I should declare that I am the descendant of enslaved people. Yet another option: she is exorcising the demons that, after all, only really exist in a twisted imagination. Is the purpose here to critique the representations and expose their currency? Or is Walker just blowing things up for the hell of it? Is Walker an evil puppet-master using the silhouettes or the overblown sculptures as proxies to express the very worst of humanity - or is she using them as decoys? I've been called many things, but visually illiterate? That I won't cop. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, has written: "No one could mistake the images of Kara Walker … as realistic images! Only the visually illiterate could mistake their post-modern critiques for realistic portrayals." Whether it titillates white audiences I can't say, but Kara Walker's art provokes and disturbs me: I feel viscerally about the bizarre or traumatic scenarios and sexually sadistic fantasies that she conjures, although I shouldn't.Īfter all, as Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, from the W. Walker told ABC RN’s The Art Show: “My work draws on a lot of pre-existing narratives of identity formulation and looks at the mythologies and stereotypes within those.” ( Supplied: Ari Marcopoulos) (There was something quite prescient about this comment, made two days before the death of the Queen). " eating some sugar, or participating in some way - going to Buckingham Palace looking at the emblems even as you're critiquing the emblems of power sort of being a little bit in awe of the Godawful audacity of it, the grandiloquent show-off-iness of it." "I feel like part of the project and the problem of my work - and maybe the problem of receiving the work - is that it kind of exposes us to our culpability in some ways, even as people of colour," Walker told me during our interview from her studio in Brooklyn. "Because, I think, my works are sort of big and histrionic, in some ways it elicits big and histrionic responses." A complex personal response It raised a lot of hackles," Walker admits. The artwork's extended title was explicit: "an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."Īpproximately 130,000 visitors saw the temporary artwork before it was destroyed, and many of them Instagrammed the encounter. Visitors to A Subtlety were encouraged to share photos of the artwork using the #karawalkerdomino hashtag. "he trouble with being an artist, in a way, is that the stories, the images, the sort of mythologies that exist, that were created at the expense of other human beings - I'm not just talking about fictions but also narratives written by formerly enslaved people - all of these things join into this big pot of cultural influence, big reservoir of information and feeling," she says. It's a criticism that Walker rejects, although she acknowledges that there are risks in working with such fraught, culturally loaded imagery. Walker has also enjoyed a rare degree of critical success given the subject matter - not to mention the corresponding sales of her artwork.Īt the same time, she's been accused by her peers of reactivating tropes and archetypes for the titillation of white audiences - rather than deploying them as mere devices to critique contemporary forms of racism. ( Supplied: Getty Images/Tristan Fewings) A tall ship not unlike those used to transport slaves is moored off the coast of a fictional land, while on the shore a naked, presumably African woman - chained by her neck with an anchor - clasps her hands as if pleading for release.įons Americanus (2019) is inspired by Buckingham Palace's Victoria Memorial. The other work now in the national collection, Your World Is About To Change is a monumental drawing in four panels, completed in 2019. The story unfolds over eight minutes, during which a female slave avenges her sexual exploitation by lynching the slave-owner, but not before penetrating him with a broomstick. In Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, Walker's silhouettes become shadow puppets which the artist herself manipulates. In a bold curatorial move, the National Gallery of Australia recently acquired two works by Walker (their first acquisition of the artist): a multi-panel drawing and a seminal 2004 film, both currently on display. Walker is one of the most important artists working in America today.
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