In 2018 Walker brought her dynamic vision of the past to Algiers Point, New Orleans, once a holding area for slaves. A small, inadequate plaque marks the spot. A steam-powered calliope was Walker’s typically unsubtle intervention, a catastrophic caravan that took the sentimental organ music of the Mississippi and recast it in a monstrous carved box of black steel, through which steam poured and history seeped. To let off steam, as a calliope must do, is visually cathartic, and the music was black resistance and uplift combined: “negro” spirituals, “We Shall Overcome,” “Down by the Riverside,” etc. But the sound each pipe made was somewhere between scream, off-key wail, and—thanks to the huff and puff of the steam itself—a hellish and industrialized machine of torture. The effect was dreadful, in the ancient meaning of that term, and too provoking and active to be called, exactly, a monument. Monuments are complacent; they put a seal upon the past, they release us from dread. For Walker dread is an engine: it prompts us to remember and rightly fear the ruins we shouldn’t want to return to, and don’t wish to re-create—if we’re wise. Dread is surely one of the things we want history to cause in us, lest we forget.
But to talk of Walker’s art this way, as if history were its only concern, and our “opinions” about that history its only content, is to traduce the art itself. Much has been written about Kara Walker, too much—journalistic debates about her often threaten to subsume any real attempt to see this work in all its strangeness.9 (Or to allow it the intimate psychology we simply assume with an artist like, say, Tracey Emin, whose engagement with feminist ideas and feminist art history in no way precludes our noticing the personal.) Walker:
The illusion is that it’s about past events…simply about a particular point in history and nothing else. It’s really part of the ruse that I tend to like to approach the complexities of my own life by distancing myself and finding a parallel in something that’s prettier, more genteel.10
These complexities have included some masochistic sexual relationships, a long romantic history with white men, a mixed-race child, and inconvenient psychic attractions to “heroic” white figures like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind that leave her “wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.” In art school she was tormented by the sense that she was “going to put my foot in my mouth if I was honest about my own failings as a black woman,” and in one early interview she recalls a slogan on a popular 1990s T-shirt, It’s a Black thing, You wouldn’t understand: “It inspired a whole way of thinking for me. Because, obviously the ‘you’ in the saying is Not Black…. So what does this mean to the person who is black and still doesn’t quite understand?”
These uncollegiate expressions of failure and incomprehension in Walker’s retellings reveal—like the border between her black cutout edges and her white backgrounds—something significant in the contrast. For of course you can’t fail as a white woman qua white woman; whiteness is not formulated as a test. A white thing is, by definition, whatever a white person does. Whereas blackness is nothing but test. So many things can threaten a black woman’s blackness (in the eyes of white people, black people, herself) that the fear of this threat can constitute an entire shadow identity, if one allows it to do so. The wrong kind of art, the wrong kind of husband, the wrong kinds of interests, the wrong kind of curiosity, the wrong kinds of desires, the wrong kinds of confessions. Confessions like this: “If the work is reprehensible, that work is also me, coming from a reprehensible part of me.”