My blog post for September is focused on the visual work of
Kara Walker, an African American contemporary artist and painter who explores
race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. Spring semester of
2015 I had the privilege of experiencing her work in the late Driskell Center
within Cole Field House on the University of Maryland campus. I will be
exploring the type of visual stereotypes her visuals depict and if her visuals
can be considered arguments according to David Flemming.
The economic side of the slave trade pushed the
visualization that African Americans were animals (Lesler, 104). It was an
excuse for the slave traders to treat them severely, like they were nothing.
Depictions of African Americans as ape-like are seen in Kara Walker’s work. In
her all black figures, she distinguishes black people from white by adding
bigger lips, feet, buts, stomachs, hands and genitals.
To further analyze I would like to go deeper into one controversial
but meaningful piece to me (left). It is a piece in her Emancipation Approximation collection that was shown on campus last
spring. In this image a civil war general looking almost like George Washington
is depicted sitting on top, almost crushing a young black male. A young black
female is depicted kneeling in front of him about to perform oral sex. Walker
is not quick to censor her work. She wants you to feel the rawness and the
ruthlessness that she believes blacks felt back in those times. This type of
rawness moves into the question of what language Walker was trying to get
across within these paintings.
Even though her images are often crass and controversial
they are meant to start conversation around them. In the piece I analyzed,
Walker wanted to show the sexualized nature of race relations in America for a
reason. Many of her images and videos show how American white men during that
time assumed that they had unrestricted access to the black female body. This
did not stop at rape, but also the taking of a black child from her mother.
Walker’s images include a baby literally being ripped from her black mother’s umbilical
cord. Let’s also not forget the little boy crippling under the weight of the
general emphasizing the impact of the race relations on the children growing up
during this time period. They had to bear the burden of racism and segregation,
separation and diminishment.
In conclusion, I believe that all of Walker’s images are
strong statements in themselves with or without dialogue. Even though I believe
Flemming’s view of arguments are two-sided caters to the formal debate-like atmosphere,
he dos make a good point that arguments cannot be reduced to “formal equations of
symbolic logic.” The two-sidedness goes back to the Aristotle art of rhetoric
of facts battling facts. Walker’s images hold facts but they do not readily
battle other facts. Even though they make strong statements, I do not believe
you can consider them arguments alone.
