Word: walkerism
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...name only the most famous, have explored and challenged the mechanisms of cultural representation. While they may not have gained any friends at the National Endowment for the Arts, these artists all raised important questions about the contemporary and historic constructions of their ethnic, sexual and political identities. Walker joked about one of Serrano's most notorious images, "You can't put Jesus in a piss jar, but you can't put Sambo anywhere...
Outside the context of contemporary art, the present debate surrounding Walker's work elicits even eerier deja-vu in light of the black literary tradition to which Walker owes so much. Over fifty years ago, Richard Wright argued against Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, claiming the book perpetuated stereotypes of blacks as "happy darkies" and minstrels. When asked about this parallel Walker answered, "The black arts community is still really young. We keep bringing up the same themes to trash each other...
While this may be true, Walker's reply doesn't explain how some black artists have managed to avoid or somehow outlive similar controversy, like Robert Colescott and Kerry James Marshall who parody stereotypes in a more literal, straightforward way. Similarly sexual, scatological, or racially-charged, their work seems less threatening (and to my mind less satisfying), because it's far more unambiguous and transparent than Walker's graphic obliquity and elliptical narratives. Walker remarks, "There's lot of information that's not revealed for you. The viewer probably knows most of the story, maybe even more than...
With so much left to our imagination, we grow nervous about what's going on in the silhouettes' shadows. Yet if we start to fill in the blanks, Walker engages us in the racist or sexist scenes we so badly wish to condemn...
...same time, we're trapped by the double bind of voyeurism, appalled at what we witness, yet unable to take our eyes away. Here again Walker allies herself with the writers of 19th century slave narratives who knew all too well that violence and sexual titillation wee useful tools for attracting readers to the horrors of their plight. Walker admits to her "love for the unnecessary flourish," and it is precisely those formal details, whether salacious contours or languorous gaps, which captivate and torment...