"Untitled": Kara Walker

Note the emphasis on the phrase "contemporary troubles." I believe Walker is indeed revisiting issues from the ante-bellum South, but I also think current matters are very much being addressed in this exhibit, and that Walker intends her imagery to be a metaphor for contemporary cruelty. So, the United States, Darfur, Irak, Burma. In the recent past, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Turkey, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Serbia, Croatia.

I worried when I saw this exhibit that Walker must suffer herself from the pain of what she presents. She says, though, "I want people to respond and to be aware that if a goody-two-shoes like me can have all of this going on in her head, then nobody's safe."

Kara Walker's art is intended for our time.

A brief word, by the way, about the
Whitney Museum itself, which was designed by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer and opened in 1966. This is a building in the brutalist tradition of the 1960s, when many architects, influenced by Bauhaus simplicities, designed enormous, blank boxes in which Fortune 500 company headquarters, major museums, housing projects for the poor, and so on were sequestered.

One such example was The World Trade Center buildings that were destroyed by the attack of September 11, 2001. Another is the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This national library is an enormous many-storied bunker, viewable from a great distance, that still exists, sadly, but is falling apart. So there's hope yet. I personally hope they're able to get the books out of it before it falls to the ground.

The Whitney's dark cheerlessness blights the street corner on which it is situated. It offends the vision that Mies van der Rohe had at Bauhaus for very simple, but airily light building design. I can think of few buildings less appropriate for the display of the color, imagination, soulfulness, and intense creativity that so much of American art possesses.