Kara Walker
Alessandra Raengo
Life in Those Shadows! Kara Walker’s Post-Cinematic Silhouettes1
Kara Walker’s installations have garnered international attention since the early
1990s for deploying an archaic representational form of portraiture – the cutout silhouette. They have been the target of considerable controversy2 for the perceived obscenity of her imagery and the alleged reviving of deep-seated racial stereotypes.3
Controversy that, I contend, is only partly a response to her iconography and more to her medium of choice: life size black cut-paper figures glued onto the gallery walls.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Even though it refers to Noel Burch’s work on early cinema Life to Those Shadows
(trans. Ben Brewster, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), the title of this essay intends to locate Walker’s work within contemporary scholarship that addresses the relevance of the ‘photographic’ as a critical/historical paradigm. An excellent overview of this position is offered in Beckman, K., Jean Ma (eds.), Still Moving. Between Cinema and Photography (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2008) most especially
Raymond Bellour’s essay “Concerning the Photographic.” His characterization of contemporary installation art addressing the relationship between photography and cinema as revealing multiple image-states is particularly descriptive of the ‘life’ that animates Kara Walker’s silhouettes, i.e. the very “wildly fluctuating, moving discontinuity” of mental images, situated “between photography’s somewhat toocomplete fixity and cinema’s often too-calm illusion of movement,” p. 270. Part of the perceived ‘obscenity’ of Walker’s work, I will argue in the remainder of the essay, comes from having brought to life images that had been safely confined to the landscape of the mind. 2
The controversy initiated by Betye Saar is summarized in DuBois Shaw, G., Seeing the
Unspeakable. The Art of Kara Walker. (Durham, Duke University Press,
Life in Those Shadows! Kara Walker’s Post-Cinematic Silhouettes1
Kara Walker’s installations have garnered international attention since the early
1990s for deploying an archaic representational form of portraiture – the cutout silhouette. They have been the target of considerable controversy2 for the perceived obscenity of her imagery and the alleged reviving of deep-seated racial stereotypes.3
Controversy that, I contend, is only partly a response to her iconography and more to her medium of choice: life size black cut-paper figures glued onto the gallery walls.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Even though it refers to Noel Burch’s work on early cinema Life to Those Shadows
(trans. Ben Brewster, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), the title of this essay intends to locate Walker’s work within contemporary scholarship that addresses the relevance of the ‘photographic’ as a critical/historical paradigm. An excellent overview of this position is offered in Beckman, K., Jean Ma (eds.), Still Moving. Between Cinema and Photography (Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2008) most especially
Raymond Bellour’s essay “Concerning the Photographic.” His characterization of contemporary installation art addressing the relationship between photography and cinema as revealing multiple image-states is particularly descriptive of the ‘life’ that animates Kara Walker’s silhouettes, i.e. the very “wildly fluctuating, moving discontinuity” of mental images, situated “between photography’s somewhat toocomplete fixity and cinema’s often too-calm illusion of movement,” p. 270. Part of the perceived ‘obscenity’ of Walker’s work, I will argue in the remainder of the essay, comes from having brought to life images that had been safely confined to the landscape of the mind. 2
The controversy initiated by Betye Saar is summarized in DuBois Shaw, G., Seeing the
Unspeakable. The Art of Kara Walker. (Durham, Duke University Press,