Contemporary Artist, Kara Walker: Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary Yet We Pressed On)
Kara Walker’s work titled Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary Yet We Pressed On) is dated in the year, 2000. It focuses on symbols and images of the historical era preceding the American Civil War. The subject is of slavery and southern plantation owners, defined also as the antebellum South. Her iconographies represent a collective of memories where both white and black racial groups are implicated as the source of racial discomfort. Walker has taken the proper traditional 18th and 19 century Victorian craft of silhouetting into today’s contemporary epoch. This medium of scissor cutouts with black paper was used for decorative portraiture, caricatures and idyllic landscapes and has since been long dead and replaced by roller banners. Walker gives it life but with provocative subversion that frequently takes the viewer by surprise and shock upon careful inspection. The silhouette figures are nearly life size and often span either the entire wall of a room or the whole room. The technique and fashion of silhouettes stemmed from physiognomy, which put fourth the concept of using silhouettes as diagnostic tools to “capturing a sitter’s physical likeness and convey a sense of the person’s character or temperament.”1 It is with irony that Walker uses silhouettes, to portray antebellum stereotypes, which are outlined blackened shadows posturing in scandalous staged scenarios.
Manning Marable, former director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, refers to the “stumbling block of stereotypes” as the “the device at the heart of every form of racism today.”2 He also echoes, the influential postcolonial studies professor Edward Said’s, Orientalism by believing, “the stereotype is not only the result of the objectification of human beings, but a denial of a people’s entire history and culture.”3 Hence, stereotyping by its very nature conceals a character’s inner individuality and grants them unreal. In addition, Walker’s commentary utilizing stereotypes of her own ethnicity appears to be a critique on both sides of historical ‘black and white’ culture. Within her work, the white slave owner, the black slave and the mulatto do not have distinct difference in skin color; they all share in a shadowy world.
1 The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English (2009). Encyclopedia.com, physiognomy, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O999-physiognomy.html [accessed July 21, 2010]
2 Corris, M. & Hobbs R., 2003. Reading Black Through White in the Work of Kara Walker, Art History, Volume 26 issue 3, p. 428.
3 Marable, M., 1992. Black America: Multicltural Democracy in the Age of Clarence Thomas and David Duke, Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series. P.3
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