There is a paradox at the heart of Kara Walker's art.
In her monumental drawings, hulking public sculptures and finely cut black paper silhouettes, the prolific African American artist animates (sometimes literally) the visual artefacts of slavery: racist, one-dimensional caricatures drawn from the white imaginary.
Her work is alive with the ghosts of the Antebellum period of American history, before the Civil War cleaved the fragile Union in two — between the generally liberal, abolitionist North and the slave-owning, Confederate South.
The racist stereotypes that were used to dehumanise enslaved people, and thus legitimise their enslavement, haunt Walker's artworks.
As with the proverbial genie in the bottle, Walker's work seems to 'uncork' the racist demons from the past — but as a viewer, I wonder if they were ever really contained in the first place?
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.
In Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, Walker's silhouettes become shadow puppets which the artist herself manipulates. 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.
The other work now in the national collection, Your World Is About To Change is a monumental drawing in four panels, completed in 2019. 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.
A controversial genius
Hailed a genius at 28 — Walker was one of the youngest ever recipients of the highly prized "genius grant" offered by the philanthropic MacArthur Foundation, in 1997 — her work has drawn accolades in the decades since.
Her often explicit, racially charged artworks have been acquired by major cultural institutions the world over, peaking with a 2019 commission for the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.
Walker has also enjoyed a rare degree of critical success given the subject matter — not to mention the corresponding sales of her artwork.
At 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.
It's a criticism that Walker rejects, although she acknowledges that there are risks in working with such fraught, culturally loaded imagery.
"[T]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, [a] big reservoir of information and feeling," she says.
"This is like the nourishment, in a way, that an artist can draw from; but the minute you draw from it, you start stirring the pot, like literally — and that's a strange, paradoxical problem, or even a trap,to find oneself in."
Racist tropes such as the contented, loyal slave Aunt Jemima – imagined long after Emancipation in the character of Mammy in the epic-novel-turned-1936-film Gone with the Wind — are Walker's stock-in-trade.
In 2014, for example, Walker deployed the Mammy trope in a virally famous public artwork — except her kerchief-wearing Mammy was hypersexualised, with outsize breasts and genitalia, and coated in sugar.
Titled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby — nicknamed "the sugar sphinx" — Walker's monumental artwork was fabricated from a foam armature coated with 40,000 kilograms of sugar paste, and installed in a former sugar factory in the Williamsburg neighbourhood in Brooklyn.
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."
Approximately 130,000 visitors saw the temporary artwork before it was destroyed, and many of them Instagrammed the encounter.
"It was spectacular. It was unexpected, I guess. It raised a lot of hackles," Walker admits.
"Because, I think, my works are sort of big and histrionic, in some ways it elicits big and histrionic responses."
A complex personal response
"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.
"[Whether that's] eating some sugar, or participating in some [other] way — [for example] going to Buckingham Palace [and] looking at the emblems even as you're critiquing the emblems of power [and] sort of being a little bit in awe of the Godawful audacity of it, the grandiloquent show-off-iness of it."
(There was something quite prescient about this comment, made two days before the death of the Queen).
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.
After all, as Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, from the W. E. B. 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."
I've been called many things, but visually illiterate? That I won't cop.
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?
Is the purpose here to critique the representations and expose their currency? Or is Walker just blowing things up for the hell of it?
Yet another option: she is exorcising the demons that, after all, only really exist in a twisted imagination.
I should declare that I am the descendant of enslaved people.
One of my maternal Aboriginal ancestors, many of whom worked for rations or had their meagre pay withheld or stolen by successive state governments to fund infrastucture and public works, would intermarry with the descendant of slaves from the west of Africa, trafficked to the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent before the British abolished slaveryin 1833.
Two of my paternal ancestors were among the estimated 60,000 Pacific Islanders brought to Australia post-Abolition, in the 19th century — kidnapped, coerced or otherwise — to slave in the cane fields; they were indentured for years to one employer and then deported back to the islands of what is now Vanuatu, by force.
A short history of racist kitsch
The tropes Walker invokes are clearly drawn from the racist caricatures that populate American literary and popular texts — even advertising (for instance, the Aunt Jemima brand name was used to sell a range of breakfast foods until parent company Pepsi retired the hardworking trope last year).
They also exist in art history. Although she's barely visible — except for the startled whites of her eyes and a turban — that's a flower-bearing Mammy fawning obsequiously over the reclining sex worker, in the background of Édouard Manet's masterpiece Olympia.
Olympia's handmaid riffs on a motif popularised in European decorative arts: the 'blackamoor' — derived from the term used to describe the North Africans who invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century.
Their presence is monumentalised in the Alhambra, a citadel in the historic city of Granada, the capital of the last independent Muslim state in Spain before its ruler surrendered to the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492.
As a decorative trope, blackamoors were always in servitude, carrying trays or candelabra — or disembodied, represented as mere heads.
In this fantasy, black bodies were just pliant forms to wrap your supremacy in – a device – every bit as decorative as the acanthus in your cornices or a claw-foot on your bath.
A recent appearance of the blackamoor trope was in a big-arse brooch worn on the lapel of Princess Michael of Kent, the wife of the late Queen's cousin, when she met Meghan Markle for the first time at Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace in 2017. (Can jewellery be racist? Hell yeah, just like a 'Swasti' tatt is racist).
But the turbaned figure so prevalent in blackamoor jewellery – which is still produced in Venice today in a tradition known as 'moretto' — is the image of Balthasar, one of the three Magi, the foreign kings bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh who knelt before the infant Jesus in Christian tradition (and consequently, Western art history).
Balthasar, too, is a trope – a black king, yes, but on his knees.
Australia mass-produced its racism, too – in kitsch objects known collectively as Aboriginalia. Neville garden statues, tearful lost bush babies, semi-nude 'lubras' painted on black velvet, and hand painted plaster heads of the quintessential noble savage, One Pound Jimmy – all kitsch, but make no mistake: these are the artefacts of racism.
Academic Dr Liz Conor has undertaken forensic study of Aboriginalia. She writes:
"The figures found in Aboriginalia evoke a troubling presence, in which visual appeal, sometimes libidinal, stands in for the profound ambivalence at the heart of settler-colonialism, which has benefited from the violent dispossession of a people. While townships were campaigning to exclude Aboriginal kids from schools, families from housing and adults from pubs, these nostalgic, perplexing images were being taken into white homes in the form of bric-a-brac."
Recasting racist objects
Surprisingly, perhaps, items of Aboriginalia were also often to be found in the homes of Aboriginal people (including relatives of mine) as neutral or even positive affirmations of cultural identity.
In their work, Indigenous artists Destiny Deacon, Tony Albert and Karla Dickens recast these objects – from dolls and plaster heads to playing cards and postcards – to subvert their meaning in an empowered act of reclamation.
Albert says: "There isn't a place in society for these objects, but to sweep them under the rug is also not the answer. For me, they are important societal records of a painful past. They are not to be hidden."
Dickens, who has collected postcards of Aboriginal people that range from dehumanising caricatures to beautiful portraits, and re-presented them in her exhibition Return to Sender, agrees.
"The materials I use confront me, and I hope will confront those that are blinded by the heavy weight of denial. These objects and images are solid evidence of the historical racism that … continues to pollute Australia — for all of us," she says.
In these representations, Aboriginal people are hollowed out to become mere reductive signs; literally objectified as defeated or servile — or weeping or lost, as the pitiful remnants of a supposedly vanishing race.
These objects of Aboriginalia are so culturally loaded as to heave with meaning; trophies that, in their mass production, enact a catharsis and a victory.
Perhaps they also express, as any iteration of the noble savage trope does, a twisted nostalgia, driven by guilt for the original sin of dispossession.
Like her Australian peers, Walker recalls growing up with the mass-produced artefacts of racism, and of trying to integrate them into her way of seeing the world.
"[In the late 80s] a lot of African Americans started collecting these sorts of black collectibles. So, there was a conversation back then about what these stereotypical objects mean, what it means to have them in your home, what it means to take them out of circulation, or whatever they happen to mean when they were trafficked among mainly white people," she explains.
"[I]t's a curious thing to wonder why so many of these figurines were necessary … postcards and cartoons and photographs.
"Why was this kind of recitation of brutality so necessary in every format — if not to, in some way, not just undermine the people depicted, but provide some kind of psychic outlet for the dark unknowns of the ruling class, or the darkness they refuse to acknowledge of their own?"
Critical responses
To my mind, Kara Walker's tropes are more problematic than an Aunt Jemima syrup bottle or the treacherous 'Uncle Tom' character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.
Walker's images are not iterations of mass-produced American Antebellum racism and slavery, but the artistic devices of a contemporary artist who weaponises them, deploying them either strategically or numbly.
Even after interviewing her at length, I'm still mystified by the paradoxes.
Are the tropes animated to expose the deeply racist minds that created them, which haunt art history and the white imaginary?
Are they reproduced in order to deconstruct them, as Barbara Kruger put it, by "turning them upside down, spread-eagle and inside out"?
I'm not sure.
Walker's 1994 debut, a large-scale wall installation of black cut-out silhouettes titled Gone (Extended title: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart) was hailed by The Village Voice as "an astoundingly mature work for a 24-year-old":
"Gone conjugated an old-timey artistic practice (cut-paper portraits) with Sol LeWitt's conceptual wall painting; Walt Disney's revisionist Song of the South with abolitionist histories; the imagery of black minstrelsy with shitting, pissing figures locked in a daisy-chain of abjection that recalls Goya's Los Disparates while evoking the proto-Harlequin romance of Gone with the Wind."
Do her visions inspire a twisted, deeply suppressed, almost subconscious, nostalgia for the Antebellum period in white Americans, who – for the most part — are the ones who buy and collect her work?
Quite possibly.
There's a thing called race play – look it up (mostly NSFW, btw).
You definitely need a sense of irony and bucketloads of gallows humour, as well as a firm handle on American race politics and the history of slavery, to read Walker's works in the way the artist intended.
Many of her most vocal critics in the early days of her career were from the older generation (Walker was born in 1969) — artists such as Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell, the first African American woman to be appointed to the curatorial staff of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Both Saar and Pindell "encouraged dialogue" about Walker's art, and Pindell even edited a series of critical essays by those who "questioned the manic intensity of the positive criticism of Kara Walker".
Pindell was overwhelmed by the response, as she writes in her blog: "Soon it became a vital grapevine, and people were contacting me wanting to vent their outrage at what appeared to be a manipulated effort to force a type of work, which humiliated the African-American community, down our collective throats."
Ostensibly referring to the success Walker has enjoyed in the art world, she wrote:
"The sponsors of this charade seemed to see the scene as some kind of an amusing masquerade – a covert racist way of pushing, in name only, an African-American artist, while at the same time keeping the status quo or less, and appearing publicly, to the outside world, to be generous and even liberal or progressive."
Ouch.
The National Gallery of Australia's decision to curate Walker's work into the collection might well be seen in this context – given that contemporary art by African American artists isn't strongly represented overall (interestingly, a work by Betye Saar was purchased in the 70s).
Walker's is the first monographic exhibition of the work of an African American artist ever held at the NGA.
The question has to be asked: how might these two works by Walker – one a revenge rape fantasy, and the other depicting a naked African woman chained by the neck with an anchor — translate here, given our reckoning with the history of slavery?
I did ask Walker if she considered how her work, and its racist imagery, might be seen in other contexts – and she was expansive in reply.
"I've never travelled to Australia, but it's a country that [was] part of the colonialist project, the British colonial project. And I think that a lot of the countries that… are exploring their relationship to postcolonial critique are really invested in the work in a way that's different than it was in the 90s.
"Because I think that when I started out, there was a kind of a glib misunderstanding that I was talking about something that had to do with a black problem, or an American problem," she said.
"But the way that the work is read, I think, is a little bit different from place to place. I think that the wrongheadedness, sometimes the humour, the tripping over different tropes, and sort of mixing and merging and blending and, you know, kind of exploding power dynamics complicates things in a way that might be challenging — but I'm not really sure."
This article draws from The NGA Annual Lecture, featuring Kara Walker in conversation with Daniel Browning, host of ABC RN's The Art Show.
