Kara Walker: the Palpable Face of the Grotesque

In my Creativity 212 class we've been looking at the work of several artists, including the silhouettes of Folk artist Kara Walker. Having some particularly pertinent things to say on the subjects of Southern archetypes and Southern mythology, you would never know this perspicacious personality was a native Californian and Northeastern college graduate.


However, what really interested me about her work was the blatant way she chooses to investigate visions and images of the antebellum South. In cycloramic narrative scenes of black silhouettes, she portrays pictures of the monstrous and the grotesque on the walls for all the world to see...


There is no hiding. There can be no casual ignorance of the subject; it's all on the wall. Panoramas of slave revolts and "representations of blackness, representations of race, racial history, minstrelsy, and ... metaphorical qualities of the body" are dealt with directly and in plain sight; for example, one part of the cyclorama depicts a "series of slaves disembowling a master with a soup ladle" (Interview: Projecting Fictions: "Insurrection! Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On").


Granted, in a later interview Walker contends that "the silhouette lends itself to avoidance of the subject. Of not being able to look at it directly, and yet there it is, all the time, staring you in the face." And a little later: "...it's designed to avoid the confluence of disgust and desire and voluptuousness that are all wrapped up in this bizarre construct of racism." (Interview: the Melodrama of "Gone With the Wind")

This direct/indirect way of looking at a subject is an interesting way (I think) to investigate the dynamic function of Folk art and culture. What are the subjects of Folk Art trying to convey to us, and/or what are the implications of these artistic statements for us in the contemporary world? What role did material culture/Folk Art play in the antebellum South that it doesn't play today? What relationship does Folk Art have with different belief systems and peoples of the South (past and present)? Are we better able to deal with problematic elements of the past in contemporary expressions of the grotesque, as Kara Walker has done?

For the rest of this course, I'm going to be working on hashing out some of these questions.