Kara Walker, Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First, Installation. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London
The root of this exhibition is a large black and white photograph that covers one of the walls in the upper gallery. With its very long title, “The Stone Mountain Dr Martin Luther King referred to in his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of 1963 (with monument to the Confederacy completed in 1972)”, this image, produced in collaboration with photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos, reflects how the mountain metaphorically and physically shadowed Walker’s teenage years in Atlanta.
Walker has cited the shooting of nine African American churchgoers in South Carolina this June as a trigger to re-think about Stone Mountain; a mountain declared the spiritual birthplace of the Klu Klux Klan in 1915, and where a bas-relief of Confederate generals was carved upon. The magnitude of Walker’s photograph has parallels with the tradition of the great American landscape. However, the evocative grey scale of the image undercuts this lofty panoramic quality. Grey is a colour of doubt, and the implication of trauma within Atlanta casts this site as an undeniably grey area. Walker installed “The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin”, comprised of cut paper shapes, in dialogue with this image. As with other installations of this type, she made this work on site, cutting in stream of consciousness mode.
Kara Walker, The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin, 2015. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London
Kara Walker, 40 Acres of Mules, 2015. Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London
Through the cut out medium, Walker appropriates the thoroughly bourgeois and decorative style of the silhouette, with its origins in bodily absence and sentimental memory. She interrogates racial stereotypes, derived from the antebellum south, which still haunt contemporary consciousness. The silhouettes are cinematic, sweeping across the wall. Walker oscillates between criticising perceptions of both gender and race. Figures engage in sexualised and violent acts. The vitality and explicitness of these images reanimate stereotypes, creating hyperbolic performances of scripted identity. Walker’s radical mythology forces one to consider how these stereotypes are constructed and maintained. Her iconography has parallels with “blackface” and minstrelsy – a masquerade that perpetuated ready-made images of blackness for the white consumer’s eyes, which were then maintained throughout society without any inquiries about authenticity.
Kara Walker,
Four Idioms on Negro Art #2 Graffiti, 2015.
Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London
Kara Walker, Four Idioms on Negro Art #4 Primitivism, 2015. Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London
In the lower space, Walker addresses other specific forms of representation that have cultural associations with “low” art. “Four Idioms of Negro Art #1 Folk”, “Four Idioms of Negro Art #2 Graffiti”, and “Four Idioms of Negro Art #4 Primitivism” are positioned in dialogue with each other on three facing walls. Walker simultaneously reclaims and satirises the motifs and styles of each idiom. Appropriated and subjugated, the metaphorical characters depicted are frozen in abstract identity. Walker forces the viewer to consider the political and psychological consequences that accompany identity formation in contexts of oppression and violence.
Kara Walker, Negress Notes (from series), 2015. Courtesy the Artist, Sikkema Jenkins & Co. New York and Victoria Miro, London
Exhibited alongside are a series of twelve preliminary drawings entitled “Tell Me Your Thoughts on Police Brutality Miss ‘Spank me Harder’”. These sketches, particularly “Unarmed Black Man” or “Pull my Hair” (which is significantly evocative of the images of the young girl in Texas accosted by a police officer at a swimming pool earlier this year), catapult us into the present day. These fraught, yet powerful and witty, narratives prompt us to consider what needs to be confronted before we can overcome the grey shadows of Stone Mountain.
Kara Walker, “Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First” runs until 7 November at Victoria Miro
Text by Philomena Epps, a freelance writer and researcher based in London, UK. She is the founder and editor of the cultural platform, Orlando. Alongside her writing, she works full time as a project assistant for the “Performance at Tate” research project, and at Third Text journal.
More: Radiant Visions: Ai Weiwei at the Royal Academy
More: Agnieszka Brzezanska: Art As Vibration