My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 94

It is astonishing how much attention
Ms. Walker receives for work that
seems as empty as an Andy Warhol
Campbell Soup Can image, and
certainly does not measure up to the
quality of inventive virtuoso of Barbara
Chase Ribaud, Martin Puryear, or
Oliver Lee Jackson. Yet, Ms. Walker
does have a place in the American “art
world” as if black expression must
receive its authentication by passing
through the hoops of dominant culture
adjudication, as if it were the only
legitimate authority on artistic practice
that matters in the world. The need
to interrogate the misappropriation of
valid African American expressivity is
precisely what prompted our inquiry
into African Diasporic aesthetics at
Emory University. So, as you can sense,
I have no particular fascination for
Ms. Walker, nor empathy, merely my
sympathy...(which she obviously does
not need on her way to the bank).

What drove me to prod my reliable
friend, globe-jetter (and originator of
the journal Black Renaissance Noire),
Manthia Diawara to venture with me
from Greenwich Village to Williamsburg
in Brooklyn to see Kara Walker’s
“Subtlety” was sugar, and how it played
and plays a huge role in the unsweetening
of the African Diaspora. Inside the
Domino factory I became intrigued,
fascinated and to my surprise much
impressed by what I saw and felt.
The piece touched issues of long interest
to me: ambitious art beyond museums
and galleries; monumentalism (whose
latest controversy is the World Trade
Center memorial); and different types
of irony at play in the gazes of the
entitled and the marginalized. Two
days later at a dinner party hosted by
Paul and Wanda Harrison I found
myself recalling my impressions to a
score of friends and other guests, who
listened with polite silence.
A spike of tricksterism passes among
some of my friends, sometimes in
the form of signifying. Two weeks
after the dinner party I got an email
from Manthia. He had collected
several addresses of my friends and
co-correspondents, including some
who had been at that dinner party,
with a link to Carol Diehl’s piece that
“might be interesting to his [my] group.”
The nearest literary analogy I could
think of was Junior High, being shoved
into a rumble for the amusement of a
fervid crowd. I could not back down
from Manthia’s public provocation.
I was forced to flesh out what I was
thinking about “Subtlety,” using Carol
Dielh’s article as a foil.

I started to plunge back into the debate
after reading Paul’s statement, then
decided against it. By this time the
exhibition was due to close the next
day and be dismantled. Writing more
about what I saw and reacted to — a
one-off, site specific construction —
would be like dissecting a phantom.
There were two primary avenues
of approach offered to the sphinx-like
figure sugar and the Mammy
iconography. Looming close behind
was the five-alarm persona of Kara
Walker. Even people who saw the
exhibit and were disturbed by the
Sugar Baby often found it gripping.
Some who hadn’t seen it (including
some at another dinner party “given
in my honor” in Los Angeles that felt
like an Inquisition) hold strong
emotions associated with features of
the sculpture and its author. Everyone
brings personal feelings and experiences
to a work of art, and among Black
people these can include deep hurts and
tender, sacred, non-negotiable spaces.
Some convictions settled before a work
was created, or seen, will not change.
My profit from these exchanges is massive.
It is a special thing, all too rare, for
a single object from a Black artist to
produce impassioned discussion among
literate non-specialists in widening
circles. Everyone who has written on
this art scandal has been forced to
probe more deeply into their thinking,
if not to change it.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Walker’s enterprise, while perhaps more
ambitious than Norman Rockwell,
borders on being cartoonish, appearing
as “arrested development,” a grown-up
engaged in child-play that is completely
unappealing or interesting for mature,
certainly not enlightened, consumption.
Most tediou s is her seeming desire for
public expurgation of personal trauma,
a self-purging of personal angst to the
point of absurd-nauseum that seems
more appropriate for clinical examination
on the couch of a Shrink, if not
otherwise, providing the public an
opportunity to engage in the popular
American entertainment of voyeurism.

93

Clyde Talyor

Some semi-private email commentaries
have a way of getting around in a circuit
of zero to one degree of separation.
The first response I saw, no doubt to
what I had written, was Brenda Marie
Osbey’s exquisite piece harnessing the
power of narrative. Her poetry often
flows as small or immense histories.
My friend Paul Carter Harrison, having
read other items on the exhibition
beside mine, took it as a teachable
moment, as indeed it was. Then followed
Barbara Lewis’ astute analysis. There
may be dozens more commentaries
orbiting in other circuits.