“I undo you, Master”: Uncomfortable Encounters in the Work of Kara Walker

I walked away from both exhibitions … feeling that I had been exposed to a deadly toxin from which I needed to leave right away and find some spiritual mind-cleaning antidote to insure that I would not be infected for life.

Betty Blayton

Her silhouettes reflect psychic evolutions in race and race relations, chronicling the intricate twists and turns, the nuanced dance, as it were, which has been and continues to be performed between blacks and whites. Her art is visually graphic and aesthetically poignant. It lingers between shock and recognition.

Michelle Carr

What is it about Kara Walker’s work that can elicit such divergent, and charged, reactions? Is her work a brave, ironic confrontation with racism, or is it a minstrel show, a work in black face that plays on damaging stereotypes to appease a white audience? Since she hit the national (and international) art scene in the 1990s, Walker has generated an impressive amount of opinions, academic articles, and press, some positive, some negative, but all of it impassioned. Criticism of Walker’s work continues, as does her praise. Working with stereotypes from the “Old South” in the antiquated “craft” art medium of silhouettes,¹ Walker depicts her all-black figures in various compromising sexual and moral positions.² Her work is in many ways overwhelming. Figures abound in her dioramas, and they are engaged in any number of contorted/distorted/carnivalesque poses: they are defecating, urinating/being urinated on, bleeding, farting, suckling/being suckled, floating in the air, fellating/being fellated, and on and on.³ It is no secret that reactions to her work are often visceral, often negative, and almost always uncomfortable.

Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, in her moving and nuanced discussion of Walker’s work in Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, describes seeing “Upon My Many Masters” in the Spring of 1997 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as follows:

Many of my fellow gallery visitors stood before the piece, jaws slack and eyes wide, staring in puzzled disbelief at what they were seeing, or at least at what they thought they were seeing. … It was a moment of communal visuality in which the act of viewing with the space of the gallery became a spectacular spectacle, a cyclical scopic activity in which museum patrons watched other museum patrons watching them back. … The phenomenological effect of the installation … was like a physical blow to the observer; it rendered many viewers temporarily disoriented and speechless.

(Seeing the Unspeakable 1)

What Shaw describes—disbelief, spectacle, disorientation, communality—all of these reactions depend upon the viewer making the act of interpreting part of the work itself.⁴ This participation is crucial, for, as Walker herself says, the silhouettes become a “blank space that you [can] project your desire into. It can be positive or negative. It’s just a hole in a piece of paper, and it’s the inside of that hole” (qtd. in Shaw 23).⁵ Julie Burrel writes of Walker’s work that its “shifting meaning demands the audience’s interpretive labor” and that “for an active viewer, Walker’s ambiguous images are readable yet retain … [an] ambivalence” (140): all characters are cast into shadow (Keizer 1666). The investment required, and the potential for negative interpretations,⁶ of the viewers of Walker’s images is starkly apparent in the recorded reactions to her work.⁷

While my own position on Walker’s work will inevitably become apparent, my goal is not to decide who is right—Walker’s critics or her supporters—as this controversy is, in large part, what matters and what is necessary in her work, but rather to examine how it is within these contentions that meaning is made, or rather, discovered. This paper seeks to “interpret interpretations” in order to interpret Walker’s work, to put negative reviews of Walker’s work into conversation with critics who see her work as more than “minstrelsy,” and to examine how both the silhouette and stereotype elicit such visceral reactions in the viewer. This paper will examine work done by a...