Kara walker's works

kara walker's work.

Kara Walker discusses her exhibition at Camden Arts Centre from Camden Arts Centre on Vimeo.

Shame and Sexuality (Eds) Claire Pajackowska and Ivan Ward 

(A text i had is one chapter of this book)

-Shame, disgust and idealization in Kara Walke  r's gone :  A Historical Romance of a Civil War As It Occured Between the Dusky Thighs Of One Young Negress and her Heart of Amna Malik

Understanding the text.

There are important remarks that i read 

The Masochism that Walker referenced in knowing and being part of a relationship in which she has 'just been body for someone's life story', and the similar sense of hurt that Shaw alerted us to , indicates the persistence of history experienced as a periodic traumatic confrontation. ( p 181)

There are times when you're friends with somebody or you're having a relationship, and you're not thinking about race for a brief moment. Then Suddenly the entire history of the whole United State America or the American south or post-Recontruction comes crashing down on you and you say to yourself 'Hmm, this reminds me of something. I'm not sure what it is, but it's vaguely familiar.(Hannaham 1998:116 referenced in Malik 1994)

Hobbs correcting in attributing to Walker's large-scale installation a return to the primal scene of racism in the fantasized memory of slavery that recasts Dubois's double consciousness as an ambivalent encounter between master and slave.( p 182)

Yet, the trauma of the encounter between 'black' and 'white' in Fanon's Black skin, White Masks is absent; instead pleasure, whether sadistic or jubilant, appears to be dominant in her work.( p 182)

Then uncomfortable associations between 'black' and 'White' deliberately courted by the artist evoke cultural shame over a sexuality that is closely tied to the disgust prompted by contact with parts of the body that serve excretory functions like shitting, pissing and menstruating. (p182-183)

When we consider these aspects of Freud's writings on sexuality within the context of the history of slavery in the US then the activation of the 'black' woman as a freed slave in Walker's images can be understood as troubling the 'readymade' social space of inferiority through questions of sexuality.(p184)

These association between sexuality and space as an interiority that is made visible is relevant to my reading of Gone because they also indicate the importance of space in the idea of liminality that is central to julia Kristeva's  theorization of abjection.(p184)

Walker's characters are all too well aware that to speak of shame is to simultaneously speak of disgust, the overcoming of which is a prequistie for sexual pleasure. The purposes of such illicit pleasure under the confines of slavery, however, become a rather dubious notion when the economy surrounding slavery is overlapped with that surrounding sex.(p 185)

The status of the walls as support makes explicit the contrast between the white subjects of the silhouette and the white walls of the gallery; it implies that they are defiled by contact with 'blackness' and reiterate its associations with dirt, poverty, stupidity and savagery perpetuated in stereotypes.

Thom Shaw's response to Walker's images came from an awareness that these historic associations between blackness and disgust are still operative.(p186)

Attributing disgust to the 'black' slave body within the art world that prides itself on its liberal ideals might expose one to censure in the eyes of others.(p186-187)

Shame is reinforced by one's assigned position of 'lack' within an idealized symbolic order and the traumatic effects of being repeatedly reminded of that 'lack'.

The shame that Walker's work generates is complex because it returns the spectator to a condition of abjection that reveals the inadequacies of a public rhetoric of racial pride. its form seems to enact a shameful exposure of the  historical romance and its popular dissemination in Gone with the wind (1939) and other films and novels inspired by the antebellum South that are marked by a troubling nostalgia for the past. (p187)

The outline of a silhouette seems to make explicit what we see, yet in Walker's hands it withholds knowledge, just as in the primal scene the child witnesses his parents having sex but does not understand what he sees. It is a kind of unknowing.

She concluded her essay by pointing to the importance of seeing Walker's images in the gallery to gather 'the full impact of the environmental experience' because of the complexity of her images that, she stated, 'are far in advance of the narratives. (p191)

The condition of being lured into the process of determining meaning when seeing the images in reproduction render the white spaces between them an absence so unremarkable because they are so ubiquitous.(p191)

The boundaries of the images that we strain to interpret as either 'white' or 'black' are marked by the contrasts of opaque black paper, dense and obdurate in its lack of reflections, texture or shading.(p 191)

Abjection and the 'black' female body

Spectators of Walker's work are seduced into an unconscious need to fix identity and inadvertently secure a hierarchy of difference within the realm of the symbolic.

The displacement of Scarlett to the side of the drama inaugurates a complex reading of similarity and difference in relation to 'whiteness' as idealized femininity, and 'blackness' as debased and yet also an object of desire and therefore a site of ambivalence.

This displacement foregrounds the pornography that marks the couple's contact, as though some truth is being exposed. One wonders if this is the only kind of intimacy that a collective consciousness can imagine between 'black' women and 'white' men: one that is pornographic and debases 'black' women.

Pornography fragments the unity of the body into a series of part objects, a splitting between and within the object of the drive and the love object. The splitting establishes a distinction between 'self' and 'others' but it is an illusory separation that abjection shatters.

The boat-woman bobbing along water echoes the girl from whose skirts babies fall; these are all containers of one kind or another that can be sat in and rowed, poured in to, or tipped to draw from.

The complexity of assigning to them a white or black consciousness does not entirely explain how they have been transformed from objects of use to souvenirs, nor why Faulkner, and Walker on more modest scale, might wish to collect them.

It is this that establishes their appeal as souvenirs in which the potentially engulfing mother is domesticated as containers.

In Walker's images they appear to be displaced into pornographic and grotesque images that, through sexuality and humor, seem to be aimed at a defense against incorporation of the self into the other: a defense that is directed by an ongoing attempt to distance ourselves from a primary repression of the mother's body.

Keristeva argues, results in the separation between culture and nature, most visible in so-called 'primitive' societies that demarcate a space distancing man from animals and animalism, which are viewed as threatening in their status as representatives of sex and murder.The second of these is what she describes as 'a personal archaeology' that is the earliest attempts of the infant to release the hold of the maternal 'even before existing outside of her'

The importance of abjection lies then in its emphasis on a stage prior to that moment when the human subject is formed as an 'I' is fashioned in accordance with the third element in the triadic structure and what was once the 'mother' is turned into the abject.

She put everything out there and there was a huge flood of information that was living back there in her mind that came forward about history, about being a woman, being black about living in the south for the period of time. She lived in theSouth and the kind of narratives that were informing this body or constraining this body as who i could be or what i could say. She decided to embrace some of those constrains as far as a southern narratives or a narrative of blackness and eventually, found herself either unable to make a picture of anything or an image but only writing stuff but still with a huge need to draw because that is what her love is and that is where, she got her desire to be an artist.
The silhouettes in her work are a result of a drawing practice and also a result of this questioning that in the end had her removing something, cut something out and she remove it from the whole and then she have got two sides we can look at, we have got our positive and negative and i really liked that dialectic there.