Busted in New York and Other Essays

by Darryl Pinckney

  De Style (1993), a barbershop scene, was one of the first works that Marshall was able to conceive on a large scale, in the space of his then-new studio in Chicago. Building it up was like a matter of engineering, he said. The barber, his head crowned by rays of a holy spirit, is about to take shears to a customer’s hair in the center of the picture, though everything around the customer seems to ignore that he is in the center. The barber and the man under the pink-striped sheet in the chair are flanked on either side by two figures, a standing black man and a seated black woman. Maybe they are just hanging out. The black barbershop is a club, a meeting place. They have elaborate hairdos, hers as high as a bishop’s miter, his the shape of a headdress from some Adoration of the Magi scene, and so they don’t seem to be there for haircuts.

  We can see only the T-shirt, black arms, khaki pants, and sneakers of a fifth person seated next to the woman. Posters, newspaper clippings, and reflections in the mirror behind the barber add to the number of black heads in the painting. The hair products on the counter are carefully observed. The figures all look out, the veiled expression in their eyes making the viewer the stranger who has interrupted a conversation.

  De Style is answered by School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), the glory of the exhibition. Monumental in scale, set in a beauty parlor, eight black women, some dressed in African prints, most seen in the middle distance with their backs to the viewer, have amazing headdresses of hair, weave jobs. Men are present, hidden, unremarked on, except for one man whose reflection we can see in a mirror against the back wall, as he takes a photograph of the woman posing voluptuously, unsmilingly, in the foreground. At the same time, he captures the rear end of a woman in sexy blue heels bent over directly in front of the mirror. Maybe one of the women reacts to what he’s doing. Two toddlers occupy the center foreground, losing interest in what might be a cardboard head of a white blond woman. It’s an impossible picture to sum up, given the colors, shapes, directions, and details. Busy as Jan Steen, the saying goes. Marshall has said that for him beauty is an understanding of the relationship of parts. The power is in the sheer painting and in the attitude conveyed. We are in the middle of things, and these black women are attending to their beauty, but they are not performing primitivism for the viewer.

  In some of his other paintings, music notes and rhythm-and-blues lyrics swirl around a romantic couple dancing just after having finished a meal—that is not excitement in her eyes—or as another couple undresses in a bedroom. The woman is looking out in a way that says she will keep taking things off even though the viewer is there. Images of white women hang from a tree, maybe like bad fruit, over a reclining black couple under a blanket on the ground in They Know That I Know (1992). Marshall’s paintings examine the way the black body has been scrutinized, especially that of black women. He has his own mysticism. A black woman levitates under the spell of a black magician in When Frustration Threatens Desire (1990), with references to black cats, snakes, severed hands, root work, fortune-tellers, and numerology. And always the hard eyes that will not let Marshall’s figures lose their cool. As he notes in Kerry James Marshall (2000):

  In the black community there’s great resistance to extreme representations of blackness. Some people are unable to see the beauty in that. So I’ve been very conscious of the way I render my figures. I try to give them subtlety and grace and there’s a delicacy in the way I handle the features, especially the lines and contours. Extreme blackness plus grace equals power. I see the figures as emblematic; I’m reducing the complex variations of tone to a rhetorical dimension: blackness. It’s a kind of stereotyping, but my figures are never laughable.

  Untitled (Studio) (2014) presents the workplace, the backstage, preparatory side of things. We are looking at most of a work in progress of a black woman in three-quarter profile. Next to it is a table laden with tools of the trade and objects that conjure up classical still life. In the distance a black male nude model waits in front of canvases turned toward the wall. Closer to us, behind a red cloth, another black male model is getting dressed. He is looking over his left shoulder toward a woman who has maybe just come in, sat down, and put her purse under the chair. She is wearing street clothes and sandals. The punch of the painting is that the woman manipulating the sitter’s head probably isn’t an assistant. She is the painter.

  Even the suburbs in the United States are segregated, and maybe Marshall is right: we accept the absence of white people in his work but never grow accustomed to the extreme blackness portrayed in canvas after canvas. It is an asserted presence every time, and the question remains: How much is in what we see, and how much are we interpreting what we see according to our own notions of what being black means? History painting waits to detach itself from its known world and journey into the future as pure painting, but maybe there is no such thing, and certainly not when it comes to the black figure, given for how many centuries ideologies of race and racism have been built up in the West. Art historians had some difficulty in identifying a recently discovered painting as a sixteenth-century painting of the Chafariz d’el Rei, or king’s fountain, in Lisbon. At first they couldn’t say where it was, not only because there are as many black people as white people in the busy street scene, but also because some of the black people are richly dressed. One black man is prominently displayed on horseback.

  Ralph Ellison rejected the cult of the primitive, because to him the emphasis on black culture as emotional, musical, sensual, creative, and the opposite of mechanistic white society represented an insult, the feminization of the black race. Marshall is with him on that, hence the eyes as keys to the locked soul. But Marshall is crucially of the Black Is Beautiful generation, psychologically, and what black artist from that time of cultural consciousness, the weaponized aesthetic, needs white permission to find desirable black women with big asses? Kehinde Wiley, a most eloquent man, told a Festival Albertine audience at the French consulate in New York not long ago that when he was a student at Yale, Kerry James Marshall visited his studio and after a while said that the light on the flesh in his paintings was wrong, that he had not paid attention to the way the light fell across the body. He told him to go look at Rubens.

  2017

  BLACK MASTER

  Kara Walker: Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!, an exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins and Co., New York City, September 7–October 14, 2017

  Constance Cary Harrison, first seamstress of the Confederate flag, remembered Virginia after the execution of John Brown in 1859. Her family lived far from Harpers Ferry, the scene of Brown’s slave uprising:

  But there was the fear—unspoken, or pooh-poohed at by the men who were mouth-pieces for our community—dark, boding, oppressive, and altogether hateful. I can remember taking it to bed with me at night, and awaking suddenly oftentimes to confront it through a vigil of nervous terror, of which it never occurred to me to speak to anyone. The notes of whip-poor-wills in the sweet-gum swamp near the stable, the mutterings of a distant thunder-storm, even the rustle of the night wind in the oaks that shaded my window, filled me with nameless dread. In the daytime it seemed impossible to associate suspicion with those familiar tawny or sable faces that surrounded us.… But when evening came again, and with it the hour when the colored people (who in summer and autumn weather kept astir half the night) assembled themselves together for dance or prayer-meeting, the ghost that refused to be laid was again at one’s elbow.

  In the savage, undreamed-of slave system in the New World, Africans were physically and mentally subjugated, worked to death, and replaced. Only when the enslaved labor population was maintained by reproduction and not by the importation of replacements were they given enough to eat to sustain life, and that was more than one hundred years after Louis XIV’s Black Codes licensed barbarism in the Caribbean. Black Retribution is the root of White Fear.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to portra
y a Nat Turner–like character in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), the novel that followed her sensation, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Stowe gives Dred the pedigree of being the son of Denmark Vesey, the leader of a planned slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. But she turns her Nat Turner into Robin Hood, and he never gets around to his slave uprising, perhaps because Stowe could not bring herself to depict the slaughter of white people at the hands of black people. You could say that Kara Walker’s work begins at the threshold of this resistance to imagining and historical memory. Before John Brown there had been Nat Turner; before Denmark Vesey, the Haitian Revolution; before Mackandal’s Rebellion, Cato’s Rebellion.

  In Kara Walker’s exhibition of twenty-three new works, mostly on unframed paper, at the Sikkema Jenkins gallery in New York, it is as though she has drawn her images of antebellum violence from the nation’s hindbrain. Walker has been creating her historical narratives of disquiet for a while, and they are always a surprise: the inherited image is sitting around, secure in its associations, but on closer inspection something deeply untoward is happening between an unlikely pair, or suddenly the landscape is going berserk in a corner. It has been noted in connection with Walker’s cutouts what a feminine and domestic form the silhouette was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that because of its ability to capture the likeness of a person in profile, it was also a kind of pre-photography.

  In a large work of cutout paper on canvas in the exhibition, Slaughter of the Innocents (They Might be Guilty of Something), that tranquil, even sentimental atmosphere of the silhouette gets deranged, disrupted. From a distance, you see a harmonious pattern of big and small human figures, adults in Victorian dress and children, some naked. There are children upside down along the top of the canvas, and the procession of figures seems to be tending to your right in frieze-like spatial orderliness. Then you make out that a black man has hooked a white man by the back of his shirt with a scythe, while two black women seem to be committing infanticide.

  “Visual culture is the family business,” Hilton Als notes in Kara Walker: The Black Road (2008). Her father, Larry Walker, is a painter and teaches art, and her mother, Gwendolyn Walker, is a dress designer and seamstress. Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, and educated at the Atlanta College of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design, Walker was criticized by some black artists at the beginning of her career for using what they considered stereotypical black images from the nineteenth century that they claimed spoke primarily to a white audience. But the titles of her early installations of black cut-out silhouettes on white walls more than give the game away: Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) positions a Gone with the Wind–style romantic white couple so that the man’s back is turned away from the images of black women and their sexual bondage; The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995) finds Stowe’s white lamb of innocence armed with an ax; and No mere words can Adequately reflect the Remorse this Negress feels at having been Cast into such a lowly state by her former Masters and so it is with a Humble heart that she brings about their physical Ruin and earthly Demise (1999) has against a gray background silhouettes of black women’s heads attached to swans’ white bodies.

  Of her 2000 installation Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), in which she projected onto the museum walls cut, pasted, and drawn-on colored gels, Walker said: “Beauty is the remainder of being a painter. The work becomes pretty because I wouldn’t be able to look at a work about something as grotesque as what I’m thinking about and as grotesque as projecting one’s ugly soul onto another’s pretty body, and representing that in an ugly way.”

  She said she was thinking of Thomas Eakins’s surgical theater paintings as she was also imagining house slaves disemboweling their master with a soup ladle. Beauty? She went on to say that her narrative silhouettes were her attempts to recombine or put back together a received history that has already in some way been “dissected.” But the images emerged from her subconscious, she warned, and she couldn’t necessarily explain their meanings. Her retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2007 was entitled My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. As graphic and unmistakable as they often are, what story her images tell as a whole is not easily read. The poet Kevin Young has observed that Walker’s early works were fantasies, however sadomasochistic. But then her work became more obviously related to American history.1

  They are foreboding, stealth-like, those silhouettes of black people that haunt a riverbank or slip across newsprint in her 2005 series of lithographs and screen prints, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). She takes prints of the engravings or pages from a popular nineteenth-century album-size book that features numerous illustrations of maps, battles, and events relating to the conflict and superimposes on them out-of-scale black figures. The presence of black people as if from another dimension has the effect of being a commentary on the scene to which they have been added. (Another version of the series was done in photo offshoot in 2010.)

  In this autumn’s Post-War & Contemporary Art sale at Christie’s is a scene from the series called A Warm Summer Evening in 1863, which shows a commotion of men around a house in flames. The caption below—The Rioters Burning the Colored Orphan Asylum Corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street, New York City—refers to an incident during the Draft Riots of 1863, when poor white men, mostly Irish, who could not buy their way out of the army attacked blacks. One hundred and nineteen people were killed, some two thousand injured. Walker superimposes over the scene the figure of a black girl who has hanged herself with her own long braid of hair. The piece, done in 2008, roughly eight feet across and five feet high, is made of felt on wool tapestry. Maybe a computer told a loom how to weave the image of the engraving. Or was it done by hand? However it was achieved, it is an extraordinary piece of work.

  Henry Louis Gates Jr. stresses in his book Black in Latin America (2011) that most of the kidnapped from the African continent were taken to South America and the Caribbean; only a small percentage went to North America. In the Sikkema Jenkins exhibition, one of the large works, Brand X (Slave Market Painting), in oil stick on canvas, shows a white man lolling in sand, his dick exposed, as if he’d just raped the black woman tied down on her stomach nearby. Around him dance instances of rape and murder. You see a volcano in the distance and the suggestion of a tropical tree. (Cartoon Study for Brand X is an affecting portrait of a black woman, done in oil stick, oil medium, and raw pigment on linen.)

  But Walker’s slave history generally refers to the United States. Her exhibition of 2007, Bureau of Refugees, evokes the establishment after the Civil War of the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, for the benefit of displaced white people as well as formerly enslaved black people. She has sometimes projected images in a way that recalls the cycloramas or dioramas of nineteenth-century American exhibition history. The press release for the Sikkema Jenkins exhibition takes off from the American carnival huckster tone:

  Sikkema Jenkins and Co. is Compelled to present The most Astounding and Important Painting show of the fall Art Show viewing season!

  Collectors of Fine Art will Flock to see the latest Kara Walker offerings, and what is she offering but the Finest Selection of artworks by an African-American Living Woman Artist this side of the Mississippi. Modest collectors will find her prices reasonable, those of a heartier disposition will recognize Bargains! Scholars will study and debate the Historical Value and Intellectual Merits of Miss Walker’s Diversionary Tactics. Art Historians will wonder whether the work represents a Departure or a Continuum. Students of Color will eye her work suspiciously and exercise their free right to Culturally Annihilate her on social media. Parents will cover the eyes of innocent children. School Teachers will reexamine their art history curricula. Prestigious Academic Societies will withdraw their supp
ort, former husbands and former lovers will recoil in abject terror. Critics will shake their heads in bemused silence. Gallery Directors will wring their hands at the sight of throngs of the gallery-curious flooding the pavement outside. The Final President of the United States will visibly wince. Empires will fall, although which ones, only time will tell.

  In an essay in The Ecstasy of St. Kara (2016), Walker says that the Twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter has become “shorthand for a kind of race fatigue” that comes from the repeated stories of a documented police shooting followed by a protest that then produces no indictments. In a “nihilistic age,” maybe “nothing really matters.”

  Her slave history is also that of the United States in the pictorial heritage she uses, starting with Auguste Edouart’s silhouettes made during his travels to Boston, New York, and New Orleans. Walker reproduces Edouart’s “John’s Funny Story to Mary the Cook,” from A Treatise on Silhouette Likenesses (1835), in her book Kara Walker: After the Deluge (2007), about the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. It shows a black male figure in high collar and tails, a coachman perhaps, in animated monologue to a thickset white woman holding a saucepan and spoon before a hearth. They are human beings, not caricatures.

  What might have made some people uneasy about Walker’s work at first was that her black people in silhouette come from the racist caricatures of American illustration. These are not sculptural, aestheticized shades dancing in an Aaron Douglas mural. Black art or black artists were supposed to restore the dignity and assert the beauty of black people. But Walker will deal in exaggerated features and kinky hair, in the black as grotesque. They are not pretty. Elizabeth Hardwick said that when she was growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, in the 1920s, she heard white people say they couldn’t understand why black people would want photographs of themselves. The carnage in Walker’s work asks white people: What’s so pretty about you?