My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 99

Dennis Kardon
But then, what are we to do with a
critique that faults Walker for the
capitalist corruptions of her sponsors,
those who came later than the exploiters
in her historical spectacle? I guess we
need to denounce Leonardo’s works
for the profit earned from the Borgias,
who also funded much of the Italian
Renaissance. Take the art out of the
Met that was supported by crooked
money and you could plant a fine soccer
pitch. Art history is never innocent —
I’m quoting somebody; maybe myself.
Walker gets blamed for the housing
development that will be built on the
site of her temporary public art piece
and trashed for the working conditions
under which her polyurethane material
are produced. Graffiti taggers, throw
down your markers!

98

A Subtlety may be more of a sensation
and spectacle than a major work of art,
but there is something large and
impressive about its effort to articulate
an idea. It says more to me than
Christo’s drapery of orange sheets in
Central Park. One thing is easy to
miss: the first thing that hits you when
you walk toward the sculpture is the
Mammy stereotype of distorted minstrel
facial features of the sugar goddess.
But what is compliant and humble in
that frontal view changes when you see
her in profile. Then you see those same
features pressed forward in arrogant
contempt and defiance. Both at once.
In mythology a sphinx is where you go
to get answers to portentous questions.
And often her answers are a riddle.
There are a few riddles in A Subtlety.
Diehl missed them all.
Part of the riddle or mystery of the piece
is its refusal to console. The pronounced
vulva at the rear end testifies to both
power and vulnerability (“sweetness and
power”). It is surely not a triumphalist
monument (but a mockery). And as a
conceptual artwork destined to dissolve
like sugar in somebody else’s bowl, it is
more tragic than redemptive. Yet to use
a phrase Baldwin knew how to handle,
it witnesses.

Carol, a fascinating piece on the
political connections of Domino, but
I would like to respectfully disagree
on a few points.
I think it is a mistake to attack Walker
on the gratuitous titillation charge. As
originally conceived in her first exhibition
at the Drawing Center, the black paper
silhouettes were radical partly because
of the way they implicated a viewer’s
imagination with its store of racial and
pornographic stereotypes in order to
complete the piece. It was the ambiguity
that gave the early work that power.
It was only after the attack by the black
intellectuals that you mention which
scared her off her original premise, that
Walker started to weaken and temporize
her work with text, illustration, and
general dumbing down and lack of
trust in the original power of her work,
making explicit and obvious what
was before ambiguous and requiring a
complicity on the part of viewers.
This is the first really great work of hers
since then, because it again requires
that complicity. Rather than temporizing
the Domino connection it throws
it in their face. No one having seen
this piece can now innocently buy a
Domino product again. She has made
visible something hidden, and easy
to stay unaware of, and in a way that
brings the full horror of it home.

It is important for groups that have
been oppressed to take back the
stereotypes that oppressors have used
to define them, emphasizing their
degrading nature. And people who
criticize Walker for doing this don’t
really understand the artistic power in
the way she has most successfully
employed it. The work (at its best) is
not really titillating, it is discomfiting.
But you are correct that the criticism
of the instagrams is disingenuous.
They were to be expected. I don’t think
it was Walker that criticized them.
I think this piece is more problematic
for Domino, especially with your
research, than it is for viewers or
Walker. As for Two Trees I am afraid
that being in bed with them is pretty
self-defeating. I urge artists not to
participate in their open studio
celebrations which just raise the value
of the real-estate and hasten their
own eventual eviction.