When you encounter Kara Walker’s exhibit, entitled "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," at the Whitney Museum of American Art at 75th and Madison in New York (through February 3, 2008), you come into an enormous, all-encompassing presentation, in several large rooms of an ante-bellum South filled with cartoonish views of plantation life, black slaves, well-appointed young white people dressed in 19th century finery, trees, mansions, wagons, carriages - a view of what The Old South had to offer, but don’t get excited if you really love The Old South.
Walker says of her art, “It’s interesting that as soon as you start telling the story of racism, you start reliving the story. You keep creating a monster that swallows you. But as long as there’s a Darfur, as long as there are people saying ‘Hey, you don’t belong here’ to others, it only seems realistic to continue investigating the terrain of racism.” This exhibit is exactly that, and the investigation is a compelling one, not least because the art is so finely made.
“Camptown Ladies” (detail): Kara Walker
In the nineteenth century, there was a form of folk art that was widely practiced in the United States, in which the artist would make cutouts from black or dark-colored paper of a person’s profile, an entire clothed figure, even of complicated scenes of country or city living. These cutouts would be mounted on white paper and framed for use in the home. Much of it was exceedingly charming, and gave the amateur artist the opportunity to make lovely things for her family in the quiet of her home.
Photo: Gene Pittman
This is the vehicle that Kara Walker uses for much of her art. You wouldn’t think something so simple could convey complicated physical degradation, personal destruction, rapine, the heart’s betrayal, and deep, deep emotional pain. Further you wouldn’t think it could do this so effectively that the viewers of such a show — in this case quite large numbers of viewers — would be walking around stone-faced, as though accused themselves of the very things being shown on the museum walls, but this is the effect that Walker’s art has.
So you see black slave women being stalked and assailed by white plantation owners. You see shit being left behind as black children run for safety from white — and black — punishment. There are representations of black people physically harming other black people in fearful ways. You see torture. Heartless maiming of children. The insouciant frivolousness of white southern belles dressed in frills and satin as their beaus rape unwilling black women. Attacks by black women on other black women. Little black girls in rags giving blowjobs to privileged little white boys.
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