Reflection on Kara Walker- Andrew Viola

Posted on October 15, 2007
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Walking into the Kara Walker Exhibition I was surprised that it was full of silhouette figures.  Silhouettes are interesting in themselves actually, at least to me they are.  The word silhouette is named after a French economist that tried unconventional methods to bring France out of a deficit in the 1760’s after the Seven Years’ War with England.  To make a long story short, silhouette decorations are “cheap”, since they lack the ornate details of real craftsmanship or art.  I’m not trying to call Walker’s art exactly cheap, or easy, I’m sure it took some professional skill, but there is definitely something lacking when faces, clothing, color, etc. are excluded from an image. There’s a lot of irony behind such “black and white” pictures, because literally the color choices are black silhouettes on white backgrounds and the conflict depicted is between Black slaves and White owners.  However, the explicit scenarios the images illustrate are hardly “black and white”, or as simple as the art medium used to create them. Another contrasting element of a silhouette image is the apparent negative space that can be used.  Personally, I didn’t observe any negative space images, but if Walker wanted to she could have created alternate images within an image if she crafted the silhouettes in certain ways.  Any way, silhouettes can also be looked at as shadows, which is kind of what Walker’s art dwells on, “shadows of the past” or a retrospect. People criticize Walkers images, calling them crude, or degrading to Blacks. I don’t feel that way though, the images don’t seem biased to me in that sense.  Sometimes I’m confused with who is Black or White, or what exactly is going on in the scene altogether.  I think when everything is silhouetted it slightly neutralizes the race and focuses more attention on the actual movement, or actions in the picture. Probably the most shocking part of Walker’s work in my observation is the children in her images. Whenever slavery comes to mind I kind of skip over the part that children were involved in the fiasco on both sides of the fence. That’s a pretty unsettling thought when I deeply ponder about it. The whole thing was basically an epiphany to me, on the generations and deep-rooted foundations of the sick and twisted world of slavery in the South.  This all may have been painfully obvious to most other people, but the gruesome truth of children being brought up as a slave or owning a slave kind of all dawned on me at once. Slave pondering isn’t a heavy activity of mine at all, but I still appreciate the arbitrary enlightenment. To close my observation of Walker’s work, I felt that either the silhouettes or the cartoon-like art style took away some of the seriousness of the images. The images looked mischievous or I even dare to say playful at times. I’m not sure if this is the look she was going for, but it comes off as a satire of the whole situation.

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