Kara Walker’s New Show Was a Sensation Before It Even Opened

Enter the New York City art gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. sometime between today and October 14, and you will encounter a world just as chaotic and dark and discombobulating as the one in which we live. That Chelsea space is where the Brooklyn artist Kara Walker—she of the massive and massively celebrated 2014 Domino Sugar factory installation—has mounted her latest work.
Walker’s subject matter is, and always has been, racism and misogyny and the way that America’s original sin of slavery continues to rot our country from the inside out. Her work, long before we elected a black president, long before we elected a white president single-mindedly intent on erasing the legacy of our black president, has served as an active, pointed rebuke to notions of a post-racial United States. First there were her silhouetted cutouts that packaged the nightmarish violence of everyday antebellum life in a jaunty, reductive, old-timey visual vernacular. That work, cunning and disturbing, won Walker a MacArthur “Genius” grant at the tender age of 27. Her installation several years ago at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar factory, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, took things one step further. Her gigantic, glowing-white, Aunt Jemima-esque sugar sphinx, surrounded by shoe-polish brown sugar worker boys, relocated the slave trade to its natural terminus: a plant in the most metropolitan of northern cities, where supply met demand, where the fruits of slave labor were processed for the sweet-toothed (though not particularly sweet-hearted) American people.
And now at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., directly in the aftermath of violence in Charlottesville over the removal of monuments that sentimentalize our most shameful history, Walker has made the connection between past and present feel all the more urgent. Walking into the gallery on far West 22nd Street, the visitor is first confronted by a massive brown linen canvas onto which the artist has collaged a series of sketches of specter-like figures mired in the muck of the earth. One woman faces away, carrying the limp body of a black child. Other bodies, their faces beatific in death, are lying prone, descending into the morass. In the background, a woman holds her hands up to the dripping, menacing tree canopy. In the foreground, a black man faces the viewer and holds out his hands, palms exposed as if in defeat. His face is a portrait of exhausted desperation, his fingers sticky with the oil-slick liquid steadily engulfing his feet. The painting’s title, Dredging the Quagmire (Bottomless Pit), calls to mind another more familiar phrase: “draining the swamp.”
There are similar winks to the current news cycle elsewhere (also a literal wink, in Alive Not Dead, a smaller work toward the back of the show, which depicts a smiling black man impaled through the chest on a tree branch, one eye raised to the heavens, the other glued shut). The most prominent work in the show is called Christ’s Entry into Journalism, and it’s a gigantic (140 x 190 inches) collage on paper that chronicles American racial history, much of it hellish. Frederick Douglass appears in the left lower corner. Martin Luther King Jr. is in the same spot on the right. In between and above, there are slaves and confederate soldiers, a minstrel and the “Hottentot Venus,” klansmen and riot police, an American flag and a confederate flag. Sexual violence abounds. James Brown wrestles with his microphone; a pair of black trapeze artists swing from a tree alongside a dangling lynched body; Batman absconds with a mummified figure, whose swollen, exposed face, as Roberta Smith pointed out in the New York Times, may or may not reference the famous photograph of Emmett Till in his casket. Elsewhere, a hooded boy, his head on a platter held by a white woman, calls to mind Trayvon Martin. Nearby, a bearded black man in a big hat with skull-like eyes dangles a disembodied white head, a puffy little cloud with a face crudely reminiscent of Donald Trump.

Walker is still working with silhouettes, and this show includes one particularly haunting example: Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something). I bring it up to say this: The artist’s silhouette technique reduces visual information to the bare minimum, and collapses space into a flat plane, a single dimension. Her newer work, frenetically busy though still cartoonish, does something similar by collapsing time. The past haunts the present, and the present calls back to the past. The two are in frenzied conversation. The anachronisms are telling: This is a swirling cyclone of freighted symbols that mashes up every era of American life and reminds us that the scourge of racism infects all it touches, the oppressor as well as the oppressed, the future as well as the past (not to mention the present).
Walker’s title, per the Times, alludes to works depicting “ ‘Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,’ the biblical event preceding his betrayal, trial, death and resurrection.” Perhaps, Smith concludes, “journalism’s death and resurrection is the main point.” Or, maybe this is a portrait of journalism as the place where culture—and art—goes on trial, or a portrait of journalism on trial itself. (Flash back to two weeks ago, when President Trump, recasting his equivocations about Charlottesville, told a roaring crowd in Phoenix, “If you want to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the fake news and the crooked media.”)

Of course we’ll all see what we want to see in these images, something the artist anticipated. If you’ve already heard about her new work, it’s because Walker made a major stir on social media when she announced the show via a very unconventional press release, written in the sensationalist style of a carnival barker: “Sikkema Jenkins and Co.,” it begins, “is Compelled to Present the Most Astounding and Important Painting Show of the Fall Art Show Viewing Season!” Walker continued with a series of predictions about how her work will be received. “Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media.” Also included in the release was an artist statement, a different sort of rejection of form. “I don’t really feel the need to write a statement about a painting show,” Walker declared. “I know what you all expect from me and I have complied up to a point. But frankly I am tired, tired of standing up, being counted tired of ‘having a voice’ or worse ‘being a role model.’ Tired, true, of being a featured member of my racial group and/or my gender niche. It’s too much.”
The press release created its own momentum. “If Walker is so tired of standing up, then she can just take a seat,” wrote the artist Lyric Prince in Hyperallergic, calling Walker’s bluff. The New York Times took a more measured tone: “In the shadow of Charlottesville, viewers are more likely than ever to come to Ms. Walker’s fall show expecting answers. Her statement acknowledges that their expectations will be disappointed.”
Was Walker’s statement a straightforward plea to be left alone? A savvy marketing move? Cynically, it could be seen as a way to guarantee that viewers will indeed “be more likely than ever to come to Ms. Walker’s fall show,” whether or not they come seeking answers. Or is it another piece of art, one that cleverly gets at pressing questions about free speech, responsible speech, and who gets to say what in the art world. For whom is the artist making her work? To whom is she liable when it inevitably offends? To whom will she have to answer?
The dangling, decapitated Trump head in Christ’s Entry into Journalism calls to mind the comedian Kathy Griffin, who, in June, circulated an image of herself holding a bloodied Donald Trump mask, and promptly lost a gig at CNN and an endorsement deal with the company Squatty Potty. (No, Griffin is not an artist; yes, comedians face similar questions about creative license versus social responsibility.) Batman dragging the body of Emmett Till (if it is, indeed, Emmett Till) might be a reference to Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, her painting at the Whitney Biennial of Till’s broken, dead body that sparked a protest from black artists about the right of a white artist to co-opt black pain as her subject matter.
Those protestors requested that the Whitney remove and destroy Schutz’s work (the museum did not do so). Months later, when the ICA Boston mounted a Dana Schutz show (notably, it did not include Open Casket), more protestors demanded that the exhibition be canceled. Walker was one of many artists who signed a letter in support of Schutz, and posted on Instagram in favor of allowing Open Casket to remain on display: “The history of painting is full of graphic violence and narratives that don’t necessarily belong to the artists own life,” she wrote. “I experience painting too as a site of potentiality, of query, a space to join physical and emotional energy, political and allegorical forms. Painting—and a lot of art often lasts longer than the controversies that greet it. I say this as a shout to every artist and artwork that gives rise to vocal outrage. Perhaps it too gives rise to deeper inquiries and better art. It can only do this when it is seen.”
Walker knows of what she speaks. She has been at the center of similar controversies, first in the late ’90s, when the artist Betye Saar, objecting to the violence and depravity depicted in Walker’s silhouettes, launched a letter-writing campaign against her. Saar called Walker’s work “sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children” and said that “it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.” And again in 2012, one of Walker’s drawings—presciently titled The moral arc of History ideally bends toward justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos—caused a backlash when it was mounted at the Newark public library. Its scenes of racial and sexual barbarity—particularly an act of forced fellatio between a white man and a black woman—prompted employees to cover the art with a sheet. Walker, in response, gave a statement: “I am sorry that the staff is so put off by the work that they feel the need to prevent others from seeing it and making their own call to look or look away. I don’t advocate any kind of censorship. The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us, viewer and maker, in a conflicted or contestable space, without real world injury or loss.”
The real-world injury and loss of 2017 is so, well, real, that there will be some who aren’t interested in being held in Walker’s “conflicted or contestable space.” And those people should probably make the choice to look away. For everyone else, Walker’s work is a reminder that good art may be confrontational, but it is never didactic; rather, it holds a mirror up to life and demands only that you see what you see in that reflection. As Walker writes, sounding rather weary, at the end of her statement: “this is a show of works on paper and on linen, drawn and collaged using ink, blade, glue, and oil stick. These works were created over the course of the Summer of 2017. It’s not exhaustive, activist or comprehensive in any way.”
It is, however, exhausting, activating, and full of moments of great comprehension. And if Walker’s now-famous press release said anything at all, it was an invitation—a provocation?—to come judge for yourself.