Kara Walker Art Exhibit at the Modern

Their impressions of the Kara Walker exhibit, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (spare me):

Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained national and international recognition for her room-size tableaux depicting historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence, and subjugation through the genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the American South before the Civil War, Walker’s compositions play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses, slaves, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past. — The Modern, Fort Worth

There is a reason you can’t count on contemporary journalism for reports on Events and the like in largely commercial publishings—a reason journalist Kevin Richardson (freelance, Dallas) would extol so eagerly the work of something so far removed from the adventurous, compelling and otherwise aesthetically appealing world of modern art.

It’s because, I’m afraid, he wanted to be published. At the end of the day, he needed a buck. And in a world littered with the scraps of the ideas of Kara Walker and other like-minded people, to broadcast a review as visceral as the one forthcoming would earn you either a vicious haranguing or worse—a comfortable spot in front of your computer, blogging on the matter instead of having people actually read it.

Ahem. On with the review.

The Modern in Fort Worth is an architectural masterpiece that has for many years provided the metroplex with a veritable nexus of culture, refinement, sophistication and the sharp edge of the new. As a rule, I attend every new exhibit made aware to me; so it was with great eagerness that I rushed to the new feature, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and completely expectant of something typically wonderful.

A small, bracketed disclaimer greeted those unfamiliar with Kara Walker’s work, advising all that that this exhibit of hers was intended for mature audiences only. I paid my student fair, nodded mirthfully to the suicidal ticket girl and headed in.

From then on, my mirth quickly plummeted to a feeling I can only describe as an arm-wrestling match between frustration and boredom, while pure, unadulterated rage fucked both of them in the ass. Clever shadows imitating fellatio performed by a talented, big-lipped and underaged black girl on a skinny, six-year-old white boy were plastered onto the walls; a woman who appeared rearing up like a horse as a man slipped under her skirt and lifted her off her feet played their nasty charade in front of everyone; the haunting music of a 1930s movie chorus played to a grainy, black-and-white video of paper puppets, featuring some nonsense about “Dead Nigger Gulch” and grandpa and whatever; and finally, in a “bold” attempt at tapping into automatic writing (while keeping with the theme, of course), canvases were littered with aggressive words of hate—a giant letter so dull and devoid of any artistic merit that I found myself, for once, incapable of reading (though it had something to do with someone getting her pregnant—or—or something).

I left the museum feeling uninspired and less intelligent for having endured the whole thing. Reviewers have commented on Walker’s knack for unveiling deep, human truths and exploring the ugly side of the past; but what I found instead was the same, boring approach to the same boring topic of racial prejudice.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with voicing your thoughts on past crimes; but to do so with the aggression and the fervor as thought it were happening now?—spare me.

Avoid this exhibit like the plague.