Maladies of Power: a Kara Walker Lexicon
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
347 Maladies of Power: A Kara Walker Lexicon by Yasmil Raymond -KARA WALKER- Maladies of Power 348 Yasmil Raymond 349 The following lexicon identifies a number of key drives Walker’s efforts to visualize the histories of boy rises up with the help of his balloonlike penis while elements — character types, objects, bodily fluids, injustice that plague our past and continue to feed our below, a young black woman lifts her leg to give birth environments, and events — that appear repeatedly present conscience. to twins (see also Birth). or occasionally in Kara Walker’s art and, when The mural’s scale insists that the viewer participate considered together, illuminate certain allegorical in the experience by walking across the periphery of meanings, philosophical associations, and visual HOOP SKIRTS the landscape as if spying on the events taking place. references between and beyond the works. The Despite the surrealism of the actions, the veracity of contradictions inherent in positions of power and acts the figures —which exhibit human proportions and of brutality are the underlying subject in this glossary Among the best-known portrayals of the antebellum traits—incites us, whether consciously or uncon- of visual symbols and, I would argue, in Walker’s South are Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with sciously, into an unexpected interaction. We are drawn imagery as a whole. Put simply, the artist exposes the the Wind and its equally popular 1939 film adaptation. into role-playing and time travel in a manner that impossibility of moral absolutes within the dynamics Set in 1861, Mitchell’s mythologized depiction of the recalls a passage from Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel of domination, a predicament that applies as well to period as a genteel and benevolent agrarian society Kindred. The modern-day protagonist and narrator, art that deals with such subject matter. In his study permanently fixed in the American psyche a distorted –––– FIG. 2 Detail of Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Dana, has been suddenly thrown back in time to come Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, on the visual representation of slavery, Marcus Wood account of the American South. The broad cultural 1994 (page 116 foldout) to the aid of her white ancestor Rufus, now a young argues that “art which describes or responds to influence, popularity, and sheer longevity of both the boy; when she asks him what year it is, he replies: trauma and mass murder always embodies paradox.” novel and the film give evidence to a continuation on In 1994, Walker exhibited her first cut-paper He adds, “How can aesthetic criteria be applied to some level of white-supremacist values in popular silhouette mural, Gone, An Historical Romance of a “It’s … eighteen fifteen.” describe the torture and mass destruction of our own culture and an implicit justification, long after Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of “When?” kind? How is it possible to make something beautiful manumission, of slavery and segregation. One Young Negress and Her Heart, a tableau some 50 “Eighteen fifteen.” out of, and to perceive beauty within, something feet long and 13 feet high that was unprecedented in I sat still, breathed deeply, calming myself, which has contaminated human values to such a form, scale, and subject matter (page 116 foldout). 5 believing him. I did believe him. I wasn’t even as degree as to be beyond the assumed idealizations The figures, slightly larger than life-size, were first surprised as I should have been. I had already of truth and art, beyond the known facts and drawn with white chalk on black paper and then accepted the fact that I had moved through time. beyond the manipulations of rhetoric?” 1 Human cut with an X-ACTO knife and adhered to the wall Now I knew I was farther from home than I had slavery, the cruelest of capitalist systems, has yet to to create a panoramic mural reminiscent in scale to thought. And now I knew why Rufus’s father be, and may well never be, accurately described either the tableaux vivants and cycloramas that emerged used his whip on “niggers” as well as horses. verbally or visually. It is this impossibility, however, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I looked up and saw that the boy had left his that has served as the impetus for Walker’s work over Flanking the pastoral scene are two large trees covered chair and come closer to me. the past decade. in Spanish moss that evoke the warmer climate of “What’s the matter with you?” he Appropriating preconceived ideas about the the American South. A total of thirteen figures, four demanded. “You keep acting sick.” antebellum South, she has given visual form to objects (a sword, a bust, a pumpkin, and a broom), “It’s nothing, Rufe. I’m all right.” No, I was the unimaginable acts, unspoken testimonies, and and one dead duck are rendered in the reductive sick. What was I going to do? Why hadn’t I gone unanswered questions from that period in American fashion of caricatures and with the idealized, well- home? This could turn out to be such a deadly history that continue to resonate today. As the artist –––– FIG. 1 Eastman Johnson, Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South proportioned, and eternally youthful features of place for me if I had to stay in it much longer. has explained, “I don’t know how much I believe in (Negro Life at the South), 1859, oil on canvas, 36 x 45 1/4 in. (91.4 x 114.9 fairy-tale illustrations. The full moon above concedes “Is this a plantation?” I asked. redemptive stories, even though people want them cm), The Robert L. Stuart Collection, on permanent loan from the New York the clandestine nature of the events unfolding in “The Weylin plantation. My daddy’s Tom Public Library, S-225; Collection New York Historical Society and strive for them. They’re satisfied with stories of front of our eyes: in the left foreground, a female Weylin.” 6 triumph over evil, but then triumph is a dead end. Depictions of the horrors of slavery and plantation figure wearing an overflowing hoop skirt leans Triumph never sits still. Life goes on. People forget life—slave hunts, mutilation, rape, and murder— forward to kiss her lover while revealing the legs of The antebellum plantation in this first experiment and make mistakes. Heroes are not completely pure, became, starting in the late eighteenth century, the someone else, a young female lover, hiding beneath of Walker’s and in subsequent depictions constitutes and villains aren’t purely evil. I’m interested in the focus of slave narratives and abolitionist campaigns her garment (fig. 2). not only a historical and geographical reference continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, but rarely were the subject of literature and visual The hoop skirt, a symbol of morality and the but also a psychological terrain in which the or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives art. 3 During the first half of the nineteenth century, quintessential fashion statement of Southern women cast shadows of masters and slaves embody people use to construct a group identity and to keep paintings occasionally centered on scenes of life in the before the Civil War, is an ever-present motif in the repressed prejudices, desires, and obsessions that themselves whole—such activity has a darker side to South, as in Eastman Johnson’s Old Kentucky Home— Walker’s imagery; both mistresses and slave women the contemporary American collective consciousness it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not Life in the South (Negro Life at the South) (fig. 1). Made don such garments not to protect their virtue but refuses to acknowledge, visualize, and reconcile. Like in the group. That’s a constant thread that flummoxes before the outbreak of the Civil War, it perpetuated the to disguise their own repressed desires. In Gone, the Dana, viewers of Walker’s work are metaphorically me.” 2 This lexicon of symptoms, tools, weapons, and myth of a harmonious rural life while disguising the breaching of the hoop skirt unleashes a series of lustful and emotionally transported to the plantation of ordeals attempts to articulate this conception of the inhumane treatment endured by slaves — some four events, including a scene in which a toddler girl sucks their own racial and gender prejudices, superiority amorphous nature of power and of morality, which million of them in the United States alone. 4 the penis of a boy her junior. Above, in the sky, a naked and inferiority complexes, and anxieties and fetishes. Maladies of Power 350 Yasmil Raymond 351 By its very nature, the identity exorcism present in slave child is wearing the boots of the master, the as a bare-chested girl wearing a banana-leaf skirt walking, others dancing —and all of them, with the Walker’s imagery is a paradox in that its potential is implication is that the child has access to the residence tries to set a palm tree on fire. The young slave exception of one, are wearing shoes that, even in their dependent solely on viewers’ consciousness of their and may in fact be the offspring of the master and a girl, identified by the iron piece around her neck, various states of wear and tear, enable mobility and own body, race, and ancestry while at the same time domestic slave. Such a relationship did not necessarily approaches the grass at the foot of the tree with an air hence the possibility of escape (fig.