Love by a Thousand Cuts (Page 2)

Walker, according to a leaflet at ARC, "accounts for the relationships between black and white people, master and slave, segregation and its inherent contradictions," and "counterbalances the American official history as propagated by cinema and literature"--an essentially realist rationale for her art that's not uncommon in commentary on her work. Such deadening verbiage strains to find edifying significance in the fraught and unruly fantasies Walker throws in our faces. All of her work makes clear, 8 Possible Beginnings just a bit more blatantly than the rest, that any basis it may have in historical or even in biological reality is completely circumstantial. Slavery becomes a metaphor for sex--and, why not, for love--as much as sex becomes a trope for slavery. Not that this lets anyone off the hook. There's no writing off Walker's inventions as the byproducts of a deranged imagination--as if she were some sort of black female art-world-insider counterpart to Henry Darger.

But this is just where interpretation gets tricky. "None of this is about her own fantasies," insists the exhibition's curator, Philippe Vergne, deputy director and chief curator at the Walker Art Center. "It is about the codes of representation and their power." Yet any such intellectual impersonality is constantly belied by the incandescent tone of Walker's work. And after all, how powerful could those codes be if they weren't able to generate some pretty urgent fantasies? Likewise, another contributor to the exhibition catalogue, cultural historian Sander Gilman, works overtime to establish that attacks on Walker for pandering to racism and sexism--and it's not surprising that they've come up--must be misguided because art cannot be "a mimetic mirror of the inner life of the artist," cannot be unambiguously traced back to "the character of the artist." But while the causal connections may be interestingly oblique and tenuous, still, the art comes from precisely what the painter and occasional critic Carroll Dunham, writing in Artforum, has called "the hostile, raunchy, ironic consciousness driving Walker's art."

Some of Walker's most fascinating work consists of writing, whether embodied in vinyl lettering on a wall, as with Letter From a Black Girl, or scribbled on paper to be presented as a form of drawing either with or without any pictorial accompaniment. It would be a mistake to rely too heavily on these texts to interpret her other works--they are artworks too, posing their own hermeneutical challenges, not commentaries--but they help underscore what may be slightly more obliquely indicated by the murals, films and other pieces: that all this is intensely personal to Walker, and that precisely for this reason, it reflects her hyperawareness of context--above all the art-world context that, as the daughter of an artist, she must have been at least tangentially aware of since childhood. "I knew that the only way to gain an audience in the art world was to cloak my work in the guise of blackness," we read on one sheet from the sometimes almost embarrassingly diaristic 1997 drawing series Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk? "I would have to make work that was so directly racial that no one could help but notice." Since she could hardly pass as white, she would have to pass as black.

This paradoxical strategy undoubtedly explains the angry reaction Walker's work--or rather its quick success--aroused among a number of prominent older black women artists: in her they see a black woman putting on blackface. Walker's ruminations, however, convey an almost excruciating sincerity at odds with the canny trickster we imagine behind the insolent films and murals. But if they also suggest a calculated bid to manipulate the white, liberal art world in the interest of success, what about the fantasy, recounted elsewhere in the sequence, of seducing none other than David Duke, "to 'bring down'...the former Klansman and almost Louisiana Senator in SCANDAL!" Well, more surprising things than that have happened.

Still, as for scandals, Walker may have caused a few, but they've been small change compared with the honors heaped on her. Does that mean she's doing something so right it's wrong? I don't think so. Whoever her public is--and they're not all white men like me--she does "bring us down" to dwell amid appalling desires and admit they might be or become one's own. "But that I would fuck an avowed RACIST--not at all unusual," writes Walker in Do You Like Creme. "Since all I want is to be loved by you And to share all that deep contradictory love I possess. Make myself your slave girl so you will make yourself my equal--if only for a minute." Walker turns out to be a closet utopian, and it's not her scathing humor or her obscenity that's made her loved--it's her perverse optimism.

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