reviews kARA WALkER
. . . the angry surface of some grey and threatening
sea, 2007, 16mm film and video transferred to
dVd, colour, silent, 9 mins 10 sec. still image
courtesy sikkema Jenkins & Co, new York
Kara walKer: My CoMpleMent,
My eneMy, My oppressor, My love
MusEE d’ARt ModERnE dE LA ViLLE dE PARis
20 JunE – 9 sEPtEM bER
‘Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey (Don’t Call Me Whitey, Nigger)’, sang Sly white elite of the late eighteenth century, the seemingly distanced and
& the Family Stone on 1969’s Stand! Then, the Family Stone’s cultural and elegant display she makes of it, are typical of a contemporary attitude: cool
racial diversity epitomised the optimistic message of 1960s counterculture, and ambiguous, with no apparent desire to ‘solve’ the ambivalence (she
but by the 70s this could no longer fit the black movement’s growing often refers to Warhol). Her cut-out silhouettes are a sharp metaphor of
distrust towards white society. Their following album, There’s a Riot Goin’ black people’s invisibility. But their location in aesthetics of the past, the
On (1971) is that of backlash and disillusion, reflecting the hardening of academicism of their diverse and beautiful variations (shadow-theatre
black nationalism and racial tensions in the US. puppet films, watercolours, large gouaches) and their repetition become
The reversibility of the ‘Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey’ lyric could problematic as the stylistic, formal, historical and cultural legacies of the
function as a motto for Kara Walker’s intricate work, with its perverse second half of the twentieth century are deliberately put aside. Walker’s
reversal and intertwining of white and black figures. The ‘black humour’ powerful works would gain in intensity if presented along with other works,
of those insulting words in a pop song is similar to Walker’s sarcastic but whether conceptual, post-Pop or postmodern (Vergne surprisingly seems
seductive use of negative clichés, visual or textual, even though her work to think that the relevance of young artists’ works lies in their ‘safe distance’
deals nearly exclusively with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical from these positions). Their proximity to, and contrast with, different
iconography. Indeed, this dichotomy points to a question the show raises: strategies that also question the representation of black identity (Renée
what happens next? Where are the Harlem Renaissance, Rosa Parks, the Green’s or Carrie Mae Weems’s work, for instance) would give them an
Black Panther Party, Angela Davis, etc? Kara Walker’s obsession with slavery autonomy and pertinence they lack in the show.
narratives is an efficient and intelligent tool for making her audience feel, With few African-American artists shown in important French
as she says, ‘ashamed because they have… simply believed in the project of institutions, ARC has missed an opportunity to represent the diversity
modernism’. It is also, as Philippe Vergne puts it in the catalogue to Walker’s of contemporary African-American art, especially since the publication
show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, a strategy to ‘remain of French critic and art historian Elvan Zabunyan’s Black Is a Color (Une
at a safe distance from a post-Pop aesthetic built upon ironic, postmodern histoire de l’art africain-américain contemporain). Zabunyan’s study shows
appropriation and insubordinate complicity’, and from ‘conceptual works that there can be no complete ‘representative’ of African-American art
that expressed criticism of visual culture’. and identity, for it is a community composed of differences, conflicts and
Walker’s appropriation of an iconography of abjection, her contradictory positions, a complexity strangely missing here.
confiscation of a formal language used as a kind of entertainment for the Lili Reynaud Dewar
Artreview 136
NEW Sept_REVIEWS.indd 22 7/8/07 15:59:07
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