Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kara Walker Genius,
By Taft Williams (Philadelphia Pa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Hardcover)
Kara Walker is the artist who has something to say in every medium. First I have viewed her sensational installations which include her trademark silouhettes which remind me of huge versions of cameos from time gone by. Second her messages are loud clear with a poetic flow . She translates her ideas about abused women,slavery,possession and if possible redemption into paper cut outs which can fill a room along with paintings drawings film and text. Her book ebodies the foundation of these images. I highly recommend it.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kara Walker , Woman, Artist and Mac Arthur Genius,
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This review is from: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Hardcover)
Kara Walker's Art currently exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum is so powerful I often think about the Art exhibit during my day it has become my companion,a stimulating and welcomed friend I recommed this book and urge all within a hundred miles of Los Angeles to visit the Hammer before June 8,2008
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
how do we read race,
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This review is from: Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Hardcover)
Kara Walker's work has many suggestions,social; ones where you need some "code" to interpret what you see, how can you come to see eyes like yours; what you see; we come to comprehend the montrous system of slavery that supported the USA for on-going decades; her approach utilization of the ante-bellum South with silhouttes often surreal imagery,with odd icon as Marcus Garvey running with an ax,Return?, Return!?We need liberation in any form;Walker's narrative is intentionally distanced,like the subject itself;as if race can only seen, by not really being seen; white man's narrative discourse is the only one Walker seems to be saying;So no one can even tell their own story; Do we simply need more enlightenment? I don't think that will do it; hypocrisy will still reign supreme, the system needs it;here there are events you can't come to believe,a woman vomiting, a mother looking up the anus of her child or someone else's child abandoned; yet as you walk through this ir-reality are you in it,Are you awake now,the
plantations that American still visit,visit in horror, or what? or do you simply want the "Dream" to continue; When do we get back to profit-taking? Her work still has a narrative discourse, you come to read it,yet you still don't understand; it is within a post-modern subject; spatiality is utilized to scatter the subject, forwards and backwards in his/herstory, but a storyline with no beginning or end, much like current reality with odd assortments of slaveries occuring,smuggled immigrant workers, "maquil" workers, sex slave trade; its all with us,next door; people still need to be saved from imperial systems of globalizations,concrete walls and pre-emptive wars.Do we still look at "Ol' Hannah" through a lens of what, our own existence, contemplating the self-conceit of our own portfolios now stolen by Wall Street; the issue of race,prejudice is still a very open question despite all the millions of dollars$$$ on holocaust museums and commissioned works of art, how much do we really comprehend of our "neighbor" Do we care?,or do we simply go on in our own hypocrisies,saying "we have ours, now let them get theirs" where's that "universalizing" trope humanity needs to survive and get their heads around the subject. Walker's work certainly triggers all these contemplations.
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