Kara Walker is one of those rare artists who develop, apparently without influence from fashions in contemporary art, both a vision and the medium necessary to express it.
Now in her late 20s, everything came together for Walker just after graduate school, and in the last three years she has produced life-size figurative cutouts that are among the more seductive and troubling artworks of our time.
Her first museum exhibition, at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, presents an installation of these works created especially for the show, along with several earlier watercolors. They convey the sensibilities of a black American painter through stereotypes common to old and new romance novels set in the 19th Century South.
Walker further exaggerates the stereotypes, constructing loose narratives that mix attraction and repulsion, fear and desire. She gives form to some of the more sensational fantasies that have persisted about plantation life, using them as psychological inkblots to engage feelings about the entire history of black-white relations.
Some of the strongest feelings belong to the artist herself, as Walker is anything but a dispassionate observer. Her art came partially from experience, but before she could draw all the strands together she had to determine her own relation to the past she embellishes.
“The work has a lot to do with living in Georgia,” Walker says. “(My family) moved there from northern California when I was about 13, and it took close to 10 years of being around Atlanta for `Southernness’ to settle in.
“My father is a painter. So I spent a lot of time going to art exhibits as a child. In Atlanta there were a lot of black art exhibits that were venues for reaffirming a positive sort of mindset. The exhibits focused a lot on that, and it definitely was a condition that began influencing me.
“Another condition was inter-racial desire in the South. A personal anecdote: Walking down the street with a white boyfriend, I was hollered at by politically motivated black men who asked if I knew my roots. It was a common occurrence. But I felt like it kicked me back 200 years into history. I was constantly in situations where I was forced to reckon with history, but not the history of history books. It was the history you want to know, the history behind the history books, the history that runs through people’s minds.”
Walker began amassing odd scraps with depictions of blacks, each expressed in terms of a cliche: the rural poor sitting on a porch, Naomi Campbell in a leopard-skin dress. Eventually, Walker realized she already carried such stereotypes within her and conceived a personal game not only to ferret them out but to elicit responses from others that might help in altering the cliches or, at least, viewing them differently.
She looked at the image of blacks on old American postcards and advertisements, trying to determine what they meant to the people who created them. Walker says she tried to go beyond racial injustice, hoping to find deeper motives. She thought she might read the caricatures coolly and detachedly, as if they were genre paintings. But it was not easy. The treatments were too disturbing.
“A lot of contradictions and conflicts came up,” Walker says, “because this endeavor was maybe one-third intellectual and two-thirds emotional. I’m very much for the emotional in life; you can’t avoid it. So not to recognize emotion in what I was doing would have been self-defeating.
“I finally structured my pursuit like a romance novel. Such books have emotion as the driving force. You know, titillation and seduction are very powerful, but we don’t like to acknowledge them, especially if they’re not in our best interest.
“I got interested in romance novels while working in a bookstore and hearing women order them. They’re just desire cloaked in historical artifice. There’s a little fact-finding involved in the writing, but really they’re about getting ravished by a hunky stranger. Now that’s not exactly in everyone’s best interest, but there’s clearly still a pull, still a yearning for that kind of adventure.”
At the time, Walker was painting–and not enjoying it. She had always wanted to do large history paintings filled with strong emotion, but now she began to realize maybe that kind of work would not be her strongest contribution.
Only when she left Atlanta, for graduate work at the Rhode Island School of Design, did the disparate elements of her research begin to come together. And once she read narratives written by slaves, she had something moreto flesh out content. The essentials of Walker’s work only awaited formal organization.
That happened, almost by accident, in 1993, when the artist created a group of wooden wall-mounted silhouettes that were profiles of black women. A few of them had exaggerated eyes and lips that Walker included as an afterthought to keep the piece from looking too artsy. Later that year she made her first silhouettes from cut paper.
“One day the light bulb went on,” Walker says, “and it occurred to me the silhouette was almost a perfect format for many reasons. Whenever I played head games with myself it was, you know, what would I have been like as a slave 155 years ago? Would I have been just like I am now?
“Well, the silhouette would have been a format that I could have used. It would have been more or less available. It doesn’t require many tools. It was middle-class. It was women’s work. It’s about incising, making a very clear statement about something. It isn’t really regarded as high art, but it’s uppity, it wants to be greater than it is.
“I even kept running across references, nasty references. There was one old book, quite beautiful, which had a text about how some lesser silhouette artists used black paper but appliqued bits of lace and feathers and all sorts of other things, finally making their sitters look like mulattos! It was strange. In a way, that was just the sort of statement I was wanting to find–and there it was.”
Silhouette making has, of course, its own long and varied history, stretching from the middle of the 17th to the end of the 19th Centuries. Walker is fascinated by certain aspects, playing for example on the American silhouette maker’s itinerancy in her poster for the present exhibition. But on the whole she does not measure her work against the finest silhouettes of the past, as do many contemporary painters with earlier paintings.
Walker’s silhouettes are not portraits of sitters but caricatures of stock types such as the mammy or pickininny. These she draws on black paper, cuts out, and pastes directly on gallery walls. The loosely structured narratives she generally determines on the spot. Individual silhouettes do not contribute to a story as much as cluster around a general theme. The one for the Renaissance Society seemed to be “Good Intentions,” reflecting the intentions that Walker says have gone “fantastically awry” since the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s–but her images had only started to go up the day we talked.
The work gains from an artistic climate that now is favorable toward temporary installations as well as art with political content, especially that which treats race and gender. However, Walker considers herself a painter and foresees the day when she will return to canvas. She is also sure about the nature of her content.
“I anticipate conflict. I mean, not just to do with myself but in the world. Nothing is without it. To kill the thing that causes conflict would only be to suppress it, again making secret desires more prevalent.
“With myself and with a viewer, I want to create a giddy tightrope walk across a mine field. I guess I want the emotional core of the work always to be complicated. That’s what it is. It’s complicated now, and whenever I feel myself getting complacent with an image or sentiment, I have to stop.
“I can’t really make an audience do anything, look at anything, though I want to. I’d like them to have the feeling of I shouldn’t look at this, it’s not in my best interest, but I have to.”
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“Kara Walker” continues at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., through Feb. 23. Admission is free. Authors Charles Johnson, Suzan-Lori Parks and Carey Phillips will present lecture-readings that complement the exhibition at 6:30 p.m. on, respectively, Jan. 15, Jan. 31 and Feb. 19. Call 773-702-8670 for locations and admission prices.
