Confusing yet Intriguing by Jonathan Joa
Posted on October 15, 2007
Filed Under
WordPress database error: [Table 'israel07.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT post_id, category_id FROM wp_post2cat WHERE post_id IN (102)
The Kara Walker Exhibition is an extremely different and unique form of art from what I am used to. The black silhouettes of the people are very effective in portraying how that part of America’s history was lost. The featureless bodies and dark shadows in her exhibition show that the story of black women during the times of slavery have been both neglected and forgotten. It even suggests that the stories were forced to be forgotten.
While some of her images are powerful and effective of getting her point across, some of her other works of art were just strange. One of which was a moving picture she had created through the use of silhouette puppets. Containing eight stories, each story seemed to have its own plot, although sometimes the stories were interconnected. The first of which showed a boat sailing presumably from Africa to America, carrying new slaves for the new world. For some strange, sadistic reason, the captain decided to throw “the niggers” overboard. The bodies float to what looks to be an island labeled “motherland” when suddenly (this is when it gets weird to me), the island grows upwards and turns out to actually be a giant. Via the lip structure and hairstyle, it can be deduced that it is actually an African woman. This giant then proceeds to greedily eat the floating bodies, which fall down through her extremely long esophagus (the bodies actually fall down her esophagus for a good 15-20 seconds before the next scene) until they are emptied out into her stomach.
The following stories were not much clearer. There was another about a black male slave having intercourse with another white man where the black man gives himself a blowjob (which is physically impossible) and somehow becomes pregnant (also physically impossible). In the next, the same African is giving birth to a baby, but in a very strange way- the baby’s leg is the first to appear from the man’s lower butt. Then, a midwife grabs the baby’s leg and yanks it out of the man’s body so hard, the baby actually flies across the sky and lands on its two feet, smiling happily.
I have no idea what Kara Walker intended when she created these films. They are of great quality and show that she put a great deal of work into them, but the films do not seem to communicate to me her themes of anger and despair of the female African slave. The Kara Walker exhibition was a mix of these two types of works- ones that truly, effectively depicted the horrors and atrocities that were committed in the times of slavery and ones that truly, effectively confused it’s spectators. A very strange exhibition, but interesting nonetheless.
Jonathan Joa
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.