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Kara Walker,
Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On),
2000.
Cut paper silhouettes and light projections, Dimensions vary with installation.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director's Council and Executive Committee Members: Ann Ames, Edythe Broad, Henry Buhl, Elaine Terner Cooper, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, Harry David, Gail May Engelberg, Ronnie Heyman, Dakis Joannou, Cind.
2000.68.
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Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On) (2000) presents a panorama of grisly scenes. A plantation master propositions a naked slave behind a tree. A woman with a baby on her head manages to escape a lynching. A group surrounds and tortures a victim with such “rudimentary tools” as ladles and frying pans, which may deliver a final blow. Other silhouettes and shadowy forms as well as theatrical, atmospheric colors fill what space remains on the wall.
The work is exemplary of the ways in which Kara Walker's art continually records and challenges—in graphically sexual and raucously violent tableaux—the traumatic, even repressed, history of slavery in the United States. She aims to find a voice for the ways in which history holds sway over present-day race relations, however intimate, unofficial, colloquial, or lewd the voice's utterances may be. Walker is best known for her antiquated-style silhouettes of an imagined antebellum South, with all its requisite “masters,” “belles,” “mammies,” and “sambos.” Her use of silhouette as a medium draws attention to the reductive nature of stereotypes, in which the complexities of individual identities and situations are distorted, even caricatured, in order to be easily understood. Walker derives her imagery in part from the tradition of the minstrel show, which she redeploys to subversive ends. Historically performed by white actors in blackface, the minstrel theater parodied the lives of African Americans and allowed whites to vicariously break their own cultural taboos by portraying unbridled sexuality and puerile behavior. In her work, Walker inverts the roles of these characters. Her stylized figures enact the violence that attends oppression as they embody scenes of bestiality, castration, murder, and cannibalism.
Walker's earlier silhouettes were composed against white backgrounds, but more recently—as with Insurrection!—color infuses the scenes, spilling forth from light projectors to flood the gallery walls and even its floors. This new technique makes the fantastical scenes all the more vivid, literally as well as metaphorically. In order to engage with the work fully, the viewer must at some point along the panorama stand between the projector and the cutouts on the wall. When his or her shadow joins those already playing across the wall, the proposition is clear: this is a work that, while it may be the fanciful “narrative of a negress,” involves the hearts and minds of all people, depending on the role and the light in which they cast themselves.
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