Blasphemous Images.
The Ironic Masquerades of Kara Walker.


Irony and Experiment: The Children of the Civil Rights Movement

In Darius James' novel "Negrophobia," the caricatures produced by America's filthy racist imagination return as frightening, hybrid zombies. Authors such as Paul Beatty (more here), Trey Ellis (more here), and Suzan-Lori Parks (more here) operate with racist stereotypes as well, and while they don't aim to arouse voyeuristic desires, they have as little concern for a social educator's correctness. Following the lead of writers such as Ishmael Reed (more here) and Steve Cannon (more here), they also owe much to the comedians Richard Pryor (more here) and Rudy Ray Moore, to name only two. Darius James cites the liberating images of Blaxploitation movies as an important influence - a genre that has frequently been taken to trial for its circulation of negative cliches. In 1975, the artist Robert Colescott (biography here and here one of his paintings) caused a stir when he exhibited reinterpretations of paintings by Leutze and van Gogh: he had replaced the characters' faces with minstrel stereotypes. Michael Ray Charles (more here) paints the younger relatives of sambos and mammies populating the world of advertising, while Ellen Gallagher takes typical blackface ingredients such as fat lips and bulging eyeballs and transforms them into abstract signs.

As a rule, the visual artists seem to provoke more critical reactions than the writers do - a result of the images' directness that diminishes the distance between remembered reality and artistic practice? Or does the long tradition of subversive humor in African American literature allow for more liberties? Kara Walker's series Emancipation Approximation demonstrates that her work has a variety of sources, from African American folktale to Greek tragedy. Setting and motifs are reminiscent of the slave narrative, although most people are probably familiar with them from the TV series "Roots". Likewise, the stereotypes that inform and give meaning to Walker's silhouettes have become stock images throughout pop culture: from the minstrel show to contemporary Hollywood movies.



 from: The Emancipation Approximation, 1999-2000

Kara Walker herself, having grown up middle class in multicultural California, became aware of racist archetypes as fictions - fictions, she found out, that still retained an enormous grip on reality. Like that of many children of the Civil Rights generation, her life was not marked by the "black experience," the continual referent of African American creative traditions. To compensate for the lack of first-hand experience, she turned to experimentation: "I had to make up my own racist situations so I would know how to deal with them as black people in the past did. In order to have a real connection with my history, I had to be somebody's slave. But I was in control: that's the difference."



 from: The Emancipation Approximation, 1999-2000

She comes across white men's fantasies. Her curiosity is aroused. However distorted by racist projections, she recognizes herself, but the images and words, hurtful as they are, don't hold the same power over her as they do over those who have been victimized by racism. She begins to play around with the forbidden fantasies, unfolding them further in order to explain their attraction, to establish a connection between herself and these fictions. In the realm of her experimental, non-authentic experience, slave narratives, folktales, and minstrel songs all have identical status as sources: they refer to, but are detached from, black traditions and racist power, respectively. They become ready material for irony, deformation, and combination, thereby obtaining an aesthetic value that opens up a gap between the sign and its original meaning. The images are separated from the racist utterance.
Or is that impossible? Walker's critics remind us that racism is not a historical phenomenon but survives even today, lodged in the same images which, as a result, will always mean exactly the same thing. Whatever the artist's intention, every blackface performance, they argue, will in the end affirm degrading judgments, because America's present is rooted in its slaveholding past.

New Millennium Minstrelsy

Walker's silhouettes - must they be regarded as a kind of black-on-black-crime? Or is it possible to appropriate racist language? Can racist discourse be undermined by using its tools? Or do the victims become injured all over again? There is but a single issue Walker's admirers and critics readily agree upon: Her work disregards the dictate of shame - in view of victims of violence, in view of degrading stereotypes, in view of sexual acts, in view of feces, etc. For some, this is simply negative representation; for others, an important liberatory step.



 from: The Emancipation Approximation, 1999-2000

Walker disregards the reverence that - to protect the innocent - conceals the fetishistic character of white male fictions of the black woman. The fetish allows the racist to handle his fears and desires free from internal conflict. In Walker's art, it is represented by the emblematic outlines; at the same time, this comforting fetishistic relationship is disturbed by the scandalous nature of her scenarios. The voyeur, unable to find reassurance, is forced to face his ambivalent desires. Thus, shamelessness can produce shame. Walker is offering fetishes for uncomfortable use. To this purpose, she eroticizes the very images her critics want to get rid of.

In a film documentary about a New York SM studio, one employee, a white woman, talks about an African American customer who pays for acting out a scenario between Southern mistress and plantation slave, a situation that makes one want to look away - out of shame. The shame brings about a ban (the enforced silence) and the demand for positive images, for something that can be said. Walker, taking the opposite course, attempts to make shameful images productive for investigating the intimacy of the racist relationship: "I always felt that it's really a love affair that we've got going in this country." Instead of rejecting the role of the "negress," she takes it on; from that position, being both desired and feared, she returns the classifying look and devises a relationship of mutual dependence.



 untitled, 2001

In Spike Lee's film "Bamboozled" (2001), things are less complicated. Posing the question of whether it's possible to deal ironically with American racist imagery, the movie's answer was a clear "no." Although it is a black character, the TV author Pierre Delacroix, who comes up with the idea of a "New Millennium Minstrel Show," the spectacle really mirrors the racist desire of his white boss. It is the desperate move of a "white man's negro" unable to escape his role or the stereotypes forced upon him. By contrast, Kara Walker and other artists and authors who are taking a similar approach turn to stereotypes as objects of their own desires.

Walker collects negrophobic memorabilia to create a minstrel show of a different order. She uses the old images and transcends them into the mythical; she takes advantage of their emblematic character, yet frustrates the yearning for definite interpretations. Slavery is not portrayed as harmless and natural; it does, however, appear as a historical grotesque populated by both black and white stereotypes. In his book "Love and Theft," Eric Lott, a professor for American and Cultural Studies, argues against simplistic interpretations of blackface minstrelsy as a pure expression of white supremacy, and emphasizes its transgressive aspects: in the very moment of racial demarcation, the line that is being drawn is already crossed. The fear of exposure goes hand in hand with a desire for the cultural expressions of the racial other. Relying on imitations of slave songs, the minstrel show, according to Lott, constituted a rather ambivalent "affective order of things." Not incidentally, after its decline as a theatrical practice, its place in American culture was filled by the drag show.

Ambivalence sabotages essentialist representational practices, be they racial, sexual, or gender related. Charging the ostensibly unambiguous images of racist power with ambivalent desires and disregarding the twin dictates of shame and positive images, Kara Walker refuses to conform to ethnocentric demands for an unchanging, uniform black identity.

all pictures: © Courtesy Brent Sikkema

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