"My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love"

Today was one sensuous experience after another. After a NY Knicks basketball game in Madison Square Garden, (my first and they won against the Chicago Bulls!) I visited the Whitney Museum to absorb more of the great Kara Walker, whose 3rd floor exhibit “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” seemed very much a retrospective of her last decade’s work. Kara’s work compellingly revisits (revises?) antebellum narratives of American slavery, desire, freedom, violence, repressed sexual and racial mores and attitudes which underlie conversations and beliefs around black womanhood, race relations, art, representation, and history.

Ms. Walker has made an extraordinary body of artwork of the 19th century silhouette to interrogate those unpredictable and explosive faultlines of sex and race which are more complicated than our current, ubiquitous, sanitized historical and fictionalized accounts of the period will allow.
The exhibit features works on paper, light projections, sketchings, puppetry, short-films, journal-like drawings and musings on her work and responses to her riveting, large scale scenes of black and white men and women of the antebellum South engaged in an endless stream of violent and sensuous fellatio, vomiting, birthings, copulation, and breast-sucking.
Those of us familiar with her work celebrate Kara Walker for her contrary vision and virtuosic ability to critique and give creative space to submerged narratives of rape, lust, desire, and love between the historicized powerless (the black slave, woman, child, man) and those with power (overseer, plantation owner, preacher, and southern belle). But, what is evident is that all are victims of this history. No one is free of the legacy of slavery and post-Reconstruction South, especially those inherited filmic and fictionalized accounts which obfuscate and obscure the intricate and peculiar relationships of that period. One cannot realize the significance, for example, of early 20th century lynchings without grasping how such public and violent moments in American history are founded upon some serious and convoluted acts of embedded desire and violence that have their roots on the southern plantation.
Ever since encountering Ms. Walker’s artwork, seven or eight years ago, I’ve always felt, while the intricacy of her artwork is evidently and obviously visionary and skillful in its execution, the silhouette as aesthetic device is both liberatory and constraining. The narratives which she seeks to revise such as Gone with the Wind are themselves wholesale in their imaginative representation of gender and race relations. The anonymity of Ms. Walker’s silhouettes, for better or worse, do not personalize the lives of those men and women she so desperately wants to unshackle from conventional narratives. The silhouettes, either projected or installed on the gallery walls, are shadowy unknowns, unnamed, and unidentified, and thus, as general as the history book versions and tales of the period. What was unique about this exhibit were the inclusion of text and drawings of what appeared to be journal responses to the black critics and elder artists who took offense to her winning the MacArthur Foundation Award in the mid-1990's.
After the exhibit? Dinner at Brooklyn’s Italian restaurant Locanda Vini and Olii owned by Francois and Catherine (a delicious couple in their own right) where I ate the most delicious octopus sopressata, pasta fazzolletini, braised rabbit and seared onions -- a truly amazing culinary experience. I felt a poem coming on, all day.