Fort Worth art exhibit puts racism in your face

by Daniel A. Kusner of of Dallas Voice

I was sitting on a bench in the elliptical gallery that the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth usually reserves for Anselm Kiefer’s “Book with Wings.” This is the first room that kicks off the enormous exhibit “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.” Projected on a screen are eight black-and-white films that trace “The Creation of African-America.” These films serve as a quick introduction to Walker’s impeccable technique: genteel 18th Century cut-paper silhouettes and shadow puppetry that look like images the Disney workshop would create while animating “Tom Sawyer.”

Good thing the museum starts by inviting gallery-goers to sit down, because beneath Walker’s antebellum sentimentalism is a loaded gun aimed at stereotypes, racism, discrimination and slavery. The images are so forceful, so angry and so explicit they could knock you over.

In the fourth film, an enormously endowed mandigo slave starts having butt sex with his master. And then, the male slave owner gets pregnant and delivers a baby (or did it defecate that newborn?) … I was so aghast that my hand was already covering my mouth. But when the elderly heterosexual couple sitting on the bench in front of me grew so disgusted that they left in a huff, I started uncontrollably laughing— my lonely guffaws bouncing off the concrete walls.

Looking back, I’m glad I laughed. Because out of the 147 works in this exhibit, Walker never releases her intense grip — images and words that are obscene, graphic, profane and somehow sacred.

Walker’s recipe for art is to overwhelm — where every ingredient is a jalapeno doused in gasoline. Take “Letter from a Black Girl,” which is just text on a wall — a big, black, typewriter font that begins “Dear you hypocritical fucking Twerp.” If you can get past that opener, you’ll eventually trip over the sentence, “Id like to thank you for giving me clothes when I needed them and food when I needed it and for fucking my brains out when my brains needed fucking.”

Almost every detail stops you in your tracks — from a gun sticking out of a vagina in “Allegory,” to two black women on their knees sharing a blue double-headed dildo in “Do You Like Creme in Your Coffee and Chocolate in Your Milk?”

Walker’s message bashes you in the head — so hard you look for someplace to rest while soaking in the complexities. For about 10 minutes, I rested on another bench absolutely dumbstruck — thinking about how sex and love could have affected a slave who became pregnant by their master and then gave birth to child, who was also born a slave and fathered by their owner … .

Did owners really chop off the legs of runaways to warn other slaves not to escape?

Walker’s works are a dizzying phantasmagoria of whites and blacks copulating, farting, defecating, giving birth and suckling one another. Almost every scene is breathtakingly degrading. Is Walker coasting on shock value? Aren’t we past this?

Then there’s Walker’s statement that greets attendees before entering the exhibit: “As long as there’s a Darfur, as long as there are people saying ‘Hey, you don’t belong here’ to others, it only seems realistic to continue investigating the terrain of racism.”