KARA WALKER AT THE WHITNEY

ART FROM THE BACK OF YOUR MIND | January 22nd 2008

Ariel Ramchandani admires an artist whose work, rooted in the history of slavery and the American south, pushes poetic truth to the point of nightmare ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I rarely suffer from art-induced nightmares, but I have, more than once, woken up in a cold sweat after looking at Kara Walker's work. I am surely not alone in this. Her work excels because it is personal and penetrating.

The current retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, entitled "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," is well designed, spacious and complex (although in a perfect world I would have wished for higher ceilings) and lets the work "work" on the viewer.

The first piece you see on entering is the the larger-than-life "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." This early and defining work is quintessential Walker. The content is reminiscent of "Gone with the Wind"—but as if Walker took the book and ripped it open, shook it upside down, unshackled it and let the characters run wild. The black silhouettes on a crisp white background are formally seductive and familiar, as well as deceptively comprehensible in the language of the old south. The lush undulations of the plantation landscape, the sweep of a willow, the flounce of an antebellum dress, the master's house beckoning in the distance—it's all there, even as we discover it to be not quite as we thought we remembered it.

The work draws much of its power from the individual viewer's discovery of perversity, hidden and outright. That flouncy dress hides an extra pair of legs. The proud master maintains his upright balance by sodomising a young child and spearing a baby on the grass with his sword. The black, flat edges of the silhouettes make your eyes work to determine the differences and parse out individual bodies. Once you have adjusted, you may catch what has been staring you in the face—a baby defecating, for example, in "The End of Uncle Tom..." as he dances to the beat of a silent tambourine. In a series of shocks you discover that the plantation has run amok, and things are not as they seem, or at least as they are usually represented.

The effect multiplies as you pass through the show. We are hostages to Walker's power of scale. Huge silhouettes overwhelm, small watercolours force a more intimate viewing, only then exposing the violence of their content. There is a short distance between discovery, implication and internal questioning. Is what you think you see unfolding in front you merely a figment of your imagination? Do the figures seem human or not? Perhaps you always, or never, thought of things like this before? And now, would you prefer them to be only in your mind? Or not exist at all? Or exist at a safe distance? Or would you prefer to revert to a more comfortable, historical retelling of plantation life? You react, interrogate your reaction, and insert yourself into Walker's narrative.

Walker says she is "[I]nterested in what viewers bring to this iconography that I'm constantly dredging out of my own subconscious ... Projecting one's desires, fears, and conditions onto other bodies, which all of my work has tried to engage with using the silhouette."

This is clearly true in "Darkytown Rebellion", where a schoolroom projector overlays colour on the black and white silhouettes. Carnivalesque lights stretch over the chaotic scene. As viewers approach, their shadows are cast across the wall. It is what we bring, both physically and emotionally, that involves us. In these shadows and reflections we see the intricacies of our own ugliness. The composition can be read like a brain scan of our private thoughts on slavery, history and race.

Indeed, the forced engagement with this tumultuous art reminds us that history has not passed, and that all the unpleasant ideas we have had at times about race or gender are not dead and buried in a box somewhere. They are alive and active.

Are sexism and racism over in America? No. Do identity politics matter, or don't they? If you care about such questions (and you happen to be in New York) go see the Walker show before it closes on February 3rd. Not for answers, but to confront a nightmare or two, sprung from the personal and historical consciousness that we usually manage to keep damped down.

(Image: Kara Walker, You Do, (Detail), 1993-94. Cut Paper on canvas, 55 x 49 in. (140 x 124.5 cm). Collections of Peter Norton and Eileen Harris Norton. Photography courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)