Exhibition of the week

Exhibition of the week

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Whitney Museum of American Art New York Through Feb. 3, 2008

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In Kara Walker’s vision of the American psyche, “racism is alive and well and on a continuous shooting spree,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. The 38- year-old African-American is one of the most important artists working today, as this “exquisite, implacable, loose-cannon retrospective” at the Whitney Museum proves. Walker’s stunning panoramas, made from black-paper silhouettes, portray a nightmare vision of the antebellum South, “a danse infernal of sex, slavery, and chitlin-circuit comedy,” as choreographed by the Marquis de Sade. Blacks with “caricatured Negroid features” and enlarged genitals happily have sex with white plantation owners. Meanwhile, babies lie discarded on the ground. “We stay in this freakish world, or its environs, throughout the exhibition.” Some in the African-American community have criticized Walker for invoking such racist images. They don’t understand how an artist can be both playful and impassioned, outraged and outrageous. “Brilliant” is the word for Walker’s art. No, “overrated” is, said Lance Esplund in The New York Sun. This exhibit “demonstrates what can happen when an artist’s work is lauded for all the wrong reasons— for its subject matter and its slick delivery instead of for the quality of its form.” Curators love to display Walker’s cartoon versions of racial anxiety, since they make any museum seem concerned with racial relations. But her images are as simplistic visually as they are intellectually, and her tableaux lack shape, depth, and logic. “They remain distant and intangible, leaving her exaggerations strident and her narratives adrift.” Taken individually, Walker’s silhouettes may be striking and even witty, but they don’t add up to anything. “Her art often feels less like an exploration and more like exploitation—of both its subject and its viewers.” Charges of exploitation merely reflect the very racial anxieties Walker sets out to mock, said Ariella Budick in Newsday. “Her work is neither anti-black nor antiwhite; it is broadly misanthropic.” These artworks aren’t just social commentary but personal expressions of what it’s like to live under “distortions in self-image wrought by slavery’s power relations.” Walker’s drawings and writing are as personal as they are political. Maybe that’s why sexual relationships are omnipresent. “In her inner life, she suggests, romance and racial politics can’t be disentangled,” and a culture born in rapacious violence will never be entirely free of it. This bleak, bracing exhibit proposes no solutions. “It is a call to arms and a distress signal, a shriek of warning and despair.”