First appeared in the Boston Globe
By Harvey Blume
THE CURRENT DIVERGENCE of opinion about African-American
artist Kara Walker dates back at least to 1997, when, at the age of 28, she won
a MacArthur "genius" award for work with what she calls the
"second-class" medium of silhouettes, a medium that in the 19th
century was reserved primarily for women and children. Some compare Walker's
silhouettes (and, more recently, gouaches and video) to Goya--others refer to
Uncle Tom. Cultural conservatives scorn her as just the sort of politically
correct, aesthetically negligible poseur the art market loves.
There's certainly enough variation on themes of race, rape,
and violence in her silhouettes--one, called "Middle Passage," shows
a slave sodomized by a slave ship--to justify all kinds of response. To further
complicate matters, there's Walker's unfailing elegance. As soon as you give up
the peculiar struggle to derive literal meanings from her images and let yourself
respond to them visually, you feel their grace and symmetry, and wonder how and
why atrocity can be made so easy on the eye.
Walker grew up in the multicultural milieu of Stockton,
Calif., but moved to Atlanta as a teen where she felt herself "being
thrust into [the] history" of race, and resolved to be a "bearer of
some truth" about it.
Walker is tall, relaxed, and articulate, as I found when we
got together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to talk about her current show,
"After the Deluge" (through July 30). Taking up themes related to
Hurricane Katrina, the show juxtaposes her work with pieces she picked from the
museum's collection.
Walker is so soft-spoken I worried that my tape recorder
would miss her chuckles--analog to the sly humor of her work--and the nuances
of her commentary as we strolled the gallery.
We focused, for a while, on a text piece she did when she
felt that her images were becoming "too easily digestible," too
readily "absorbed into the American metabolism." The text, typed on
note cards, expresses rage--then rage against the fact of rage. It rants about
whites, then just as energetically about being antiwhite, before concluding
with the line: "I forget what I was saying." Walker said the piece
"swallowed itself" before resolving into something "unfailingly
polite."
But unfailing civility didn't stop her from saying she just
"might strangle" me if I was gearing up to ask one of the questions
that most annoy her: why most of her imagery pertains to slavery, rather the
present. Warily, I asked it.
. . .
WALKER: You're asking if I'm going to update the
stereotypes? Move from the antebellum? I have moved from the antebellum. I go
back and forth.
IDEAS: But do you work with images that are obviously
today's images?
WALKER: Why ask? I don't think of these works as living in
the past. They're responding to right now. I haven't felt the need to
hip-hopify anything.
Look at this piece at the far end, "Entrance to the
Underground Railroad" [a gouache depicting what could be a smoldering
entrance to the underworld]. How is this not up to date?
IDEAS: You've said Americans have "a fear of what
happens when [racism] is overcome." It's an amazing suggestion that we
cling to racism, that we'd miss it.
WALKER: It's informed so much of American culture, and keeps
doubling back on itself.
IDEAS: Is there a way out?
WALKER: I don't know if there's a way out. In some ways art
can be a way out. Or it can be just another set of traps. I wonder if we're
locked into restating certain things because of a tradition that's already been
established.
IDEAS: How do you contend with that?
WALKER: By wrestling with the effects of that recycling.
How, for example, does it limit a black woman's agency if she can only speak in
terms of rape and abuse, over and over again. Where does she insert her own
voice?
IDEAS: Do you personally do it as an artist?
WALKER: I don't know. It's a construct. One set of
parameters has to do with rape and abuse, another set with pride and anger.
Both constructs predate me and become my point of entry. Not the actual
experience of being a black woman, but the experience of those constructs.
IDEAS: Is there a precise moment when you got into
silhouettes?
WALKER: A huge moment at the Rhode Island School of Design.
I'd been looking at a lot of early American art, thinking about
self-definition, what it was for a group to define itself against, say, Europe.
Silhouettes kept coming up, but didn't make sense until I brought in thoughts
about black self-image, the performance of blackness, gender, masking, passing,
pretending, physiognomy, and race sciences...
IDEAS: Silhouettes in race science?
WALKER: Just the profile, and the idea of gleaning so much
information from a detail. It also came from the direction of art making, and
the recognition that I wasn't going to make paintings.
IDEAS: Your father, Larry Walker, is a well-known abstract
painter, so you just couldn't go that way?
WALKER: There were reasons that had nothing to do with my
Dad, and everything to do with my confidence about painting what I wanted to
paint.
So I demoted myself to making a kind of art that enjoyed
second-class status, and lets you effectively thumb your nose at whatever
thinks it is first class, including those large oil paintings I was trying to
make.
IDEAS: I think of your art as touching on politics and
pornography.
WALKER: It refers to and is very ambivalent about both.
IDEAS: A third reference point is outsider art. Your
training makes you anything but an outsider. But you're completely self-taught
when it comes to your medium.
WALKER: What I relate to in outsider art is the urgency to
tell the tale, to reveal something no one else is seeing. Compared to high or
fine art, you have an earnestness or passion that will not be tempered by the
right thing to do, the right move to make.
IDEAS: Don't your silhouettes refer, as well, to black face
and minstrel shows?
WALKER: There's a funny place in the minstrel show parallel
to the work of an artist, particularly in black performers blackening up and
relating to that constructed image of constructed blackness. To whom is it
entertaining? Where is this fuzzy location where pride and humiliation come
together?
IDEAS: Look at that piece [a silhouette of a black woman
holding up a reptilian child.] You don't have to worry about that being easily
understood.
WALKER: That's reassuring.
IDEAS: There's a black woman...
WALKER: That's an assumption! Keep in mind they're images,
not men, boys, or girls. We're looking at pictures that respond to other
pictures, rather than the actual thing.
IDEAS: OK. But what would you say if I asked you tell me
about it?
WALKER: I'd say I already told you about it by making it. I
was referring to certain images, the gator-babe, the black child who's
forgotten.
What would you say to the tape recorder if you had to
describe it?
IDEAS: I'd say your work tempts people to "read"
it for meanings.
WALKER: I hope it also slips them up.
Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge.
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