Kara Walker makes some of the most unsettling and thought-provoking art that you'll see anywhere these days. Her principal subject is power and its abuses, most often approached in terms of racial, sexual, or physical subjugation. She draws upon history and literature, and upon habit, preconception, and aspiration, to construct an imagined world that manages to be both immediately recognizable and constantly suggestive. Though she tends to borrow the appearances and language of the past, the real strength of her art lies in its uncomfortable pertinence to contemporary experience. It is equally remarkable that an art that poses so many difficult questions enjoys such genuine popularity.
Kara Walker's most immediately recognizable form is the silhouette cut-out. This allows her not only to evoke the world of the antebellum south that is the recurrent setting for her narratives, but it also means that her imagery is somewhat generalized. This, I think, is the key to both its immediate palatability and its broader long-term relevance. It is a crucial political device.
Her splendid retrospective, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love", which was at the Whitney in the winter of 2007-08 (in between appearances at the Walker in Minneapolis, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Hammer in LA, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) was widely thought of as one of the most remarkable shows of the last decade. The New York Times called it simply "Brilliant".
Next week she will be the honoree at Brooklyn Museum's eighth annual Women in the Arts luncheon, the latest artist in a series that has included Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz, Maya Lin, and the Guerilla Girls. The luncheon benefits the artistic and cultural programs of the Brooklyn Museum and its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.
I spoke to Kara Walker recently, and she proved to be every bit as thoughtful in conversation as she is in her art. She was also funny, refreshingly candid, and happily self-deprecating. We eventually got into a fascinating discussion about her latest commission, and a broader conversation about the presence of violence in her work, but we began by talking about next week's event in Brooklyn.
Kara, what do you think is the significance of the honor you're about to receive from Brooklyn Museum?
I'm a little embarrassed about the whole thing really, because I think I'm a little over-honored sometimes! But the museum does have a commitment to women artists, though it's funny because I wind up not thinking about myself as a woman artist. Or I forget. That's a significant thing, I guess.
Do you find the label "woman artist" frustrating? Or any of the other labels that are constantly attached to your name: African-American, silhouette-artist, issues of race, sexuality, or violence?
... And issues of representation more than all the other things! I was just thinking about this today. The problem is that the overarching joke of my work was that very early on I positioned myself as a "negress", and there was a fictional construct that embraced this anachronistic and totally racist naming that I used as a tool. But it's been like a pie in my face. It's the naming device that stuck!
I always think that stereotyping is an implicit problem for art that wants to be political. If the work is too obviously political, it immediately turns off the very people that it intends to reach.
I have that exact same opinion!
Is it something that affects your own work?
Well, I took a political stance early on, but I don't think my work is overtly political. I respond to events. It's almost political by accident, because it's quite personal, but I'm also aware that who I am is shaped by the world I live in, and that world is also informed by mythologies and stereotypes and narratives that move beyond the inner dream space and into real action.
I grew up around a fair amount of work that was politically charged. A lot of the late sixties, early seventies work that I saw as a child was pretty heavily political, coming out of the black arts movement and Vietnam and post-Vietnam, and I felt that very problem. Artists aspired to having issues thought about and talked about, but their work wasn't necessarily doing that at all. It was doing just the opposite.
Well, if I might ask you a directly political question, how would you characterize the current condition of racism in this country?
Right now, it's gone right back to the worst it's ever been. A couple of years ago you might have thought there were conversations going on about education and immigration, but now with the Tea Party and all this classic racist hubbub that's raising its head about having a black president or a bi-racial president or whatever you want to call him, things that I feared and suspected haven't gone away. I'm a little bit grateful for it frankly because when things are underground you just feel paranoid and harbor fears. I'd rather see things paraded out in all their gaudy splendor!
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