Kara Walker and Blogging

This is the appendix to an essay I wrote on Black Feminist Video Art. It is a rant against the racism (in Walker's art) that is all too warmly accepted by the general public, art historians and art critics. Enjoy!

The Whitney Museum provided a blog site whereby visitors to the Kara Walker exhibition have uncensored venue to react to the art works. The site explains: “Kara Walker intends for her artwork to inspire reaction and dialogue. This blog provides a place to share both.”¹ The blog provided a series of questions which responders could react to in order to generate conversation including: What personal associations do you bring to the exhibition? Do you ever find yourself using stereotypes despite your best intentions? If so, how? Do you think art can be a form of resistance? Like many of the reviews of the exhibition, commentators on the website praised the exhibition for directly addressing our views of racism. Helen, who identified as coming from the rural South wrote: “I hope it makes all who visit the exhibit have just a bit more sensitivity and a bit more strength to contribute to stopping the wrongs across our world that are ever so present right now.” There is a very interesting concern here for semantics as our is never clearly defined. Holland Cotter and Jerry Saltz, amongst others, expand upon this essentialist construction in the manner which they praise this exhibition. Cotter wrote: “Ms. Walker draws an important one: The source and blame for racism lies with everyone, including herself. It seems we are addicted to it. We claim to hate living with it, but we cannot live without it.” Yet, Cotter never addresses who constitutes this we. Is we those who read and have access to the New York Times? Is we those who are able to afford the costs of admission and the luxury of time to see the exhibition at the Whitney? The semantic conundrum is that we and our are not clearly defined and the perceptions that these proponents discuss are merely abstract assumptions on visibility and experience.

Viewers of Walker’s work enter into a subconscious and psychosexual contract with a video such as Calling. However, as opponents of Walker have asserted, what viewers do experience is a moralistically flawed construction of racially identity - of the past and the present. There were several persons on the Whitney blog who equate the immoral acts of her character with Walker’s own conscious. A blogger identified as mutope wrote: “There’s no need to gain the world and lose your soul.” Even more directed is Lore who empathized with Walker’s purported anxieties: “I hope all her anger and frustrations cease one day, because it has to be a very sad life to see the world through those eyes.” It is quite possible, as Lore suggests, that there is a more personal dynamic that Walker has with the exhibition then catches the eye. But, if there is any bit of the artist to be found in this video it is best seen as a record of her personal hang-ups with her self-hating racist psychosis. Howard Halle, and likeminded critics, argued that these historically fictionalized tableaus are incapable of capturing the human condition. There seems to be an anger boiling just underneath the surface of Walker’s work, but it never manages to convey the personality of the artist. The unfortunate result is that her works are, “far less free than she imagines.”²

The generational gap is another contentious issue concerning the criticism of Walker’s work. Critics Holland Cotter and Jerry Saltz dismissed any negative criticism as attributed to overzealous geriatrics. Cotter writes: “several African-American artists of an older generation, with careers dating to the 1960s, publicly condemned her use of racial stereotypes as insulting and opportunistic, a way to ingratiate herself into a racist white art industry.” However the most poignant and directed criticism on the blog was from Christopher, a self-identified 26 year old African American, who felt accosted by the onslaught of grotesque and perverse representations of Blacks:

Walker’s work does not subvert the white supremacist imagination of blackness but rather re-presents it in the tangible hear-and-now, bows to its hegemonic force and makes offerings of eagerly copulating slave women, debased pickaninnies and confused buckcoons [. . .] Walker’s work disturbs me because while it does present a horrifying, grotesque, epic vision of this country’s foundation it simultaneously hints that it is all ok, that blacks are just as complicit as whites and that these horrors were somehow, in part, self-extracted. She presents this racialized psychosexual fantasy as an obscured reality /shadows on the wall/, as the (subhuman) raw material blacks are truly made of.

This construction of select generational angst is countered by Christopher’s eliciting the criticality of Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell. The elder established Black feminist artists react out of anger as Walker has visually overturned the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. Christopher’s reaction is rooted in his distrust of a highly marketable and commercially successful artist.

It is not to say for certain that commercially successful artists cannot maintain a critical outlook, however the context of her work is compromised by the exhibiting institution – the Whitney. The conversation regarding this body of work has only added to the work’s mystique –a shallow self-sustaining hype. While the success of Walker is undeniable, the conversation regarding monetary compensation for moralistic obligations is a dish best served cold.