Word: walkerism
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This Freudian conceptual foundation, like the monochromatic form of Walker's figures, allows these racial archetypes to vacillate between positive space and negative space, between active role and passive role in this psychological struggle. On the subject of sadism and masochism, Freud wrote, "[M]asochism is nothing more than an extension of sadism turned round upon the subjects own self." To the extent that Walker's silhouettes of black girls swallowing their own hands or feces imply a masochistic tendency, they become completely interdependent with the sadistic acts being represented on other walls. These two extremes of suffering and cruelty...
...self-hatred appear multiple times in the exhibit, yet never establishing a clear victim and persecutor. This is one of the central strengths of the exhibit. While it tackles such complex and political topics as black assimilation, it never devolves into a narrative of either blame or exoneration. Rather, Walker explores the inter-connection between white cruelty and black mimicry of whites, between white fetishistic desire of the black female and black female self-annihilation. The ingenuity of Walker's work is that, not only does she represent these cultural phenomena, but she examines how they form a support network...
...Though Walker reaffirms this concept with a plethora of feeding imagery, the exhibit does not fall simply into a framework of symbolism. The figurativeness of Walker's work exists in the divide between conscious and unconscious more so than the divide between real and metaphor. Walker's images allude to Freud's analysis of dreams. The series of fantastical silhouettes--a tree split in half, a two-headed woman, oddly-shaped flowers, a man with talons--create a visual world that vacillates between dream and nightmare. The dream that Walker unfolds here is not just any dream, but the dream...
...Walker, in the tradition of writer and political theorist Franz Fanon, builds upon Freudian psychoanalysis and Lacan's theory of dialectical identity to expose the underpinning mechanisms of racism in contemporary American society. Walker's catalogue book, riddled with references to the "Other," the "gaze" and "perversion," tackles the psychological foundations of racism in the context of a history of slavery. She successfully uses theories that have been applied to a colonial history to create a conceptual framework that addresses the unique perversities of a racism grounded in slavery. This is no small feat...
...punch of Walker's exhibit is that it refuses to render the challenge of race into a simply rhetorical question. As cynical as the show is, it demands a solution from its audience. Like psycho-analysis, Walker's work reminds the viewer of things that she does not like to know that she knows. It confronts the audience with the grotesque, debasing racial stereotypes that are embedded in our collective psyche, with the hope that bringing them to consciousness will be the first step to their eradication...