On the visual experience: White Marble, Black Paper
by Sarah Hassan '09
Monday March 24, 2008
At first, drawing distinct comparisons between experiencing a contemporary show by an artist who uses cut-out drawings and a timeless sculpture revered as the perfection of physical masculinity may seem like a long shot. What could Kara Walker, art hero to the politically disturbed masses, possibly have in common with Michelangelo, artist of kings and gods who gave the world a gift in a defiant marble sculpture as a proverbial ivory middle finger to a royal family? Quite a lot. The answer is not based on technique, birth, experience or material, but rather on the visceral emotive response elicited by the viewing of their work. One of the most interesting aspects of both artists is the way their work interacts with the space around them and how the room and wall the work is set against acts as a sort of power play between the materials. For example, both the stylized dome-shaped alcove the David rests in and the stark white walls that Walker plasters her paper to have the ability to transcend the spatial context that they have been dealt. There is a subtle psychology to how each artist makes you feel in regards to how each mastermind curator wished to display their wares. I was not only shocked by how similar my responses to both the David and the work of Walker were, but also pleasantly surprised. Thisonly reaffirmed my opinion that visual art, like most creative arts, does not exist in a vacuum.
I first encountered the David while studying in Florence, home to the treasured relic at the Galleria dell’Accademia. Given the sheer scope of reproduction and over stimulation of the iconic sculpture’s image by overzealous historians, I was convinced that the stamp of the image my brain already housed would dull the sensation of viewing the piece in person. Happily, to my utter surprise, this was hardly the case.
He snuck up on me by surprise. I didn’t expect him to be in such an obvious and accessible location: right after I turned the corner into the main gallery, right after my tension had mounted in the form of a ticket stub and I had been scanned for security reasons. This is where I found him, or rather, he found me. Like an old familiar friend waiting for me at the end of an elegant corridor who looks better than I imagined, nothing could’ve prepared me for such a startlingly immaculate creation. The lonely planet books and flag-waving tour leaders were right. This was the real deal and I bowed down in awe of it, submitting to the Holy Grail of beauty and form. My body felt what my mind now knew; it was all it is supposedly cracked up to be, to gaze in wonder at the muscular thighs, the enlarged hands throbbing with veins of history, the clean edges of toenails and intensity of his gaze.
Nothing was underdeveloped; no minute detail could be taken for granted. This man, frozen in time memorial with the weight of his iconographic status on his rounded, perfect shoulders, spoke to me as a viewer with the beauty of silence. The interplay between the dome and his head was an almost halo-esque partnering of architectonical space. I sensed that if the Italians had to, they would’ve built a whole world around David, lest make him move from his resting place, and perhaps they have in a way. He gently filled the space till there was none, the symphony of his mere existence reaching a galloping crescendo the longer I looked. It was a great moment of my life to go home with, safely tucked away in my once overly skeptical mind.
How to compete with such an experience? Where was I to go from there, once back home in New York and near the city that never failed to delight and thrill me? Luckily, as perfect timing may sometimes allow, I was able to catch the tail end of Kara Walker’s show at the Whitney: “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.” Walker, like Michelangelo, has joined the ranks of iconographic artists known for a certain medium. Whereas with the later it is Carrara marble, with Walker it is the simple material of black paper. A deceptively innocent format, Walker is able to slice out creations of nightmarish intensity housed in the form of traditional silhouettes. Her portraits and depictions of black slave life in the Old South come armed with bitter ammunition against racial prejudices and social construction. Her images aren’t just historical plays and puppetry acts in the name of freedwomen everywhere; they are our history as we know it, staggering illustrations of a time that actually happened, lest we forget while we go through motions of uneasy racial tensions still lurking in parts of our own backyard. If David is physical stature and presence incarnate, than Walker’s cut-outs are ghosts, but they are ghosts who will be damned if they go quietly into the night. Instead, Walker’s cast of characters opt to go out kicking and screaming, lighting fires in their path and howling at the moon. Away with your chivalry, this is war we are talking about!
When the elevator of the Whitney opened on the third floor to reveal the first scene of Walker’s show, I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnetic power the simplicity of the black and white scheme actually had. The scenes she depicts range from gothic love letters to racial hypocrisy. When I first encountered Walker’s work, I thought she was flattering the notion by giving it a story, a visual voice. It was only after I tilted my head, like the other museum goers, and stepped back a bit, did I realize that the exploited was becoming the exploiter. A whole world thought to be deeply buried was reaching up out of the bowels of the earth with both hands and blood on its mind. This kind of emotional intensity is easy to overlook. After one formative sweep of the eye over the paper doll story, I could’ve been on to the next one in the next carefully constructed room. But not this time—not when I could actually hear the characters screaming from shot to shot. I had to move on to keep from losing myself. Walker’s delicate profiles and gestures are somehow laced with a potent poison; look too hard and one is bound to collapse.
This, in comparison to the almost religious intensity I had gazed at the David with some weeks before, was not that different. But where Michelangelo whispers of worlds laced with water music and gentle nocturnes of man’s conscious contemplation, Walker’s slaves pound their fists into the ground and conjure up the screeching of shanty violins and the slapping of silver spoons with aching hands on bruised thighs. The outcome may be the same emotion but the road to it is white-lipped foam versus broken glass and trodden dirt.
There is a ferocity and need for flight with Walker; her characters are always moving or mid-action, their gestures never content to sit idly against the white wall, whereas Michelangelo sculpted a man who seems content to stay still forever if only to be admired for the ripple of his abdomen or slightly cocked knee. Both are the kinds of works that mystify because they exalt the human condition in two of its physical states of activity and passivity. I say passive for David not in the sense of idleness, but in the sense of his relationship with the viewer. There is no need to speak when you are with him, for you have nothing to say. But with Walker, after the shock of what she places in front of you wears off, there is the need to speak, to scream and cry and question. David wants you to relax and get comfortable, Walker wants you to wake up and smell the carnage. Beauty needs no questions, for beauty is truth incarnate. But Walker isn’t dealing you a hand of beauty, not technically. She is dealing you the truth, a collective truth of a human experience and as we know, the truth isn’t always as simple as that. This Shantytown isn’t on display as a fun park; this town is rebelling and it’s bringing what really happened with it.
If Michelangelo’s motive was to catch humanity at it’s best when it wasn’t looking, David being the blissfully unaware portrait of masculine perfection, than Kara Walker has ensnared humanity at its most brutal and hypocritical-a tiger by the tail if you will-with some of those lurking tigers being a confederate soldier who suckles the breast of a young slave girl before he goes off into battle and a plantation master cutting off the leg of his black bastard son. Michelangelo and Kara Walker might not be kindred spirits in the hallowed world of art history, but they both have the capacity to draw out the same responses to their works on a purely carnal and visceral level. My perception of physical space and what one does to get a point across within that space has been dramatically altered by two masters, one of white marble, the other of black paper, and for that I am eternally grateful and passionately curious.
