Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
I am pleased to have ended this course with “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.” This exhibit ended the Fall semester on a really good note and it was also the most controversial, provocative, and personal due to the nature of Walker’s artwork. Initially, the name of this exhibit puzzled me and I did not understand how it connected with the disturbing silhouettes that shadowed the interior walls of the Whitney. Only after viewing the exhibit in its entirety was I able to grasp the significance behind the title. The enlarged letter on the last expanse of wall clarified that her Complement, her Enemy, her Oppressor, her Love are all in reference to a single entity – a white man, the allegorical representation of the upholders of slavery in the Antebellum South. By embodying all of these opposing facets, the White Man’s influence during the Antebellum is further emphasized as an all-encompassing power, a defining characteristic of the slave society that was the white-dominated South. This point is taken to another extreme when one shifts focus from the disturbing figures and considers that the negative space that surrounds the black silhouettes are its complementary color – white. White again, permeates each and every scene, impressing upon the viewer an oppressive feeling, an expression of slavery under a white dominant society.
This exhibit also incorporated many stereotypes in reference to Black people in the context of American slavery; this functioned in conveying the pejorative and dehumanizing aspects of the slave society, a stark contrast to the representation found in the opening for the movie “Gone With the Wind” in which the Antebellum South was romanticized in the following lines:
“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind…”
Of all the black figures that I have encountered in this exhibit, only one stands out the most to me – the silhouette of a diapered girl clutching a dead duck or goose. This small child is seen on the opening wall of the exhibit, and she appears impish with her heavy jaw, crouching gait, and beastly posture. This devilish nature is emphasized with the lifeless fowl in her strangling hands and with her two small pigtails that stand up on her head in the fashion of devil horns. This wicked representation of a young black girl exemplifies how stereotypes can extend to the innocent, one of the most contemptible outcomes of discrimination.
These stereotypes are what Kara Walker ultimately seeks to criticize and literally destroy in her exhibit. In the free audio guide that was provided, Walker explains that she finds the act of tearing down the silhouettes from the walls at an exhibition’s close very poetic in that it is analogous to tearing down the stereotypes that perpetuate in society. Walker can now have peace with her work in knowing that it has served its purpose and has objectified the concept of stereotypes, transmuting it from an abstraction to a form that is concrete, thus allowing her to destroy and tear up what had been cut by “the able hand of […] an Emancipated Negress and leader in her Cause.”