A Critique of Kara Walker’s new Whitney Museum
exhibition “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”
11/19/07
Even though I’m not an artist or in any way connected
with the art world, I’m very glad to have had the opportunity to hear Howardena Pindell talk about the
ongoing racism in American art institutions at the Here and Now: African and
African-American Art and Film Conference at NYU this past weekend. There, she referenced her 1997 N.Paradoxa paper (with a 2007 postscript) detailing her
criticisms of Walker’s
art and its place within the larger framework of and disparities within
institutionalized support of black artists. ///
Also, please check out the ArtConversation forum to find a very interesting
response where someone calls Walker the “last living American slave
owner”… /// Also, feel free to follow conversations about her work
on Keith Boykin’s
message board and the POC Craigslist forum…
10/30/07
Please check out this video on Walker’s work on the NY Sun website. Excellent soundbites
from Howardena Pindell who
was one of the black artists who protested Walker’s work in the late
‘90s.
____________________________________________________________
10/25/07
Recently, I visited the Kara Walker exhibition at the
Whitney “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love”. What I saw disturbed me.
I left my thoughts on the “Respond”
blog for the exhibition’s
website…
Thank you Whitney for finally not censoring my posts.
I’m leaving copies of the comments here as well… Continue the discussion over on my blogspot
page…
Why do I care? Because I have no choice. Because I’m
tired of being degraded and having my social existence circumscribed by the
psychological terms of whiteness.
I’m doing this for my own sanity. Walker’s
work demands conversation.
Let’s talk y’all.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(second comment post to
“Respond” blog)
As an African-American man under 30, my personal reaction to
Kara Walker’s work is one of absolute disgust. As this work ultimately
has direct multiple effects on my life, I believe the
Whitney should allow for my voice to be heard and to print this critique. To
silence a simple blog comment, as you’ve done
with my previous post, is to render me as one of Walker’s two-dimensional
shadows, trapped within the nightmarish psychosis of white supremacist
projections of blackness currently displayed on the Whitney’s walls,
completely raped of any connection to the historical humanity of the slaves
Walker absolutely betrays. In almost every review of her work, all mention of
protest is characterized as the byproduct of a generation gap, between
now-fusty ’60s era social politics and the balanced reason of today’s
youth. Well, I am here to tell you that, unlike Allison Saar
(Betye Saar’s
daughter who supports the work), I personally believe
Kara’s work carefully situates itself within the post-Civil Rights
backlash against racial equality. It’s a trickbag,
occasionally adopting the rhetoric of “exposing” stereotypes for
the sake of social justice, while at the same time further perverting these
stereotypes for the tacit amusement of the predominantly white art
establishment.
Walker’s
following is informed by several layers of conscious and subconscious
reactions, aversions, collusions, interactions with her artwork. Her works
offer many a somewhat safe vehicle to experience the grotesquery of American
slavery while several comfortable notions of black humanity are left untouched.
In a way, her works reaffirm the whiteness of her white spectators against the
black projections of white-derived fantasy on the wall. Her pieces position a
relationship between spectator and caricature, falsely presenting the spectre of white racial psychosis as the obscured truth for
the authentic betrayed historical reality, the depths of which most Americans
do not wish to fully confront given the lack of recognition in the relevance of
the American slavery reparations movement! In the end, the pieces do not
subvert white supremacist fantasies of blackness. The pieces allow for a sort
of “ironic” front which offers a sort of pretend resistence but in fact submits to the hegemony of American
race relations. A pretend compassion for the deeply Human suffering
of blacks in America
which informed Wolf Blitzer’s “so poor, so black” statement
in the wake of Katrina. A conscious national narrative
which posits the equality of opportunity but a subconscious that degrades black
humanity as a justification for ongoing massive inequalities in incarceration,
education and the workforce and the white privilege that results from being on
the positive side of the equation. A subconscious brought into full view
on the Harvard IAT test which states that most participants demonstrate a
“moderate to strong preference for white over black.” Mostly
informed by the continually perpetuating antebellum-era stereotypes Kara Walker
depicts, but ultimately palliates for the white subconscious. Is this why her
work is lauded as “not being preachy”?
As work like this becomes socially sanctioned by
institutions of high culture such as the Whitney and artists such as Kara grow
in clout, while it may have been temporarily taboo to display mammy dolls and
lawn jockeys, it again becomes socially sanctioned to display art with
“ironic” but blatent stereotypes in
galleries, corporations, the homes of the social, cultural, economic and
political elite.
Yes, art can be a form of resistence
but Kara’s work is anything but. In fact, Walker professes a sort of love affair with
white supremacy, both personally and in her work. After all, her show is
entitled “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My
Love”. She has made statements such as “I believe the problem with
racism in America is that we secretly enjoy it, where would we be without the
’struggle’” and “All black people in America want to be
slaves a little bit”. She professes a masochistic submission to white men
in the “Notes of a Negress” accompanying
the work “Why I Like White Boys”. As Holland Carter of the New
York Times wrote in 2003: “Her blacks don’t resist aggression, or
at least not in obvious ways. They seem to give in to it, let themselves be
abjectly used, often by one another.” If this is resistence,
please tell me when I’m dead. Kara’s work panders to a covert
liberal racism which adopts fashionable social posturing but lacks any sort of
progressive substance. And even among well-intentioned white liberals,
whiteness (which by origin and definition is synonymous with the ideology of
white supremacy and is naturally defined in opposition to
“blackness”) remains in the center of their identities and social
experience. As well-intentioned Helen was in her social politics, when the Klan
made her put mud on her face I can’t help but wonder whether some of the
shame was in temporarily internalizing not so much the humiliation of having to
put mud on her face but rather having to temprarily
internalize any degradation she might have subconsciously believed to be
inherent in the idea of blackness alone. The fact that most Americans show this
internalization of racialist beliefs is demonstrated on the Harvard Implicit
Association Test (IAT). In reality, noone who can
identify with the experience of being white in America can truly claim to be
colorblind as his or her identity is built on the ontological opposite. And
even for the most well-meaning white liberal, Kara’s work panders to this
subconscious. As this white supremacist subconscious is deeply rooted in all
Americans, Walker’s
work does not subvert the white supremacist imagination of blackness but rather
re-presents it in the tangible here-and-now, bows to its hegomonic
force and makes offerings of eagerly copulating slavewomen,
debased pickaninnies and confused buckcoons.
I have a problem with Walker’s
so-called irony. Is irony a copout? Esp. when the irony is positioned on the
authenticity of white supremacy (”irony” caters to an open reading
by all racial ideologies) and within the compliance of black women in their
continued rape by slavemasters?
Walker’s work disturbs me because while it does
present a horrifying, grotesque, epic vision of this country’s foundation
it simultaneously hints that it is all ok, that blacks are just as complicit as
whites and that these horrors were somehow, in part, self-extracted. She
presents this racialized psychosexual fantasy as an
obscured reality /shadows on the wall/, as the (subhuman) raw material blacks
are truly made of.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(original comment post to
“Respond” blog, this one was censored for
24 hours and only posted after they received the above second comment)
"I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting
and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and
children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the
white art establishment."
--Betye Saar,
African American artist
"What is troubling and complicates the matter is that
Walker's words in published interviews mock African Americans and
Africans...She has said things such as 'All black people in America want to be
slaves a little bit.'...Walker
consciously or unconsciously seems to be catering to the bestial fantasies
about blacks created by white supremacy and racism."
--Howardena Pindell,
African American artist, at the Johannesburg Biennale, October 1997.
All black people in America want to be slaves a little
bit.
--Kara Walker, as quoted by Jerry Saltz
in a 1996 FlashArt piece
Her blacks don't resist aggression, or at least not in
obvious ways. They seem to give in to it, let themselves be abjectly used,
often by one another.
--2003 NYT article by Holland Carter
Kara Walker is not presenting a heightened reality of
American slavery. Blackness is a
concept that Kara Walker objectively debases. These images are visualizations of what
Toni Morrison describes as the white subconscious Playing
in the Dark. As such, they are a
reflection of the psychosis of white supremacy. However, it is not a full critique of
this mindset and may in fact justify this mindset. It is my opinion that she rationalizes
and projects in her work, the psychosis of the white male mindset, without the
guilt, in fact with total acceptence.