My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Página 101

Paul Carter
Harrison

Forth of July holiday, 2014, and the call
for Liberty and Justice still rings hollow
in the ears of this Native Son on this
final weekend of the Kara Walker
Sugar Coated Mammy — entitled The
Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby —
at the defunct Domino Sugar Factory
in New York. The colossal installation,
poised in quiet submission on her
haunches like a Sphinx, her mammary
seeming to memorialize the Sweet Tit
of breast-feeding slaves, her bountiful,
bare-ass inviting the voyeuristic specter
of the Venus Hottentot.

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More than 100,000 people — with
the conspicuous absence of people of
color — have passed through the
portals of the Domino Factory to view
and cavort with the Walker spectacle,
constructed in the cavernous empty
“hull” of the factory, its walls still
spewing with the rancid odors of
decayed liquefied sugar, the 35 feet
high/75 feet long structure is coated
with 40 tons of refined sugar.
Impressive, though it may be in its
execution and its monumentality, does
it resonate anything more compelling
than the novelty of visiting Coney
Island to view the Bearded Lady?

Skip Gates seems to think so, noting
that for “many people like myself,”
mid-brow consumers of culture
who are unable to discern between
Art and Artifact — or otherwise the
canned-laughter of manufactured
entertainment — the structure is a
“startling, palpable image” that “shakes
us by the shoulders” with its critique
of stereotypes. On the other hand,
Nicholas Power was in attendance and
unable to suppress an unrestrained
sense of disgust for the frivolous antics
of the white visitors – skittishly posing
with infants between the enormous
breasts of the Sugar Coated Mammy,
or fatuously posing under the exp osed
two-foot length vulva of her gargantuan bare buttocks — causing him to
exclaim impatiently: “You’re recreating
the very racism this art is supposed
to critique.”

However disquieting to those of us
intimately connected to the Mammy
iconography, Clyde Taylor, who
never fails to direct our consciousness
to the nuances of cultural production,
observes that the Sphinx posture
offers a riddle in “its refusal to console,”
noting that the “pronounced vulva…
testifies to both power and vulnerability.”
And while Powers invokes DuBois’
Double-Consciousness, “the sense of
always looking at one’s self through
the eyes of the other,” Clyde invokes
Baldwin in support of the icon,
viewing the Sugar Coated Mammy as
“a witness.” I, on the other-hand, view
the manipulation of the icon from a
more or less cynical posture, one that
suggest that it represents very private
sexual pathologies that have been
unresolved for the artist/manufacturer.
Its public exposition is tantamount
to self-loathing if not self-flagellation.