Kara Walker, the continuity of the conflict

Alicante,

They do not offer unidirectional readings and do not raise easy sensations: the works of the Californian artist Kara Walker are aesthetically delicate, but their formal beauty collides abruptly with the violence of the issues they address; Among the most common, racism, apartheid, the social impact of that discrimination and the way in which historiography has told it. It is interested in this author to face the dramas, own and collective, linked to slavery, sex or social injustice, affecting the idealizations projected on what were vexations.

His procedures have often been inspired by the cartoon cuts on black cardboard typical of the seventeenth century of the seventeenth century, but has evolved from the paper silhouettes of their beginnings to projections that allow it to connect with the history of the cinema, the magic flashlights and the theater of shadows.

Until next September, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante. Maca dedicates to this author the exhibition “Burning Village”, which feeds on her works present in the funds of Michael Jenkins and Javier Romero; Both donated their collection to this center in 2021 and the Museum has already raised two exhibitions from the three hundred pieces of approximately half contemporary authors that compose them, both young and consolidated, but mostly interested in social and political issues, as is the case of Walker, and also linked to New York City, where these collectors reside.

After the collective “Overture beyond the maps” and “Moving Forward, Looking Back”, Walker’s is the first individual that is born from that collection and consists of more than forty pieces dated the works throughout his career: drawings, engravings, sculptures, artist books and one of his most recent videos; Most had already been deposited in Maca, fourteen of them have traveled for the occasion from the United States. We will verify in the route how, reviewing that historical tradition of the portraits of shadows, which is not only characteristic of France but also of Victorian England, of the shadow theater of the avant -garde or of the magical flashlights, Walker appropriates archetypes and uses chaos and black humor to reveal contradictions in relation to past notions those distinctions that excused oppressive and discriminatory systems. The American past and myths and realities on which our current vision of that country is based are the basis of many of these projects; Walker attends especially to the stories that have been able to remember or broadcast badly, to the perpetuations of clichés and the possibility of generating new historical narratives.

The heroes are not completely pure and the villains are not purely evil. I am interested in the continuity of the conflict, the creation of racist or nationalist narratives, or any narrative that people use to build a group identity and stay together.

The exhibition with pieces dated in the mid -nineties begins, such as the silhouettes cut in black that integrate I’LL be a monkey’s uncleand that it will use again years later in Untitled (Monkey Grinder) either Restraint. Its use does not only have to do with formal issues or with the obvious dichotomies raised between the white and the black or the absence of grays when approaching certain historical episodes; but with a mixture of its technical and expressive concerns: I had a catharsis by observing the first US varieties of silhouette cuts. What I recognized, in addition to narrative, historicity and racism, was a very physical displacement: the paradox of removing a form of a blank surface that, in turn, creates a black hole. I was hit by the irony that so many of my concerns were addressed: white/black, hole/totality, shadow/substance.

The handling of these silhouettes was combined by the artist with that of the usual engraving techniques: her etching and aguatintas approach in their results to the ink and water drawings. In many of them, critically address stereotyped readings of American history, approaching the grotesque: slavery becomes fantastic narration in Vanishing Act, Cotton, Untitled (John Brown), Li’l Patch of Woods either Do just so … His virtuosity in printing was also deployed in the velvety series The Emancipation Approximationin which it refers to slave violence by combining Greek or African -American references; In the photogravures Testimonyinspired by a previous film, where again gives life to black silhouettes; or in the suite An unpeophed land in uncharted watersReflection on the trafficking for which he used both silhouettes and techniques of engraving of the sugar, Aguatinta, Spit-Bite and the dry tip.

We will also contemplate in Alicante eight drawings in small format with the letterhead of a Los Angeles hotel: spontaneous and emotional nature, they tell us about the importance of this medium in the whole of Walker’s production, from a preparatory or autonomous point of view.

A set of projects in Maca emphasizes that his look at the past is, for Kara Walker, a way of trying to understand his position in the present: we refer to Exodus of Confedeates from Atlantawhere he combined lithography and screen printing to establish a dialogue between new and old images linked to the secession war; already Resurrection Story Without Patrons. The latter was carried out after his stay at the American Academy of Rome, which would have many implications for her: myth, martyrdom and iconography of Christianity are associated here to the allusions to slavery in America.

They complete this sample various sculptures in which it refers to the past of global colonialism or the meaning of the memorials using laser -cut steel and black -painted steel, three artist books (one of them illustrates poems by Tony Morrison), the animation film Prince Mcveight and The Turner Blasphamiesin which racial terror develops in an atmosphere of fairy tale, or the sculptural game that gives title to this exhibition: Burning African Village Play Set With Big House and Lynchingin which the original function of trimmed paper silhouettes to face the stereotypes associated with the southern states, in a chaotic narrative of always infamous outcome.

One of its purposes remains to establish continuities: The heroes are not completely pure and the villains are not purely evil. I am interested in the continuity of the conflict, the creation of racist or nationalist narratives, or any narrative that people use to build a group identity and stay together.