A major new show for an African-American woman artist at the Saint Louis Art Museum is something to celebrate, though Kara Walker’s work itself does not tend to leave one in a celebrating mood.
Walker’s work is among the most recognizable in contemporary art. Her basic forms are large cut-out silhouettes of stereotypical images, typically drawn from American slavery. She tends to embellish these images for grotesque comic effect and then place them in a disturbing historical context.
An instructive example of her work – and how it offends some people – can be seen in a drawing of hers that was displayed, and then obscured, in the Newark Public Library in 2012. The drawing’s title says a lot: “The moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.” One of its most barbaric images – of coerced plantation sex – was so offensive to some library workers that they demanded the image be hid from view.
“I really don’t like to see my people like this,” library employee Sandra West told the Newark Star-Ledger. “We need to see something uplifting and not demeaning.”
If, like this Newark librarian, you look to African-American art for uplifting images of African Americans, then you should be prepared to quarrel with the work in Walker’s new show “Anything but Civil: Kara Walker’s Vision of the Old South,” which opened yesterday in Galleries 234 and 235.
“Anything but Civil” is really a show with a sidebar. The main show is Walker’s 2005 print portfolio “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),” which consists of her familiar stereotyped silhouettes superimposed over 15 enlarged reproductions of prints of Civil War scenes first published in 1866, the year after the war ended. The sidebar is a group of 23 drawings that deal mainly with the same themes as the prints: race, sex, slavery, violence.
One drawing depicts two disembodied heads of black men. One head, encircled by a spiked slave collar, is being told by the other head, “You just tryin’ to act white!” That’s the sort of grotesque, disturbing humor one encounters at a Kara Walker show.
The large-scale prints in this show are more subtle, less directly confrontational. There is an odd power to seeing these historic prints of Civil War scenes “annotated” (as Walker says) by what appear to be giant silhouettes of images drawn from slave life.
Though Walker often seems intent on provoking, rather than informing, the viewer, there is an implied commentary in this portfolio. In Walker’s prints, the dignified depictions of Civil War scenes – for the most part, white men killing white men – are literally overshadowed and in part blotted out by big, crude images of nameless, faceless black men and women.
As the title of her print in the Newark library reminds us, history “curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.” History, for Kara Walker, is a nightmare from which we have not yet awakened.
Love or hate these images, they are in St. Louis to stay, as Alison and John Ferring have promised them to the museum as a gift.
Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free, and “Anything but Civil: Kara Walker’s Vision of the Old South,” exhibited in Galleries 234 and 235, is a free show. For more information, call 314-721-0072 or visit slam.org.
