Please react to my letter to the Whitney on this post.
Hear excellent soundbites from Howardeena Pindell here.
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.
22 comments:
Hi Christopher, I hope you don't mind me to ask what you mean when you say "To silence a simple blog comment, as you've done with my previous post is..." on the Withney's respond page. Did they delete your first comment? I'm studing how museums handle controversial response to their exhibitions. I would really appreciate your replay, since as a Caucasian foreigner I'm trying to understand american society issues.
Hi serena,
Yes, the post with the quotes from other artists was my first comment on the Whitney forum (even though it appears as the second one). I called the Whitney and asked why they didn't post it. Their response was that they would not allow political discussion on their blog, but were simply trying to capture personal reactions... I think this was a disingenuous policy and am glad they finally saw the error in their ways after I submitted my second post...
I CELEBRATE Kara Walker's transgressivity and subversion, which must be working since so many privileged people of color and noncolor wish to censor her and erase her art. These privileged people are shocked when Kara undermines their rigid assumptions. Great art disturbs, and Kara's art will live forever, while the attempts at erasure BY the privileged people of color and noncolor will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
HI! I'M ALLAH BELOW! IT'S SOOO COOOL BEING ME...
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TO THE RADICAL ISLAMISTS & THE PROGRESSIVES WHO SUPPORT THEM--NOW THAT I'VE PICTORIALLY REPRESENTED YOUR gOD, ARE YOU GOING TO KILL ME IN THE NAME OF SENSITIVITY & TOLERANCE? IS THIS SPEECH A HATE CRIME?--i.e., SPEECH WITH WHICH YOU DISAGREE?
Man, why, after spending all this time and effort and energy on this project, can you fail to realize what has happened -- Kara Walker's work has inspired you in exactly the way she means it to. THE WORK IS FOR YOU! If art gets you this riled up and passionate and pushes you to such heights of fury, how could it be bad? Or do you have similar sites targeting Matthew Barney and John Currin?
Matthew Barney and John Currin don't go out of their way to portray black people in a dehumanizing manner. One of the central questions for this country today is: Was slavery justified or is it alright that justice was never served for this atrocity, was it even an atrocity or were the rationalizations for it essentially correct. In other words, are blacks really human and deserving as respect? For a black artist to turn around and state that blacks somehow asked for it or that we were the ultimate benefactors of chattel slavery is beyond perverse.
I speak as an African-American woman and I love Kara Walker's work. I'm a little shocked by her comment that "All black people in America want to be slaves a little bit." Personally I try to never use the word "all" in reference to any group of people but that's just me. I think it reflects how disturbingly twisted and long lasting the effects of slavery have been on psyches of black people, the idea that you love what you hate the most, and possibly even touching on the idea of servitude and the underlying human desire to serve one another and work together, something beautiful in its unmanipulated state. I could be entirely wrong.
While her images may be dehumanizing, the entire period of slavery and its impact on American and global society have been just that so how could they be anything but? To have these images being recreated by a black woman and shown in a peversely dainty way, I think she is using irony to entice black and white americans to deal with the horrific and to keep looking. To see the disfigurement, the hatred, the pain that was forcibly imposed and she chooses to regurgitate.
I think she is confronting white supremacy by saying that if this is supremacy, it is only supremely bestial, there everyone, look at the beast. Now do you feel sorry for him, do you hate him, what do you do with him? And of course, there is his prey. But because we are not just animals, nor do we all think or react alike, the issues further and further complicate themselves, but our reactions reveal our own fears, stereotypes, and fantasies.
The fact that people's responses are so emotional shows that her work is doing the job of digging up and recreating, recontextualizing and forcing people to remember, to question, to answer and to think about it some more, all while being seduced by the romantic American nightmare. Undoubtedly some people will take pleasure in these images and I believe she wants the peversion to be revealed, hopefully to themselves, but whether they confront it on their own or it is perceived and recognized by others,is out of her control, the revelation is the goal.
Holland Carter's quote about "Her blacks don't resist aggression, or at least not in obvious ways..." seems as if HE is blaming blacks for their situation. Isn't survival in the midst of genocide aggressive enough? That's like blaming a woman being raped at gunpoint for the attacker's desire to possess and abuse her, and for not having a gun, or overpowering him, or not killing herself instead of being raped. Enough of the blaming. Deal with the issue, the crime and the circumstances which made it possible, including the culture that encouraged the rapist's sense of entitlement, and then help the woman to heal.
The "blackness" she debases is the blackness that was created as a result of white supremacism and its need to define and objectify. This concept has developed in light of and in response to that mindset. Alot of this criticism seems to reinforce the pervasiveness of white supremacy and the fear of dealing with this nation's racist history other than in scripted ways of proving the humanity and equality of African-Americans. What is a "full-critique" of white supremacy?
The irony is not a cop-out, it's a slap in the face and i think it's successful. Slavery was horrible. It was tragic. And it's not over. I'd like to know what you would consider a "...heightened reality of American slavery..."?
By no means is Kara Walker the end-all, be all, know-it-all authorian on blackness, black art, race relations, diversity education or American history but does she have to be, just because she's an African-American female artist choosing to tackle an enormously complex and taboo issue in American society and history? I think it's current, introspective, raw yet refined, and is creating a great dialogue. She, like everyone else, is entitled to her own views and should be free to express and explore them in the way she chooses, otherwise, we're all still slaves. I think we should be congratulating her for her bravery and what must be exhausting process of art-making.
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THAT shit is very ugly. It amazes me that his stuff (Kara White) has people up in arms or is even shown at the Whitney. I'm in the South, so I never knew about this person and her "work." It neither uplifts or amazes. It's purely boring. Some of it seems sexually odd, but nothing I would waste my time or money seeing. I am remind of a quote by Banksy: Museum art is so boring (or something like that).
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