Trauma and Visuality in Modernity

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUaiON BY Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg

Dartmouth College Press Hanover, New Hampshire

Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London Dartmouth College Press Published by University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766 www.upne.com

© 2006 by Trustees of Dartmouth College Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trauma and visuality in modernity / edited and with an introduction by Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg.—1st ed. p. cm. — (Interfaces: studies in visual culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-58465-515-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58465-515-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-58465-516-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-58465-516-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Arts, Modern—Psychological aspects. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Psychoanalysis and the arts. I. Saltzman, Lisa. II. Rosenberg, Eric M. III. Series. NX449.5.T73 2006 709.04001'9—dc22 2005032123

The editors gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint the following chapters:

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. pp. 25-56. © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

van Alphen, Ernst. “The Revivifying Artist: Boltanski’s Efforts to Close the Gap,” reprinted from Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). Courtesy of the author. Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg ix

Part 1 IMAGE 1. Isabelle Wallace, Trauma as Representation: A Meditation on Manet and Johns 3 2. Eric Rosenberg, Walker Evans's Depression and the Trauma of Photography 28

Partll MONUMENT 3. Erika Naginski, Canova's Penitent Magdalene: On Trauma's Prehistory 51 4. Lisa Saltzman, When Memory Speaks: A Monument Bears Witness 82

Partin PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION

5. Judith F. Rodenbeck, Car Crash, 1960 103 6. Anna C. Chave, "Normal Ills": On Embcxjiment, Victimization, and the Origins of Feminist Art 132

V vi CONTENTS

7. Gwendolyn DuBois Show, The "Rememory" of Slavery: Karo Walker's The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven 158

Part IV FILM 8. Cathy Caruth, Literature and the Enactment of Memory: (Duras, Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour) 189 9. Ernst van Alphen, The Revivifying Artist: Boltanski's Efforts to Close the Gap 222

PartV HISTORIOGRAPHY 10. Mark Jarzombek, The Post-traumatic Turn and the Art of Walid Ra'ad and Krzysztof Wodiczko: From Theory to Trope to Beyond 249

Epilogue: Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg 272

List of Contributors 277

Index 279 SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 159 7 llie "lleiiiBiiioff il Slaveiy: Kara Walker's The End of Uncle Tom and

the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven

GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW

If this is what is inside of me, then nobody is safe. —Kara Walker

Figure 1. Kara Walker, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, 1995. Detail. Cut paper and adhesive on wall. Dimensions variable. [Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.] The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven is one of Kara Walker’s most impressive large- The End of Uncle Tom is comprised of four groupings of silhouette scale works (fig. 1). When installed in a square room it covers characters involved in ambiguous, nightmarish scenes that may be under­ three of four gallery walls with haunting, life-size silhouettes stood as individual scenes.^ When a photograph taken of the work in that evoke an imaginary episode from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Har­ 1998 is read from left to right, the first scene contains a group of three riet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 sentimental novel about slavery. It is slave women and a child involved in a moment of mutual nursing. This is a work meant for public display. Originally mounted in 1997 at followed by a larger arrangement of three small slave children, one hold­ the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, and then again ing a basket, another a spike, and the third a tambourine. Their young the following year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern mistress, who raises an ax high above her own head, stands in the center Art, the work translates the nostalgic form of the silhouette into of the grouping. The third scene is dominated by the character of a cor­ a contemporary, museum-ready format by increasing its scale pulent and crippled master who rests his belly on the back of a pubescent from preciously small to shockingly monstrous. The ambitious slave that he is sodomizing. He counterbalances his girth with the aid of scale not only asserts the work’s authority within the space of a saber that is thrust into the body of an infant beneath him. The final the museum, but the scale of the individual character silhou­ scene centers on a balding male slave who, knees bent and hands clasped ettes, their human size, helps them to force their way into the in prayer, is connected to a fetus lying on the ground by a cord dangling space of the spectator; they become the shadows of those from his anus, while at the far right a woman who is partially obscured standing before them. by bushes gestures in his direction.

158 160 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 161

The physical connection between the work of art and the spectator albeit negative form, at its base the silhouette expresses a void: an un­ that Walker’s installation effects is further emphasized by the format of knowable black hole that is signified by an outer contour line. When com­ the piece, the way it wraps around the gallery, adapting the shape of a bined with what is arguably the most pervasively traumatic, guilt-ridden, nineteenth-century panorama.^ In addition to referencing theatrical art­ and gothic episode in American history, this form produces an extraordi­ work, the silhouette characters are reminiscent of shadows cast by Javanese nary space of projection in which the present-day spectator comes in con­ puppets or by actors behind a scrim. The black-paper characters that tact with a magnetic and disturbing specter of a mythical past. I argue enact this apocryphal and pornographic sentimental master-slave dialectic that Walker constructs the form line of this space of projection, which can exist in a fantasy world that is just beyond the apron of an imaginary hold a myriad of meanings for its spectators, out of an image world that stage, an effect that is furthered by the curtain-like, scalloped lower bor­ originates in the mediation of the personal and collective trauma of Afri­ der that floats a few feet above the gallery floor. Standing before the piece, can slavery in America through nineteenth-century American visual, po­ spectators are brought eye to eye with shadow characters that perform litical, and literary culture. Her sources range from slave narratives and for their benefit. And yet, the spectatorial experience is more complex sentimental novels to abolitionist propaganda and scientific illustrations. than solely witnessing a drama. Spectators are drawn into the shadow play Further, the psychological impact that her silhouettes have on their audi­ by the uncanny effect that the life-size scale of the work has on them: it is ence can be understood through both Freudian and Jungian psychoana­ almost as if the spectators are seeing their own outline being projected lytic theory, as well as through popular manifestations of the gothic in onto the wall. And like Peter Pan’s shadow cavorting around the room of contemporary literature and film. Wendy Darling, these errant phantoms have disturbingly separate minds Female sexual self-reflexivity is at the core of the first section of The of their own. End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven. Walker’s expansive use of the silhouette form combined with her revi­ In this scene, the spectator is presented with an unsettling arrangement of sion of the uncannily familiar yet naggingly obscure subject matter of four silhouetted characters: three bare-breasted slave women and an in­ Stowe’s sentimental treatment of the traumatic experience of African slav­ fant child are engaged in a chain of mutual nursing. The woman at the top, ery boldly visualizes what I have come to call the discourse of the un­ with her right arm posed in a gesture of offering, gazes down on the woman speakable. Spectators may encounter the shadow characters of The End beneath her, who in turn bends her body forward to reach the next breast of Uncle Tom (and those in other silhouette installations by Walker as that is just in front of her, all the while supporting on her hip a basket well) in a variety of ways, often finding that the characters express visu­ filled to overflowing with what appears to be cotton. In so doing she ally myths and histories that have been “disremembered” within the pub­ extends her own breast to the third woman, who crouches before her. lic discourse of American slavery and race relations. This encounter may The black, cotton-boll-shaped piece of paper falling from her basket leads be an uncanny confrontation with a previously benign part of a specta­ the eye downward to the patch of stylized ground upon which both she tor’s personal past; for example, the silhouettes themselves might refer­ and the third woman stand. An infant perches on the third woman’s lap, ence personal memories of having a profile made during childhood, or merging into her as its neck cranes upward in a vain attempt to reach her might evoke ancestral profiles that the spectator’s family might have flaccid breast. All three women essentially look alike: they are young, owned.^ Other spectators find themselves confronted with a visualization they have kerchiefs on their heads, their dresses are pulled down about of private sexual fantasies or violent nightmares; thoughts too terrible to their waists, their backs arch forward, and their rear ends press outward. utter or enact are thrown up before them in the form of black paper glued In one sense this image, in which the nourishing and the sexual nature to white walls. In addition to the types of personal associations made by of the breast becomes confused, alludes to the horrific impact that slav­ individual spectators, the physical nature of Walker’s life-size silhouettes ery wrought on the bodies of African American women. It prompts the calls forth nostalgic emotions from the Durkheimian collective conscious­ spectator to remember that a slave woman’s breasts, along with the rest ness because of the medium’s links to the archaic visual culture of the of her body, did not actually belong to her; rather, her owner controlled eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.'* With its combination of an elegant them. In an 1850 daguerreotype of a slave woman by J. T. Zealy, “Delia, 162 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 163

made her let his baby suck too,” a former slave from North Carolina re­ called. “If Aunt Mary was feedin’ her own baby and Miss Lucy started cryin’ Marse John would snatch her baby up by the legs and spank him, and tell Aunt Mary to go on and nuss his baby first. In scene A, then, the women have neglected their duties as slaves, from the overflowing bas­ ket of cotton to the empty-mouthed infant, and are nursing each other. In their self-reflexive arrangement, each one turned toward the other, they are oblivious to the consequences of their ignored work and the starving child, and live only within the immediate moment in which their own de­ sire is being fulfilled. The legacy of the abuse of the slave woman’s breasts that Walker’s image addresses is also found at the center of Toni Morrison’s gothic novel Be- loved.^ Beloved is a fictionalized account of the true story of Margaret Figure 2. J. T. Zealy. Daguerreotype. March Garner, often called the “modern-day Medea.” A runaway slave threatened 1850. "Delia, country with imminent capture. Garner attempted to murder her own children born of African Parents. rather than see them returned to the state of servitude from which they Daughter of Renty, had just escaped. In the book, the ghost of a dead child returns to haunt Congo. Plantation of the surviving family members and, most intensely, to haunt its mother. B. F. Taylor. Columbia, The ghost, called Beloved, is the literal return of the repressed: a demonic South Carolina." Repro­ duced in Marilyn Yalom, “rememory” who defies the mother’s attempts to “disremember” her trau­ A History of the Breast matic past. This uncanny incarnation of trauma’s trace is what makes the (New York: Knopf, book decidedly gothic. In the following passage Sethe, Garner’s fictional 1997), 125. name, attempts to reconcile her deeds as having been at least partly the result of the systematic abuse of her breasts by her owners. country born of African parents ...” has been stripped to the waist and presented to the invasive eye of the camera (fig. 2). The manner in which I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. her bodice drapes around her hips is echoed in the way that Walker’s slave How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is some­ women’s clothes straddle their waists, forming indecent bustles and thing I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it she’ll flounces. By witnessing Delia in a state of undress the spectator/reader is understand, because she understands everything already. I’ll tend reminded of her total lack of agency over the exposure of her body; the her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever trauma of this visual violation and its attendant humiliation can be read get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it in the sorrowful affect that consumes her face. to nobody else—and the one time I did it was took from me—they Walker’s image highlights the fact that for many a slave woman in held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby. Nan Delia’s situation, functional worth was tied not only to her ability to work had to nurse white babies and me too because Ma’am was in the in the fields or elsewhere on the plantation at domestic chores but also di­ rice. The little white babies got it first and I got what was left. Or rectly to her ability to produce milk when the duties of a wet nurse were none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is required by her owners. “My Aunt Mary b’longed to Marse John Crad­ to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and dock and when his wife died and left a little baby—dat was little Miss holler for it, and to have so little left. I’ll tell Beloved about that; Lucy—Aunt Mary was nussin’ a new baby of her own, so Marse John she’ll understand. She my daughter. The one I managed to have 164 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION I SHAW; THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 165

milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it; after they outwardly. The Jungian shadow is the antagonist within the repressive handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the exterior personality, and as such it is linked to Freud’s idea of the sadistic stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses7 superego.^ The superego is “the expression of the most powerful im­ The “stones” of these three women—the fictional account of Sethe’s pulses and most important libidinal vicissitudes of the id,” writes Freud. ordeal, the image of Delia, and the narrative of Aunt Mary—may be read “By setting up this ego ideal, the ego has mastered the Oedipus complex m the half-naked, fervently nursing female slaves of Walker’s installation. and at the same time placed itself in subjection to the id. Whereas the ego heir emotions of pain, anger, and humiliation over the abuse of the fe­ is essentially the representative of the external world, of reality, the super­ male enslaved body are present as their “rememories” in Walker’s sil­ ego stands in contrast to it as the representative of the internal world, of houette characters. the id. Conflicts between the ego and the ideal will, as we are now pre­ When Walker’s life-size silhouettes are read in this way, as the pared to find, ultimately reflect the contrast between what is real and mdependent-mmded shadows of those who gaze on them, they may what is psychical, between the external world and the internal world. be viewed as icons of death that have been resurrected to haunt the liv- In the world of Uncle Tom, the shadow and the warring superego are pushed to the front of the viewing experience. The shadow characters be­ mg. Within nineteenth-century gothic literature and imagery the term come doppelgangers created to bring forth the dark side of the spectator/ shadow’’ has often appeared as a reference to the personification of reader’s imagination. For Freud, the superego can become the punishing, eath and to the spirits of the dead returned to haunt the living. In the work of Edgar Allan Poe, for example, the term “Shadow” is used as a darker side of the psyche when states of hysteria or mania, for example, double for the figure of Death in the short story “Ligeia,” in which the are present in the analysand. The Jungian shadow and the Freudian super­ mam character describes the fatal illness of his first wife. “Words are im­ ego are responsible for dealing with the guilt that the rest of the psyche must repress. The “super-ego manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt potent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow.”* Later in the story the “shadow” is pres­ (or rather as criticism—for the sense of guilt is the perception in the ego an­ ent m the form of the spirit of the dead woman returned to the world of swering to this criticism) and moreover develops such extraordinary harsh­ the living m a furious attempt to regain life through the possession of the ness and severity towards the ego ...,” writes Freud, “that the excessively husband s second wife. “[A]nd I saw that there lay upon the gold carpet, strong super-ego which has obtained a hold upon consciousness rages m the very middle of the rich lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow— against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect—such as might be fancied for whole of the sadism available in the person concerned.” He states that in the shadow of a shade.We can see then this deathly relationship that sadism “what is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of death instinct.”^* In psychoanalytic terms, then, the physical occurs whereby Walker’s shadow characters resurrect and trope Poe’s nineteenth-century tradition in which shadows are figured as related to confrontation between the spectator and the shadow scenes on the gallery death and to the dead. In this way these life-size, almost alive “shadows walls is one of witnessing a personally repressed anima, the cruel superego of shades” are able to remind the spectator/readers of their own corpore­ within the psyche, let loose to roam at will, thoroughly unchecked. Con­ ality and mortality. sonant with the ghost-child Beloved, the gothic shadow characters in The In addition to being related to a gothic literary tradition, uncanny con­ End of Uncle Tom are meant to provoke repressed memories of personally frontation with the deathly shadow that the spectator/reader experiences experienced racial and sexual trauma and/or guilty feelings of one’s role when standing m front of The End of Uncle Tom may also be read in within a continuous, omnipresent historical narrative. These memories of trauma and feelings of guilt are both lived and received; they remind terms of C. G. Jung’s psychoanalytic concept of the shadow as the pri­ us that we are still haunted by slavery and that we are at the mercy of our mary archetype of the collective unconscious. For Jung, the shadow the own punishing superegos as the repressed is finally allowed to return. amma or spirit within, is a person’s hidden nature, and as such it is gen­ In a fundamental sense, then, the initial section of The End of Uncle erally of the opposite gender-temperament to what an individual reveals Tom presents the slave woman’s breasts in a psychologically subversive 166 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 167

context. This scene of adult women acting as sexualized wet nurses to each to note that within certain African American communities, lesbianism, other transgresses a number of boundaries. “On the one hand, breasts are even more so than male homosexuality, has been slow to gain public recog­ associated with the transformation from girlhood to womanhood, sexual nition and social acceptance. More often it has been viewed as the rejection pleasure, and nursing,” states the feminist historian Marilyn Yalom in her of the already downtrodden and abused African American male, rather discussion of the complexity of this part of the female body in Western than an embracing of female sexual desire. In the 1980s, Alice Walker’s culture. “On the other, they are increasingly associated with cancer and novel The Color Purple encountered much antagonism from a variety of death . .. [B]reasts literally incarnate the existential tension between Eros African Americans because of the lesbian relationship between Celie, who and Thanatos—life and death—in a visible and palpable form.”^'* The had been abused by her husband, and the free-spirited blues singer Sug, slave women in Walker’s image, in the focused attention they give to their who helps her to recognize her own humanity and inner strength.!^ erotic activity, all but forget the infant who requires their breasts as its The depiction of sexual self-reflexivity in Kara Walker’s scene may be sole source of life-giving nourishment. The child, instinctually knowing read, then, as an institutionally imposed mother-hunger, a desire for a lost that it must obtain the breast in order to be satiated, now strains hope­ maternal nurturing that was systematically withheld under the system of lessly to get it within its grasp. But the women have lost all instinct to pla­ slavery rather than denied by a “bad” mother. Given these associations. cate it. No longer is the slave woman’s body to be used by others, by men Walker’s image at first seeks to engage in this discourse of lesbianism as or babies; now it is to be enjoyed by the self and one’s own kind; now it an alternative to heterosexual relationships among African American men is to be the self-reflexive object of desire. And yet, tbe carnality on the and women. However, with her injection of a third woman into the scene, part of the three slave women should not be read as simple enjoyment. In along with the presence of the neglected child on her lap. Walker takes a its orgiastic presentation the scene speaks of a transgression of racialized step further into the realm of the gothic as the three women engage in com­ sexual roles and creates a bizarre matriarchy. Walker’s African American plete cultural and sexual transgression.'^ The beginning of their sexual slave women are shown as quite literally sexually voracious; not only do experience is the end, as what had so often been withheld from their grasp they acknowledge the sexual potency of their own bodies, but also they is finally released into it. The child, however, will simply have to wait. consume the bodies of their analogues. In order to emphasize the sexual If sexual transgression can be said to dominate the scene of mutual nature of the women, rather than their nurturing side. Walker has not cut nursing that begins The End of Uncle Tom, then sadomasochism and defe­ their forms to resemble the body of what is frequently stereotyped in cation dominate the scene that follows of wildly uninhibited slave chil­ American culture as the overtly maternal and grossly corpulent body of dren and their provocative young mistress. The slave children exude an the “mammy.” In contrast to this familiar stereotype, as seen in Aunt aura of malicious mischief that implies mutual participation; they are Jemima Pancake Mix advertising, for example, these women do not focus ready both to serve and to skewer their ax-wielding mistress, who is the their attention outward, seeking the satisfaction of others, but toward focal point for the surrounding action. As the largest character in the scene, each other instead. the young mistress, who may be read as the character of Little Eva, stands The suckling slave women in Walker’s installation have rejected both with one foot flat on the ground, the other lifted rakishly up behind her; motherhood and masculine attention, and their deviant lesbian sexuality her crinoline skirt juts out from her waist at a ninety-degree angle.'® She becomes another key to the disturbing nature of this scene. The three leans precariously over a tree stump as the blade of the ax that she holds women exist in a self-reflexive world in which they see only themselves. turned backward over her head marks the apex of the pyramidal arrange­ They are orally fixated on nursing, the activity that Freud believed was a ment that is formed by the other, smaller characters who flank her. Her person’s first sexual experience, for which other objects and body parts unbalanced position and the inverted ax hint that a masochistic act of are later substituted during the post-Oedipal period.*^ As they turn in­ self-inflicted mutilation is about to occur. Behind this ax-wielding Little ward toward the replicas of their own bodies, there is no need for a sub­ Eva is the character of a slave girl who crouches forward toward the large stitutional object on which to shift their desire. Male presence is inconse­ flower of petticoats that fan out in front of her. The ankle-length dress she quential to their actions and independent of their desires. It is important wears is covered by an apron, tied at the back, its bow echoing those of 168 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 169

her head rag and the short braid at her nape. Her outstretched arm ends during the antebellum period in the rise of the slave narrative as a literary with a fist that is clenched tightly around a sharpened stick. She holds it and reportorial genre. In his own slave narrative, Frederick Douglass, at a sadistically threatening angle so that if the other girl were to lean while not omitting the graphic details of the physical torture he had en­ back it would pierce her bottom. On the left are two small children, one dured during his early life, was unable to adequately verbalize his feelings a boy and the other of indeterminate gender. The boy stands naked, his about what had been done in front of him and what had been done to him- small penis sticking out beneath the bucket he holds in his hands as he waits on the petticoat-wearing girl whom he faces; the other child has He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make crossed the scene from right to left, leaving in its wake a trail of globular her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to piles. The piles grow and then diminish in size until they are reduced to a swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I final teardrop attached to the child’s buttocks. The child stands in mid­ witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but well I stride with one leg in an adult-size boot, as if playing dress-up, and with remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. the other hand upraised, holding a tambourine. With lips slightly parted, It was the first in a long series of such outrages, of which I was the child looks back at the other characters. doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful In this scene Walker visualizes the difficulty of speaking the unspeak­ force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of able, the incapacity for articulating trauma, by expressing this hidden dis­ slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible course through action. She does this by focusing the spectator’s attention spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I on the character of the third slave child. The narrative arc crosses the beheld it.^^ gallery wall from right to left, the child dropping his piles along the way, connecting the three sections of the tableau to each other. The tambourine While some narratives were written by former slaves, as in the case of this child plays provides the sound track for the scene, and one can almost the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Writ­ hear its rattling recalling the chains of the Ghost of Christmas Past in ten by Himself, others were told to an intermediary who then wrote them Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol. For Walker, the implied noise the down. These ghostwriters were usually abolitionists who were more com­ child makes is important: “I could sort of hear this character with the tam­ mitted to their cause than to the accuracy with which the personal details bourine stomping with one foot,” she said in an interview.*^ But the of the former slave’s life were recorded. As a result many elements, ones stomping of the boot and the rattle of the tambourine are not the only that deviated from the conventionalized form of the genre, were simply sounds that are made. Speech is represented here as form. The dialogue dropped from the account. These disturbing specifics, often sexual in spurts out of the tambourine player, as reversed and uncontrolled “diar­ nature, constitute an important aspect of the unspeakable in nineteenth- rhea of the mouth,” until intent has become mired in a pool of waste. The century slave history. A recent analysis of this genre by historian Nell Irvin piles of excrement that trail from its backside are words that should be Painter provides a context for the repressed discourse of the unspeakable repulsive, yet do not affect the characters within the scene that are occu­ that is present in the mediated Narrative of Sojourner Truth.^^ pied with their own filthiness. This metonymic process in which words In the vein of Douglass’s autobiography. Truth’s Narrative (originally become excrement is linked to a specific gothic discourse born of the legacy written by a European American amanuensis, Olive Gilbert, in 1850 and of slavery. Within this context, the shadow characters may be read as bod­ expanded in 1875 by Frances Titus) speaks of the New World relationships ies, which in an effort to be heard, in a desire to express their repressed that were forged between masters and slaves in the late eighteenth and feelings and experiences, mangle and corrupt them so that eventually the early nineteenth centuries in the United States. Until recently this subtext words literally come out as excremental exaltations. “Really it’s about remained obfuscated by the inability of Truth’s amanuensis to give voice finding one’s voice in the wrong end,” explains Walker, “searching for to the full extent of her subject’s suffering.^^ Gilbert, however, thanks to one’s voice and having it come out the wrong way.”^° This struggle to ar­ her efforts to provide a context for Truth’s story, is able to furnish the ticulate the traumatic impact of slavery was witnessed at its most potent contemporary reader with a better understanding of the conditions under 170 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 171

which Truth lived. For example, Painter points out that because most while at the same time they stirred a desire in her to reach a point of one­ slaveholders in New York State, where Truth lived the first part of her life ness with her oppressor. As a bonded individual Truth became complicit under the slave name Isabella, had only one or two slaves, the relation­ within her miserable situation and grew to accept it as the natural state of ships between owners and their property were analogous to those in an her lived reality. Truth’s anxiety to please her torturer and her oppressor, extended “family.” She contrasts this with the southern situation of a and to then in turn benefit from that pleasure, is echoed in a related work massive plantation in which the owners lived separately from their chat­ of art by Walker, Vanishing Act (fig. 3). This small print visualizes this tel, who remained down in the slave quarters.^'* For Isabella this meant need of the slave to understand and internalize the presence of the master. that her owner, John Dumont, had a particularly potent and patriarchal In Vanishing Act we see a view of a curtained stage from the vantage of a influence over her life as his slave. “Dumont only beat her when she de­ theater box. On the proscenium are two figures in the magical process of served it, she said later, but her narrative attests to her hyper-vigilance, the becoming one. The larger figure, a crouching black woman in a bell-skirted wariness of a person who lives with the specter of violence. Isabella would dress and beribboned bonnet, is busy swallowing a European American sometimes stay up all night, afraid to sleep, trying to do her work well girl-child whole. Her mouth opens wide as she engulfs the small body enough to gain approval.” Painter explains that this relationship was char­ headfirst. The child does not appear to struggle, and the woman is able acterized by an abusive and complex attachment with both her master to accomplish her task with the natural ability of a boa constrictor con­ and her mistress. “Her anxiety to please Dumont earned her the scorn of suming a rat. The setting indicates that this is a performance being given his other slaves, who may have isolated her even before the sexual abuse began-----The sexual abuse came from her mistress Sally Dumont, and Truth could tell about it only obliquely, in the scattered pages of her Nar­ rative.There were certain things in the nineteenth century that, despite the sentimentalism and the abolitionists’ belief in their own enlightened understanding of the horrific nature of slavery, could still not be said pub­ licly. Truth’s inability to give voice to the pain and humiliation of having been sexually violated by Sally Dumont is as much Olive Gilbert’s as it is hers. The implication of Isabella’s sexual torture at the hands of her mis­ tress correlates with the unspeakable actions of the children in the End of Uncle Tom scene who both serve their ax-wielding mistress and await an opportunity to skewer her. The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven is an effort to “rememory” the visual stories out of the mediated testimonials of the traumatic events and lingering repercussions of slavery that Truth’s slave narrative exemplifies. Walker does not visualize only the sanctioned histories that can be culled from such stories. Instead she cri­ tiques the cleansing of history that abolitionist rewriting performed: she attempts to rememory what is missing, to say what they could not. Through visual utterance she commands the return of the repressed, the speaking of the unspeakable. In the case of Sojourner Truth, the unspeakable physical and psycho­ Figure 3. Karo Walker. logical abuses perpetrated by her master and mistress instigated a torture Vanishing Act. Aquatint on paper. [Courtesy of of the ego by the superego within the psyche of the subjugated person. Sikkema Jenkins & Co.] 172 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 173

for the benefit of an unknown audience, their forms having been only the incorporation of the object—the prototype of a process which, in the barely roughed out by thin smears of aquatint. form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological In addition to visualizing the desire of the slave to reach a point of con­ part.”^® It is the masochistic character of the young mistress with the in­ vergence with the master, the act of cannibalism as spectacle and magical verted ax lifted above her head in the previous scene that reminds the spec­ encounter that is performed in Vanishing Act references the American tra­ tator of this incorporation. Violence toward the other is really violence dition of blackface minstrelsy. The act that Walker’s characters perform toward the self, and this is why the ax is turned backward, for the other here reverses the manner in which blackface’s European American prac­ represents the externalization of the repulsive that is always within. In The titioners consumed and inhabited the black body as they reconstructed it End of Uncle Tom the self and the “other” become one in a gothic union along specific lines of difference.^^ However, here we have the black body as the margins seek to consume the center. “Gothic is the art of haunting, consuming the white, taking all of the other into the self, absorbing its explains literature historian Mark Edmundson in his recent book Night­ being, wholly and completely. Walker explains that, for her, the act of mare on Main Street. “Gothic shows time and again that life, even at its “cannibalism is wanting to have everything of the other person, body and most ostensibly innocent, is possessed, that the present is in thrall to the soul----- There is a little bit of masochism, I think, involved ... so much past. All are guilty. All must, in time, pay up.”^^ Walker’s tableau, in which love and hate involved in eating something; to kill something and eat it. so-called innocents (cute yet vile little children) perform ghastly deeds, en­ It’s very sexual, very sensual. sures that the act of viewing is the moment in which spectators, regard­ The act of loving cannibalism that Walker describes here, and that is less of their racial self-identification, are forced to confront their guilt found in Vanishing Act, echoes the writings of Brazilian art theorist over the traumatic legacy, both real and imaginary, of slavery. Oswaldo de Andrade, author of the 1928 Dadaist “Anthropophagite The scene that follows continues to explore the themes of sexual trauma, Manifesto. ”2* In this rambling and nearly incoherent, yet fascinating and the subversive, and the anthropophagous through its visualization of dynamic, treatise de Andrade exhorts the postcolonial subject to devour sadistic sexual activity, sodomy, murder, and mutilation. It centers on the the former colonizer in order to transform him from “taboo into totem.” silhouette of an adolescent slave girl bending at the waist, raising her but­ “The lucta between what one would call the Uncreated and the Creature tocks in the air, and grasping a cornstalk with both hands for support. [is] illustrated by the permanent contradiction between man and his Resting on her rear end is the enormous belly of a possibly legless man taboo,” writes de Andrade, his words initiating a process in which the who stands with the aid of a wooden leg and a saber that is thrust into formerly colonized body absorbs the entirety of the colonizer—mind, the body of a small child on the ground behind him. The two main char­ body, and spirit—in order to reconstitute that being as a basis for a new acters merge, as the slave girl’s legs, shown in profile, become a substitute social organization. “Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. In for the man’s missing limbs. They are further connected by his fat belly, order to transform him into totem. The human adventure. The mundane which is supported by the slave’s back and, in economic terms, living off finality. . . . What happens is not a sublimation of sexual instincts. It’s the her labor as well. The numerous phallic references and allusions to anal thermometric scale of the anthropophagous instinct.With his words sex made in this scene moor The End of Uncle Tom in the gothic realm de Andrade proposes an artistically created reconciliation between the of sexuality under the system of slavery, in which permission is not conflicted dyad of exploiter and exploited, and thermodynamic process granted and submission is legally required. In Walker’s shadow world, the in which matter is transformed. master character can sodomize his physical and racial subordinate, but Walker continues de Andrade’s pan-American, postcolonial tradition only with her presence beneath him supporting his unseemly girth, and both in The End of Uncle Tom and in Vanishing Act where cannibalism/ only with the aid of penile prostheses. The slave, in turn, hangs on to the anthropophagy acts as a mechanism of Freudian pregenital, sexual or­ cornstalk for support and waits until the act is finished, as if in acknowl­ ganization. Each piece proposes an image world in which “sexual activ­ edgment of the futility of a potential struggle with such a crushing load. ity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food; nor are oppo­ Echoing Truth’s Isabella, she is complicit in the act of her domination; she site currents within the activity differentiated . .. sexual aim consists in is taking in the body of the oppressor; she is becoming one with him. 174 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 175

Despite having no visible legs of his own (the slave’s legs merge with that the slave grasps for support. Its nasty implications are further evoked what might be his sole leg), the master character has two prostheses in the by the slave master “cornholing” the youth with what might be called his form of the wooden peg leg and the saber upon which he leans. These “third leg,” which in turn is common slang for penis, as well as an ironic may be read as phallic replacements for his symbolically castrated body. reference to his missing leg and his victim’s function as surrogate limb. This type of phallic addition echoes those in the mid-nineteenth-century Walker’s scene of prosthetic sodomy follows in this humorous tradition painting by John Quidor, Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of phallic signification, and thus the corpulent slave master may be read of Peter Stuyvesant (fig. 4). The historian of American art and literature as the shadowy descendant of Quidor’s Stuyvesant. Bryan Wolf has recognized that the sword, peg leg, walking stick, and While the wordplay of “cornholing” and the ridiculous phallic addi­ pipe, all attached to Stuyvesant’s body, are direct phallic replacements tions that extend from the master in all directions are twisted yet witty and images of his sexual potency. In addition to these visual analogues, references that tie the work into a subversive and perverted gothic para­ Quidor’s illustration of a scene from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker digm, it is the act of impaling the infant with the saber that emphasizes Tales features the type of nasty wit that is found in the scene of sodomy the sadistic irony of the sex act in which the master and the slave are en­ in The End of Uncle Tom. Both are grimly humorous in that they revolve gaged. Anal sex, fellatio (the most cannibalistic of sex acts), or other forms around a play on words and rude phraseology that is unspeakable within of sodomy are, of course, nonreproductive. Sodomy has always been, for polite society. The term “cornholing,” slang for the anal sex act in which Americans, something gothic and threatening (yet widely practiced) and the master and the slave are engaged, is inferred by the phallic cornstalk today remains illegal in some parts of the country. This is in part due to a general, secular antihomosexual sentiment, but it can also be linked to Figure 4. John Quidor, Antony Vbn Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter religious beliefs that all sexual contact should be for the purpose of pro­ Stu)aesant 1839, oil on canvas, 27| X 34^^ in. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York. 63.110. creation rather than mere sexual satisfaction. This explains why the term sodomy itself defines a variety of nonreproductive sexual acts including anal and oral sex. And sodomy is, historically speaking, the most gothic and literally sadistic of sex acts; the Marquis de Sade (for whom the prac­ tice is named) had anal (rather than vaginal) sex with his partners for the specific reason that it was subversively antireproductive. The contemporary cultural conception of sodomy as a violent male ho­ mosexual activity is borne out in the recent American film Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino. Similar to The End of Uncle Tom, the film includes a wide array of gothic characters and themes in an attempt to shock the spectator into experiencing feelings of both terror and titilla- tion. The theme of sodomy, and anal penetration in particular, is linked to sadomasochistic homosexual sex in a scene in which the characters of Butch and Marcellus are kidnapped and tortured by a group of fetishistic weapons enthusiasts. The setting for their ordeal is the subterranean, crypt-like basement of a gun shop. The potential for death and pain lit­ erally surround the two men as various knives and other phallic torture devices cover the walls. And yet, the most powerful element of terror produced by this scene is the threat of homosexual violation. From the southern accents of the captors to the subhuman character of the “gimp” that is kept in a trunk in the dungeon, the scene is a thinly veiled homage 176 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 177

to the backwoods rape scene from John Boorman’s 1972 gothic rafting way that the slave prays to heaven opposite the master who preys upon drama Deliverance. This threat in Pulp Fiction, while visited upon both his terrestrial victim. Similarly, the cord that hangs from the anus of the Butch and Marcellus, is carried out only on the African American char­ character on the right echoes the saber on which the other man leans for acter Marcellus. And the revenge that he later seeks upon his violator is no less than death. support. The character of the praying man in this scene is a direct descendant of Sadistic sex, and the cultural links to death that are associated with it the kneeling slaves prevalent in antebellum abolitionist visual culture. His m gothic films like Pulp Fiction, are also found in Walker’s tableau in the bent stature echoes not only the fetal position of the child beneath him form of the baby that is impaled on the blade of the master’s saber. This but also that of the kneeling slave in Josiah Wedgwood’s brooch Am I steely connection references the potential for violence within the rela­ Not a Man and a Brother (fig. 5). Art historian Kirk Savage has recog­ tionships between European American slave masters and their “mulatto” nized that the Wedgwood pendant marked a decided change in the im­ children. Like the ancient Roman pater familias, the American slave agery of slavery when it first appeared in the late eighteenth century. It master had legal and mortal control over the bodies of his slaves and their children, whether fathered by another slave or by himself. “I know of “changed the focus from submission to supplication,” states Savage, “nei­ ther crushed by the weight of oppression, nor driven by it to defiance, the such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves invariably suffer Wedgwood figure was calculated to inspire benevolent sympathy.”^'* In greater hardships. And have more to contend with, than others,” wrote intention the praying character is directly linked to Stowe’s Uncle Tom Douglass in his narrative; “[the master] must not only whip them himself, character, who would rather appeal to God for his release from the system but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few that oppresses him than take matters into his own hands. However, Walker shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked has altered Wedgwood’s initial design in a number of ways in order to back. ” In a sense, the image of violent oppression that Douglass evokes transform a benevolent figure into a scatological one. First, she raises the for his readers is circumvented in this End of Uncle Tom scene, as the character up off his knees and into a crouching position. This new posi- master is witnessed disposing of his own spurious issue by killing it at birth. At the same instant that he murders the child, he is also eliminat­ ing the possibility of creating other children, through his choice of anti- reproductive, sadistic sexual activity. The theme of the European American male role in procreation and sexual sadism during slavery evoked by the image of the master sodom­ izing his slave is continued in the next scene, where another slave character crouches, bent at the waist and knees, with his hands raised toward heaven. He kneels in prayer as his head tilts back and his grossly exaggerated lips^ echoed by a wreath of curly hair, are pursed in an expression of suppli­ cation. His trousers have been pushed down to midthigh, and his feet are bare. Trailing from his anus to the belly of an infant lying behind him on Figure 5. Josiah Wedg­ the ground is an umbilical cord. The cord appears to pierce his body and wood. Am / Nof a Alan emerge from the gap between his pants, becoming a diminutive substitu­ and a Brother, circa 1787. Wedgwood tion for his penis. To the right of him, the body of a woman emerges at brooch, jasperware right from a clump of foliage. The ribbons that decorate her hair echo her set in silver. The Mint outstretched arm as well as the man’s penile cord. She gestures in his di­ Museums, Charlotte, rection with her right arm, pointing at him with her index finger in a North Carolina. scolding manner. These last two scenes mirror each other in the uncanny Delhom Collection. 1965.48.85. 178 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 179

tion implies a state of incomplete evolution much like that found in charts However, this scene in The End of Uncle Tom presents the spectator depicting the ascent of man. He exists somewhere between animal and with an image of a male slave birthing a child, and as such it references human, not quite able to stand upright on his own. Second, she transforms the fate of children born from unions between free European American the chains that bind the Wedgwood figure’s wrists and ankles into the um­ women and enslaved black men as well as those born to black parents. bilical cord that hangs from the shadow character’s anus. And yet, despite Often these infants suffered horribly despite the freedom that was sup­ having transformed the bondsman’s chain into an umbilical cord, the idea posed to follow their being born to free mothers. “In such cases the infant of shackling that is present in the Wedgwood medallion remains palpable is smothered, or sent where it is never seen by any who know its history,” within Walker’s image. This is perhaps because under slavery birth was the wrote the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs in her narrative Incidents in the beginning of a life of unending misery and oppression for African Amer­ Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself.In Walker’s tableau it is the fa­ icans. Since the children of female slaves belonged to the slave owner rather ther, feminized by the act of giving birth, who defecates his child. In rais­ than to the parent, servitude was perpetual for the slave’s blood lineage. ing his hands to heaven he seeks deliverance from this parasitic product “The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true,” of his intestines, as though it were a tumor grown from antireproductive wrote Douglass of his own parentage. “The fact remains in all glaring sodomy gone awry. The defecated child becomes the ultimate unformed odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that gothic creature in the process of fantastic transformation from a state of the children of slave women shall in all cases follow the condition of their humanity to one of human waste. Visually it rhymes with the other child mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their own lusts, on the ground just to the left that has been skewered with a saber by the and make a gratification of their wicked desires profitable as well as plea­ slave master, as the cord that rises from the defecated baby’s belly rhymes surable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a with the sword being driven down into the guts of its counterpart. Both few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and father. babies are linked to men who could be their fathers, one by violence and That birth into slavery, as the child of two slaves or of a slave and a the other by bloodline. In their helpless fetal positions the infants echo the master, was the beginning of an existence that was at all times plagued by piles of waste that trail from the anus of the child playing the tambourine. mortal terror is visualized in Walker’s male slave who begs for deliver­ They are as refuse upon the ground, at the mercy of the feet that stomp ance, deliverance for and from his own child. It is also textualized in Mor­ above them. This visual metaphor of humanity as human waste is further rison s Beloved where Sethe finds it mortally abhorrent to imagine that emphasized by a small subscene above them that contains the character her children will inherit only pain and suffering if they are returned to of a man making a mad dash from a slave cabin across a short divide to­ slavery. After seeing that her prayers to save them have not been enough, ward a small privy with a moon cut into its door. she literally takes matters into her own hands trying to spare them hell on In addition to interrogating notions of humanity. Walker’s “rememory” earth by dispatching them to heaven. The “rememory” of Sethe’s Medean of the trauma of slavery re-visions and defamiliarizes the sentimental fic­ action. Beloved, is the classic gothic trope of the past haunting the pres­ tions of slavery written by European Americans, most obviously repre­ ent. The girl’s specter is revived by her guilt-ridden mother as a vessel sented in this instance by Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Walker’s tableau vi­ through which to confront her transgressive act of infanticide.^* The girl, sualizes questions of authenticity in order to interrogate notions of artistic returned as Beloved, is the physical manifestation of the return of the re­ identity and authorship: are we reading the words of the freedwoman So­ pressed, of Sethe’s own superego in the physical form of her dead child, journer Truth, the slave Isabella, or the European American amanuensis called up to punish the ego for the guilt that Sethe feels. It is Beloved’s in­ Olive Gilbert? Is the author of The End of Uncle Tom the young African carnation as a “rememory” of what has been “disremembered” by Sethe American woman artist Kara Walker, or is it “Missus K. E. B. Walker,” in her attempt to put a traumatic past behind her that allows the un­ the persona responsible for the Negress Notes drawing series, one of the speakable to be spoken. For Sethe the act of confession is the first step to­ various signifyin(g) pseudonyms that Walker has assumed in her work.^* ward reconciling her unspoken personal dialectic between good and evil, The latter is a name reminiscent of obscure middle-class nineteenth-century transcendence and transgression. African American women writers like Mrs. A. E. Johnson and Mrs. N. E. 180 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 181

Mossell, and references the role that these women played within the since the end of the Civil War. For certain diehards today the Confeder­ world of polite middle-class letters by departing from the propriety and acy is still a state of mind in which the war that was lost was a war that piety that their work represents.^’ Walker uses the archaizing persona of never really ended. In Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Un­ Missus K. E. B. Walker as a mechanism to free the Freudian superego that finished Civil War, journalist Tony Horwitz tells the stories of contempo­ she is required to repress in her contemporary social identity. “I imagine rary people who are actually still fighting the war via battlefield reenact­ that most of us have some kind of fictive world that we can retire to dur­ ment, etcetera, in the vain hope of an alternative outcome to the conflict. ing our day. An imaginary self or an imaginary location,” Walker responds Through this type of “rememory” Civil War history buffs engage their de­ when asked about her role as narrator. “I found that in textured and sire to conquer a traumatic past and to force a new vision of the future."*^ multi-layered ways I was retreating into the lore of the South.Thus, Horwitz claims that for some European Americans Civil War “reenacting Missus K. E. B. Walker serves as a type of magical amanuensis who can [has] become the most popular vehicle of Civil War remembrance” with literally draw us into an image world in which both death and desire can over forty-thousand participants each year."^^ “The freedom of slaves [does be acknowledged. not] figure much in [reenacting],” he states. “[A]lthough Glory inspired Through its complicated distortions of cultural history The End of several units modeled on the black regiment depicted in the film, the Uncle Tom resurrects and reenacts a phantasm of inherited guilt over Wilderness reenactment and a half-dozen other battles I later attended slavery that many Americans have long tried to reconcile in their rush to were blindingly white affairs. declare a race-free society. In contemporary European American culture And yet, guilt over the inherited legacy of slavery is not something this type of genetic guilt (much like the stigma of being descended from that European American spectators shoulder alone as they stand before slaves that is carried by African Americans), born from the knowledge (or Walker’s tableau. In witnessing the complicity of the Black characters in some cases only the vague suspicion) that one’s ancestors participated (and we must read them as black on multiple levels, from the color of the in or benefited from slavery, is often ignored or denied. A quick search on silhouettes to the pervasive racist cultural association of blackness with the Internet for the key words “guilt” and “slavery” produces a bevy of evil and degradation) with the European American oppressors, African articles from the current public discourse over reparations for slavery. American spectators are given the opportunity to confront the traumatic These articles, largely authored by conservative European American re­ possibility that their ancestors may at times have been complicit in the vi­ actionaries who oppose monetary reparations of any sort to the descen­ olent culture that they were forced to live within. The nagging suspicion dants of slaves, routinely deny that any type of inherited guilt might be that not all African Americans are descended from resisters or runaways, manifest in the reality of their own white privilege. These pundits also re­ that some actually have an “Uncle Tom” in their family tree, perhaps hang­ fuse the United States’ national, governmental culpability, or the respon­ ing next to a noosed runaway, has the power to create in some spectators sibility of the still functioning companies that profited from slave labor a revised relationship with the past."'^ during the nineteenth century.^i In his article “Guilt over Slavery: A His­ Art critic Dan Cameron has recognized that Walker’s sprawling, slavery- toriographical Analysis,” southern historian Gaines M. Foster argues that themed silhouette installations are a dark sort of battlefield reenactment the contention that white southerners felt guilty about slavery, that in in the way that they rewrite a painful part of our history through life-size their heart of hearts they found it impossible to reconcile their peculiar in­ restaging.4« jjj f^ct, the concept of Civil War reenactment, and the vari­ stitution with their democratic sentiments and evangelical faith,” has ous visual memorials to the war that can be found throughout the South, been key in various discussions of nineteenth-century American history. first helped Walker to envision installing her silhouettes directly on the However, claims Foster, the concept of guilt has rarely been defined or been gallery walls. She found that doing so created a feeling within the spectator supported by archival evidence; rather, these mostly European American of being engulfed by the scene. “^JC^ell, from the moment that I got started historians have used the concept of southern guilt to rehumanize the Con­ on these things I imagined that someday they would be put together in a federate characters about whom they write. kind of cyclorama,” Walker told Alexander Alberro in a 1996 interview. The manner in which European Americans have dealt with personal “I mean, just like the Cyclorama in Atlanta that goes around in an end­ guilt and the legacy of slavery has varied over the intervening 141 years less cycle of history locked up in a room, I thought that it would be pos- 182 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 183

sible to arrange the silhouettes in such a way that they would make a kind order than the installation that I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Mod- of history painting encompassing the whole room. ”'*7 In light of the j ern Art the following year. Because of this difference, and because it implies artist s expressed intentions. The End of Uncle Torn may be read as a sort i that the artist (who supervised both installations) is interested in exploring a of Civil War reenactment of its own. It is an immediate personal reaction ' multiplicity of meanings and possible narratives through the ordering of the to the artist’s life spent growing up in Atlanta surrounded by a dominant various scenes, I will not attempt to construct a linear progression out of the scenes. Rather, I will discuss each scene in relation to the others, as discrete culture obsessed with a mythos of happy slaves and benevolent owners episodes that produce a cumulative effect. perpetuated in phenomena like Gone with the Wind. However, in the case 2. In interviews Walker has discussed the impact that viewing the cyclorama of of Walker s shadow installations, it is not the bodies of twentieth-century the Battle of Atlanta has had on her work. rebels that squeeze into the costumes of their forebears to battle it out on 3. During Walker’s 1997 exhibition at SFMOMA I attended the opening and the ancient ground; rather it is Morrisonian “rememories” and the shad­ visited the galleries four times in the company of various groups of specta­ ows of unwitting spectators that cavort across the gallery walls. tors. On three of these occasions I discussed the impact of the work with my In conclusion, Kara Walker’s life-size silhouette installation The End of companions, who included fellow employees of the museum, friends, and an Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven signifies organized group of female African American graduate students from Stan­ on the predictable myths of antebellum plantation life using a complex syn­ ford University. Another time I visited the show in the company of the artist and a group of spectators as part of a program, “Looking at Art with thesis of racialized imagery, nostalgic visual devices, historical narrative. In Artists,” sponsored by the museum’s education department. the fantasy world that the artist has created, all characters regardless of 4. And yet, even in the 1800s profile silhouettes were nostalgic due to their links race or social position are guilty of vile acts and intentions. Each specta­ to classical coinage, etc. Today, thanks to the advent of photography and the tor is prompted to face his or her own potentially traumatic relationship subsequent boom in mechanical reproductive technology in image making, to history and acknowledge whatever repressed guilt and sadomasochis­ silhouettes remain shadows of the originals that they were once believed to tic feelings one might have about one’s personal relationship to slavery. chronicle so precisely; they comment on and endlessly reference their own The young mistress may wield an ax, but the slave child also holds a past history. spike. The master may rape his property, but his victim does not hang her 5. E. Hellerstein et al., eds., Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States head in shame; instead she looks back over her shoulder to see if her at­ (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981), 231-232. As quoted in tacker is pleased. In this bizarre and horrific tableau there are no innocent Marilyn Yalom, A Fiistory of the Breast (New York: Knopf, 1997), 124. heroines, no loyal retainers, and no one escapes unpunished—not the 6. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988). black-paper characters on the white walls and certainly not the spectator. All who gaze upon this signifyin’(g) drama are implicated as active par­ 7. Ibid., 200. 8. Edgar Allan Poe, “Ligeia,” in The Tell Tale Heart and Other Writings (New ticipants within its unending cyclorama, as they find separate yet shared York: Bantam, 1982), 64. histories of domination, suffering, and emancipation being turned upside down. “All are guilty. All must, in time, pay up.”"*® 9. Poe, 70. 10. C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, part 1, 2"‘* ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 3-41. NOTES 11. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Gay, 722-771). 1. I have chosen the term character, rather than figures, because in psychoana­ 12. Freud, “The Ego and the Id. Ill, The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego Ideal)” lytic theory character is defined as a cluster of fixations, a definition that I (Gay, 643). think holds true for Walker s work. (See Sigmund Freud’s essay “Character 13. Freud, “The Ego and the Id. V, The Dependent Relationships of the Ego” and Anal Eroticism,” in Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader (New York: W. W. (Gay, 654). Norton, 1985), 293.) When the work was first installed at the 1997 Whitney 14. Yalom, 8. A discussion of American slavery and the breast is found on pages Museum of American Art Biennial exhibition the “scenes” had a different 123-125. 184 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION SHAW: THE “REMEMORY” OF SLAVERY 185

15. “At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked 28. Oswaldo de Andrade, Revista de Anthropophagia (Sao Paulo), no. 1, May with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object out­ 1928. Reprinted in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, side the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast,” wrote Freud 1820-1980 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 312-313. in his essay “The Transformations of Puberty.” “But even after sexual activ­ ity has become detached from the taking of nourishment, an important part 29. Ibid., 313. of this first and most significant of all sexual relations is left over, which helps 30. Freud, “The Phases of Development of the Sexual Organization,” 273, from to prepare for the choice of an object and thus to restore the happiness that “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (Gay, 239-286). has been lost. All through the period of latency children learn to feel for other 31. Mark Edmundson , Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism and people who help them in their helplessness and satisfy their needs a love the Culture of the Gothic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, which IS on the model of, and a continuation of, their relation as sucklings to 1997), 5. their nursing mother” (Gay, 288). 32. Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Revision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth- 16. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket Books, 1985). See also Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Alice Walker, The Same River Twice (New York: Scribner, 1996), in which Press, 1982), 132-133. she discusses the book and the process of making the movie. 33. Douglass, 23. 17. The taboos against lesbianism and child neglect that Walker flouts are simi­ lar to standard gothic tropes such as the dark secret of incest that lurks in the 34. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument shadows in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (The Tell Tale in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Heart and Other Writings [New York: Bantam, 1982], 25-43) or the spec­ 1997), 21. tacular picture of childhood abandonment that Shirley Jackson constructs in 35. Douglass, 23. The Haunting of Hill House (New York: Viking, 1959). 36. It is important to note that in the “real life” story of Margaret Garner on 18. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Little Eva is the angelic child whose purity and faith which the fictional tale of Beloved is based, the child that Garner killed was has a redemptive effect on many of the characters, slave and slaveholding probably fathered by her master, Archibald Gaines. The horror of this mo­ alike, in the book. While she is able to Tom to Christianity, she cannot with­ ment was intensified when Gaines discovered the body of his dead daughter stand the trauma of the world in which she lives, and her youthful death rep­ and burst into hysterics, thus emphasizing the complex nature of familial love resents a Christlike sacrifice, a sentimental mechanism used by Stowe to ac­ and relationships under slavery. For more on Garner see Steven Weisen- tivate antislavery sympathy in her readers. burger. Modern Medea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). 19. Kara Walker, as quoted in interview with Jerry Saltz, “Kara Walker: Ill-Will 37. Linda Brent [Harriet Jacobs], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by and Desire,” Flash art (international edition), no. 191 (November/December Herself, edited by Lydia Maria Child (first published in Boston, 1861), intro­ 1996) : 82-86, 84 quoted. duction by Walter Teller (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 52. 20. Ibid. 38. Negress Notes was displayed on the wall opposite The End of Uncle Tom and 21. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an Ameri­ the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven in the 1997 exhibition Upon can Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Signet, 1968), 25. Originally pub­ My Many Masters: An Outline, at SFMOMA. lished in 1854. 39. Johnson was the author of Clarence and Corinne; or, God’s Way (New York: 22. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: Norton Oxford University Press, 1988, originally published: Philadelphia: American 1997) . Baptist Publication Society, c. 1890), and Mossell authored The Work of the 23. Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1970). Afro-American Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, origi­ Originally published in 1850, reprinted in 1875 with additional notes. nally published: 2nd ed., Philadelphia: G. S. Ferguson Co., 1908, c. 1894). 24. Painteg 6. 40. Walker as quoted in interview with Lawrence Kinder, director of the CCAC Institute, February 24, 1999. 25. Painter, 15-16. 41. For a representative example of this mode of thought see Robert W. Tracin- 26. For a discussion of minstrelsy please see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface, ski, “Apology for Slavery Will Perpetuate Racism,” 1998, The Ayn Rand In­ Mmstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University stitute, http://multiculturalism.aynrand.org/apology.html. Press, 1993). 42. Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished 27. Saltz, 84. Civil War (New York: Vintage, 1998). 186 PERFORMANCE AND INSTALLATION

43. Ibid., 126. 44. Ibid., 136. 45. The dyad of white and Black spectators that I am presenting necessarily ig­ nores the multiplicity of spectatorial self-identifications that are undoubtedly present amongst gallerygoers at Walker’s shows. Why not address other racial or ethnic identifications, sexual or gender differences amongst spectators, or question how other “others” approach and interface with the traumatic im­ pact of African slavery in America? Unfortunately, complete investigations of these avenues of inquiry are beyond the scope of this essay. But it is impor­ tant to note that in discussions with spectators at several of Walker’s exhibi­ tions, including the one at which this work was shown, I have found that they frequently recognize personal affinities within and take offense at elements of these silhouettes along themes of universal human suffering. For example Jewish spectators often discuss the Holocaust and the sense of guilt that survivors had. Interestingly, Walker’s work has been best received abroad in German-speaking countries. Since the late 1990s she has had numerous ex­ hibitions in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. This response is perhaps due to the lingering nature of traumatic experiences like slavery and genocide and to guilt over resistance, lack of agency, or collaborationist complicity. 46. Dan Cameron, “Kara Walker: Rubbing History the Wrong Way,” On Paper 2, no. 1 (September-October 1997): 14. 47. Kara Walker with Alexander Alberro, Index 2, no. 96: 26. 48. Edmundson, 5.