Black Puppets Moving Through Infinite (Kara Walker)

Black Puppets Moving Through Infinite

by Karol Forero

        Walking through the narrow, crowded streets of New York City, I saw these black and white figurines that caught my attention from the lobby of The New School of Design. Even though these black paper silhouettes are two dimensional on snowy mural, they invite you to be part of a much bigger fairytale.Who brings 18th and 19th Century dark figures to life in this cosmopolitan, modern, liberal culture? Kara Walker, an African-American artist from Stockton, California, who dabbles in “huge-tableaux constructed from black cutouts as well as in watercolors, drawings, and films.”(The New Yorker)

        Kara Walker started her first sketches when she was only 5 years old, no doubt her being influenced by her father, who was also a painter as well in Minneapolis. In 1987, Walker took on an art major at the Atlanta College of Art and enrolled in the MFA program at Rhode Island School of Design five years later (New York Times).The first of Kara’s works was called “Selection 1994” which was exhibited at the Drawing Center in New York. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is a professor of visual arts in the MFA program at Columbia University. (Walker Art)

       The majority of themes that Walker has worked with involve a glimpse into slavery, institutional racism, fear, sexuality, humor, and power. She uses a silhouette technique to criticize discrimination and aristocratic privilege during colonization in America.Walker`s creations are a retrospective into the lives of American negroes who suffered at the hands of their white slave masters like wild animals trapped in a cage (The New Yorker). The techniques used to get her point across involve using “a greasy white pencil or soft pastel crayon on large pieces of black paper, which she then cuts with an X-ACTO knife. As she composes her images, she thinks in reverse, in a way, because she needs to flip the silhouettes over after she cuts them. The images are then adhered or directly to the gallery wall with wax” (Kara Walker).

    

       Artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Coles, Adrian Piper, and Vincent Van Gogh were some who inspired her artwork (The New York Times). One of her installations that she is best known for, titled “Slavery!Slavery!” was presented in MoMa in 1997. According to her official website, “She constructs a story in the round, by presenting silhouettes in a 360-degree installation modeled after the 19th century cyclorama”.(Kara Walker) A cyclorama is a large, cylindrical painting. The artist experienced this antiquated art form during her youth in Atlanta, where a 400-foot cyclorama of the infamous Civil War conflict, the Battle of Atlanta is on display. Like the Atlanta panoramic mural, the scale of “Slavery!Slavery!” insists that the viewer participate in the story by walking across the periphery of the landscape as if spying on the events taking place. Additionally, the circular structure of the work eliminates a clear beginning or end to the story. In short, it tricks the viewer because it does not have a beginning; it obligates the audience to try and imagine all micro-situations into a whole scene. In the artist’s words, “Slavery!Slavery! was the first time that I had a completely circular space to surround the viewer and kind of build a narrative that doesn't actually start on the left. I didn't want for it to be read from left to right like the pieces that were on a flat wall." (New York Times)

      While Kara Walker is best known for her black-and-white cut-outs, she started her artistic career as a painter. For Walker, painting was very much connected to an expression of upper class history. The silhouette, with its assignment as a middle class art form, allowed her to explore different questions about race and power. She has since returned to painting with gouache and watercolor at various times, particularly in 2001 when she began a series of mixed media paintings where she layered black silhouettes over colorful landscapes. (The New Yorker)

     Throughout Walker’s career, her artwork has often been seen as controversial. Some critics had found themselves “captivated by its paradoxes” (Irreverently) while others such as well-known artist Betye Saar (who loathes Walker’s work) said: "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” (in PBS series I'll Make Me a World, 1999).

      Walker denies this, though. According to her, reinforcing negative stereotypes is not her intent. Instead she seeks to investigate the impact that fictional racist narratives have had on her own psyche and – ultimately – America’s cultural imagination. She attempts to explore the ways in which these stereotypes are acted out by both whites and blacks in a contemporary context. In an interview Kara Walker gave for PBS in 2007, she said, “Projecting one’s desires, fears, and conditions onto other bodies, which all of my work has tried to engage with using the silhouette”. (PBS)

     In my opinion, her art is an expression of juxtaposed feelings, thoughts, and humor through a historical nonlinear narrative. Looking at her installation “My Compliment, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” in the Whitney Museum, Walker has created  a scenario by projecting colorful lights and images implicating the audience and involving them into the exhibition through their own shadows. Her work is a particularly unique vehicle which brings dualities between ideas and emotions together as one.

Essay

       According to Bell Hooks in her essay “Art of My Mind”,art is a process which defamiliarizes the viewer`s own thoughts and point of view when they are looking at it and helps them to explore new ways of looking at things; while according to Leo Tolstoy in his essay "What is Art", art should be an experience to evoke “feelings” from the artist to the audience.I consider Kara Walker`s art represents and symbolizes these ideas of art.


        Kara Walker`s “Slavery!Slavery!” portrays variety of hard, painful, and realistic scenes during the Civil War in America. Tolstoy writes, “The spectators are infected by the feelings which the author has felt” (Tolstoy 2). He suggests that art is a kind of virus that poison viewers in a good or bad manner instantaneously. Therefore,those black paper figure cut-outs remind us of oppression, suffering and racism that blacks had to deal under an aristocratic, cold, and heartless master.Walker wants to transmit a critique against the violation of human rights through her sarcastic humor and historical narrative.

         Kara`s paintings also are an answer of “Identifying with art goes beyond the issue of representation” (Hooks 3). Even though Walker has a strong link with African -American social and political events, she proposes the notion of “decolonization” in “Untitled 2001”.This painting is a burlesque image of exaggerating sexual harassment with disfigured, voluptuous physical appearances that pretend “to be a Protest Art”. In addition, it persuades spectators to go further those charcoal, naked images to create an ironical picture. I think this painting bring us back sexuality combines with violence and humor in a new way which our minds are free without shame and social stereotypes. I find these images funny and full of sexual connotations.

       Even though both works use different techniques like paper and pencil , they reflect a new idea of art goes beyond understanding historical events, race and violence. Kara Walker` works incorporate a contradiction of ideas and emotions through her interactive installations where audience can participate and receive the thoughts of the artist. Art is a bridge between the artist and viewers.