La di dah, just another essay of mine from college as I am finishing up a different post… This essay is currently floating somewhere in the Gregory Allicar Museum Curatorial Files at CSU.
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Representations of race in art have evolved throughout the decades. A variety of different methods and styles have risen through the years to convey the history of race in the United States of America. Movements like the Harlem Renaissance are notable periods where art blossomed from communities of color, but what about today? Kara Walker is one of the most notable artists both nationally and internationally. Her works of art convey historical narratives of the Antebellum period. Specifically, Kara Walker’s Boo Hoo (Fig. 1) uses contemporary art practices to convey racism to modern audiences and relate it to race relations in today’s society. In this essay, I will decipher the context and content of Kara Walker’s Boo Hoo, examine how she uses contemporary styles to narrate historical stories to modern audiences, and argue why her work connects to today’s society.
This exhibition, Talking About Race, is about the representation of race in contemporary artists’ work. How can contemporary artists convey current manifestations and issues around race? We have drawn from artists around the globe whose work discusses their racial identity in their own experience. Included are global artists from South and East Asia, African, South American, Mexican, indigenous artists from Alaska, Hawaii, and Polynesia. American artists of various racial identities and backgrounds also span this exhibition. Included in this exhibition is Boo Hoo by Kara Walker who exemplifies discussions and representations of race within her work.
Boo Hoo is a cutout silhouette of a woman who is holding a whip in one hand and a snake with its mouth next to the woman’s face in the other. The woman has natural black hair and other imagery that hints at black ancestry like the hoop earrings. There are other aspects of Boo Hoo that Walker is known for in her other works like a large hoop skirt, exposed nipple, and the large, life-size height of the piece. The main interest is the emotion of the woman and the white space around the woman’s mouth area. Adair Rounthwaite in “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker,” notes that the appearance of white space around the mouth area hints at blackface. He says “Boo Hoo brings the blackface image to the surface yet again to address its unmournable quality, and to reveal how the use of such images in art that deals with Black identity fundamentally fails to recoup the history it addresses, creating a specific type of pain that is about the consequences that the citation of that history in the present has for the subject.”[1] Pain and the impact of that pain in the current day is an aspect we will talk about throughout this piece because of the relevance to society and how Walker utilizes that direct impact on current day to make her work that much more relevant. Pain is evident in the emotion of the woman and Enerel Essner in a catalog entry in Double Vision: Woman as Image and Imagemaker points out that the use of minimalism in Boo Hoo draws attention to the objects in her hand and the woman’s emotions.[2] Walker’s use of silhouette and medium add elements of historical reference, personal reasoning, and emphasis of content.
The objects themselves are worth noting because they also reference pain. The snake and the whip are historical uses of torture and hints at the antebellum period that Walker is known for portraying. On closer analysis, they point to topics of sex and the history of these objects. Essner comments on how the snake object in association with the woman points to the Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve. This association of biblical text used with antebellum imagery by a contemporary artist suggest the “burden of being a woman in the contemporary society where she cannot be disassociated from the perceived inferiority of her sex.”[3] Rounthwaite says the objects can be seen “as metaphors for the stereotypical images of blackness that Walker uses in her work. For the black subject who sees the way that society sees her in these images, they are weapons that continue to sting long after whips have ceased to do so.”[4] Rounthwaite continues to argue why the objects are contemporary subjects by understanding how we look at objects and know the racist history behind them “which are some of the primary means by which that history becomes known to the contemporary subject.”[5] This association of historical with contemporary and the idea that the past stays with us and that imagery can evoke pain is something we’ll delve into further because of its significance in the conversations Walker tries to start about race and memory.
Another aspect of Boo Hoo that adds to the complexity of the piece is her medium. Walker is known for her medium, silhouette, which hints at a historical use, personal reasoning, and a way to further emphasis her content. Historically, silhouette cutting has an appropriate history that connects to Walker’s themes. It was considered a lesser form of art that was more accessible to women, specifically African-American women artists.[6] Walker herself has said that working with paper cutouts was a rejection of oil painting, which is considered a high art form.[7] With her use of silhouette, she looks back at history and how a women of color would have been able to create art in the time period she represents as well as the hierarchical status of mediums even within society today. Walker has stated that using silhouette “was both structurally [and] physically a kind of violent act of removal, like claiming a shape from another space”[8] This can be related to some of her content and the reclamation of imagery that people have thought she does in her depictions of racist representations. Understanding the historical use and motivations behind Walker’s decision to use silhouettes is a way to examine her work as a woman of color. Dan Cameron in “Kara Walker: Rubbing History the Wrong Way” says the contrast between the old-fashioned technique of silhouettes that’s a “passive mode of representation” with the violent imagery “becomes a working symbol for the degree to which the American psyche is suspended between a kind of 19th-century obliviousness concerning race and more vivid memories and facts that lie just below the surface.”[9] Relating her medium to the historical time period and how race was viewed back then creates another dimension to her work for audience to discussion in regards to contemporary race in society. Wall adds to the complexity of the contrast by saying, that Walker “forces us to confront the suddenly glaring and obvious contingent relationship between form and content and, thus, defamiliarises the act of looking itself.”[10] This contrast between content and form is present in Boo Hoo. We have violent and painful ways to torture African Americans both psychologically and physically represented however the form itself is historically delicate and docile and makes the audience consider the relationship between the two in regards to purpose and history.
Adding into what Cameron mentioned with the contrast between delicate and violent, Hill in “The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson” points out that it “amplifies the two dimensionality”[11] that stereotypes psychologically form of the subject they compress in the actual two dimensional form of silhouettes. This becomes a visual representation of stereotypes and how stereotypes are a fictive idea of a person we associate based on appearance or small hints rather than viewing them holistically. The solid black of the silhouettes act as a black hole that the audience fills with their imagination and makes the audience interact and form the racist narratives in “our desire for narrative coherence”[12]. As Shaw in Seeing the Unspeakable says, “the scale of the individual character silhouettes, their human size, helps them to force their way into the space of the viewer”[13] and the audience is forced to be involved in the art. As we look at Boo Hoo, we can see our reflections on the glass frame. The woman depicted is nearly the same size as us so even though it’s a comical portrayal, we can’t help but connect ourselves to the piece in front of us.
Historically, Walker’s art focuses on the Antebellum South and uses images of slavery to express various issues. Walker Hamza in “Witness to her Art” explains that the “South is a trope through which desire is expressed, and specifically, desire as a turbulent combination of pleasure and power, a relationship that encompasses submission and domination.”[14] The hoop skirt, as seen in Boo Hoo and a symbol of the Antebellum South, usually acts as a symbol of morality in fashion for that time period, but in Walker’s work signifies a “disguise [of] their own repressed desires”[15]. This idea of repressed desire can be seen in sexual terms and exemplified by the erect nipple on Boo Hoo. It can also be seen as repressed desires from oppression and desire to be free on constraints, which could be the symbols of torture like the snake and whip. This use of imagery in context to historical meanings adds depth the symbols included in Boo Hoo.
In Boo Hoo, the woman is shown very comically and the representation of blackness relies on stereotypes of appearance. The stereotypical imagery is how Walker creates a complex narrative. By using this imagery and historically painful symbols used to oppress African Americans, she subverts the power that the images have on black people by physically responding to the “dispossession of black people of their self-image through racist stereotyping”[16]. Instead of conforming to complacent imagery of black people, she engages in the violent representations of black people and transforms the power relationship from being “victim” to reclaiming dominance.
By using this imagery, she exposes the misrepresentation of blacks and the dehumanizing effects of the “psychosomatic realities of racism” that these images are trying to convey. [17] What makes Walker’s work powerful is the use of mental power. We aren’t physically being affected by Boo Hoo, but emotionally and mentally it pulls at different parts of ourselves and the history we are associated with. Using these stereotypes makes the audience question their reactions to these images as 21st century audiences and connect that to racism and images in our contemporary society.
Part of the conversation about stereotypes ends up at the conversation of black artists and what constitutes black art. As with many black artists, the art institution has put Walker in a place where her race ends up being the defining factor in her work as an artist. Walker has acknowledged her position as a black female artist saying that she knew the only way she could have an audience in the art world was if she cloaked her art in blackness.[18] In response to the essentialist attitude that museums tend to take on when dealing with black art, Walker uses stereotypical images that normally black artists try to subvert. She exploits and exaggerates the stereotypes “to debunk monolithic notions of blackness and to question the very notion of black art.”[19] Audiences might not think of Walker’s art as art that would uplift the black community since the person she portrays is stereotypical and comical. The imagery she uses are old and worn stereotypes and the woman shown is demonizing blackness with clear portrayals of torture. Rounthwaite states:
Instead of presenting us with a manifesto that attempts to define what black American identity is now, [Walkers’ art] poses future transformation of identity as a question, through an investigation of the connections between representations of history, race, and perception in the present.[20]
Compared to other works of art in the exhibition made by black artists, Walker’s work readily accepts the stereotypes and uses them to her advantage. She isn’t afraid to show someone wearing blackface and portraying an over-sexed, emotional, black woman with kinky curly hair and hoop earrings. Boo Hoo adds to the complexity and diversity of art made by black artists to show the diversity of racial identity.
Walker’s work in the past has been included to “[relieve] the museum of being a slave to history in a manner that equates black artists with black audiences.”[21] This still keeps the art world segregated and black art and artists essentialized. Additionally, pandering to black artists by using work like Boo Hoo which addresses historical and contemporary representation of black identity lack the wider conversation that it seeks to initiate. Hamza states:
If black history, no matter how dignified it may be rendered at the hands of a black artist is considered solely the province of a black audience, then we haven’t gotten anywhere since Plessy v. Ferguson. Through her work, Walker is proposing that we NOT buy in at the level of history but at the level of humanity in which blacks and everybody else has equal stakes.[22]
One of the reasons we included Boo Hoo is because of the reactions the work creates from audiences. Black audiences are not the sole audience meant for this piece of work and they are not the only ones who can understand it. Boo Hoo references imagery that many people in American regardless of race can interpret. While Walker’s art has been included to tokenize and, in some ways, exploit the black audience in a continued power dynamic of institutional power, we include her to in efforts to encourage conversations of what constitutes black art. How does the art institution approach art by people of color and what are we expecting from the audience and from the artists?
So how does Walker’s work point at contemporary manifestations of racism and why should the modern audience care about antebellum images? How does this piece of Walker’s fit in with an exhibition of contemporary representations of race if she’s depicting slavery? Walker’s art is much more complex than just stereotyped images of slaves. While we’ve discussed the medium and and some of the significance of her images, the history of her work and the controversy point to issues within the art world surrounding race. Walker makes the audience reflect on their thought process and the stereotypes they hold.
Probably the most important and one of the reasons her work resonates with contemporary audiences is the involvement of the audience. There’s an enticing component to Walker’s work that draws our attention back to it. We as viewers are drawn to the images, even if it’s a concept or an image we don’t particularly want to see.[23] This becomes another component of Walker’s we have to internally question to ourselves. Why are we drawn to this image of pain and suffering, specifically regarding race? Furthermore, we know what we are seeing. It’s easily comprehendible and almost instinctual which then makes us question our internal thoughts and views of black people.[24] In looking at these images, “the viewer is never allowed to maintain any neutral distance from the image and is, thus, continually forced into the recognition and acceptance of her own complicity in the ‘violence of looking’ at the heart of racial representation.”[25] Along with the involvement via our reflection in the glass and the near-life size portrayal of the woman, we are watching her pain. We are imagining what is happening and what will happen to her and who she is. The power that the audience has in creating the narrative and coming to conclusions is part of the conversation about how we create the social construction of race in today’s society.
In Boo Hoo, Walker uses imagery like the whip and blackface that are familiar to black people and that’s why it has the resounding effect that it has.[26] Her work wouldn’t have the power that it has if the audience wasn’t already familiar with these. The use of stereotypes also points to the relevance that they still hold today and how they have remained since slavery.[27] Because these stereotypes and images are still easily recognizable, Walker is making the viewers think about today’s society and if we really are past these stereotypical representations in our mainstream media.[28] Wall explains, “there is a consistency to the shapes and forms of the black body in western culture that points clearly to the ‘iconography of the grotesque as one of the primary visual languages of modern racism.’”[29] We can immediately look at Boo Hoo and tell it’s representing black culture by the stereotypes like hair and earring. These representations aren’t foreign to us and are probably similar to images we see in our everyday media. Walker’s work “demonstrate[s] how fragments from our past have the capacity to redeem the present and the future.”[30] Walker wants us to think about why we recognize these images so easily and what that says about our contemporary society and how we see black people.
Delving in further, we as an audience are the ones producing these images and coming to the conclusion of the narrative. Wall in “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker” explains how “we, as western viewers, constitute that narrative inasmuch as in the process of looking at the image we inevitably put the disparate fragments together. Indeed, in our tracing of the generic contours of primitivism, the image does not exist without our narrativising impulse.”[31] We are forced to participate in the making of this work and we project the emotions we ascribe to these narratives.[32] As audience members, we start forming the content of the image and the background story of the woman crying. We use our knowledge which has been formed by our education and own lives to inform our viewing experience. This narrative that we generate calls into question the “stereotypes of blackness and whiteness… exposed as mental projections; caricatures, as grotesque fictions that were actually already within ourselves when we started looking.”[33] She gets the audience to look at the psychological component of racism because we have to decide what constitutes blackness and why hoop earrings or curly hair signifies to us that this person is representing blackness.[34]
Additionally, work help us understand our history with perpetuating stereotypes and addressing the history of racism that is still prevalent today because of our ability to place these stereotypes so easily on her work[35]. By doing this, the audience has to look back on their upbringing and what parts of society have helped them form these stereotypes. Since Boo Hoo is set in Antebellum time and these forms of torture like the snake and the whip were used during slavery, Walker calls to the ability of the past to exist in the present. However, instead of pulling audiences apart, she brings them together because a majority of viewers have these stereotypes in their mind regardless of their skin color which calls into question our society.
All these relations to contemporary issues and audiences are in the hopes that conversations about race can start happening. By exposing both the racism in the viewer’s subconscious, she tries to get the viewers to start discussions of race in the present day that people want to have conversations about but don’t.[36] Walker has stated that although her work provokes conversations about race and history, she states “it’s how we talk about it I guess that’s the thing. It’s like, you know, there’s scholarly conversations about race and then there’s the kind of like meaty, unresolved, mucky bloodlust of talking about race where I always feel like the conversation is inconclusive.”[37] The fine arts world can seem scholarly with hierarchies of mediums and complex works of art that are inaccessible to those who don’t have the access to higher education. With Walker’s art, her intention to use the audience’s general background of stereotypes based on our society helps to open these conversations to wider audiences. Our hopes are that audiences can look at Boo Hoo and feel the emotions being represented and reflect on themselves. Boo Hoo brings out a reaction in audiences because of its visceral content and conversations about the content and about how it’s making people feel are why we included it in this exhibition.
[1] Adair Rounthwaite “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker,” Image [&] Narrative 19, (2007).
[2] Enerel Essner, untitled catalog entry in Double Vision: Woman as Image and Imagemaker, exh. cat. The Davis Gallery, ed. Elena Ciletti. Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2013. Accessed March 23, 2016. https://www.hws.edu/academics/davisgallery/pdf/double_vision.pdf.
[3] Essner, Double Vision: Woman as Image and Imagemaker, 44.
[4] Rounthwaite “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker”.
[5] Rounthwaite “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker”.
[6] Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 20.
[7] Dan Cameron, “Kara Walker: Rubbing History the Wrong Way,” Art in Print Review 2, (1997), 12.
[8] Vania Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” In Understanding Blackness Through Performance. Edited by Anne Cremieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 93.
[9] Cameron, “Kara Walker: Rubbing History the Wrong Way,” 11.
[10] David Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” Oxford Art Journal 33, no.3 (2010): 286.
[11] William Hill, “The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson,” (MA thesis, DePaul University, 2012), 40.
[12] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 97.
[13] Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, 38.
[14] Hamza Walker, “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” In Witness to Her Art. Edited by Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson (New York: The Center for Curatorial Studies, 2006), 274.
[15] Philippe Vergne, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007), 349.
[16] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 95
[17] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 93; Hill, “The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson,” 53.
[18] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 94.
[19] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 94.
[20] Rounthwaite “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker”.
[21] Walker, “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” 279.
[22] Walker, “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” 279.
[23] Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 292.
[24] Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 281; Walker, 279.
[25] Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 280.
[26] Essner, Double Vision: Woman as Image and Imagemaker, 44.
[27] Rounthwaite “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker”.
[28] Hill, “The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson,” 46.
[29] Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 298
[30] Hill, “The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson,” 58.
[31] Wall, “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker,” 281.
[32] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 97-98.
[33] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 98.
[34] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 98.
[35] Géré, “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” 98
[36] Cameron, “Kara Walker: Rubbing History the Wrong Way,” 12.
[37] Kara Walker, interview by Audie Cornish, Artist Kara Walker Draws Us Into Bitter History With Something Sweet, NPR, May 16, 2014.
Fig 1: Kara Walker, Boo Hoo, 2000, print on paper, 40 5/8 in. x 21 11/16 in. University Art Museum, Fort Collins.
Bibliography
Cameron, Dan “Kara Walker: Rubbing History the Wrong Way” Art in Print Review 2, (1997): 10-14.
Double Vision: Woman as Image and Imagemaker, exh. cat. The Davis Gallery, ed. Elena Ciletti. Geneva, NY: Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 2013. Accessed March 23, 2016. https://www.hws.edu/academics/davisgallery/pdf/double_vision.pdf.
Géré, Vania. “Kara Walker’s War on Racism: Mining (Mis)Representations of Blackness,” In Understanding Blackness Through Performance. Edited by Anne Cremieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi, 91-99. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
Hill, William “The Post-Black Aesthetic and Meanings of Blackness through the Collage Narratives of Kara Walker and Fred Wilson.” (MA thesis, DePaul University, 2012).
Rounthwaite, Adair. “Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker.” Image & Narrative 19 (2007) Accessed March 3, 2016. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/autofiction/rounthwaite.htm
Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. Seeing the Unspeakable. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Touré. Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness. New York: Free Press, 2011.
Vergne, Philippe. Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2007.
Walker, Hamza. “A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” In Witness to Her Art. Edited by Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson, 273-279. New York: The Center for Curatorial Studies, 2006.
Walker, Kara “Artist Kara Walker Draws Bitter History with Something Sweet.” Interview by Audie Cornish. NPR, 16 May. 2014. < http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=313017716> (3 March 2016).
Wall, David “Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker.” Oxford Art Journal 33, no.3 (2010): 277-299.
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