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Black Folks, Killing Jokes, and the Journey of the Self
A Review of the Art of Kara Walker

When considering the works of Kara Walker-visionary artist-one confront a series of ever lurking cultural historical artistic ancestral shadows. Walker's silhouette cut-outs are sensuous and sick explorations into painful American History and existence. Her black and white spaces are loaded with myths and metaphors of a legacy of abuse, denial and forbidden desire. Walker's works are not the products of someone naive and ignorant of the history of racist America, as some critics would have her viewers believe. On the contrary, and as she has stated in artists talks about her work,she feels she has every right to misrepresent the misrepresentations of black images in art and life.

Within and outside the art world, attempts often made to reduce the complexities of our African-American culture into easily digestible categories of race and sexuality are simply futile. How can a race of people as complex as African Americans, children of the African diaspora, be expected to fall neatly into cultural and artistic paradigms without displaying within our art the turmoil of personal improvisation? Having suffered centuries of oppressive colonization and demonization, African American artists, and citizens in general, have learned to publicly mask our pain in an illusion of wellness. Such public suppression of ourselves- keeping our dirty laundry under the proverbial lock and key-creates a psychological cancer which eats away at our self-souls. We are left with an ever growing list of blues and taboos which run as fleeting shadows in our minds, unborn, unspoken, unseen.

It is the misinterpretation of Kara Walker's intent which has so many African Americans inflamed, albeit falsely so. One cannot accuse Walker of creating images based upon invalid reasoning after hearing her speak of her research into slave narratives, of the frequency with which African Americans write in order to appeal to an antebellum white consciousness, of the history of racist imagery in America, and of her own personal journey through issues of identity.

No one can deny that hate-filled, stereotypical imagery in America has dehumanize the lives of people of color. Such images predominated the American superstructure and embraced premeditated murder of black Americans. To make one's black existence a killing joke wrought such traditions as the "picnic," a outing for the white, racist family where they could dine and be entertained by the burning flesh of a lynched "nigger." Though gruesome and gut-wrenching, we should not discourage inquiry into present day effects of such traditions, or into the imagery of Walker's work. This contemporary artist has taken upon her art a public journey most would choose to take privately, if at all.

It would be easy to speak of Kara Walker's works in black and white, right and wrong, love and hate, reality and fantasy dichotomies, as if none of these categories overlap to form the hologram that is American culture. In this country, entire histories are suppressed dependent upon the agenda of the historian or the reader, leaving whole cycles of data unrecorded and the psychological effects of those histories untreated. Walker is not the first to resist the dichotomy game, nor will she be the last to incur the wrath of her people for doing so.

The position her works place her in the minds of many African Americans is akin to that which the great artist Francisco Goya was placed in by Spanish people of his times. His landmark etchings series, "Los Caprichos," so pointedly satirized the Spanish people, and so upset the authorities that only by the intervention of the king was he saved from the fires of the inquisition. Centuries later, the African American cultural image tribunals look to rein Walker (possibly a modern-day Goya) for works of art they consider visually and intellectually out of line. It is a dangerous precedent.

If one shifts this dialogue from a broader cultural matrix to a personal one, Walker has embarked on the eternal journey of the self, the first stage of which is acknowledgment of an internal need to purge one's being of psychological repression. Complicate this with broader psycho-sexual wounds inflicted by American slavery, operating on the seepage of collectively repressed mental sicknesses and physical lusts, and one is left to face, quite alone, all the angels and demons at play within the American soul.

Artists who take upon themselves the task of confronting the shadows, giving them voice and visualization, are left to carry alone the weight of a collective psychosis. Acknowledging the madness around us often gets us labeled as mad. A few select artists attempt to walk into the spirit world and return with messages of joy and pain; they receive such labels as visionaries, fools or liars.

Art will forever be a form of cultural preservation. For any artist to assume that their art has no bearing on the future of a culture is irresponsibly unrealistic. Kara Walker is not an irresponsible artist though she may well be provocative to say the least. Through her art, Walker has raised a debate long needed to be given voice in the art world, a debate about freedom, oppression, complicity, accountability and purpose; a debate about despair and hope, forbidden fruits, hidden plagues and dirty killing jokes. Eventually all people of African descent living in America must ask themselves the questions Walker raises in her art, questions of identity and survival, of who we are within ourselves and within American culture, and of who we wish to be. We will not grow as a people or move forward from our internal horror stories until we face all physical and mental demons crippling our growth potential. Whether we do so with a caress or with a slap is up to individual artistic genius.

Kevin Sipp, a native of Florida, earned his BFA in print-making Atlanta College of Art, 1991. As a Mixed Media artist, Sipp's works utilize everything from used lightbulbs, to trash to old records to paint. Sipp's central focus in art criticism is an attempt to break down the boarders of what has been stereotypically considered black thought and black art.

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