My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 95

Carol Diehl

“Dirty Sugar” Kara Walker’s dubious
alliance with Domino

94

There’s much that disturbs me about
Kara Walker’s much-lauded and wildly
popular installation at Brooklyn’s
defunct Domino Sugar refinery, but
I’ll start with its undeniable beauty.
Made of sparkling white sugar, this
gigantic, crouching sphinx-like figure,
with curves like a Brancusi, looms like
a symbol of purity in the vast darkness
and decay of the factory’s interior.
The sweet smell is overwhelming, and
the piece itself is intended to degrade
over time; when I was there, skeletal
dark lines were beginning to form
between the polystyrene blocks
that form the core of the sculpture.
Conceptually and figuratively, it’s a
virtuoso performance that brilliantly
fulfills part of nonprofit Creative
Time’s original mission to “support
the creation of innovative, site-specific,
socially engaged works in the public
realm, especially in vacant spaces of
historical and architectural interest…
while pushing artists beyond their
“normal boundaries.” [see note]

So why does its beauty upset me?
Because the installations’ sheer
gorgeousness and spectacle serve as a
distraction from the insidious agenda
that makes a mockery of another part
of Creative Time’s mission, to “foster
social progress.” I have long felt that
Walker’s work — in which blacks are
portrayed as passive victims of slavery
engaged in psycho-sexual drama —
doesn’t invalidate, but rather reinforces
the stereotypes whites have imposed on
blacks to justify racism, and is entirely
dependent on the gratuitous titillation
that violence and sex inevitably
engender, regardless of the context —
or the race of the person who
perpetrates them. Walker’s sphinx
conflates two familiar white parodies of
black women: the big-assed, sexually
available Jezebel, with her vulva hanging
out for the taking, and her opposite,
the maternal, large-breasted but
desexualized Mammy, who sublimates
her own needs to fulfill those of her
white charges.

Whites are discouraged from criticizing
black artists, but white critics, curators,
and collectors are free to ratify work
that enrages many black intellectuals,
whose protests are then dismissed as
attempts at censorship. That Walker’s
work is celebrated, even tolerated,
tells a lot about the racism that’s still
subtly endemic in the art world; it’s
hard to imagine a “genius grant” being
awarded to an artist, no matter how
Jewish, whose specialty was caricatures
of big-nosed Jews sucking Nazi dick.
Vulgar photos taken by visitors posing
with the “sphinx” are all over Instagram,
and castigated online by writers
who are upset that the artwork is not
being shown proper respect. Derived
from minstrel shows where whites in
blackface lampooned blacks, the
caricatures Walker appropriates were
created with the specific intention
of provoking ridicule. Should we then
be surprised when they succeed?
Roberta Smith in the Times writes
that Walker “evokes the history of the
sugar trade, its dependence on slavery
and slavery’s particular degradation
of women, while also illuminating
the plagues of obesity and diabetes
that keep so many American dreams
unfulfilled.” Yet it can also be said that
Walker is providing massive advertising
for Domino Sugar, which donated
the 80 tons to make the sculpture.
As a sponsor, the familiar Domino logo
is prominently featured on a wall
at the site as well as Creative Time’s
website, and a Google search for ‘“Kara
Walker” Domino’ garners over 88,000
links. Statements that speak of “history,”
along with the fact that Walker’s images
are based nostalgically on our antebellum
past, present a view of slavery that
locates it dangerously outside the
present capitalist global economy —
when it is still very much part of it.