Word: walkerism
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...near life-size, black silhouette in Walker's current Carpenter Center exhibition features a black man hunched over a banjo, a long drop of drool descending from his distended lower lip. Behind him, a kerchief-capped girl reaches to turn the enormous screw-key sprouting from his back like that of a wind up doll. Recalling the tradition of black minstrelsy, the key also suggests a brutally-planed pair of scissors--a silhouette cutter's tool craftily inscribed within the silhouette. This image alone might be taken as an icon for the controversy surrounding Walker's work, as viewers question...
Over the past year, Walker's work has been widely exhibited at influential venues, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and in New York at the Whitney Biennial. Last April at age 27, she was the youngest 1997 recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award. Walker's Harvard installation was originally presented at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, but here she takes full advantage of the Carpenter Center's lobby to surround viewers with a parade of figures under floating Spanish moss and cotton bolls...
...Despite Walker's broad institutional acceptance, the critical response to her work is more contentious. Some black artists and curators fear that her use of negative racial imagery, like over-sexed pickaninnies, perpetuates harmful stereotypes rather than subverting them. One established black artist, Betye Saar, even launched a letter campaign which challenged people in the art world to question whether they found Walker's work racist or sexist...
...Walker's opponents often fail to pay attention to the visual characteristic of her art. They write without noticing the peculiarities of her medium, as though she were simply presenting straight-forward racist scenarios in photographs or realistic paintings. But if a silhouette isn't a photograph, then a stereotype isn't a stereotype in Walker's hands...
...effective, any stereotype (whether visual or verbal) must be highly-legible, unambiguous, and easily consumable. Walker's figures are not. Despite the incredible precision of their finely-cut outlines, it's impossible to really know what's going on inside their black, opaque fields. She brilliantly exploits the graphic irony and tension of her medium which seems to provide so much information and yet so little...