Draped in Melting Sugar and Rust: A Look in to Kara Walker’s Art

June 6, 2014

There was nothing subtle about Kara Walker’s gargantuan installation inside the old 19th century building of the Domino Sugar Factory that closed in 2004. After Walker’s “A Subtlety” comes to a close, it would be taken down to make way for luxury rise condos even for a building with such rich history. Sugar Baby lay in the deep recesses of the old factory as a last hurrah for the rich albeit dark history surrounding the sweet but bloody sugar industry. The giant marvelous and highly sexualized sphinx stood there as a sweet reminder that the golden age of industrialism in the 18th and 19th century was fueled by the blood and sweat of the Caribbean slave trade.

During NPR’s Audie Cornish time with Walker in the factory, Walker explains that much like blood diamond, “Basically, it was blood sugar,” she continued,” today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands.” Walker narrates that to produce the refined sugar, slaves would feed the large miller with canes by hand and that it was a dangerous process: Limbs and lives were lost to provide the Western world with its sugar. (Cornish) Much like the walls in the factory, the story attributed to refined sugar is draped in melting sugar and rust.

Much of Walker’s career has produced works that gives a sense of a “giddy discomfort” as she puts it. Her work continuously raises issues of race, the female body, sexuality, inequality, slavery, intense graphic violence oppression and the sullied power that comes from it. Born in 1969 in Stockton, California, Walker, at age 13, moved to Stone Mountain in Atlanta when her father accepted a position at Georgia State University. Walker recalls a time when she watched her father draw in his studio that she remembered thinking, “I want to do that, too”. At around the age 2 ½ or 3 she said that she decided that she was going to be an artist like her father. She received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art back in 1991 and a MFA degree from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. 3 years after receiving her MFA degree she was included in the Biennial exhibition in 1997 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Being the youngest recipient of the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s grant, her work garnered a huge controversy among the public.

One of her most highly sensationalized work was her cut-paper silhouettes that she started working with in 1993 during her graduate studies in Rhode Island School of Design. Paper-cut portraits were dated back in the late 16th century in France to the court of Catherine de Medici. In the 1700s silhouette-cutting became an art form due to popularity among the rich but in mid-1800s “shadow-portraits” became more of a craft than art and was mostly used in carnivals and in the classrooms to train “good ladies”. Tied to its 18th century phenomenon of physiognomy, an old “science” claiming that a person’s outer appearance, mainly the face, or profile determines one’s character or personality, Walker uses this as a tool to bring the history of racial representation. She draws the images on black paper using pencil or crayon then cuts them with an X-ACTO knife. The form of the images seems like a caricature reduction of the characters and because everything is reduced to a silhouette of the same color, it made them invisible and gave them anonymity as Walker explains. The cut outs are then fastened to canvas, paper or wood using wax or sometimes like her work, Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause 1997, she sometimes adheres her work directly on the gallery walls

Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the ab… — Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or "Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole' (sketches from Plantation Life)" See the Peculiar Institution as never before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause 1997

Walker had started exhibiting large scale cut-paper silhouettes in 1994 at the Drawing Center in New York. The piece entitled, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, was described by Nato Thompson, Chief Currator of Creative Time, to be depicting a “Historical Romance” bursting with sex and violence and adds that the “difficult blend leaves the viewer unsettled.” Her work was not without controversy. Back in the 90s Thompson relates that at the time that she was thrust into the limelight some established artists called her work racist and recently back in 2012-13, her work, The moral arc of history ideally bends toward justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism and unrestrained chaos, revolted and shocked many people because it depicted Obama giving a speech with graphic violence all over the work which represented the horrors in the antebellum in the South including “a white man shoving a black woman’s face into his crotch.” (N. Thompson) The public library covered the artwork for two weeks until they decided that in order to handle the delicate matter and to exhibit the drawing again, they held a public discussion with Walker.

Walker is also keen in using a narrative type of depicting her work. Her work tends to be derived from historical romantic fiction and to 19th century narratives of slaves about the life during the antebellum in the South. Titles of her work lean towards a very theatrical impression and she also tends to spell slang words the way that they are pronounced like the divisive shadow-puppet film, Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale.

A 400-foot cyclorama of the Civil War conflict that she saw when she was young influenced her to Construct her work, Slavery! Slavery! in the same manner. The 360-degree installation surrounding the viewer asserts them to submit into participating in the story “as if spying on the events taking place”. Being in a rotunda also takes the fact that it eliminates a definite beginning or end to the story.

Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart,Image from NYCLOVESNYC — *Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart*,
Image from NYCLOVESNYC

Kara Walker started her career as a painter. Back in the Atlanta School of Art, she worked with oil as an undergrad student and when she graduated and attended Rhode Island for School of Design in 1994, she began working on cut-paper silhouettes. She associated the medium she uses to its history and because of that she coupled oil painting to the upper class. Walker explains that she had to wean herself to the oil painting’s “obvious seduction” and added that she was determined to be better and to “make work that would actually stimulate others” With the silhouette, she was able to have more autonomy in exploring issues about race and exchanges in power. (K. Walker)

In exploring shadow making with her silhouettes, in Darkytown Rebellion, she used light projection to cast shadows and create a swallowing atmosphere for the viewers in her installations. The paper-cut silhouettes are plastered on the wall then projects colors using transparencies on the overhead projectors. Because their shadows tend to get cast because of the light projection, viewers become part of the installation and the story.

Besides being theatrical with her works, she also sometimes worked on some of her pieces like she would write to her diary. She constantly draws and creates sketches in notebooks like the series of 66 works on paper, Do You Like Crème in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? (1997). While it was definitely smaller in scale compared to her large installations, they are quite powerful as these were her personal responses to public criticism of her work at the time. She also worked with Text-based works like Texts (2001) and Many Black Women (Certain Types) (2002) which was a text based work and it involves sentences, phrases and quotes that seemed to be notes that she writes for herself. In a larger scale, she also used this medium for Letter from a Black Girl (1998) which explores the power-exchange between master and slave and the artist and the art world possibly as a response to the criticism she received from the public and other artists who called her “racist” (N. Thompson)due to the dark nature of her work.

She further explored the use of silhouette, light projection, and storytelling when she delved into film animation. In her silhouette puppet animation, Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale, Walker uses violence titillated with sex and narrates things that grueling and are taboo for the history of Slavery America.

Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale (2011)Image from lehmannmaupin — *Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale (2011)*
Image from lehmannmaupin

Her latest piece, A Subtlety, is a massive installation used a medium that is within time constraint stage in a place that has been doomed of its existence. Walking towards the building, people immediately would notice the smell of sugar and molasses within the air acting like a luring agent to the giant confection waiting inside its walls. Audie Cornish puts it best, “She’s doing what she does best: drawing you in with something sweet, something almost charming, before you realize you’ve admired something disturbing.” Walker worked with sugar to bring to light its history, its production, and at what cost a refined white sugar took to achieve its “purity”. The story of great empires that were built using the lives of slaves were highlighted by the use of the sphinx to mirror the American slave history to enjoy the luxury it provided and to allow its culture of overconsumption.

Walker’s work is not without criticism because it constantly brings us to a position that is completely uncomfortable because of violence, sex, nudity, racism, slavery, dehumanizing people for power, antebellum in the South, and how such injustice was a part of a golden age in America’s industrial history wrapped in squeamish humor. To feel a negative emotion towards her work seems to be a victory of the artist’s part because it brings to light a moral compass within ourselves that we need to constantly remind the world that such horrors should never be allowed to happen again.

References:

http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/domino-sugar-factory/

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/05/23/artist_kara_walker_says_farewell_to_the_domino_sugar_refinery.php

http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/Main/DesireAndShame

http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/curatorial-statement/

http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=110565

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/27/going-to-see-kara-walkers-subtlety-read-these-first/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/arts/design/a-subtlety-or-the-marvelous-sugar-baby-at-the-domino-plant.html?_r=1

http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/Main/Biography

http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker/Main/TechniquesAndMedia

When Social Activism Lends Itself to Art: Ai Wei Wei's "According to What?" in the Brooklyn Museum

May 30, 2014

On the fifth floor of The Brooklyn Museum lies a gargantuan piece entitled, “Straight.” The piece was created using Steel rebar that were recovered from the wreckage of schoolhouses in Sichuan due to the 2008 earthquake. It took almost the entire floor of the room and it would seem that it was appropriated only for this piece. Each bar that was recovered was painstakingly re-straightened and arranged in a way that it seemed like the earth’s plates that are in motion during an earthquake. The work in itself evokes a minimalistic aesthetic but given the way the piece was created, it dawned on me that it was speaking in volumes about the children who were forgotten and names of the dead that its government would not recognize. Ai Wei Wei may have used this work as a reminder to straighten out a crooked past.

Much of Ai Wei Wei’s work is about social activism. He uses art as an eye opener and as a means to pull through the realities that the Chinese government seems to be undermining if not hiding, and he brings up China’s culture, and social awareness. One of his most notable work was a photo- triptych of him “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” in 1995 is displayed on the 4th floor of the museum together with Han Dynasty vases that have been painted over using industrial paint. These pieces together with the “Map of China” which was created using Tieli wood (iron wood) from temples that were taken apart seems to point out China’s unity and churning in on itself of its culture, politics, and history.

People can also get a glimpse on Ai Wei Wei’s past through his pictures of his life in New York back in the 80s that hung on the walls of the 4th floor gallery. I was able to see his pictures of street performances in the Greenwich Village, his interesting nude portrait with his penis tucked between his legs in his Williamsburg apartment, to the Chinese New Year on Mott Street back in 1989. These photos almost conveys something endearing and also something very personal as it also included photos of his friends and his people who moved to America for another chance at life. But these would seem to be the only part of the exhibition where I found myself smiling as the rest of it felt like a chilling presence.

His Social Media Snap Shot of police brutality shows his committed activism through new mediums and even evidences of the crime like his MRI scans were laid out in the exhibit; possibly as a sort of expose because his appeals for justice seemed unheard. But nothing had prepared me for that room on the 5th floor with the re-straightened rebar and the names of thousands of forgotten souls that were posted on the right wall of the room. It was very painful and for the last piece that you’ll ever see in his show it seemed like a bitter end. However, it is up to the viewer what he’ll do with what he has seen. It will be up to them if they shall remain forgotten or just another memory of an art piece that they glanced in a museum.

Time’s Refusal to be Measured

May 30, 2014

It was as if the darkness swallowed me in, and forced me to be immersed in what was about to come. The walls and floor were painted dark grey if not black and it had markings and notes like a production set. I felt as if I was prepared to see a show and yet the chairs were not arranged in rows and the speakers are found almost in disarray everywhere. While the stage was seemingly chaotic, at the center of the room is this machine like structure that was in constant thumping and pumping like a beating heart at the center of the room. Despite the machine being a rigid structure, it was as if it was in itself a breathing and beating organic thing.

There was a moment of stillness a few seconds before the installation video begins and in the darkness and stillness of the room, it suddenly flashed a bright video of a metronome that gave a constant beat. Even before my eyes could fixate on it, another flash of video of the same metronome started on the sides, and then another, until I was surrounded on all four sides by the ticking metronomes coupled with throngs of oppressive brass music aggressively pushing me deep within its center. I almost felt shocked and unexplainably scared and the lack of order in the seating forced me to go around the space with each of the speakers providing me individually with different music or audio throughout the entire experience.

The metronomes proceeded to change into a video of a man walking constantly even up and down a chair that obstructed his path and the changes in each sides happened like a form of reaction from the first screen where it first showed the man. It constantly kept changing but each scene was almost felt like a reaction to the screen next to it and before the viewer can see what was happening to the other screen, the video had elapsed and had changed its context almost as if it was whirring the viewers gaze constantly like a centrifugal force and the only constant thing was the churning breathing machine in the center.

There were instances when the whole screen was showing the same video and the next would be “different” possibilities of what could stem from that scenario as the case in the scene of a man leaving his wife at home to go to work and the wife taking her lover in the house the moment the husband leaves. The screens started with the same scenario and then proceeded to change in what happens next, in one screen, the husband suddenly comes home and the lover was made to hide under a table cloth. When the husband investigates, the lover changes to a tuba or in another video in another wall the lover hides under the table and a group of people instead comes out from under the table.

There were multiple times when the videos kept repeating a scene like a disturbing video glitch almost like a hiccup in time. The screens while almost entirely different seem to have a central theme like different gears churning and working against and with each other.

William Kentridge’s Refusal of Time was inspired by Peter Galison’s work when he studied a 1905 paper on relativity that hypothesized that time is not absolute and cannot be measured therefore there would be delays in any centralized and synchronized clock. This was made evident in Kentridge’s work with the delays in the changing of his videos that it felt as if each video was a reaction from its predecessor.

The entirety of the show made me lose all form of control from the lack of central visual, the various audio that was playing in different speakers, to the lack of a constant position in which you’re forced to view the entire program in continuous motion. You are bombarded with the notion that you’re not in any form of control of what is happening much like a reminder of the conjecture that time, like the installation experience, is something that you cannot control.

The 1964 World’s Fair Ghosts

May 30, 2014

Set in the grounds of a forgotten world, where wondrous magnificent structures promised the tomorrow that we now have and told of futures that have now become a blurry past, The Queens Museum laid host to a controversial work from its equally controversial and elusive artist. The museum displayed some of the faces of the 13 most wanted men by Andy Warhol and finally was shown to the public for the first time in the very same ground that denied its public release back in 1964 in The New York World’s fair.

Surrounded by dilapidated ghostly structures of a promising past, the newly renovated museum displayed some of the most haunting faces that were once plastered on the New York State Pavilion but were painted over before it even reached its official public viewing. These faces stared at me, followed me and it filled the room the moment I entered the gallery as if it was coming back to haunt the very place where it once stood. Maybe it was partly due to its size but despite being black and white while other works on the walls were composed of possibly 10 different types of bright colors, it was seemingly always in my peripheral. Surrounding it are pieces of the story covering how these images were brought to life though items like receipt orders for the silk screens and the actual FBI wanted list booklet from the FBI, and how it ended because of the controversy it provoked.

Andy Warhol, Thirteen Most Wanted Men, silkscreen on canvas, 20 x 20 ft. Installed on the exterior of the New York State Pavilion. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The gallery also brought Andy Warhol’s endearing past with pictures of his life back in the Silver Factory, friends who constantly frequented meetings and parties with him, and the beautiful and damaged people he once surrounded himself with and whom, more often than not, became his muses. There were personal handwritten letters and some were even for official business as for the case of Andy Warhol transferring to another museum without meeting personally to discuss such matters. While this can be easily viewed as lack of social and business etiquette, I could not help but be charmed by how lovingly he wrote the letter. Warhol always had been charming and endearing despite being eccentric and hard to pin down.

13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Fair, Installation view, 2014, Queens Museum. Photo: Peter Dressel

Billy Name, Untitled 1964, reprint 2014, Archival pigment print. Courtesy the artist. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The exhibit felt like a ghost confronting its past. While it was banned because of the controversy back in 1964 it also brought to light the question, “Where is the freedom to express art?” It showed faces, stories, and documents that enriched the history of the work and its maker and even fed the powerful and haunting photographs. I stood at the center of the gallery with the wall facing it behind me and stared at these faces, then as an experiment to see if these faces do make me feel haunted, I closed them. Even in the darkness, I saw these ghostly faces of these men that were being haunted back then staring back.

Andy Warhol, Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr., 1964. Acrylic and liquitex in silkscreen on canvas. Image given courtesy Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Photographer: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main © 2014 The Andy Warhol Fou… — Andy Warhol, Most Wanted Men No. 11, John Joseph H., Jr., 1964. Acrylic and liquitex in silkscreen on canvas. Image given courtesy Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main. Photographer: Axel Schneider, Frankfurt am Main © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–1996 "A Negroid Type" — **From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried**, 1995–1996 "A Negroid Type"

The Endearing Beauty and Its Truth that Pierces You in Carrie Mae Weems’ Retrospective

May 30, 2014

Family Pictures and Stories, 1981–1982

Carie Mae Weems’ Retrospective begins on her very roots, a cluster of photos entitled, “Family Pictures and Stories (1978–84)”. There was something endearing in the photo I became fixated on at the very first series that I encountered. The photo captured an elderly black man sitting on a chair while a younger black fellow was holding the top brace of the chair on the right from the back. They both looked at the camera with a sense of familiarity with the photographer and both posed with comfort from possibly knowing each other for an extensive amount of time. Both men were neither smiling nor were in any discomfort. Instead, the softness of their face indicates that they are possibly inside the very home that they shared together. While the photo that captured a tender moment between them seems to bring about a sense of gentleness, love, and familiarity, the artist weaves a narrative to this piece that brings a gut-wrenching truth confined with the characters in the photograph. The narrative of the piece entitled, Dad and Son-Son, shared a disturbing fact about a shared experience between the two men; the father and son truly did love one another but during one instance after the two men drank heavily, both whipped out pistols and fired at one another. After this surge of violence immediately came the tenderness of the son’s crying and pleading, “Daddy, daddy, I’m sorry.”

Not Manet's Type, 1997 "It was clear, I was not Manet's type Picasso...who had a way with women... only used me and Duchamp never even considered me" — **Not Manet's Type**, 1997
"It was clear, I was not Manet's type Picasso...who had a way with women... only used me and Duchamp never even considered me"

The piece encapsulates Carrie Mae Weems’ body of work in to two words: endearing and disturbing. Her entire work swerves Guggenheim’s walls like tracing a woman’s curves and the narratives that envelopes it pricks the heart with every step. It forces you to stare and then once you bite and glance at it, it continues to ask why you were looking. Like a feisty woman baring herself out it suddenly darts at you for looking and prodding. In her work, “Not Manet's Type, 1997”, we find a woman contemplating on the things that society deems that a woman should look through a series of photos. The photos depict a woman alone in the room getting naked and initially almost reluctant of her body but ends with the last photo of a woman lying down on the bed, naked and without a care in the world. Like its narrative that seems to ask the question to what our society deems as beautiful, most of her work constantly asks the things that are seemingly normal to you and questions the things that you find beautiful, funny, acceptable, and erotic.

Carrie Mae Weems took upon the responsibility of taking beautiful photographs of unapologetic truth combined with vivid narratives about being black to bring about positive change. Weems’ explains, “my responsibility as an artist is to work, to sing for my supper, to make art, beautiful and powerful, that adds and reveals; to beautify the mess of a messy world, to heal the sick and feed the helpless; to shout bravely from the roof-tops and storm barricaded doors and voice the specifics of our historic moment.”

From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 1995–1996

"A Negroid Type"

"You Became Playmate to the Patriarch"

"Black and tanned Your Whipped Wind of Change Howled Low Blowing Itself-Ha-Smack Into the Middle of Ellington's Orchestra Billie Heard it too & Cried Strange Fruit Trees"

The entirety of the exhibit throbs like a heartbeat. There are moments of warmth and gentleness that thumps a placid pacing and then braces to the rawness and painfulness of its sharp narrative and then it brings you to moments when your heart stops, pauses, then drops deep within your core burning a fiery hole.

In 1995, Weems was commissioned to investigate historical photo-images of blacks from the Getty Museum. This led her to create From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried a series of photographs integrated with texts that bring to life thoughts, questions, and experiences of the black community from these photos. The images were toned in red and begin with photos of African men and women then moves along to photographs of African slaves dressed in western clothing and even contained a disturbing image of a slave with its back torn from whipping. The images alone seemed more of an anthropological collection of a disturbing past but Weems paired it with the most emotional color – red and added gut wrenching narrative of what had become of the people that were brought from Africa to the West. The photos coupled with the texts were strong, sharp like a piercing blade, and it felt like walking on hot lead as the viewer progresses through the series.

Carrie Mae Weems’ work is a feast and a delight to one’s eyes. She captures beauty in the grit and truth and yet the narratives scratches, burns, stabs, and boils me. Its beauty forces me to look and the words like a sharp tongue shouts the reality to me and questions me. It was as if I saw a beautiful woman and her words made me purge and she had me swallow the searing vomit in my mouth.

Latest & Greatest

This is a block field

You can put any content in here.