{"id":271,"date":"2008-01-21T03:00:32","date_gmt":"2008-01-21T03:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2008-10-27T02:17:09","modified_gmt":"2008-10-27T02:17:09","slug":"kara-walker-at-sikkema-jenkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/21\/kara-walker-at-sikkema-jenkins\/","title":{"rendered":"Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine<\/p>\n

\"Kara<\/a>
Kara Walker \u2018Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art\/Contemporary Painting. A death without end: an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs\u2019, 2007, Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Co.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Kara<\/a>
Kara Walker, Bureau of Refugees: Bob Foreman cut at Union Springs, 2007<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the time Kara Walker\u2019s first full scale American museum survey arrived at the Whitney Museum from the Walker Art Center last fall, a wave of press coverage, including feature articles in the New Yorker and Art in America, made it the must-see show of the season. But it was the fifty-two-panel, handwritten text in Walker\u2019s simultaneous downtown gallery show that deserved the attention.\u00a0 Flanked by smaller works in her signature cut-paper style illustrating atrocities committed against freedmen after the Civil War, the enormous text installation, with an equally expansive title (Search for ideas supporting the Black man as a work of modern art\/contemporary painting; a death without end, an an appreciation of the creative spirit of lynch mobs), stood out for its sheer unornamented rawness\u2014no illustrations, just scribbled handwriting\u2014and its scathing references to U.S. military action in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Since the mid-nineties, Walker\u2019s silhouettes, paintings, videos, and projections have consistently conjured imagery of the Old South in abject yet clearly readable scenes of violence and sexual subjugation. When she used text, it was written in what could plausibly be the artist\u2019s own perspective or that of an alter ego. Her more recent text-based work (since 2002) adopts a range of voices\u2014anthropologist, slave, contemporary middle class African-American.<\/p>\n

Search for Ideas is an even more cacophonous brew of observations and perspectives. Here, Walker explores the potential analogy between racist attitudes in America and those perpetuated by Americans overseas in texts that refer to Saddam Hussein as a \u201cporch monkey\u201d or Arabs as\u00a0 \u201csand niggers.\u201d\u00a0 Under the rubric of aggressor and complicit victim, the text details rapes and torture, proffers that black soldiers are willing Klansmen and asks, in the face of global jihad, \u201chow can colored folks get on the winning side w\/o giving up their hard-won right to jeans that fit…\u201d Because the fifty-four parts are hung cheek-to-jowl and there is no obvious sequencing, it is unclear whether one is supposed to read them left-to-right, or top-to-bottom.<\/p>\n

Likewise, the show\u2019s small cut-paper works and large-scale collages on panels lack clear storylines, such as ReConstruction (2007), a decorative m\u00e9lange of floating silhouetted heads over a background of post-9\/11 New York Times ads offering condolences.<\/p>\n

From Richard Serra\u2019s 2005 poster recreating a scene from Abu Ghraib to Jenny Holzer\u2019s presentation of declassified documents pertaining to military bungles in Iraq, among many other examples, Walker is not alone in using her artistic platform to protest U.S. foreign policy. Yet Search for Ideas seems uniquely geared to offend and disturb by its graphic descriptions of violation, its willingness to lay blame all around, and its success at tapping another well of middle-class guilt, this time over atrocities committed in the name of the American public. A schizophrenic toggle between individuals and nations, and between first and third person, makes for a confusing and overwhelmingly despairing indictment. However, as a grating tour de force of ugly truth, the piece is powerfully effective and makes a loud riposte to one text\u2019s assertion that \u201cKnowledge comes in the form of whispers of those in the know.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine By the time Kara Walker\u2019s first full scale American museum survey arrived at the Whitney Museum from the Walker Art Center last fall, a wave of press coverage, including feature articles in the New Yorker and Art in America, made it the must-see show of the season. But it was … <\/p>\n

Read more “Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[24],"tags":[8,18,9,15,14,13,12,17,10,16,11],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-contemporary","tag-critic","tag-exhibition","tag-gallery","tag-new-york","tag-photography","tag-sculpture","tag-tour","tag-visual-art"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2BDOD-4n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkarttours.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}