Walker Show Subverts Racial Stereotypes

Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found by Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored. At the Carpenter Center Through Apr. 5

Talking about form in Kara Walker's racially-charged art may sound a bit like commenting on lighting in Mapplethorpe. But Formalism isn't always a fancy cover for prudishness, and when discussing such inflammatory art it's all too easy to get caught up in political generalities, as most of Walker's critics do. Words like "sexism," "racism," and "stereotype" circulate with little direct attention to how the art object conveys meaning through its form. It's time to start looking closely.

One near life-size, black silhouette in Walker's current Carpenter Center exhibition features a black man hunched over a banjo, a long drop of drool descending from his distended lower lip. Behind him, a kerchief-capped girl reaches to turn the enormous screw-key sprouting from his back like that of a wind up doll. Recalling the tradition of black minstrelsy, the key also suggests a brutally-planed pair of scissors--a silhouette cutter's tool craftily inscribed within the silhouette. This image alone might be taken as an icon for the controversy surrounding Walker's work, as viewers question whether her scissors puncture negative racial stereotypes or simply stab blacks in the back.

Over the past year, Walker's work has been widely exhibited at influential venues, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and in New York at the Whitney Biennial. Last April at age 27, she was the youngest 1997 recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award. Walker's Harvard installation was originally presented at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, but here she takes full advantage of the Carpenter Center's lobby to surround viewers with a parade of figures under floating Spanish moss and cotton bolls.

Despite Walker's broad institutional acceptance, the critical response to her work is more contentious. Some black artists and curators fear that her use of negative racial imagery, like over-sexed pickaninnies, perpetuates harmful stereotypes rather than subverting them. One established black artist, Betye Saar, even launched a letter campaign which challenged people in the art world to question whether they found Walker's work racist or sexist.

Yet Walker's opponents often fail to pay attention to the visual characteristic of her art. They write without noticing the peculiarities of her medium, as though she were simply presenting straight-forward racist scenarios in photographs or realistic paintings. But if a silhouette isn't a photograph, then a stereotype isn't a stereotype in Walker's hands.

To be effective, any stereotype (whether visual or verbal) must be highly-legible, unambiguous, and easily consumable. Walker's figures are not. Despite the incredible precision of their finely-cut outlines, it's impossible to really know what's going on inside their black, opaque fields. She brilliantly exploits the graphic irony and tension of her medium which seems to provide so much information and yet so little.

Take for example the image of a young black girl lording over a kneeling woman, possibly her mistress. The girl appears to be pinching the woman's nose while holding some knife or saw to her throat. The characters are so finely drawn that we can make out the contour of the girl's toenail, but though we see one foot we're unsure of where the other falls. Similarly, we can't determine the relationship of blade to neck, the difference between "grazing" and "penetrating" so important to the woman's life and our understanding. These spatial contiguities are lost somewhere in the details of overlap which Walker's silhouettes refuse to disclose.

Turning to the installation as a whole, we're tempted to find some sequential continuity in the processional arrangement of figures Walker's title supports this literary drive, evoking the conventions of 19th century slave narratives: "Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found by Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997." Yet our search for narrative unity is frustrated by fragmentation, as all mythic histories and fantasies are. The figures run into each other, and we can hardly determine on which of the Carpenter Center's walls the story begins.

Even on the level of scale, Walker distorts the niceties of hand-held, 19th century bourgeois silhouettes. The near full-scale images in her surreal world aren't genteel keepsakes or familiar racial epithets. Walker's anti-stereotypes wouldn't make good logos on syrup bottles or tidy punch-lines to racist jokes. Rather, the very icons designed to suppress and stigmatize blacks return magnified and grotesque to haunt our collective conscience. Most shocking of all, the pickaninnies have appropriated the garb of paper silhouettes, the charming craft of their mistress' reaction.

Ultimately, the figures and scenarios in Walker's mysterious, melancholy art don't provide the instant recognition that stereotypes require. Although she may toy with stereotypical tropes like hair texture as a signifier of race, close attention to visual detail distinguishes her subversive and exploratory project from an uncritical parroting of racial cliches.

Still, Saar and others argue that Walker's tremendous success in a predominately white art establishment demonstrates an insidious bias on the part of curators and collectors who embrace artists willing to "sell themselves down the river." While it may be true that many of today's well-known black artists, including David Hammons, Carrie Mae Weems and Glenn Ligon, all engage powerful stereotypes, they should be considered as part of a broader artistic trend.

Since the late 1970s return to figuration, artists like Barbara Kruger, Andres Serrano and Mapplethorpe, to name only the most famous, have explored and challenged the mechanisms of cultural representation. While they may not have gained any friends at the National Endowment for the Arts, these artists all raised important questions about the contemporary and historic constructions of their ethnic, sexual and political identities. Walker joked about one of Serrano's most notorious images, "You can't put Jesus in a piss jar, but you can't put Sambo anywhere."

Outside the context of contemporary art, the present debate surrounding Walker's work elicits even eerier deja-vu in light of the black literary tradition to which Walker owes so much. Over fifty years ago, Richard Wright argued against Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, claiming the book perpetuated stereotypes of blacks as "happy darkies" and minstrels. When asked about this parallel Walker answered, "The black arts community is still really young. We keep bringing up the same themes to trash each other."

While this may be true, Walker's reply doesn't explain how some black artists have managed to avoid or somehow outlive similar controversy, like Robert Colescott and Kerry James Marshall who parody stereotypes in a more literal, straightforward way. Similarly sexual, scatological, or racially-charged, their work seems less threatening (and to my mind less satisfying), because it's far more unambiguous and transparent than Walker's graphic obliquity and elliptical narratives. Walker remarks, "There's lot of information that's not revealed for you. The viewer probably knows most of the story, maybe even more than I do."

With so much left to our imagination, we grow nervous about what's going on in the silhouettes' shadows. Yet if we start to fill in the blanks, Walker engages us in the racist or sexist scenes we so badly wish to condemn.

At the same time, we're trapped by the double bind of voyeurism, appalled at what we witness, yet unable to take our eyes away. Here again Walker allies herself with the writers of 19th century slave narratives who knew all too well that violence and sexual titillation wee useful tools for attracting readers to the horrors of their plight. Walker admits to her "love for the unnecessary flourish," and it is precisely those formal details, whether salacious contours or languorous gaps, which captivate and torment us.