Kara Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby" | ART21 "Exclusive"

Kara Walker: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous
Sugar Baby"

[WALKER] "Kara Walker's work deals with history..."

[Domino Sugar Factory, Brooklyn, NY]

Embedded in that statement,

"Kara Walker is dealing with history,"

is this kind of desire for

a hero who can fix this problem

of our history and racism.

And I don't think that my work is actually

effectively dealing with history.

I think of my work as kind of

subsumed by history [LAUGHS]

or consumed by history.

[MAN #1] Alright, what we want...

we want to work from the back, forward.

[MAN #2] Go the back...

the layout...

14, 24, 34, 44.

[MAN #1] Okay.

[WALKER] Nato Thompson from Creative Time,

he said, "You have to see this."

"This place is totally filled with molasses."

Molasses on the walls,

molasses on the rafters,

globs of sugar fifty feet up in the air,

just left over from this refining process.

It was such a cathedral to industry,

and such a cathedral to this one commodity.

The whole project is predicated on

this space being demolished

at the end of the run of the show.

I had to learn more about sugar

in the process of trying to understand this
building.

Sugar comes from sugar cane.

Sugar cane is grown in tropical climates.

Sugar cane is, and has been, harvested by
slaves,

underpaid workers, and children possibly.

It's a fascinating and very long history.

I started putting down all of my free association
ideas,

starting with sugar and molasses.

And molasses is a by-product

of the sugar processing.

What other by-products are there?

And I got to the end, and I was like,

"Ruins!" You know?

It was just like, "Ruins,"

everything was just in ruins.

And I couldn't just produce ruins.

In this book I was reading

about the history of sugar,

contemporaries described something called

a "sugar subtlety".

I loved this term.

A "subtlety" is a sugar sculpture

made out of sugar paste,

marzipan,

fruits and nuts,

that was sculpted to portray royalty,

and only could be consumed by

royalty, nobility, clergy.

The subtlety presents this opportunity

to make a figure that

can embrace many themes

that is representative of power

in and of itself.

[WALKER] Wow!

I was sort of grasping at

too many different ideas

that I wanted to bring into the piece.

[WOMAN] Like, what don't you want it to look
like?

[WALKER] I don't know how to answer that.
[LAUGHS]

I mean, I've never done anything like this
before [LAUGHS]

So I don't really have, like,

a really good opinion, you know?

From ruins to the sugar subtlety

lead me to think about the...

you know, what sort of figure,

and what sort of position would she occupy.

I think there was a moment of stepping back

and...ding! You know?

"Oh, what about a sphinx?"

You know, it was very subtle, actually. [LAUGHS]

It's not a kind of

Egyptophile relic.

This is someone from the new world.

I was not at all secure about doing sculpture.

This was one of those things that was

so out of my league that I hung back

during the sculpting process.

[MICHAEL FERRARI-FONTANA] We started with
a clay model.

The model was scanned and digitized

and created into a file that could be read
by carving robots.

It's simply one layer that goes on top of the other.

You always hear about sculptors

[Michael Ferrari-Fontana, Sculptor]

liberating the figure from the block.

We go back in with the bow wires

and basically drag the bow wire across the
blocks at angles

in order to achieve the curvatures that we're
looking for.

No matter how incredible robotic carving is

the hand is an element that you can't get
away from.

And it's beyond the hand.

It's not just the hand--

it's what's driving the hand.

[ERIC HAGAN] We're in the process of doing
our first test,

so we're still very much in the discovery
phase.

I've done a lot of smaller tests--

some twelve-inch figures--

[Eric Hagan, Sugar Artist]

but nothing five-feet tall.

So it's a mixture of

corn syrup, sugar, and water.

Kind of like what you would use to make

caramel, or lollipops.

So we're boiling it up to between

265 and 290 degrees Fahrenheit.

We're pouring them into a rubber mold

to let them set.

So when we de-mold them,

they will be covered in the sugar and water
mixture

similar to the sphinx.

[WALKER] I highly recommend a fifty-pound
bag of sugar

for personal therapy.

But if you mix it with

a couple of gallons of water...

it's very fun.

I mean, it's the most fun I've had since kindergarten,
I think,

making art.

I think it was very important to me to have

figures made out of a substance that is so

temporal--

it's so subject to change.

I really recognize what a privilege it is

to be working in that space,

because I can think of

a thousand other artists who could take on
the challenge

of that space.

I really love the fact

of these figures kind of melting and dripping.

And they're very much like the interior of

the Domino Sugar Factory

which is also still dripping,

still producing molasses from its interior,

still sort of weeping this substance.

The mammy,

although she's bent over in this gesture of,

sort of, supplication,

I don't feel like she's there to be taken,

or satisfied,

or abused in any way.

She's sort of withholding.

I don't want to make her into

a non-sexual caretaker of the city.

She's powerful because she is so

kind of iconic in a way.

And she is so monumental and so unexpected.

If I've done the job well,

then she gains her power

by upsetting expectations one after the other.

I think it's very important to look back.

I don't think we do it often enough.

I think sometimes looking back leads to, kind
of,

depression and stasis,

which isn't good.

But, looking forward without any kind of

deep, historical feeling of connectedness--

it's no good either.