A Conversation with e2c about Kara Walker

I recently posted some quotes by other African-American artists about Kara Walker's work on SerenityLife's blog. The ensuing dialogue was very interesting and allowed me to further articulate my disgust with Kara Walker's work. I thought it would be interesting to recapture the dialogue here for anybody who happens to come across this blog and would like to respond.

I've edited SerenityLife's comment stream down to the essential strain:

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Christopher wrote:

"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.

Thanks again for letting me post my critique.
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e2c replied to Christopher’s comment:

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

BINGO!!!!! I'm not yelling, just being emphatic - because this is it, especially the part about "abjectly abused, often by one another."
Also, Betye Saar's comments hit home for me, because of the fact that so much of her work challenges stereotypes in a very effective way
(and she has been quite "in your face" at times, too).

When I did a Google image search on Kara Walker, I found some disturbing images of black children involved in what appeared to be sexual play (or fantasies of sexual play) with one another. There was a very intense dominant/submissive (as in sadism/masochism) element to these images... and that's something I find deeply disturbing about Walker's work. Sex and cruelty seem to go hand in hand most of the time in her assemblages, and it strikes me as painfully ironic. Maybe Walker is trying to be ironic; maybe she feels the only way to get them to be willing to face this is through painful confrontations.

If that's so, I hope that she is able to work out other ways of bringing that about.

As for the 1996 comment by her, I don't want to say anything without first reading it in context. It's so easy to twist what people say by using highly edited, selective quotes - and that might be the case here.

Good grief, I feel like Walker is on trial and I'm in the jury! And I'm not comfortable with any aspect of that notion....
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e2c replied to Christopher’s comment:

Re. the Walker quote, see this page, on the deliberate use of parody, irony and other forms of humor in Walker's work (http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/Main/Humor).

She definitely has some points, though she makes me VERY uncomfortable in talking about them - and I'm not sure if I can handle dealing with them on her terms, in her work.
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Christopher replied to e2c’s comment:

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? You are right in noting that much of her imagery presents a debaucherous fantasy about erotic exchange in the antebellum south, often with willing and nonresistive blacks. It's my personal opinion that she offers up these images to validate the psychosexual subconscious of her mainly white male patrons. I would parallel this aspect of her work with the television drama "Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal" which would ablate power dynamics and suggest that the love between 42yo Thomas and 15yo Sally, slavemaster and slave, to be free and willing. However Kara Walker seems to rejoice in the power dynamics of carnality between blacks and whites. In her online thesis, "Hype and Hypersexuality: Kara Walker, Her Work and Controversy", Erikka Searles writes about Walker's piece "Why I Like White Boys":

Walker comments on the personal phenomenon of White boys attraction to her in a set of journal-like thoughts typed hastily on index cards that are collected in Narratives of a Negress. “I’m easy,” she states. “…that is why white boys like me and black boys suspect me of liking white boys. [F]unny loop.” She describes herself as “a gash, like a swipe of black ink on plain paper.” She calls attention to the absence of the Black male in her work. But these facts, why white boys like her and why black ones do not, fail to answer the more interesting question: Why does Kara Walker prefer white boys? Walker hints at the answer, saying that White boys never try to play the role of big brother, that they think themselves either God or the Devil, and that they are in either case distant and often oscillate between those extremes.

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.
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e2c replied to Christopher’s comment:

Christopher, I can't help wondering about a lot of things re. Walker's work, especially her repetition of certain things. (To me, mostly perverse stuff, and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense - more like the people are using each other in a cruel way.)

I'm a woman, and am *intensely* uncomfortable with most of what she's presenting, but I'm not really convinced that the big buyers are white men with money. (I'd rather not go into why I think that, at least publicly.) I'm also very uncomfortable speculating on Walker's comments on her personal life. I'll just reiterate that I find Walker's work to be deeply disturbing on multiple levels that go far beyond the TV movie you mentioned. (Which was truly terrible, for all kinds of reasons!)
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Christopher replied to e2c’s comment:

As for patronage: In an WNYC interview with Helga Davis, Kara Walker states that the majority of her patrons are white. This still leaves the question of gender. However, as you don't need to be white in order to believe in white supremacy, you don't need to be male in order to support patriarchy and to feed into this fantasy of coersion/submission against the bodies of black slaves. bell hooks has described her use of the term white supremacy capitalist patriarchy "to evoke a political world we all frame ourselves in relationship to"...
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e2c replied to Christopher’s comment:

Yes, but the majority of *buyers* (individual) with the money to ante up are white; probably the majority of the curators involved in Walker's current show (which will travel) are also white, because most museum personnel in the US are white. I used to work in that world... which is one of the reasons I don't want to come out stating that the people who buy her work are a bunch of white men with perverted fantasies.

Lots of people buy work by "hot" artists solely as a kind of blue-chip investment. You have to take that into account, too.

I also wonder if this is a case, in some respects, of people not wanting to say that the emperor has no clothes, because they might upset somebody if they did that. (i.e., provoke a firestorm of controversy by criticizing work by an African American woman.) With the intensely PC climate that was the norm in the museum world during the 90s, I don't think you could have done so publicly without serious consequences. I don't know if that's still true, but I have a hunch that it might be. (and that's all it is - a hunch.) In my earlier replies to this thread, i wasn't explicit about the content/imagery in Walker's work, either, but not because I'm trying to censor myself. it's very painful stuff, and I didn't want to spell it all out when SweetMisery was thinking that she'd wait 'til she saw the show in person.

It might well be that many white men find Kara Walker's work to be difficult - for good reasons, not bad ones. I'm not so convinced that everyone is on her bandwagon, if you see what I mean. (Of course, I don't really know that for sure, but.... )

I think her work also has a strong component of misogyny - so, of self-hatred. Again, my point isn't trying to read her personal life into her imagery, but I can't help thinking that most women - of all colors - would find this work deeply troubling.

To some extent, I'm just throwing ideas out on the table, almost thinking out loud. (Like the comment about what might happen if someone challenged her on the content of her work - it's all speculation on my part, but still...)

When I worked at one of the Smithsonian museums, the PC-ness was just crazy. I mean, literally, that minority employees would talk about it being out of hand at times. It seemed like there was a policy of going to ridiculous extremes about some things (and groups of people) while avoiding the most obvious problems that face visitors and staff alike.

I don't mean to be unkind here, but I can remember reading through summaries of some grant research proposals written by people who got SI grants for art and art historical research, and it was nuts - someone based his research on the "heterosexism" of US society. Now granted, he was writing about a homosexual poet and some gay painters, but.... he used the word "heterosexist" in a way that looked like he was saying that all men and women who aren't gay/queer are "heterosexist." That really got me!!! (And some of my straight female colleagues, too.)
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Christopher replied to e2c's comment:

Well, regardless of the motivation of buyers, she still has a public following: from those who granted her the MacArthur Genius award in '97 to those who continue to visit her shows around the world. I simply wanted to suggest that this fanbase was informed by several layers of conscious and subconscious reactions, aversions, collusions, interactions with her artwork. That 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. 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 relevancy of the American slavery reparations movement. That 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 plight of blacks 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, and palliates.

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So what do you think? Given the fact that her work is lauded as "not being preachy" and her Whitney show is entitled "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love", do you believe her work professes a sort of love affair with white supremacy?