Magic lanterns? Scenes of horror and guilty pleasures, more terrifying than the cruellest fairy tales. Thousands of little drawings halfway between surrealism and newspaper satire. A prestigious prize. Controversy. Bad puns. Books. Films. A retrospective. Enormous chaotic drawings with a touch of expressionism about them. Still more very bad puns. New scandals. A Sphinx made of sugar. Hundreds of interviews and exhibitions.

Kara Walker, The Moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos, 2010, graphite et pastel sur papier, 182,9 x 289,6 cm, Courtesy of Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., New York, © Kara Walker

All in the span of twenty years: from her exhibition at the New York Drawing Center in 1994 to her last two shows at the Victoria Miro Gallery in 2015, the work of Kara Walker has spanned a number of mediums, while remaining consistently faithful to a program defined by anti-racism and anti-sexism. Her work presents an endless variation on the relationship between violence and representation.

Reactivation of a minor genre for political ends: the silhouette

By now, Walker is famous for installations such as Gone, A History of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), a parody of the famous Gone With the Wind. The feeling of déjà-vu experienced by the viewer when observing what appear to be shadow puppets disappears when, upon closer inspection, they realize that they are looking at shapes cut out of black paper; once wax-glued to the wall, they become so flat they seem to “vanish” into it¹. The grotesque appearance of the characters and their actions, together with the act of cutting the figures out of their black background, is an attack on the idea of historical representation itself and on how slavery is remembered. The artist mentions history painting² among the many eclectic sources that inspired the silhouette installations: thus, we are dealing with no less than the actual removal of figures from their background through the violent act of cutting.

The installations subvert the initial function of the silhouette, which were used in lieu of portraits towards the end of the 18th century and during the romantic era. Walker’s silhouettes “aim to suggest they capture the outlines of flesh and blood models³,” but they really are simulacra, imitations of portraits that have no models. Instead of models, Walker uses stereotypes. They quickly establish a link between the distortion of the history of slavery and symbolic violence. The characters that we will read as “slaves” (therefore black) are borrowed from racist caricatures (in the form of images or tchochkes) that flooded visual culture in America following the Civil War, a time when the myth of the refinement of the Old South, where masters and slaves lived together in peace and harmony, was taking root in American culture⁴ .

Kara Walker, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, 1994, Cut paper on wall. Installation dimensions variable; approx. 156 x 600 inches (396.2 x 1524 cm) Installation view: Selections 1994. The Drawing Center, New York, 1994 Photo: Orcutt Photo © Kara Walker, image courtesy of Sikkema, Jenkins & Co., New York

At the end of the 18th century, the carving out of profiles – the silhouette – had been appropriated by the practice of physiognomy, a pseudoscience that applied them to develop theories on so-called racial inequalities⁵. But also, and perhaps most importantly, due to their resembling shadows, Walker’s silhouettes present the shadow as the subject’s evil twin. And according to philosopher Lewis Gordon, the negative figure that opposed the idea of modernity that took shape during the Enlightenment was precisely the figure of the Black person, which historian Cedric Robinson notes is a purely Western fabrication⁶.

For Walker, both immersed in Adrian Piper’s conceptual art and passionate about oil painting, the silhouette was a deliberately adopted position. The early 1990s were marked by the rejection of painting. The prosperous part of the 1980s were characterised in the United States by a reactionary socio-political and aesthetic context, exemplified by the resurgence of somewhat chauvinistic neo-romantic positions focused on figurative painting, with increased speculation in the art world. When the financial crisis hit and investors withdrew from the art market, this was suddenly replaced by practices centred around cheap materials and casually-produced forms, resulting from a strong interest in identity politics, at a time when the art scene was expanding to include minorities⁷. In this context, oil painting was considered as a vehicle that spoke to, and for, a conservative social order⁸. The artist herself associated this medium with a patriarchal logic that would have placed her “at its margins somehow⁹.” Yet, the silhouettes also borrow their immersive spatial arrangement from the cyclorama – circular panoramic paintings rendered obsolete by cinema, aiming to allow spectators to experience a historical event in a fully immersive manner¹⁰. Walker identifies this type of grandiloquent oversized painting and silhouettes as minor art forms¹¹. Their fusion enabled her to criticize a dominant form using marginal mediums.

Kara Walker, That Thing, 2005, pencil on paper 22 x 30 inches (55.9 x 76.2 cm) © Kara Walker. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Using anachronistic strategies to raise questions about the present

Anachronism is the structuring principle behind Walker’s silhouettes, who created them from the fictitious point of view of a black woman who would have lived “150 or 200 years ago,” who would not have had anything more than limited access to forms of artistic expression¹². The medium thus highlights the implicit limitations confining the artistic practice of black women during the 1990s. The titles of the artworks, which often refer to the artist as the “Negress,” stress her ironic position, exaggerating the stereotypical expectations thrust upon minority artists. Moreover, from the very beginning the artist had associated the silhouettes with blackface¹³ : the silhouettes made all models black, which Walker ascribes to the latent and ambiguous desire to “become black” in Western culture, but which also relates to the visual artist’s strategy for positioning herself in a scene where the white majority would expect her to examine her “blackness.” Her humorously sensationalistic titles put forward the “artificiality¹⁴,” or performative aspect of this stance¹⁵.

Walker’s art is therefore not concerned with the past or with slavery¹⁶. Unlike Fred Wilson in Mining the Museum (1993)¹⁷, it is not a question of working as a historian or coming to terms with a traumatic past. According to art historian Darby English, the installations give the illusion of being “images of slavery”; what is at stake is shattering the possibility of representation itself, by suggesting that the memory of slavery has been buried and irrevocably transformed by its representations¹⁸.

Kara Walker, Nina Simone, 2010, unique ink transfer on paper 59.5 x 72.25 inches (151.1 x 183.5 cm) © Kara Walker. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Kara Walker, Augusta Savage, 2010, unique ink transfer on paper 43.625 x 72.25 inches (110.8 x 183.5 cm) © Kara Walker. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Deadly representations

The silhouettes address both the symbolic violence of the representations of slavery and their effects on contemporary consciousness, namely the real impact of the images and representations. They reflect the back-and-forth motion between mental constructs and concrete, visual representations that infect daily life¹⁹. They illustrate this phenomenon by only revealing the “identity” of the characters if we accept to identify their racial profile²⁰ (pointed nose = “white,” thick-lipped = “black”), that is, to recognize that we know how to read signs related to the reduction of individuals into caricatures. In that way, the silhouettes are deeply conceptual since they must be activated, not only through the act of perception, but also through the personal history and social position of the observer²¹.

Given the semantic and historical richness of the installations, we can see that it can be difficult to avoid boiling down Walker’s work to those installations alone. Yet the majority of Walker’s creations examine the crushing weight of representations. Thus, starting in 2007, the visual artist introduced a series called Search for Ideas supporting the Black Man as a Work of Modern Art – Contemporary Painting. A death without end: an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs, including fifty-two texts written in sumi ink on paper arranged in the form of a minimalist grid²², exclamations and interior monologues using ultra-violent (often vulgar) language and descriptions of actions (rape, circumcision, murder, torture, expropriation). Walker had created this series as a response to images of tortured Iraqi prisoners detained in Abu Ghraib that had surfaced on the Internet two years before. Confronted with these omnipresent images, Walker preferred to use text instead: a metaphorical black body referring back to the violence perpetrated against the racialised enemy (and in American English, one of the racial slurs used to designate Arabs is “sand nigger”) – Black here constituting the universal Other, as defined by Western racist terms.

Kara Walker, From: Sugar Makes This World, 2013-14, ink, watercolor and graphite on paper. One form a set of 19, 11.75 x 8.25 inches (29.8 x 21 cm) © Kara Walker. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

To put the Kara Walker controversy to rest

To consider Walker’s work as a criticism of representation and of the violence at stake in representation also allows us to understand the controversy that has marked her career to the point of being mentioned in nearly every interpretation of her work²³ . In 1997, a letter-writing campaign was initiated by artist Betye Saar to prohibit the exhibition of Walker’s work; it was later supported by artist Howardena Pindell²⁴ . Walker was accused of perpetuating the negative representation of African-Americans and to sully the memory of slaves in an opportunistic or oblivious manner. Clearly, the exceptional character of Walker’s artistic rise to fame in the 1990s, in a similar fashion as Jean-Michel Basquiat, implicitly betrayed the narrow-mindedness of the art establishment with respect to artists with minority backgrounds²⁵. The issue of representation became socio-political, showing that for any artist coming from a social minority, there exists a requirement for a total representation of the group with which he/she is identified. And the controversy revealed what historian Hal Foster described in “The Artist as Ethnographer ?” as the relegation of the responsibility of political commentary to artists from marginal backgrounds (social or geopolitical)²⁶.

Walker’s position as a black woman, a very specific minority, probably had a certain influence in this instance²⁷.The proliferation of explicitly sexual images in her work is perhaps one of the reasons why “the controversy” was so overly heated – the issue of the representation of the sexuality of black women being further complicated by the concealing of their sexual exploitation, combined with the development of their fictitious excessive sexuality²⁸. Art historian Lisa Gail Collins reminds us that black female nudity was problematic in art for a very long time: in general absent from the canon²⁹, and if represented, it came back to perpetuating the hypersexualized image of black women that had been used as an excuse to legitimize systematic rape under slavery – and colonialism³⁰. In this context, the re-defining of black femininity (socially acceptable, and thus bourgeois and heterosexual) by African-American women largely implied the denial of the body³¹. According to critic Hilton Als, we had to wait for the photograph of Michelle Obama at the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States (2008) to put an official iconographic end to the “mortification” of the black female body³². Yet Walker’s creations feature many images of black women concerned with the pursuit of pleasure. While the body of the artist is never present, not even as self-portraits, we can nonetheless assume that it was the representation of sexuality by a black woman that caused such an uproar. All the more so given that the represented sexuality was often contradictory, perverse – as seen in  That Thing (2006). However, the use of sexuality in Walker fulfils a largely allegorical function: in this drawing, made in obvious bad taste, the activities the feminine figure engages in primarily refer to the masturbatory element involved in ruminating about the past and about history.

Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014, polystyrene foam, sugar Approximately 426 x 312 x 906 inches (1,082 x 792.5 x 2,301.2 cm) A project of Creative Time Domino Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn, NY, May 10 – July 6, 2014 Photo: Jason Wyche © Kara Walker. Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, 2014, polystyrene foam, sugar Approximately 426 x 312 x 906 inches (1,082 x 792.5 x 2,301.2 cm) A project of Creative Time Domino Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn, NY, May 10 – July 6, 2014 Photo: Jason Wyche © Kara Walker. Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

Towards an Afro-Feminist rewriting of world history

Walker’s art must therefore be considered in afro-feminist terms. Her series of monotype textual prints (2010), excerpts from various Internet sources (namely Wikipedia), touches on the issue of so-called representative women: figures with whom a famous black artist like Walker is supposed to identify³³. Only one visual artist is included in this pantheon, sculptor Augusta Savage (1892–1962), alongside Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. The selection of historical rather than contemporary figures does not suggest the return of the past inside the present, since the Wikipedia entries are recent, but calls attention to the miserabilism and voyeurism at play in the historiography of these artists and is a reminder of the current weight of race and gender in how art is received.

To this is added Walker’s examination of a history – and present – subjected to globalization. This element of the work became more prevalent during the 2000s and 2010s, as demonstrated by her interest in themes that were less and less specifically American. The temporary exhibition at the Domino Sugar Factory (commissioned by Creative Time), A Subtlety or The Marvelous Sugar Baby³⁴ (2014) consisted of a monumental Sphinx covered with a white sugar solution, which looked like a stereotypical black nanny, flanked by caramel figures that were slightly smaller than the average adult spectator. Based on research into the history of sugar cane culture, the highly odorous and physically volatile installation condemned the systematic erasure of black slaves from the written history of Western modernity: no slaves, no sugar money for Western powers ; no colonial profits, no Revolution – whether American or French³⁵. And the fact that she chose to depict a black woman showing her behind reminds us that it is on the double exploitation of black women (in terms of labour and sex) that empires were built. At the same time, the choice of stereotype and the scandalous position use humour as an instrument to create distance from the burden of trauma – a constant in Walker’s work.

Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at Teatro La Fenice, Venice Italy. A special project of the 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia. May 20 – June 6, 2015 Director, Art Director, Costume Designer: Kara Walker Associate Director: Ann-Christin Rommen Photo: Lucie Jansch © Kara Walker. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

That Walker has chosen, upon an invitation from curator Okwui Enwezor to participate in the 56th Venice Biennale, to relocate Vincenzo Bellini’s opera in colonial sub-Saharan Africa, fits into this vision of globalized history. The play by French romantic playwright Alexandre Soumet, that inspired Felice Romani’s libretto, drew from a mythical Gallic past to invent glorious roots for French nationalism, while Romani used the same to mirror the building of Italian nationalism. Yet, these nationalisms with legendary sources were used to support the European colonialist impulse at the end of the 19th century. To make Norma a colonized African thus resonates particularly well with the ideological foundations of the opera. Hence, Norma confirms one of the many strengths in Walker’s work: her ability to freely manipulate established representations and the myths which collective identity rests on.

Vanina Géré is a former ENS-Lyon student, Global Visiting Scholar at NYU, and graduate of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University (2012). Her doctoral thesis examined the work of American visual artist Kara Walker (Chancellerie des Universités de Paris Prize 2013). A specialist in American contemporary art, Géré teaches art history at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Nancy; she is an active art critic and translator of writings on Art.