Collective Unconscious `Reconfigured' in Black and White: Kara Walker

PRESENTING NEGRO SCENES DRAWN UPON MY

PASSAGE THROUGH THE SOUTH AND

RECONFIGURED FOR THE BENEFIT OF

ENLIGHTENED AUDIENCES WHEREVER SUCH MAY

BE FOUND, BY MYSELF, MISSUS K.E.B. WALKER, COLORED

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Through April 5

From the title alone, one can gather that Kara Walker's exhibit positions itself on a fine edge between mockery and representation, between historical narrative and cultural commentary. Rather than narrating history, Walker uses history as a backdrop for a less literal, though just as real, melodrama. Her work unabashedly analyzes the collective unconscious of the American psyche. What she dredges up--racist imagery involving bestiality, child abuse, feces and more--is not pretty. It is grotesque, disgusting, ingenious and eerily beautiful.

Pasted to the walls of the Carpenter Center are sheets of black paper, cut into silhouettes that wind around the oddly-shaped space of the lobby. Entering the lobby, one is confronted with the long, cumbersome title, printed in 19th century type on the gray concrete of the front wall. The title's reference to "enlightened audiences" could not be more apt in all its cynicism, class consciousness and cultural criticism than it is here, in the art center of Harvard University.

The black paper cut-outs form a series of approximately life-size silhouettes staged in a dream-like setting that ranges from rural plantations to stylized gardens. The images of the exhibit move like a dream, occasionally implying a broken chronology, or continuing a narrative through head gestures of the silhouettes. Many of Walker's images combine stereotypes of the devilish, animalistic black American with allusions to the folklore of the "happy darky" who entertains whites and enjoys subservience. The result: the exhibit achieves, in Walker's words, a "reinactment [sic] of history in the arena of desire." The id of America is exposed.

Walker's exhibit unabashedly disturbs the viewer with representation of the images and history underlying racism in America. Like the chromatic form of the piece--black paper on white walls--the exhibit deals with race only in black and white. This form alone, in its insistence on turning negative space into positive space, implies the underlying concept of dialectical racial identities. Walker establishes a visual language that bluntly indicates the race of each silhouetted figure. White figures are marked by a few pointed wisps of hair, a straight nose, and thin lips. Silhouettes of black figures are cut with rounded bumps for hair, or twisted plaits, with rounded noses, and large, often open-hanging lips. The figures look like neither real people nor caricatures, but like characters in some Southern plantation novel that takes itself quite seriously. The silhouette of a white man in a three piece suit and fluffy tie stands under a tree with his hands resting on the shoulder of a young white boy, who holds a flower and looks up toward the sky. A big-bottomed black girl wearing a bandanna hangs laundry. They are recognizable.

Though much of the exhibit focuses on the horrors of slavery, Walker also effectively explores issues of black assimilation, black self-hatred and class mobility. For example, a black couple in 19th century formal-wear and bristling with haughtiness attempt to establish a safe-haven through European clothing and custom. Yet, the woman's skirt or stole is lined with ferrets, and a head of one remains alive, as its silhouette, too, is shown in profile, turning around to observe her. The scene establishes a dramatic irony; the viewer is aware that this black couple has failed to escape the racist terms of the exhibit, but the two black silhouettes dance on, unknowingly.

On another wall, a two-headed woman leaps through the air, with the head and neck of a white woman attached to the crown of her nappy-haired head. The delicate position of her arms and the grace of her ballet-like leap imply that she, like the waltzing couple, finds pride in her appearance. Perhaps, she is unaware of her second head. More likely, considering her posture, she is proud to have garnished a European head, and is unaware of her deformity. Even more disconcerting, perhaps she acknowledges her deformity, and considers it a small price to pay for the hair, nose and lips that she has always wanted.

Across from her, the silhouette of a black woman stands over that of a young black girl, watching intently as the girl holds a knife to the neck of a crouching white woman. The girl looks back expectantly to the adult black woman, who is holding a threaded needle and a severed head of another black woman cradled in her arms. Clearly, an exchange is about to be made. But for whom? Perhaps, the black woman holding the head is replacing the white woman's head with that of another black woman, in order to become the two-headed woman leaping across the other wall. If so, she has left one black woman headless in order to achieve her self-transformation.

These themes of black self-hatred appear multiple times in the exhibit, yet never establishing a clear victim and persecutor. This is one of the central strengths of the exhibit. While it tackles such complex and political topics as black assimilation, it never devolves into a narrative of either blame or exoneration. Rather, Walker explores the inter-connection between white cruelty and black mimicry of whites, between white fetishistic desire of the black female and black female self-annihilation. The ingenuity of Walker's work is that, not only does she represent these cultural phenomena, but she examines how they form a support network, mutually feeding off each other.

Though Walker reaffirms this concept with a plethora of feeding imagery, the exhibit does not fall simply into a framework of symbolism. The figurativeness of Walker's work exists in the divide between conscious and unconscious more so than the divide between real and metaphor. Walker's images allude to Freud's analysis of dreams. The series of fantastical silhouettes--a tree split in half, a two-headed woman, oddly-shaped flowers, a man with talons--create a visual world that vacillates between dream and nightmare. The dream that Walker unfolds here is not just any dream, but the dream of the collective American psyche, filled with all the pain, desire, cruelty, love, hate and shame of American history.

Walker, in the tradition of writer and political theorist Franz Fanon, builds upon Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacan's theory of dialectical identity to expose the underpinning mechanisms of racism in contemporary American society. Walker's catalogue book, riddled with references to the "Other," the "gaze" and "perversion," tackles the psychological foundations of racism in the context of a history of slavery. She successfully uses theories that have been applied to a colonial history to create a conceptual framework that addresses the unique perversities of a racism grounded in slavery. This is no small feat.

The punch of Walker's exhibit is that it refuses to render the challenge of race into a simply rhetorical question. As cynical as the show is, it demands a solution from its audience. Like psycho-analysis, Walker's work reminds the viewer of things that she does not like to know that she knows. It confronts the audience with the grotesque, debasing racial stereotypes that are embedded in our collective psyche, with the hope that bringing them to consciousness will be the first step to their eradication.

This Freudian conceptual foundation, like the monochromatic form of Walker's figures, allows these racial archetypes to vacillate between positive space and negative space, between active role and passive role in this psychological struggle. On the subject of sadism and masochism, Freud wrote, "[M]asochism is nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subjects own self." To the extent that Walker's silhouettes of black girls swallowing their own hands or feces imply a masochistic tendency, they become completely interdependent with the sadistic acts being represented on other walls. These two extremes of suffering and cruelty in Walker's work function not so much as disparate poles of reality, but as opposing sides of the same history, casting black identity and white identity as inextricably linked. For better or for worse.