Exploring Kara Walker’s Radical Use of Silhouettes | Art21

KARA WALKER: The Psychlorama, you know,

was a major phenomenon in the 19th century,

but it's just before cinema, you know.

It's round.

So you enter into this rotunda that's lit.

It's like the peak of the painter's 
creative enterprise, you know,

to make the painting surround the viewer

and to create the illusion of depth and of space

and to lure the viewer into the 
feeling of being a part of the scene.

[Brazilian teacher]: Is there 
only one story being told here?

It seems each figure comprises a story.

At the same time, we’re in a round room?

Does the story have a beginning or end?

Most of my work is, the illusion 
is that it’s about past events.

The illusion is that it’s simply about a 
particular point in history and nothing else.

And it’s really part of the 
ruse that I tend to like to

approach the complexities of my 
own life by distancing myself

and finding a parallel in something prettier

and more uh, genteel,

like that picture of the Old 
South that’s a stereotype.

I had started to read the book Gone With the Wind

and was thrilled, with how, you know,

engrossing that story was,

and how grotesque it was at the same time…

the romance of it, the storytelling,

it was so rich and epic and 
that was what I hadn't expected.

I hadn't expected to be titillated 
in the way that, you know,

stories like that are meant to titillate.

It was so much fodder for 
the work that I wanted to do.

The distressing part was always being caught up

in the voice of the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara.

Scarlet, in her desperation is, you know,

digging up dried-up roots and 
tubers down by the slaves’ quarters

and she's overcome by a "niggery" scent?

and vomits?

And it's scenes like that, that you know,

might go washed over by the sort of 
vast, epic structure of the story,

but that is an epic moment.

A lot of my work has been about the unexpected…

that kind of wanting to be the heroine

and yet wanting to kill the 
heroine at the same time.

And, that kind of dilemma, that push and pull,

is the underlying turbulence that I 
bring to each of the pieces that I make.

The silhouette lends itself to, you know,

avoidance of the subject, you know, 
not being able to look at it directly.

My earliest memory of uh, wanting to be an artist–

uh, I was three, I was sitting on my dad’s lap

and he was drawing in his studio

which was the garage of our 
house in Stockton, California.

And I remember thinking to myself that I,

I wanted to do what he did.

And he used to give me chalk 
to draw on the sidewalk,

and you know he would you 
know document my creations.

When we moved from California to Georgia,

I know that I was having nightmares 
about moving to the South.

You know, the South already 
was a place loaded with,

like I said, mythology, but also a 
reality of, you know, viciousness.

It was just such a frightening prospect,

to be sort of borderline 
between child and teenager

and going into an environment where 
black kids are being targeted.

Stone Mountain, Georgia is where 
I did most of my growing up.

It’s like a Mount Rushmore type of 
thing, of the confederate heroes.

That is pretty significant.

Stone Mountain was a haven for the Ku Klux Klan.

So that place had a little bit more resonance.

It was just so in your face.

There was no real hiding the fact.

You know, what black stands for in white America,

what white stands for in white 
America are all loaded with

our deepest psychological 
perversions and fears and longings.

Most of the pieces, I guess, have 
to do with exchanges of power,

attempts to steal power away from others.

I was tracing outlines of…

of profiles you know thinking about uh, uh,

uh, physiognomy and racist sciences and minstrelsy

and the shadow and, and the dark side of the soul.

And and I thought well you 
know I’ve got black paper here

and I was making silhouette paintings 
but they weren’t the same thing.

And, and it seemed like the most obvious answer,

it took me forever to come to, just,

just to make a cut in the 
surface of this black thing.

You know I had this black paper 
and if I just made a cut in it,

I was creating a hole, you know and it was 
like the whole world was in there for me.

I've always been interested in the melodramatic,

in outrageous gestures. I love history paintings…

this artistic, painterly conceit,

which is to make a painting a stage,

and to think of your characters, 
your portraits or whomever,

as characters on that stage…

and to freeze-frame a moment 
that is full of pain and blood

and guts and drama and glory.

This work is two parts research 
and one part paranoid hysteria.

It’s called “INSURRECTION.

Our tools were rudimentary, yet we pressed on”…

an image of a slave revolt 
in the antebellum south uh,

where the house slaves got after their master

with their utensils of every day life

and really it started with a sketch of,

of a series of slaves disemboweling 
a master with a soup ladle.

My reference in my mind was the surgical 
theater paintings of Thomas Eakins.

Overhead projectors created a space where

the viewer’s shadow would also 
be projected into the scene

so that maybe they would 
you know, become implicated.

Overhead projectors are a didactic tool,

they’re a schoolroom tool, so they’re about,

I mean in my thinking they’re 
about conveying facts.

The work that I do is about 
projecting fictions into those facts.

I began to love the kind of self-promotion 
surrounding the work of the silhouette artist.

You know they would have to uh,

show up in different towns 
and advertise their skills

and sometimes very overblown language 
describing their incredible skills,

you know able to cut you know in, in uh,

less than a minute you know, ten 
seconds for your, your sitting,

for your likeness, accurate likenesses.

And I also begun to question this 
whole idea of accurate likenesses.

The work takes on this narrative structure,

creates all the elements of the 
story and I just need the viewer,

like an author needs a reader, you know, to 
fill-in the rest of the tension of the story.

This is a book I made in 1997, 
called “Freedom: A Fable.

A Curious Interpretation of the Wit 
of a Negress in Troubled Times.”

The negress, as a term that I apply to myself,

is a real and artificial construct.

Everything I'm doing is trying to skirt 
the line between fiction and reality.

It’s not just an examination of 
race relations in America today.

I mean, that's a part of it.

It's a part of being an 
African American woman artist,

but it's about how do you make 
representations of your world,

given what you've been given?