Kara Walker’s art thematizes police violence – culture

During his presidency, Barack Obama presented himself mostly serious or cool, sometimes as a dry, self-deprecating politician. However, those moments in which the 44th US President appeared vulnerable and publicly showed emotions are particularly imprinted on the collective memory. Obama wept when he spoke to the media about the 28 people killed, including 20 children, in the winter of 2012 after the killing spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He also suffered while delivering the funeral speech for the nine victims of the racist attack in Charleston in the summer of 2015. At the end of his speech, the President sang “Amazing Grace”, the church gospel and anti-slavery protest song. His tears became a political statement. A powerful politician showed the world that he shared people’s pain and impotent anger in the face of violence and racism.

The New York artist Kara Walker now recalls Obama’s tears with four large-format pictures. On the new drawings created in 2019, which form the center of a comprehensive Walker exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, the image of the democrat becomes part of a larger narrative in which the boundaries between political historiography, artistic fiction and references to art history have become fluid. In a gesture reminiscent of the old masters, the artist allegorically staged the first Afro-American president with the help of pastel chalks.

That this exhibition premieres in Basel and not in the USA is a coup

The biggest impression is made by a picture in which Obama is shown as a half-bared modern man of pain who stoically endures the violent and torturous attacks of seven malicious chimeras. The fantasy beings are representative of the propagandists of the so-called Birther conspiracy tale. The propagators of the racist conspiracy tale, including Donald Trump, claimed against their better judgment that Obama was not born in the United States and should therefore never have become President of the United States.

The ambiguous, cosmic-sounding title of the Basel show is “A Black Hole is everything a star longs to be”. With over 650 sketches, studies, collages, notes, handwritten scraps of dreams, overpainted book pages, typewriter index cards and objets trouvés from almost thirty years, the exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of the graphic oeuvre of the artist, who was born in 1969. The fact that this exhibition premieres in Basel and not in a large US metropolis should be a real coup for the Swiss Art Museum. After all, along with Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall, Arthur Jafa, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper and Mark Bradford, Walker is currently one of the most sought-after African-American artists in contemporary art. After Basel, the show will also be shown in the Schirn-Kunsthalle Frankfurt and in the Dutch De Pont Museum in Tilburg.

A few years ago, Walker responded to the invitation from Anita Haldemann, head of the Basler Kupferstichkabinett, with the surprising offer to open her archive and to show most of the material in Basel that had not yet been publicly presented. Many topics come to the table with an overwhelming openness and diversity: racism, gender roles, sexuality and police violence, abuse of power, her role as an artist in a patriarchally organized art business or scratching the old white canon. “Art which is only visible to Black People” is written on a grayish paper with sepia ink and thus becomes an image: “Art which is only visible to black people”.

The artist found canvas painting too entangled in a patriarchal and white tradition

This exhibition will become a sprawling celebration for the medium of drawing, which, with its speed and incompleteness, becomes visible as the perfect means of transport for thoughts and feelings. Walker is not only a virtuoso of pencil, brush and ink on paper, she also plays with art historical references from Peter Paul Rubens or Francisco de Goya to Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz and Otto Dix to George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat”. She became famous in the mid-nineties with space-filling silhouette installations, which looked pleasing on a cursory glance, but revealed grotesque or violent scenes at second glance, which are set in the American slave-holding period and have extended to the present day. Scenes of torture, oppression and submission flow into one another.

Walker formulates the question of the legacy of slavery and everyday racism in an aesthetically surprising way using the underestimated medium of paper cutting. The early departure from painting, as one learns from the thick catalog book for the exhibition, which has also become an artist’s book, was programmatic. The artist found canvas painting too entangled in a patriarchal and white tradition. Walker started looking for alternatives. The fact that the artist also masters the game with large rooms with monumental formats was shown in 2014 with the installation of a huge, white sugar-coated sphinx with the facial features of an African-American woman in a disused sugar factory on the banks of New York’s East River: “A Subtlety , or the Marvelous Sugar Baby “. In autumn 2019 she placed a thirteen-meter-high, anti-imperial fountain sculpture entitled “Fons Americanus” in the turbine hall of London’s Tate Modern.

Open detailed view

In Basel it becomes clear how Walker develops her XXL formats from the “small” form of the drawing. This is not a one-way street. Because at the same time, in the drawing, she also breaks the major contemporary questions, which revolve around gender, history, skin color, capitalism and origin, down to a human level. These images insist on the question of where the artist self is in the great story with its unwieldy thoughts and feelings. “True Painters understand Tradition and how to upend it (while never changing anything)” wrote Walker about the drawing of a hanging figure. “True painters understand tradition and how to overturn it (without changing anything)”.

A Black Hole Is Everything A Star Longs To Be “. Art Museum Basel. Until September 26th. Catalog (JRP Editions) 60 euros.