A Friday Night with Kara Walker, by Ariana Tobias
Posted on October 15, 2007
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One of the cleverest pieces of the Kara Walker exhibit, “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” was easy to miss among the huge silhouette murals and the disturbing marionette films. It didn’t show grotesque scenes of fornication, excretion or death; there were no misshapen or contorted humanoid figures performing unspeakable acts; no, by Kara Walker’s standards, it was tame. The piece in question was a newspaper page from February 1862. There were nine portraits of white men above the caption “The Last Delegation from Alabama in the Congress of the United States,” and the lower part of the page was an article about the state of the Confederate government at that point during the Civil War. Kara Walker’s contribution to the page was to paste racy ads from the personals section next to each photograph, as if Clement C. Clay (a senator) was looking for someone to “Pamper Me.” Or perhaps Sydeniiam Moore really “Wanted Diaper Lover,” while David Clopton favored “Slave Boys.” Beneath each title were more detailed descriptions of the advertiser’s fantasy, each more specific and outlandish than the last.
While everyone has fantasies and desires, these usually remain private and completely separate from our public personas. Kara Walker’s collage of newspaper images of prominent politicians and illicit sexual preferences causes a collision of private and public lives, a combination that embarrasses us, as if we were seeing images of the men without any clothes. But the politicians in the picture continue to stare nonchalantly into space, unaware of the new captions that now define their portraits. One wonders what other tidbits of information could define these men. Would we be just as embarrassed if there were a tally of how many slaves each man owned, impregnated, or put to death? Would they look just as unconcerned?
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