Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love [Hardcover]

Kara Walker (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Walker Art Center
• ASIN: B001K201FG
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Kara Walker Genius, February 28, 2008

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, April 23, 2008

By 

Alma Stent "Doing well" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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, October 13, 2008

By 

scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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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.