WHITE AND BLACK — Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress
All I can say about this exhibit is “Wow.” I remember wanting to skip out that day because of a terrible migraine I was having that lasted through the week. I thought better of it and figured I might see something I liked at the Whitney Museum. We all filed up the stairs to the Kara Walker exhibit and all of a sudden, a huge panorama of cut out black silhouettes on strikingly white canvas happily occupying the entire height and length of the rounded wall it was on. At first, I was skeptical. What is this? It all seemed like a bunch of figures, one belle tiptoeing to kiss her lover, a bunch of children playing on a rock, a child breaking the neck of a duck (perhaps for a dinner soon beckoning), and a few other figures posing on the other side.
This was my first reaction. I then looked a little closer to find out what the story behind these figures was. This was when I found two sets of feet underneath the dress of the Southern belle. I pointed this out to my friends, equally puzzled as I was. One of us suggested that we get an audio aid to help us understand the exhibit a little better and we all thought it was a good idea. The audio aid was indeed a great instrument. We finally saw the real picture behind these seemingly mundane silhouettes. On the rock I mentioned before were two children. However, they were not playing as I thought previously at a glance: one was a girl and the other, a boy. The girl was giving fellatio to the boy, both about six or seven years old. To the upper right of that scene was a man with an enormous penis, almost as big as his body, as he floated up to the sky. Underneath him was an image of a mere child with one leg up in the air and underneath it, a newborn that looked as though it was just given life by the child and had fallen on its head!
The exhibit was definitely a lot more than I expected. After walking through the entire exhibit and watching two of Walker’s puppet shows, my interest in the subject was more than a little piqued. There was simply so much emotion and so much statement in her art. So much anger and so much love and so much of nothing but the raw facts of history and life. My favorite aspect of all of her artwork is the simplicity of black cut out silhouettes on a white background. It was so fitting. The concept of the dichotomy between black and white, Negroes and slave masters. She really brought out that concept by using black against white because essentially, that was what her artwork entailed. It was the anger of Kara Walker and of slaves and ex-slaves and their children, against the brutality and animalism of the white plantation owners. It was truly a sight to behold. Furthermore, the language of the titles and the language of the videos made everything seem so real, as though I were back in history witnessing the worst of mankind’s follies take place right before me.
The interesting thing was, there was no sadness. Kara Walker made it so that it was not an exhibit that induced the pity of strangers. It was an exhibit that induced curiosity and recognition. She wanted something to be said. She said it.
As Elias stated in his entry, I too, am glad we ended the semester on such a poignant and profound exhibit charged with an undeniable oppression and decadence ingrained upon our history and our nature. It simply just told the truth.