Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (WALKER ART CENT)

Kara Walker's work has many suggestions,social; ones where you need some "code" to interpret what you see, how can you come to see eyes like yours; what you see; we come to comprehend the montrous system of slavery that supported the USA for on-going decades; her approach utilization of the ante-bellum South with silhouttes often surreal imagery,with odd icon as Marcus Garvey running with an ax,Return?, Return!?We need liberation in any form;Walker's narrative is intentionally distanced,like the subject itself;as if race can only seen, by not really being seen; white man's narrative discourse is the only one Walker seems to be saying;So no one can even tell their own story; Do we simply need more enlightenment? I don't think that will do it; hypocrisy will still reign supreme, the system needs it;here there are events you can't come to believe,a woman vomiting, a mother looking up the anus of her child or someone else's child abandoned; yet as you walk through this ir-reality are you in it,Are you awake now,theplantations that American still visit,visit in horror, or what? or do you simply want the "Dream" to continue; When do we get back to profit-taking? Her work still has a narrative discourse, you come to read it,yet you still don't understand; it is within a post-modern subject; spatiality is utilized to scatter the subject, forwards and backwards in his/herstory, but a storyline with no beginning or end, much like current reality with odd assortments of slaveries occuring,smuggled immigrant workers, "maquil" workers, sex slave trade; its all with us,next door; people still need to be saved from imperial systems of globalizations,concrete walls and pre-emptive wars.Do we still look at "Ol' Hannah" through a lens of what, our own existence, contemplating the self-conceit of our own portfolios now stolen by Wall Street;the issue of race,prejudice is still a very open question despite all the millions of dollars$$$ on holocaust museums and commissioned works of art, how much do we really comprehend of our "neighbor" Do we care?,or do we simply go on in our own hypocrisies,saying "we have ours, now let them get theirs" where's that "universalizing" trope humanity needs to survive and get their heads around the subject. Walker's work certainly triggers all these contemplations.

I do love Miss Walker beautiful but disturbing cutouts. The have an edge that deter them to fall in cuteness. But this book is sooo lame. The drawings are too raw to pass as finished work. The text, lurid. And the odd list in index cards: been there done that. What I wanted to see (the cutouts)are so poorly reproduced it's shameful. Do a favor to Miss Walker and do a book with good photography, splendid text and leave the drawings in an annex. I only kept the book as maybe it will become a rare print!

Great!

Kara Walker's Art currently exhibited at the UCLA Hammer Museum is so powerful I often think about the Art exhibit during my day it has become my companion,a stimulating and welcomed friend I recommed this book and urge all within a hundred miles of Los Angeles to visit the Hammer before June 8,2008

Kara Walker is a heavyweight of the international art circuit. She is photogenic. Her subject matter is bang on trend. Her approach to it is suitably ironic and subversive; in fact her work is so effectively controversial that both the legions of the politically correct and massed ranks of the right thinkers give it the oxygen of publicity in their vociferous denunciations of it. Subversive or not, her work is collected by such radicalised organisations as Deutsche Bank. And she has a style or brand that is instantly recognisable, so that every gallery of contemporary art that wants to taken seriously needs one of her major works.As a major figure of contemporary art, Kara attracts art criticism of the highest calibre. This book is evidence of the fact. There are several critical essays in this book. If you did not have a handle on her work before, you will after you have read these pieces. Swot up on them, memorise some of the best insights and you will not fail to impress at cocktail parties, gallery openings and intermissions at the opera.My only criticism of the criticism is that it is printed in brown ink on brown paper, which played havoc with my varifocals.Walker is famed for her large installations of silhouettes. Usually black on a pure white background, these play with society’s pre-conceptions of African American culture, taking us into an imaginary ante-bellum parallel universe where the white man’s simultaneous attraction to and terror of his imaginings of unbridled sex, uncontrollable fertility and licentious perversity among black people is given free rein. It is a dreamscape of Uncle Toms, picaninnies and heroic tumescences that launch the proud owner skyward.There are five of these installations shown in this book, each copied in miniature by means of fold-outs including the famed 1994 work, Gone..[Amazon’s auto-censor seems to be preventing me from giving the full title of this work]. The book is almost worth buying for these fold-outs alone. Each is endlessly inventive and is full of amusing detail to keep the interpreter entertained for hours.However, the bulk of the book is made up of a large number of lesser works, most of which are sketches where the artist is framing and rehearsing ideas for her larger works. These are interesting, but they are the equivalent of those Bob Dylan albums that comprise of alternative takes of his great songs - listened to once and then filed away.The front cover and final section of the book include some of Walker’s written works of art. As the long and complex titles of her larger works reveal, Walker’s creativity is not limited to the graphic arts; she also has a way with words. These works are as subtle and amusing as her silhouettes, and should not be overlooked. In fact, if you become a purchaser of the book, it would be hard to overlook them as one of them takes up all of the front cover of the book, expletives and all.The book also includes an exhaustive exhibition history and a voluminous bibliography.Finally, it is worth pointing out that, brown ink and paper aside, the book is beautifully produced and is, if not an art work itself, a labour of love. Connoisseurs of beautifully produced art books would savour this book.For serious fans of Kara Walker, this book is a must. Art book connoisseurs would also find a lot to like. Casual fans of Kara would do better to wait for something more popular to come out. Four stars for the production, the criticism and scholarship, and the fold-outs.

Qualität der Bilder und der Texte sind sehr gut. Wer sich für Kara Walker interessiert, kann hier ohne Bedenken zuschlagen. Habe den Preis jedenfalls nicht bereut.