Kara Walker
- Noah Simblist -
Kara Walker, Negress Notes, 1995; collage, ink, gouache, pencil, watercolor on paper; 20 sheets; hanging dimensions variable; collection of Ellen and Richard Sandor; courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Darkytown Rebellion, 2001; projection, cut paper, adhesive on wall; 14 x 37 feet overall; collection Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
As one would expect, an exhibition surveying over ten years of Kara Walker’s engagement with slavery and the subsequent history of racism in America is layered with imagery that slides between the bizarre, the imagined and the horrifically real. Further, Walker’s work explodes notions of race into larger questions of power and the function of abject violence and eroticism as mediators between the self and the other.
Aside from the cutout paper pieces for which Walker is known, the exhibition includes small watercolors, paintings on canvas, overhead projection, video and wall text. These media inform one another, revealing the interplay between material exploration and the construction of a narrative. For instance, In Darkytown Rebellion, pools of colored light projected over cutouts cause the stark edges of black figures on white walls to diffuse, enveloping them in an atmospheric dreamscape. Viewers are ensnared by projected light, their own shifting shadows overlapping with the narrative that unfolds on the wall. One might think that the ephemeral nature of Walker’s work is limited to installations with light or video, but her interest in the transitory extends to her cutout murals, which are destroyed after each exhibition. It is here that we can see the influence of Sol LeWitt, who approached murals with a similar disinterest in monumental permanence. Walker’s cutouts temporarily infect the architecture, surrounding and forcing us to realize a subjective and complicit relationship to a racist narrative.
In the catalogue, which functions as a scholarly extension of the exhibition, curator Philippe Vergne describes Walker’s practice as a kind of institutional critique. But rather than focusing on the institution as a totem to be directly attacked, Walker tracks vectors of power by employing a truly deconstructive approach. She engages the museum and the titans of the Western modern-art canon and then slyly subverts their hold on the “truth” and the production of history. In particular, Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress addresses the objectifying gaze of European colonialist primitivism as explored by Brancusi, Picasso and Matisse. It is this direct reference that links Walker’s paper pieces to Matisse’s cutouts, charting both the history of art and the history of slavery as a nexus between Africa, Europe and the Americas.
Much of Walker’s work is shocking. Both her words and images slice through repressed knowledge and desire. The anxiety that one experiences when confronted with this work is akin to the vulnerability we feel as the wall between conscious and unconscious perception peels away. Like the unconscious sense of the real, art worlds allow for time and autonomous subjectivities to conflate—to pass and pose as one another. This slippage of time and clearly defined boundaries between personages is especially common in relation to trauma—both personal and collective—as it acts as a kind of healing. The power of the dystopian nightmare that is slavery will never fade with time; it is lodged in the consciousness of our culture. But by actively engaging the tropes of racism and misogyny, Walker takes hold of this history and fashions it into a world in which she is the master.
Noah Simblist is an artist and writer based in Dallas.