Kara Walker

Kara Walker is the ultimate, most graceful and powerful muckraker. Black artists like Betye Saar rail against the "unpositive" nature of her work. Her shock tactics consistently create controversy, usually from her "base" of African American and women artists. She's an art star--she's not playing to the woman-artist/African American-artist ghettos. She is the youngest recipient of a McArthur award. She has created a really specific and tenacious niche for herself: she is the White Art Establishment's Negress, spewing forth endless reams of gorgeous silhouetted ugliness and the darkest, most playful, off-the-hook embarassment and shame. She is shameless. She seals a dirty pact with her viewers. We do the work of profiling these characters. We create the stereotypes with her. Walker has a unique ability to represent race as a social landscape in which we are all projecting, creating the sihouetted stories with her. Nobody is exempted in her picture of the way race works.

I am working on a review of her show at the Met this week, and will be masticating years of looking at her work and how it plays out in my life. So stay tuned as I flop around like a fish on the deck of a boat! This is an exciting challenge--if it feels uncomfortable, it's important to do it. I go to Kara Walker's work with a lot of needs, and I actually love that she consistently refuses to give me what I need. At the same time, I hate that she doesn't give me some things I want from her work. When I think Kara Walker, I think A Simple, Constant Pain That Feels Vaguely Satisfying, Like When You Cut Your Fingernail Too Short and Can't Stop Worrying It.

This is a complex, kind of critic-proof feeling, and my first task as a reviewer is to tease apart what I need from her work and what I want from her work. Because race is such a loaded issue, and because I can't quite tell my needs from my wants, I need to start by telling you who I am in terms of race.

I am a liberal white woman who grew up in a liberal enclave of the self-segregated, conservative American Southwest. This means I grew up on platitudes about equality and a worshipfulness of MLK, but I never mixed with many black folks. This cultural vacuum and the idealistic ignorance it spawned has led me to two great day jobs that teach me a cold new lesson every day about how pernicious and wasteful racism is, and about how completely implicated I am in it. My parents fucking lied to me. They gave me this idea that racism is outside of me, of the past--that not being racist is as easy as not saying words like pickaninny. Racism doesn't work this way at all. It is not about who says or does what to whom. From where I stand, it is about what isn't said. It's about what white and black people assume about themselves and about each other. It's about everybody's internal dialogue. It's a thicket that I am constantly catching my legs in.

I go into the public schools in Brooklyn and teach (almost exclusively non-white) kids about environmental awareness. When I'm not doing that, I am the de facto "overseer" of the landscaping crew at Socrates, which is plucked mostly from the Astoria Houses up the street. And that very fact, that I wind up assuming this role of overseer--not even boss, overseer--even though I work with these people and am not even their boss, that is exactly what racism is to me.

And I tell you, I truly hate and am very much affected by racism. It is just fucking chilling to look at a ten-year-old boy and know by the way he stares past me, by the way his teacher treats him, that everyone has given up on him already. I learn from other people, and racism makes too many people unavailable to me. It makes too much conflict in my work life. Being a white woman coming into an African American teacher's classroom and "disrespecting her by telling her what to do" has created a lot of tension in my life. Befriending guys on the landscaping crew can have awful effects. Suddenly the person I was chatting with about stuff like family, weekend plans, old-school rap and how much better it is than boring post-Public Enemy lawsuit rap... is a snitch and an oreo. He gets threatening looks from the other guys. He tries to solve the problem by asking what he did wrong and a fistfight almost erupts.

Over what? Snitch about what? I am not their boss. And why are the stakes so high?

I go to Kara Walker's work as a white person with a lot of questions about how this all got to be so ugly. What do I do to create this tension? Is there anything I can do to stop it? Who has the power? What are the people I work with thinking? Since I am from Arizona... why is working with Mexican immigrants so profoundly different? It's obviously that nasty legacy of slavery... but what is it about American slavery that is so uniquely degrading? Is it the way we handled it together? Is it the level of atrocity? Why are the Vietnamese eager to befriend me as a tourist after the ungodly horror of their American war? And why are we so quick to drop the gook thing now that the war is over, even though we don't even have all our POWs yet... and why do any Jews at all live in Germany?

Horrific, horrific, horrific. Slavery is horrific! But people do truly horrific things to one another all the time. There is something else going on here. What is it? Why are we still holding on to slavery with such a tight fist? And why do I feel so dirty even asking this question? I legitimately want to know! I am affected by this!

So yeah, Kara Walker's work is loaded for me. I go to it needing absolution and answers, and I don't get either, and this is one of the greatest strengths of her work. She has no business being the Racism Absolution Fairy or the helpful gal at the Advice For White People About Blackness booth, even if she could. But there is something in this sticky gap between what she puts out and what I bring that is as weak and disappointing as it is strong and correct.