: a young black girl going down on a young white boy; a black woman birthing dead fetuses to the ground; a white girl concealing a black slave beneath the folds of her hoop skirt. All of these figures are rendered lovingly in delicate black paper silhouettes, like the negative reel from a Disney film. The docent asked the kids, sitting cross-legged in front of her, to weigh in on the artist’s use of a cartoon-like style. “I think she’s saying something about how we don’t take this subject seriously,” ventured one bespectacled girl. Another classmate added, “Cartoons are something people are used to seeing and enjoy looking at.” “Exactly,” interjected the docent, “she draws you in and then she punches you in the face.”

Kara Walker is mad at you. Not because you’re white; or black or green or any other color. It’s 2007, and most people are satisfied with the current discourse on the legacy of slavery. But according to Walker, the story is more complicated than most of us have come to terms with. No one’s confronting it, and it pisses her off. And so, this new show demands a lot from its viewers—it doesn’t let you wander through, hands clasped behind back, to admire the artist’s aesthetic skill and reflect mournfully or angrily on the plantation system. Instead, it pushes you around a bit, pulls you into its overblown narrative, and waits to see if your eyes open any wider.

There’s no question that Walker’s art engenders a feeling of discomfort. Her racial types are identified by unsettlingly overt sterotypes: black women with swollen lips who are all breast and behind; white men with neat little noses and small penises; well-endowed black men chomping on fried chicken drumsticks. They’re the kind of archetypes you don’t want to admit you recognize. Walker then animates these characters through intercourse that is Dante-like in its gross violence. She takes the imagery to the next level by placing it in familiar contexts that are essentially perversions: in one video, we watch Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox lynch three black men to the tune of Oklahoma’s “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” It’s a lot to take in. As I made my way around the gallery, I watched an older lady stand up and walk out of a film that showed a young black girl fellating the corpse of a lynched white man. Later, an artsy-looking young girl strolling through the show turned to her boyfriend with a confused grimace to say, “I’m not a big fan of this floor.” The only spectators who looked truly at ease were two women, dressed like corporate buyers, who walked deliberately through the rooms, chatting about the complexities of moving the paper cutouts from private collections to the exhibition space.

And its not just gallery-touring white ladies who have trouble swallowing Walker’s work. In 1997, black artist Betye Saar started a petition in opposition to Walker, decrying the betrayal of African Americans “under the guise of art.” Saar, who was interested in the empowerment of the African American stereotype, felt that Walker was exploiting them.

While it seems fairly clear that Walker is using racist imagery intellectually and not derogatorily, it is her goal to be offensive, or at least unsettling. In an ongoing dialogue with the viewer, carried out through wall-texts, Walker comments, “Perhaps it is time to do away with pictures of things which engage our pleasure centers, before trying to destroy them.” And Walker has a nuanced definition of what constitutes a pleasurable image. She preempts a general desire on the part of the masses to see white people depicted negatively and black people depicted positively. This is a fixation on the same old story—it is comfortable and frustratingly incomplete. So Walker shows us scads of images involving white people exploiting black people, but she also imagines scenes in which blacks turn whites into slaves. One small cutout shows two black women throttling each other.

Walker drives this point home through the overriding theme—both underlying and overt—of sexual and romantic love. There are plenty of scenes of white people forcing themselves on black people, but also scenes in which slaves willingly engage in sexual acts with white masters. The complexity of this relationship is spelled out in the title of the exhibition: “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.” It’s as if to say love exists in spite of race, but doesn’t obscure it. The result is that love creates, because it implies agency and complicates notions of complicity, victimization, and exploitation.

Walker isn’t subtle, but she’s not easy to pick apart, either. Ultimately, nobody’s role in this story is clear. She’s presciently aware of how people are inclined to think about art that deals with gender and race, and she won’t let you slip out of her show without re-evaluating superficial impressions. On another wall-text she writes, in a tone that is thick with sarcasm, “It’s always of great interest to the public to hear a black woman ‘speak her mind’.” More importantly, Walker wants to remind you that the legacy of slavery and racism is alive and well and you’re playing an active part in the series of events. At one point, you walk through a room with silhouettes projected on the walls. As you look at them, you pass in front of the projectors—scattered across the floor—and see your own silhouette integrated slide into focus amidst the chaos.