I just finished a New Yorker article on the artist Kara Walker who does these amazing installation pieces that are made entirely of silhouettes and depict the antebellum south, slavery, etc, but in an imaginative, crazy, sexual way. It sounds amazing. She has a retrospective up at the Whitney now that I can't wait to see. The article talked about her sexuality and her identity as a black women and how she got bashed in the culture wars. I am thinking of using it in my class on the body that I will be teaching in January.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
New Yorker article on Kara Walker
I just finished a New Yorker article on the artist Kara Walker who does these amazing installation pieces that are made entirely of silhouettes and depict the antebellum south, slavery, etc, but in an imaginative, crazy, sexual way. It sounds amazing. She has a retrospective up at the Whitney now that I can't wait to see. The article talked about her sexuality and her identity as a black women and how she got bashed in the culture wars. I am thinking of using it in my class on the body that I will be teaching in January.
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"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.
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