The Shadow Act.(My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love)

Octavia picked up her pen in the dimly lit Moroccan restaurant and leaned over her notebook. A bespectacled nine-year-old who aspires to a career in fashion, she thought for a moment and then set to work. It was June, 2007. Outside, Paris was thick with humidity in the twilight. Inside, the restaurant's pillows and rugs were redolent of tagines past. But Octavia's concentration was complete as she drew first a head, then a neck, then a pair of wide, staring eyes. Gradually, it became clear that the figure she was sketching was her mother, the thirty-seven-year-old black American artist Kara Walker, who was in Paris for the opening of her travelling retrospective, "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love." The show, which had originated at Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, in February, was due to open two days later at the ARC/Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. (Curated by Philippe Vergne, Walker Art Center's deputy director and chief curator, "My Complement" will open at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, this month.) Intellectually and emotionally ambitious, Walker's retrospective showcases more than two hundred of the provocative--frequently incendiary--and racially charged images that she has produced in her thirteen-year career.

A kind of latter-day Daumier, Walker presents--in huge tableaux constructed from black-paper cutouts or silhouettes, as well as in watercolors, drawings, and films--a visual world that rivals the French master's. Instead of industrial Paris, Walker combs the mansions and swamps of the antebellum South to find her characters, whose surroundings are a visual corollary of their fetid imaginations and musty souls. Like Daumier, she pays attention to costume, which functions in her work as a signifier not only of race and class but of ethics. Her white characters are often creatures of fashion, morally bankrupt beneath their silken folds, while her black characters wear the uniform of the oppressed: head rags, aprons, or tattered britches. But Walker is much more than a caricaturist. Her work has a spiritual quality, a meditative thoroughness that recalls the canvases of the late Haitian master Hector Hyppolite. Where Hyppolite used Catholic and voodoo symbols, Walker's saint figure is a character she calls the Negress. Small, with braided hair and sometimes oversized boots, the Negress appears in a number of Walker's works, often shitting, vomiting, or farting her way through a beautiful composition on the subject of bestiality, lynching, or the Christian ethos of slavery. Still, Walker's belief in the Negress's trickster nature--in her wiles and her will to survive--makes us believe that the girl can beat the odds and make it through.

At the restaurant, Walker sat on her daughter's left. On Octavia's right were two other Walker women: Kara's sister, Dana, who runs the continuing-studies division of a design college, in Pasadena, California, and her mother, Gwendolyn, who is a former amateur dress designer and seamstress. (As a girl, Kara modelled Gwendolyn's designs in her home town, Stockton, California.) In a sense, visual culture is the family business. (Walker's father, Larry, is a painter.) But Walker--who as a child dreamed of becoming the next Charles Schulz--is, so far, the only family member to have achieved international visibility in the art world. In 1997, at the age of twenty-eight, she became one of the youngest people to be given a MacArthur "genius" fellowship. The award followed an outpouring of works like "The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven" (1995). In this large-scale cutout wall piece, Walker laid out, among other things, a trio of female slaves suckling one another while a plantation floats in the distance; a prepubescent slave girl--Walker's Negress--defecating and brandishing a tambourine; a white girl in a hoopskirt wielding an axe; and a potbellied gentleman with a wooden leg and an erect penis, which is shaped not like a male member but like a slave boy (in his hand is a sword impaling a slave baby). Walker's vision, here and elsewhere, is of history as trompe-l'oeil. Things are not what they seem, because America is, literally, incredible, fantastic--a freak show that is almost impossible to watch, let alone to understand. In Walker's work, slavery is a nightmare from which no American has yet awakened: bondage, ownership, the selling of bodies for power and cash have made twisted figures of blacks and whites alike, leaving us all scarred, hateful, hated, and diminished. "The End of Uncle Tom" not only takes on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 masterwork--which James Baldwin called "a catalogue of violence"--but also explores the psychological legacy of the acts of brutality it described. Both historical and contemporary, the piece is a critique of slavery, as well as of the casual racism that modern blacks are exposed to on a daily basis in our post-politically correct times. Walker throws hatred back in our faces.

She uses the country's pre- and post-Reconstruction past to examine her personal history, too. "I am driven by myself . . . the capture of myself in the mirror, the auctioning off of myself . . . teeth and hair, tits and ass," she once wrote. And she is not unaware of the ambivalence--or anger--that the graphic and accusatory nature of her work inspires in some viewers. "Dear you insufferable cunt, you with your Black wailings, your Hungry ghosts, your vengeful heart," she wrote in the voice of an imaginary critic, on one of a series of index cards in a piece titled "Texts" (2001). "Why do you insist on tormenting yourself, as well as your loved ones, with Ingratitude? . . . You are given 'chances' 'opportunities' 'inches,' as well as Miles. And you take them all. And spit, spit in those faces, bite those hands defecate on heads from your bare branch perch."

In 2000, Walker gave a talk at the Des Moines Art Center. Afterward, a white man in the audience asked her how long she intended to make the type of work she did. Walker responded, "Oh, probably as long as I'm black and a woman." (This exchange has been quoted as an example of Walker's "fearlessness," with Walker depicted in the press as the art community's very own Sojourner Truth, a paragon of black righteousness in a corrupt white world--an image that Walker, who has said that she occasionally feels like "somebody's pet project," is very much aware of.) But, of course, the subtext behind the Des Moines man's question remains: Why--or how--does a Kara Walker come to exist at all?

The four Walker women covered the spectrum of the color brown. Octavia was the lightest (her father--the German-born jewelry designer Klaus Burgel, from whom Walker recently separated--is white), Walker the darkest. The adult Walkers were tall and thin, with a graceful bearing and prominent clavicles. Their ...