Kara Walker. Her-story
By Cedar Lewisohn
After a week trapped inside Liverpool’s Tate Gallery, you get the feeling that Kara Walker is suffering from a mild case of cabin fever. Seven days stuck in a room drawing out hundreds of images inspired by the debauched perversions of African slavery would be enough to test most people’s nerves. For Kara, however, it’s in the job decription. In person, the 35-year-old New Yorker is thoughtful, friendly and as well versed on her subject matter as you’d expect. But in spite of the slick homespun exterior there’s always a nagging feeling that inside her there’s this shy geek desperate to brake out and do a runner. Whatever the case, she smiles warmly and often when talking, which acts as welcomed balance to the hardcore nature of the subjects under discussion.
In Art world terms, Kara Walker is already a huge star. She regularly exhibits in some of the biggest and best museums and biennales around the world and her work has graced the covers of most serious art journals. Born in Stockton, C.A, Walker is one of those people who always knew she wanted to be an artist. Her father was Chair of the State University Art Department for which the family moved from California to Atlanta, Georgia when she was 13. The attitude in America’s Deep South to race came as a complete shock and would prove integral to Walker’s later work. Her career first started to take off in 1994, with an exhibition at New York’s Drawing Centre. Then, in 1997, she won the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award. Skip forward to 2004, and the curators at Tate Liverpool have just pulled off something of a coup commissioning Kara to make a new piece especially for the gallery. Beginning the project, Walker knew she wanted to address both the city of Liverpool and the Tate Gallery’s blood-soaked ties to the trade in human cargo. As a reaction, she chose a painting by J.M.W. Turner as the starting point for her first major show in the U.K. Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying – Typhon Coming On), depicts sick and dying slaves being tossed from an 18th century galleon. Walker hasn’t so much remade the piece, as packed it full of Semtex and watched the bright lights given of by the explosion. An exorcism of sorts, paint and canvas have been replaced with the artist’s trademark large-scale paper cut-outs, stuck directly to the gallery wall. If Turner’s painting had a reasonably straightforward moral standpoint, Walkers new work, Grub for Sharks, introduces a far more complex set of issues. Looking at the Turner, it’s easy to be disgusted at the slave trader’s callous behaviour. Throwing people off ships to claim on the insurance is never going to be a vote winner in today’s "civilised" times. For Walker however, problems with the source image where more deeply rooted. With typical tranquillity, she says, "The idea of Turner as a master of emotive painterly skill was something of a challenge and an affront to me". Hence the radical deconstruction. In conversation, Walker is eloquent and considering. She explains any issues raised by the work with business-like professionalism. It’s only after the interview is officially over that a more goofy, personal side is revealed.
In Grub for Sharks, there are no boats, fish or ocean. Only a lithe slave boy holding a sextant gives some clue to the installation’s nautical origins. Instead, we are plunged into Walker’s black and white universe that utilises all the available wallspace of the Tate Liverpool’s ground floor gallery. The images are populated by hugely obese plantation owners being carried through the sky by black baby angels and sexually aggressive female slaves wielding bush whips over shackled and subservient white males. This is a new perspective on black history, and it’s a perspective where Walker calls the shots. The way the women are given massively enlarged rear ends or the evilness of the Mammy figures is typical of the way Walker challenges deep-rooted Aunt Jemima Golly Wog clich�s. Though these stereotypes may be outdated, they are the seeds of prejudices or misconceptions that still exist today.
Not many artists could get away with these exaggerations without being branded racist or misogynist; claims Walker herself has been accused of. But these are accusations she finds "Jarring", as such ideas are deeply misguided. These images already exist, after all. What Walker does is reprocess them from her own point of view. When critics do take issue with the work, they usually do it under the assumption that a white artist has produced it. Exasperated by this, Kara gives another smile: "The number of people I meet who say, ‘I’m so glad your black!’"
Aside from the grotesque or thorny nature of the images, there’s also a folksy, art and craft side to the artists’ signature style. Imagine a Mark Twain novel, rendered in cut out sheets of paper. And, as in all good story telling, the devil is in the details: a bell on top of a slave boy’s neck clamp or the smirk of a clergyman viciously lashing a run away. These nuances draw the audience in. That’s not to say it isn’t difficult to be confronted by such evil reminders of colonial history. It is indeed quite scary. No one is more acutely aware of the heartstrings being pulled than the artist herself. As she points out, "The images come from popular culture of the past and present. Well-meaning or not, they are still shocking". Slavery is still such a sensitive issue that it would be almost impossible to depict without falling into the realms of the sentimental. Our romantic attachment to the past is something Walker skilfully embraces and plays on. She explains; "My work is about reversing assumed roles. It’s a fantasy and an illusion to myself. I always wanted to make grand history paintings in the tradition of many white male artists". In the end, this all boils down to Empire, and that translates into, "A white male invention, a very complicated mechanism for giving birth to things".
Slave mythology is precisely one of these imaginings. So, through her practice, she redresses the balance. History should be rewritten on a regular basis and if an artist’s take on history mixes with his or her own fantasies, so much the better. History is subjective, after all, so why not be explicitly so? This follows from what Walker points out to be a very long tradition of black female authors and artists who have infused their work with autobiography, and she includes herself in the list. "It’s very selfish of me. perhaps, but I can’t help but become the centre of the work," she says, letting out a huge sigh of relief as the interview comes to an end. It’s interesting to look at the pictures as a metaphor for the artists’ creativity and personality in general. A refection of the world of now, rendered in the style of Victorian silhouettes. As much as times have changed, it’s not as if ignorance or moral degradation has gone away.
Kara Walker
Grub for Sharks
1st May-31st October 2004
Tate Liverpool
Alber Dock
Liverpool, L3 4BB
0151 702 7400
Admission Free
