Kara Walker

The question of race in America is so morally weighted that if an artist deals with the issue in a nuanced manner she is liable to be accused of betraying the cause. On the face of it Kara Walker’s art is not over-subtle. Her treatment of the legacy of slavery through the medium of black cut-paper silhouettes confronts us with a visual pun that would be obvious enough to provoke a groan if it didn’t touch on such tortured themes. But while her work by its very form will never let us forget that her subject is blackness, her consciously grotesque treatment of the theme of racial inequities is so ambiguous that she is alternately called a provocateur and a ‘Judas’.

This crypticism is all too apparent in ‘After the Deluge’, Walker’s exhibition at the Met. Declaring that she was inspired by the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans last year, Walker relates how she became fascinated with ‘muck’, the ‘murky, toxic waters’ that occupied the city in the weeks after the bursting of the levees. In this dirt she sees an ‘amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth’. Yet ‘After the Deluge’, which interweaves works by the artist with pictures and objects borrowed from the museum’s collections, never quite fulfils this mission statement. For a start there are no post-Katrina works on display; nor does it deeply scrutinize the show’s other professed theme, ‘the transformative effect and psychological meaning of the sea’. What we are given is Walker doing what she does best: studying race.

Walker’s unsparing dissection of slavery is always compelling. Deformed and dislocated figures swarm the walls of the gallery, recalling the parade of grotesques in Francisco Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ series (1799). In Untitled (1996) a woman holds up a reptilian child by its pigtail in disgust. Elsewhere the decapitated head of the abolitionist John Brown soars through the air in John Brown or Big Love (2001), while the silhouette of a woman looks at it with her arms crossed, as if questioning the point of this much-vaunted saviour figure. If we have seen this all before, what allows Walker’s work to remain fresh is the insistence that no one be spared her critical gaze. ‘A Black subject in the present tense,' she has written, ‘is a container for specific pathologies from the past and is continually growing and feeding off those maladies’, and the poisoned chalice of victimhood shows up frequently in her work. It is this ambivalence towards her subjects which has seen her sporadically condemned by the African-American community for portraying ‘negative black images’.

Her most recent work, the series ‘Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)’ (2005), continues the theme but relocates her silhouettes from their usual plain white backgrounds to heavily etched illustrations of the Civil War taken from a 19th-century periodical. The silhouettes seem all the more powerful as they obliterate the fine lines of the etchings, casting a shadow devoid of form on these traditional commercial renderings of a conflict that was still fresh in the minds of readers at the time of their publication. But while these are formal innovations, the message is familiar. In McPherson’s Death (2005) a figure grins in maniacal delight at the loss of his foot, recalling Walker’s Text Cards (2001), in which she wrote of her subjects ‘chewing off their feet to escape the chains’.

The problem that besets ‘After the Deluge’ is not that Walker’s work lacks power but that, tied to a somewhat misconceived premise, it appears curiously inflexible. Mindful of her august host, Walker has roped in some of the Met’s permanent collection to attend to the theme. Many of these pieces do indeed feature deluges and scenes of disaster, yet the juxtapositions do not so much elucidate the premise as become completely subsumed by Walker’s insistent vision. Traditional silhouettes drawn from the museum’s 19th-century collection now seem baited with menace or burdened with complicity. Joshua Shaw’s stunning Deluge Towards Its Close (c.1813), in which three white figures lie beneath a pitch-black sky, suddenly seems little more than a negative image of one of Walker’s silhouettes. The juxtapositions are suggestive, but the works are not allowed to give much back. They ultimately appear overpowered, or as background, like the Civil War illustrations in her latest work. Even the most striking object plucked from the Met’s collection, a wooden African fetish embedded with nails and metal shards, seems to have been co-opted into Walker’s vision of an eternally disfigured race, denuding it of all its mystical trappings. To be sure, part of the point must be that race is all-consuming in America, inflecting every act of perception. But it’s hard not to miss what is lost as this point is being made.