Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker |
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Author: Adair Rounthwaite Abstract (E): This article describes Kara Walker's art as a move from a melancholic attachment to racist conceptions of black American identity to a mourning for the way the self is shaped by a history of oppression. Using Judith Butler's concepts of foundational melancholia and foreclosed attachment, Adair Rounthwaite argues that stereotypical imagery in Walker's work addresses how the subject can never totally know the oppressive history that shaped it. Walker's art mourns the inability to relate to others in the present outside of the power dynamics of the past, and attempts to open up a space of perpetual ending unbound by social convention in which this grieving can take place. The art's autofictive quality lets it perform this mourning in the discursive field in which it operates. Abstract (F): Cet essai montre l'art de Kara Walker comme saisissant la possibilité d'une transition, de la part des Noirs américains, de l'attachement mélancolique à des conceptions racistes de l'identité, à une nouvelle façon de faire deuil des manières dont le Moi prend forme au cours d'une histoire marquée par l'oppression. Se servant du concept de 'mélancolie fondatrice', développé par Judith Butler, Adair Rounthwaite affirme que l'imaginaire stéréotypée que l'on retrouve dans l'oeuvre de Kara Walker montre que le sujet ne peut jamais entièrement connaître l'histoire oppressive qui lui a donné sa forme. L'art de Walker fait le deuil de l'impossibilité de se rapprocher des autres en dehors de la dynamique du pouvoir du passé, et essaie d'ouvrir un espace d'un 'finir sans fin' - ouverture rendue possible by les conventions sociales dans lesquelles ce deuil peut avoir lieu. La qualité autofictive de l'oeuvre de Walker lui permet d'opérer ce deuil dans le champ discursif qui est le sien. keywords: Kara Walker, identity politics, mourning, melancholia, performance To cite this article: Rounthwaite, A. Making Mourning from Melancholia: The Art of Kara Walker. Image [&] Narrative [e-journal], 19 (2007). |
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In her article on Kara Walker, Hilary Sheets describes curator Thelma Golden's first encounter with Walker's art in the following way:
This questioning about whether the artist is black or white is a quite common reaction to Walker's work, and in this paper I would like to use this curiosity as a departure point for discussing the art's autofictive qualities. Walker's critics' constant conflations of the artist's personal identity, the vision of identity presented in her work, and generalizations about black American identity evidence the fact that her oeuvre puts a confusion in play, in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between these categories. Might this confusion have a critical function?
It does, and that criticality is two-pronged. First, it functions to address the conditions of reception of Walker's art within current art critical and wider societal discourses of black American identity. The autofictive confusion in Walker's art allows her work to directly address this context, performing at a larger cultural level the themes that it addresses at the level of content, which this in analysis I will discuss in terms of the relationship between melancholia, race, and personal identity. The second aspect of Walker's autofiction's criticality operates at this level of content, in its enacting of metaphorical scenes of how the subject is brought into being as "passionately attached to his or her own subordination", as Judith Butler writes in The Psychic Life of Power. (Butler, 1997: 6) The connection of this critique to the aforementioned cultural field in which Walker works occurs through the deployment of the strategic confusion between the subject she is and the subjects she depicts, allowing the work to pose questions about the conditions of possibility for making and viewing art which addresses contemporary black American identity.
My investigation will begin with a critique of the way in which many of Walker's critics read her art as a reworking of the oppressive history of slavery geared towards creating the artist's "own version of the past" (Janus, 2000: 139), in which she emerges as a subject with a "genuine ownership" of history. (Walker, 1997) Proposing instead that we read Walker's work using the notion of history that Butler employs, in which subjects are always exceeded by the history that enables them, I will examine how Butler's idea of the relationship between race, history and melancholia offers a different way to analyze Walker's art. Through readings of Letter From A Black Girl (1998), Burn (1998), Boo Hoo (2000), an untitled gouache from 1995, Cut (1998) and That Thing (2005), I will focus on how Walker's work depicts the consequences of that foundational melancholia in terms of how the subject connects to others in the present, and how constructions of race become sedimented by shaping the subject's perception of situations and relationships that lie outside of the historical power dynamics of slavery.
Closely connected to this consideration is the issue of how racist stereotypes are used in Walker's art, which I argue is to stand in for attempts to mimetically represent the history of slavery, and to address how that history is fundamentally unknowable to the contemporary subjects that it shapes. There is a gap between the art's function as a 'constative' (of racist black and white stereotypes in lewd interaction in the antebellum South), and its function as a 'performative', which is key to the specific identity politics endemic to Walker's art. At the end of the paper, I will pose the question of whether the subjectivity that Walker's autofiction depicts is comparable to Barthes's definition of weariness as a perpetual ending without a social code, and whether or not a post-melancholic subject who has gone through a mourning process for its foundational loss is figured in her works. The role that her art itself might play in this mourning process is directly linked to its autofictive function of confusion between the artist herself and the subjectivity the work depicts, and the way in which this conflation addresses the conditions of the art's reception.
Most of Walker's critics seem to agree that what her art embarks upon is a metaphorical journey into the past designed to rewrite the history of oppression which generated racist images, presenting a new history that helps Walker to understand the role of the past in her present identity, and installs her as a self-claimed subject who'owns' the history that previously oppressed her. For example, in an article for Parkett, Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw writes about Walker's "attempts to better understand her own role in history by re-creating it in the present." (Dubois Shaw, 2000: 129) Later, Dubois Shaw expanded her reflections on Walker 's work into the book Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, in which she argues that Walker creates re-visions of texts and histories of slavery that "[signify] on the predictable horrors of historicized, fictionalized, and mythologized slavery in a uniquely African American way." (Dubois Shaw, 2004: 5) Elizabeth Janus writes that "Walker's own version of the past is played out on an epic scale, in fragmented visual narratives that are told through simple black paper silhouettes using as their backdrop one of America's ugliest or, depending on whom one asks, most glorious periods: the ante-bellum South." (Janus, 2000: 139)
Along with these interpretations of Walker's art as bringing the past to the present, Robert Hobbs argues that Walker imaginatively leaves the present to travel back into the past: "[t]he irony of Walker's work is found in her need to enter the stereotypical realm of the Antebellum in order to combat it." (Hobbs in Corris and Hobbs, 2003: 425) Like Hobbs, Hamza Walker depicts Kara Walker as entering a past that she was not originally part of by writing herself into it, this time in order to 'own' it. He asks, "[h]ow does one write oneself into a painful history without first inquiring into the human capacity for lust, disgust, and violence? [.] As bizarre, beautiful, or violent as her imagery may be, Walker understands that a historical imagination is a prerequisite for a genuine ownership of the past." (Walker, 1997) Annette Dixon envisions Walker not as traveling back, but as looking back, and inducing her viewers to do so:
Interesting in this statement is the way the present is depicted - marked by the "legacy of prejudice and inequality of slavery", but also a time in which "the horrors of that period are often repressed". Notably, speaking of "half-buried memories in our national psyche" ignores the fact that a memory is not the same as the historical event which it is a memory of. As I will argue throughout this essay, a memory is an experience in the present of past events, and the events of slavery are events of which no presently living subjects have personal memories, as Robert Reid-Pharr points out. (Reid-Pharr, 2002: 37) I will also argue that the experience in the present that Walker deals with is an important part of the "legacy of prejudice and inequality" that remains from slavery, which is closely connected to why her use of stereotypes seems so urgent and so controversial.
Furthermore, claims that Walker presents a rewritten version of history that allows her to emerge as history's "owner" quickly come up against a number of issues that these authors leave unanswered. If the works present us with a new black subject as the agential re-writer of the history of slavery, where is that subject in these works, which show black people, and particularly black women, engaged in bizarre and degrading activities? Are we just supposed to infer this strong agential subject who triumphs over history from the fact that Walker is black and that she makes these images, falling back into the trap of biographically equating the artist of color with her art's discourse on identity? And what exactly does it mean to re-create the past in the present?
An unexamined conflation of Walker's personal identity with the autofictive effect of her work is not productive in the way that the autofiction itself can be, because it skips over the questions that the autofiction specifically seeks to induce. These questions include what the grounds for authorial authority in identity politics art discourse are, and how to critically approach the fact that the art's presentation of a specific vision of identity is intimately connected to, but not equatable with, the artist's own working through of that identity for herself. The majority of the critiques of Walker's work mentioned above oscillate between a description of Walker as a person and the subject of her works, often discussing the figure of the 'Nigger Wench' who is an autofictive character which Walker creates for herself within her own art. For example, Dixon states that "Walker's alter ego of the Negress who performs as a silhouettist has a pen knife: a weapon that enables her to sublimate her urge to kill by wreaking her revenge in visual vignettes based on both history and fantasy." (Dixon, 2002: 19) Here, Dixon identifies the artist with the autofiction by calling the latter an alter ego, and then turns that autofiction into a 'silhouettist' in order to equate its agency with the artist's, the overall effect of which is to depict Walker herself as the Negress with the "urge to kill".
This conflation is problematic not because it seeks a dialogue between Walker's biography and her art. These are connections which the artist herself often encourages people to make through interview statements that stress the notion that the works are a product of her own psychical processes, such as when she says to Golden, "I am sometimes horrified by the thoughts that come to my mind and am occasionally blinded by them." (Golden in Dixon, 2002: 44) Instead, the conflation is problematic because it moves from the information Walker provides us about the emotional role the creation of the works plays for her to making major assumptions about her motivations and desires. Furthermore, it makes it seem as if the artist's act of creation liberates her, and by extension the group which she is taken to represent, from the oppressive history that her works address. Whatever personal liberation and privilege Kara Walker, American citizen and professor at Columbia University, has gained from creating her work, equating her with her autofiction of the Negress who gets revenge is to create a burden of representation for her as a 'new black subject' in a way that not only ignores any class analysis, but also vastly underestimates the prevalence of the systems of oppression her work addresses. The links between the artist herself, the subjectivity performed in her works, and black American identity on a larger scale should instead be directed towards an examination of how the tension between personal identity and group identity shapes the reception of the work and the social sphere in which it is able to intervene.
The most important aspect of Butler's take on melancholia and mourning for my analysis here is that she brings together a reading of Freud's texts with a focus on how power both constrains and enables subjectivity, to produce an analysis of melancholia and mourning as both individual processes and larger agents of social cohesion. The Psychic Life of Power concentrates on developing a framework for the social operation of melancholia through close readings of Freud, and a 1997 interview with Vikki Bell for the journal Theory, Culture & Society entitled "On Speech, Race and Melancholia" brings these concerns specifically into the context of questions of racial identity. For Butler, melancholia characterizes the subject per se, because it bears witness to the fact that the subject has been enabled by power, and as such contains traces of alterity that are the necessary conditions of social existence. (Butler, 1997: 196-196) In a certain respect, therefore, desiring the conditions of one's own subjectivation is necessary for social survival, and these conditions form a loss which is foundational to the subject. (Butler, 1997: 9) Because this loss exceeds and conditions the subject, it can not be totally reflected upon or processed (Butler, 1997: 23), thus constituting a foundational melancholia. Though grieving this loss is structurally impossible, a desire to do that remains: "Is there not a longing to grieve - that which one never was able to love, a love that falls short of the 'conditions of existence'? This is a loss not merely of the object or some set of objects, but of love's own possibility: the loss of the ability to love, the unfinished grieving for that which founds the subject." (Butler, 1997: 24)
Ultimately, there can be "no final separation of mourning from melancholia" (Butler, 1997: 193), but it is possible to some extent to distinguish in Butler's analysis different effects that each has for society and for the individual. On a collective level, a distinction arises between forms of loss that can be publicly mourned and those which cannot, which she discusses in terms of same-sex attachment. Queer attachment is foreclosed and its loss denied at a structural level, at which every ostensibly straight identity "is purchased through a melancholic incorporation of the love that it disavows." (Butler, 1997: 139) Certain types of attachment are also foreclosed in relation to cultural events where specific types of attachment are held to be not real love, and their loss not real loss. Butler gives the example of the AIDS crisis, in which mainstream culture's homophobia creates in queer communities "a love and a loss haunted by the specter of a certain unreality, a certain unthinkability." (Butler, 1997: 138)
Melancholia thus varies not only between individuals but also between social groups, and the specific manifestations that occur in different communities will reflect the different losses that are foundational to each group. Butler recasts some of the symptoms which Freud states are characteristic of melancholia in light of this social focus, arguing that the melancholic "sustains an indirect and deflected relationship to the sociality from which he or she has withdrawn." (Butler, 1997: 182) The melancholic's self-beratements are not just "mimetic internalizations of the beratements leveled by social agencies of judgment or prohibition", but show the way in which power creates a "social foreclosure of grief" by regulating what can and cannot be mourned. (Butler, 1997: 183) The melancholic's lack of shame and their loquaciousness at voicing these self-beratements are attempts to reconnect the deflected and internalized structures of power back up with the social world. (Butler, 1997: 181-182)
The importance of melancholia in subject formation testifies to the extent to which subjects are exceeded by the history that forms them: within this formation, it is possible to have one's subjectivity be deeply impacted by losses in one's community or society that happened long before one was born. The continued presence of historical discourses and dynamics of race in contemporary subjectivity is described by Butler as follows:
In this formulation, the task is less to reclaim history than to locate oneself within it, becoming aware of the ways in which it has been formative but also exceeds one's own power to control it. The close relation between melancholia and this temporality which exceeds the subject makes an examination of historically specific forms of melancholia a possible way to embark on such an investigation of how one is exceeded by history.
Butler argues that 'interracial' love is also culturally barred in a way parallel to same-sex love: "the history of miscegenation involves a history of melancholia in an interesting way, that to the extent that cross-racial sexual relations have been foreclosed - and I use that word specifically, i.e. not just prohibited but foreclosed - in the sense of unthinkable." (Bell, 1997: 170) She also discusses Deborah McDowell's work on the unmournable loss of the endless stream of young Black men violently murdered in the US, stating that McDowell argues that
In the face of such collective melancholia, though the foundational losses cannot ever be fully grieved, creating means by which that mourning can be made public are essential to the community's ability to offer support to its members: "[t]he emergence of collective institutions for grieving are thus crucial to survival, to reassembling community, to rearticulating kinship, to reweaving sustaining relations." (Butler, 1997: 148)
This endless stream of violent deaths is a very literal type of loss, but as I will argue in the following analysis of Walker's art, there are also foundational losses endemic to specific communities that are less easy to locate because they have to do with ways in which the subject is formed, specific kinds of attachment to one's own subjectivation that remain painful, even though they have been there from the beginning. We can see this in terms of the subject Walker brings into being in Boo Hoo (2000) [Fig. 1], a print in which we see a woman with an Afro, hoop earrings, and a full skirt, whose lips and eyes resemble blackface, weeping copiously as she gingerly holds a whip and snake, both turned in towards herself. Why is the woman crying? Not so much because of the torture she undergoes, which takes on a humorous and cartoonish tone, not least because she inflicts it on herself. Following Butler, I suggest that we read this print as an attempt to picture a subject for whom melancholia has been structural.
Fig. 1 Boo Hoo, 2000, print on paper, dimensions unknown. Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
In this reading, the whip and the snake that the woman holds can be read not just as objects which she uses to effect her own torture, or mementos of the time when slavery was taking place, but 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. The deep cultural ambivalence about these images, whose display is considered unequivocally problematic by some, and encouraged by others because it reveals America 's true racism, means that they come up again and again, remaining painful but never being publicly mourned. Though their historical origin dates back to the time of slavery, they cannot render that history knowable today, and hence bring a kind of pain that can only indicate the unrecoverability of its origin. As Reid-Pharr writes about Walker's autofiction and her approach to memory:
Reid-Pharr stresses the way that Walker's work deals not with the history of slavery per se, but with the invention of an idea of history around racist objects and images, which are some of the primary means by which that history becomes known to the contemporary subject. Instead of attempting to access the historical period from which racist images originate, 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.
The history of miscegenation, which Butler locates as a culturally foreclosed form of attachment, has special significance for Walker's art. This aspect of the ungrievable loss which is figured in her work can be examined through an analysis of her wall text piece Letter from a Black Girl (1998) [Fig. 2].
Fig. 2 Letter From A Black Girl, 1998, transfer text on wall, dimensions variable Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
The text of this work reads as follows:
Hilary Sheets, in her article for ARTnews, referred to this text as " a tirade by a fictional freed slave directed to both a former master and an art-collecting boyfriend" (Sheets, 2002), and in Art in America Nancy Princenthal wrote that "At the outset, the most likely target of this screed seems to be a white slave-owner. [.] Further on, it shifts to a man who is probably African-American". However, rather than pinning a specific race and identity to the actually ambiguous addressee(s), I suggest shifting the analysis to the modes of attachment expressed by the addresser off the letter, the 'Black Girl', and what consequences these modes of attachment have for her.
On the whole, the tone of the letter is striking its evocation of the melancholic's inability to detach: this reads like a letter you write to someone who has broken up with you, paradoxically trying to keep open the emotional connection with another subject by saying the things that will hurt the most. Butler writes that in their tirade the melancholic gives voice to responses to a past event, things they were not able to say to the abandoning other: "[one] would have denounced the lost other if one could - for departing, if for no other reason." (Butler, 1997: 182) The "past subjunctive" tense of the beratement prevents it from ever reaching its addressee, leaving the melancholic constantly struggling to reinstate the past in the present. How the period of the relationship with the addressee - "the last four years of my life" - has come to an end is not specified, but seems to be constituted by some sort of abandonment on the part of the other.
This abandonment is figured twice in the text as a forgetting: "I have to thank you for forgetting to stick your neck out for me after I craned my neck so often in your arms" and "NOw that youve forgotten how you like your coffee and why you raised your pious fist to the sky, and the reason for your stunning African Art collection, and the war we fought together, and the promises you made and the laws we rewrote". Both times there's a sense that the addressee has rescinded on a debt owed to the Black Girl - the first time connected to shared sexual experiences, and the second time to a shared artistic/revolutionary project. It is notable that though these sexual experiences are described in the part of the text most closely connected to the context of slavery's power dynamics, and very possibly involved rape or other coercion, they are nonetheless depicted as acts that were actively engaged in by both parties: " what you proceeded to do to me - what, rather I proceeded to do to you".
Contrary to Sheet's and Princenthal's interpretations, it is not a clear shift to a different addressee that marks the temporal change in the text. After all, an African Art collection is not necessarily temporally incompatible with the time of slavery. Actually, it is with the sentence "I am left here alone" that the mode of narration switches to the present. This present is pinpointed as a present that is post-slavery when the Black Girl asks: "Should i never be heard from again, follow the Route of my forebears and quietly, GO, or shall I seek to kill you, burning the last of the fuel you gave me and expected of me?" Here, the subject of the text is temporally located as the descendant of escaping slaves, living in a time when only "the last of the fuel" provided by the relationship with the addressee remains. Initially it might seem that what emerges in this text is a love object from another time, a longing for slavery's specific pleasures of the relationship with the white Master in which the deepest ambivalence existed, political correctness be damned. This type off reading seems to be supported by images such as That Thing (2005) [Fig. 3], in which a black woman masturbates while straddling the skeleton of a confederate soldier: we might read this image as showing a black woman retrospectively getting off on the power dynamics of bygone slavery.
Fig. 3 That Thing, 2006, pencil on paper, 22" x 30" Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
But what of the fact that Letter From A Black Girl is clearly titled and presented as a letter, placing emphasis on it as a mode of addressing someone else? Focusing on the mode of address that the work brings into being, as well as on the temporality which exceeds the subject evident in its sliding between past and present, I suggest that we read the text simultaneously as metaphorically describing a past relationship and as a mode of address in the present that shows a certain way of relating to another subject. In such a reading, what comes to the fore is the continual past-ness of that present relation, a connection with someone shaped by the now-absent dynamics of slavery.
In an interview with her cousin James Hannaham, Walker made a comment about the way in which racial dynamics continually surface in present relationships:
Considering this quotation, the specific melancholia endemic to Letter From A Black Girl appears as one caused not by the loss of a particular love object as such, but by an inability to engage in the power dynamics of present interpersonal relationships without inevitably experiencing them as an extension of slavery's power dynamics. Walker's art depicts a mode of subjectivity in which not only is the subject temporally exceeded by the discourses which enable her, but in which relationships with others are also temporally exceeded by power dynamics from another time. In this sense, Walker's autofiction of the Black Girl is not 'LOST' because she no longer knows who she is, but rather she is always already lost to a history that shapes her and that she cannot control.
Butler argues that it is essential to realize the temporality of racial structures, and how they need to be repeated in order to keep operating. (Bell, 1997:168) Walker 's art deals with the often involuntary repetition of such structures in contexts whose power dynamics are no longer those of slavery, but which become seen through that history by the subject and others, consciously or unconsciously. In Walker's statement in the Hannaham interview, that seeing takes the form of an encroaching feeling of uncanniness, the sense that the present is an inexact but persistent citation of the past. As such, Walker's work is not so much a question of using stereotypes of blackness to uncover the resilient racism which becomes disguised through discourses of political correctness, but to show how subjects become racialized in part by a cultural inability to read personal and group relations outside of certain lines of power. To make this argument is not to say that contemporary oppression of black people in the United States has only a subjective and not an objective component. Rather, it is to consider how the history of racial perception has consequences for how subjects perceive themselves and others as racialized that are related to, but not reducible to, more obviously material forms of segregation and oppression.
The way that dynamics of racial oppression enter into perception is highlighted by a small ink and gouache drawing from 1995 [Fig. 4] reproduced in the issue of Parkett that featured Walker's work. This image consists of an inkblot, the upper half of which is sparingly painted with white gouache details to suggest a little-black-sambo-esque figure with an earring, nipples, and an inflated raccoon tail/phallus. The details show us what to see in the ink blot, playing on its classic function as a test of what is on the looker's mind: the dark splotch itself means nothing, what you see is what you bring to it. Clearly, the viewing subject that the drawing brings into being is one who sees racist stereotypes everywhere. Judging whether that subject is seeing them where they do not exist, or whether the violence of the structures which created those stereotypes are inherent but disguised in the history of supposedly neutral tools like the ink-blot, is a process of constant personal negotiation.
Fig. 4 Untitled, 1995, gouache on paper, 8.75" x 12" Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
In light of these readings, I argue that what Walker's work, as constative, describes - racist black and white antebellum stereotypes carrying out ambiguously lewd and morose deeds -, is different from what it performs, which is a locating of loss so that it can be mourned. This act of location serves to battle melancholia by visually figuring an irrecoverable loss, thereby presenting it as a mournable object. The new kind of subject that Walker's work enables is not one who rewrites history, or writes themselves into it, they are a subject already in history who has the knowledge that losses from another time have irrevocably shaped their subjectivity. Combined with Butler's thesis that some forms of love will never be grievable, and will therefore constitute an abiding melancholic loss, it appears that the melancholia that Walker's work moves away from is a space in which one is unable to name the loss by which every new love object is in some way lost from the beginning, by which the historical formation of one's subjectivity means that new relationships will always be mapped onto the oppressive power dynamics of that history.
This is where the importance of autofiction in Walker's art comes in, as a way of joining this location of loss up with the field of cultural politics and production in which her work is received. Significant here is that fact that in Letter From a Black Girl Walker uses the format of the letter to much more directly interpellate the viewer than in her silhouette works. In addition to however we might discern the identities of the addresser and the addressee in the text, ultimately this is a letter written by the artist for us, as viewers, to read: the viewer is the real "hypocritical fucking Twerp" being addressed here. If, as I have suggested, we maintain the idea that the letter displays a type of attachment in the present indelibly marked by memory of the power dynamics of slavery, then what comes to the fore is the ways in which our relationship with Walker, and our perception of her artistic agency, is shaped by that history.
The 'contemporary slave' outfit designed for Walker by Comme des Garçons, in which she notoriously appeared on the cover of Interview magazine and which forms the basis of the silhouette in her self-portrait CUT, also emphasizes the fact that our perceptions of Walker will inevitably be molded by the history of American race relations. Thus, a central component to Walker's locating of loss is to show that though she is no slave, the history of slavery will have big consequences for how the still largely white art world relates to her and her art, and how she relates to it. Golden's reaction as described in the citation at the beginning of this paper, questioning whether Walker was black or white, attests to the extent to which notions of racial identity and belonging inevitably form the fundamental conditions of reception of her work, conditions which Walker's art and public persona take over and exaggerate as a way of making them visible. I argue that the extension of the autofiction beyond the boundaries of the artworks has made this point about the historically determined reception of Walker's art very successfully. It has thereby created a performance not only on the level of the content of the art but also in the cultural field in which it circulates, making public that historical determinacy. We might read the intense rancor and dispute which has often met Walker and her work as evidence of the lasting centrality of the losses which she makes visible, though she is often accused of creating a regressive vision of black identity that ignores the fight for rights and respect carried out by the preceding generation.
Walker's art definitely names this loss, but does it perform a complete mourning process, after which the subject is able to pursue love objects not inevitably perceived in terms of the power dynamics of slavery? No: though the work identifies the foundational loss to be mourned, the closure of that period of mourning does not occur within the work itself. Instead, a space of continual ending without an end is opened up, which might be considered according to what Roland Barthes describes as "the paradoxical infinity of weariness: the endless process of ending." (Barthes, 2005: 16) Barthes argues that society permits mourning to endure for a certain time and a certain time only, the limitedness of which permits it to be coded, and thereby integrated into the normal functioning of society. He writes:
The provisional code placed on weariness by its limited time period is an attempt to classify and control a state that society cannot accept as an enduring state of being, a state whose possible endurance seems to hold fundamentally disruptive possibilities. Barthes defines "the domain of the artist" as the prerogative to make the request that Blanchot makes: to be "led back to a region" where the force of mourning to "disorganize" the subject does not have to be reigned into a socially acceptable form.
I will now examine the way in which Walker's art requests such an opening of a space for mourning, through a short analysis of her work CUT from 1998 [Fig. 5].
Fig. 5 Cut, 1998, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 88" x 54" Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
This piece is widely understood to be a self-portrait, and Dubois-Shaw performs an article-long reading of the work based on that assumption. She writes:
In this reading, the confusion of Walker herself with the autofiction present in CUT leads Dubois-Shaw to make assumptions about the way Walker's art careers affects her personally, instead of posing the question that is at stake within the work itself: what does it mean for the piece to bring an autofiction into being at the moment that her suicide has just occurred? This autofiction is one whose moment of life - the moment animated by CUT - is a life not just after death, but in death, as this particular autofiction does not exist without the artwork, and has no 'biography' outside of the artwork's space. Walker's autofiction in CUT is one who vibrantly lives at a moment when it should not be possible to live, and it is in this respect that the autofiction creates an opening in a way that cannot be reduced to the artist's biography. If anything should indicate an ending, an closure, it is death, but Walker 's Nigger Wench autofiction is not only not brought to a close by death, but exists for the viewer specifically in that moment, when death has already failed to bring her to an end. Though bringing a stereotyped autofiction of Walker to life in a moment which is located after that autofiction's death, CUT performs a return "to a region where it might be possible to be weary", to continuously mourn the ways in which the self is shaped by a history of loss and violence.
Barthes stresses that this submitting to weariness, this lingering in the space of mourning, gives rise to new possibilities:
As stated above, I believe that a subject who emerges from that mourning process, who has a post-mourning perspective on black American identity, is not one who is figured in Walker's works. That does not mean that Walker's art is hopeless, but that the subject it brings into being is one who is still unsure of the ways in which it will be transformed by the mourning processes. This indeterminability of the result of mourning is described by Butler in her book Undoing Gender:
The openness to that unknowingness is, perhaps, one of the most challenging and hopeful aspects of Walker's work. Instead of presenting us with a manifesto that attempts to define what black American identity is now, it poses future transformation of identity as a question, through an investigation of the connections between representations of history, race, and perception in the present. In Letter from a Black Girl, the addressee writes of "burning the last of the fuel you gave me and expected of me", which is taken up again in Burn (1998) [Fig. 6], and which might be understood as a metaphor for the way in which Walker uses images depicting a history of oppression as fuel for a present art practice. The frightening power of that act lies in the fact that it leaves the future so unsure. It poses the question of how the subject will keep warm after the fuel is gone, a question which Walker's work had powerfully posed to artists dealing with issues of black American identity for a long time to come.
Fig. 6 Burn, 1998, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 92" x 48" Image courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. "Weariness." The Neutral. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005: 16-21. Bell, Vikki. "On Speech, Race and Melancholia: An Interview with Judith Butler." Theory, Culture & Society 16.2 (1999): 163-174. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Corris, Michael and Hobbs, Robert. "Reading Black Through White In the Work of Kara Walker." Art History 26.3 (2003): 422-441. Dixon, Annette, ed. Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002. ---. "A Negress Speaks Out: The Art of Kara Walker." Dixon: 11-26. Dubois Shaw, Gwendolyn. Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Dubois Shaw, Gwendolyn. "Final Cut." Parkett 60 (2000): 129-133. Golden, Thelma. "Thelma Golden/Kara Walker: A Dialogue" in Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time. Dixon: 43-49. Hannaham, James. "Pea, Ball, Bounce." Interview. November 1998. January 29, 2007. <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_n11_v28/ai_21248654> Janus, Elizabeth. "As American as Apple Pie." Parkett 60 (2000): 130-141. Princenthal, Nancy. "Kara Walker at Wooster Gardens." Art in America. February 1999. January 29, 2007. <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_2_87/ai_53868153> Reid-Pharr, Robert. "Black Girls Lost." Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time. Ed. Annette Dixon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2002. 27-42. Sheets, Hilarie M. "Cut It Out!" ARTnews 101.4. 2002. January 29, 2007. <http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1097> Walker, Hamza. "Kara Walker." The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. 1997. November 10, 2006. <http://www.renaissancesociety.org/site/Exhibitions/Essay.51.0.0.0.0.html> |
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Adair Rounthwaite holds a BA in Art History and French from the University of Guelph (Canada), and an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest are contemporary art, theories of sensory perception, feminist theory, and the subject of postcolonial art criticism. |
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