Transgression and Violence

Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker
Author(s): David Wall

Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2010), pp. 277-299
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40983288
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Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking
in the Art of Kara Walker
David Wall
1 . Quoted in Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the

Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke
University Press: Durham, NC, 2004), p. 15.
The notability that attached itself to the African -American artist Kara Walker
2. .Howardena Pindell, 'Diaspora /Realities/
Strategies', in Howardena Pindell (ed.), Kara almost from the moment she emerged onto the American art scene in the
Walker-No /Kara Walker-Yes/Kara Walker-?
mid-1990s has doubtlessly assisted in both her individual success and the
(Midmarch Arts Press: New York, 2009), p. 61.
mini-industry of scholarship that has developed around her work. Her
3. Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable, p. 43. invocation of grotesque racial stereotypes as the central feature of her
4. Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total
enormous silhouette tableaux transgressed some of the most sensitive social
Darkness (MIT Press: Cambridge, 2007), p. 23. and cultural sensibilities of late -twentieth -century America. Continuing to
wrestle, as she has done, with the dark gothic underbelly of the American
5. Robert Storr, 'Spooked', in Philippe Vergne,
Sander Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, and Robert fabric, her work manages to engage the taboo-laden territory of racial
Storr (eds), Kara Walker: My Complement, My representation and, in doing so, forces an unsettling confrontation with
Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Walker Art Centre:
images of violence and depravity and the repeated transgression of sexual,
Minneapolis, 2007), p. 65.
social, and racial codes.
6. Quoted in Anne M. Wagner, 'Kara Walker: What began as notability was transformed into something approaching
The Black- White Relation', in Ian Berry, Darby
notoriety in 1997 when, on the back of the critical acclaim she had garnered
English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt
(eds), Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (Rizzoli for works such as Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred
International Publications, Inc.: New York, Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994) and The
2007), p. 93. End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995), she
became the youngest ever recipient of the John D. and Catherine
T. Mac Arthur Foundation 'genius' award. This sudden celebrity caused some
consternation amongst a constituency of (mostly) African- American artists, of
whom the two most well known and outspoken were Betye Saar and
Howardena Pindell. Saar's response was to undertake a letter- writing protest
campaign that condemned any public display of Walker's 'derogatory and
racist' work. Pindell, for her part, delivered a paper at the 1997
Johannesburg Biennale in which she accused Walker of 'catering to the bestial
fantasies about black culture created by white supremacy and racism' . Walker's
proponents, however, have seen in the grotesque imagery an excoriating and
parodie interrogation that, variously, 'calls forth the ghosts from our
collective psyche', 'authorises a history of unfixed power relations and
counternormative desires', exposes 'a black hole at the core of Western
culture', and provides a visual landscape in which 'the black object. . .
[becomes] . . . the black subject in a profound act of artistic exorcism'.6
This debate was - and remains - profoundly important in efforts to make
sense of Walker's work within the broad contexts of American and
African- American art and culture. It forms an entire chapter of the first full
monograph dedicated to Walker, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw's Seeing the
Unspeakable (2007), and recurs as a subject repeatedly in books attached to
Walker's exhibitions such as Narratives of a Negress (2003) and My Complement,
My Enemy, My Oppressor, My love (2007). Indeed, any engagement with
Walker is almost inevitably drawn into its orbit and I too shall (briefly)
address the controversy later. However, the central focus of this essay is the
© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 277-299
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcq035
David Wall
way in which transgression helps to frame and explain the particular and
powerful charge of Walker's work. It is my argument that transgression is
built into Walker's work so that the viewer is never allowed to maintain any
neutral distance from the image and is, thus, continually forced into the
recognition and acceptance of her or his own complicity in the 'violence of
looking' at the heart of racial representation. Situating the viewer's
relationship to the 'scopic regime' of race across a broad spectrum of visual
culture, I consider Walker's work in relation to other visual texts, such as
Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (1859), and via critical frameworks
provided by scholars of transgression and its cognate forms such as deviance
and carnival. Most significantly, I turn to the work of Russian critic Mikhail
Bakhtin whose work on carnival and the grotesque, though rooted in the
literary rather than visual text, offers a model for understanding the
multitude of discursive and cultural forms that the transgressive can assume
and the powerful charge possessed by inversion, abjection, and hybridity.
To speak of transgression is also and inevitably to speak of excess. Indeed, it is
in the very exceeding of limits, rules, and boundaries - the breaking of taboo -
that the transgressive resides. For Chris Jenks, the excess of transgression works 7. Chris Jenks, Transgression (Routledge:
as a 'dynamic force in cultural reproduction . . . [thatl . . . opens up chaos and New York, 2003), p. 7.
reminds us of the necessity of order'. As it does so, it 'prevents stagnation by 8. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of
breaking the rule and it ensures stability by reaffirming the rule'. When we Art (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003),
p. 19.
think of transgressive rule breaking in an art historical sense, we are, of
course, drawn to one of the central tenets of modernism. In this history, we
are similarly given to understand transgression as something positive. As
Anthony Julius puts it, 'to describe an artwork as transgressive is to offer it
a compliment'. And yet transgression is always and simultaneously deeply
troubling, for formal and aesthetic transgressions are forever shadowed by
much broader cultural and ideological concerns.
Fig. 1. Kara Walker, Endless Conundrum, 2001, cut paper on wall, 16 x 37 ft. 6 in. (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
280 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010
The ubiquitous visual tropes of Kara Walker's work - race, sex, the gothic, the
grotesque, violence, violation, abjection, obscenity, desire, death, excrement, and
9. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics

slavery - collide and crash violently and constantly with the racial and sexual
and Poetics of Transgression (Cornell University registers of American history and culture. Her representations of transgression
Press: Ithaca, 1986), p. 3. and excess - those visual discursive eruptions that leak from the confines of
10. Mark Reinhardt, 'The Art of Racial the image - possess a disturbing and destabilising power. However, as
Profiling', in Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian mentioned above, the transgression of visual codes is never merely an aesthetic
Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt (eds), Kara Walker:
event. As all cultural domains are 'continually structured, legitimated, and
Narratives of a Negress (Rizzoli International
dissolved' in respect of each other, to transgress the dominant modes of visual
Publications, Inc.: New York, 2007), p. 114.
representation is to simultaneously attack the 'the cultural scripts and social
1 1 . Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and
structures that shape them'.
American Visual Culture (University of California
Press: Berkeley, 2005), p. 14.
Because we are so profoundly reliant upon the world of images that surrounds
and supports us for our sense of who we are, the visual landscape of the racial
12. Darby English, 'This Is Not About the Past:
Silhouettes in the Work of Kara Walker', in Ian
subject/ object is a particularly potent arena for the articulation, subversion, and
Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark transgression of broader discursive categories. As the repository for a whole
Reinhardt (eds), Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress series of implicit, unspoken, and unacknowledged fears, desires, loves, hates,
(Rizzoli International Publications, Inc.:
rages, and resentments, the labour of any racialised image is always subject to
New York, 2007), p. 152.
excess. Even when racialised images do not conform to grotesque or gross
13. English, 'How to See', p. 76. caricature, they are still subject to what Martin Berger describes as those
'discourses circulating outside art objects [that] circumscribe their significance'.11
But Kara Walker foregrounds the notion of excess by utilising the dainty and
polite form of the silhouette to construct her transgressive images. The violence
of the imagery that stands in disruptive contrast to the delicacy of the medium
acts as a perfect form for the elucidation of dissonance and, thus, underscores its
excessive value. This dissonance is a central formal feature of Walker's art
allowing her work to become, as Darby English puts it, 'overstuffed with subject
matter that devastates the medium's innocent reputation'.1
In Endless Conundrum, An African Anonymous Adventuress (Fig. 1), Walker
employs the visual tropes of Africa and imperialism as they are ubiquitously
articulated throughout Western popular and elite cultural forms. Made up of
a series of vignettes that collapse the jolly cartoon world of Hergé and
Warner Bros, with the avant-garde high art primitivism of Roger Fry and the
unhinged horror of Heart of Darkness, the piece confronts the viewer with that
concatenation of power, desire, fear, and anxiety that underpins much
Western representation of the African body. Like most of Walker's large-scale
installations, Endless Conundrum offers no centre and no vanishing point.
There is no landscape and no narrative to follow, but merely a series of
visual ejaculations that erupt from the focal plane and shuttle between it and
the cultural and social registers beyond. This lack of location or landscape,
however, is easily overcome. Shaped as we are by the visual and verbal
grammars of primitivism, these figures are deeply, and all -too -comfortably,
familiar. We do not need anything to tell us where this is because we know
what it is. Limned in that space Darby English identifies 'between narrative
and the forces that erode it', the image insistently demands that, like
Conrad's Marlow, we chart the blank spaces, fill in the gaps, and complete
the mapping of the terrain for ourselves.
That we are able to do this so easily reveals our deep and continuing
investment in the currency of the colonial narrative. We, as western viewers,
constitute that narrative inasmuch as in the process of looking at the image
we inevitably put the disparate fragments together. Indeed, in our tracing of
the generic contours of primitivism, the image does not exist without our
narrativising impulse. But we also constitute the narrative in the sense that
we are the featured subjects and objects of the image, endlessly constitutive
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 281
David Wall
of, and reconstituted by, that same discourse. In this way, Endless Conundrum
refuses to allow us to absolve ourselves of the responsibility for this colonial
Jetzendramaturgie - this drama of fragments - that is so 'fundamental to the
14. Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage
Western sense of self and Other' .
intellects, Modern Lives (University of Chicago
Walker is offering neither a corrective version of African or colonial history, Press: Chicago, 1991), p. 8.
nor making some glib gesture towards the inequities of imperialism, but is 15. Julius, 'Transgressions', p. 23.
confronting us rather with the unsettling collision and collusion of violence
16. John Jervis, Transgressing the Modern:
and eroticism that is the West's African fantasy. As her métonymie figures Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness
play out a series of encoded significations that confirm our presence in the (Blackwell: Oxford, 1999), p. 4.
imaginary of the 'dark continent', they enact a danse macabre of murderous
17. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black:
anger and raging desire. From the cavorting cannibal to the carved idols to Images of African and Blacks in Western Popular
the safari-suited explorer stealing away with his grotesque fetish-child over Culture (Yale University Press: New Haven,
1995), p. 234.
his shoulder, Endless Conundrum manages to both confirm and subvert our
deepest sense of the primitive experience as a form of transgression that 18. English, 'How to See', p. 120.
'mixes dread and ecstasy'. Walker's parodie invocations of images of
shamanism, slavery, 1950s design, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,
Josephine Baker, Saartjie Baartman, tribal fetishes, abstract carving, and
totemism, among much else, maintain an insistent threnodic chorus of those
iconic signifiers that have repeatedly reduced Africa to a set of discursive tropes.
In view of John Jer vis's argument that in Western notions of Otherness,
transgression will inevitably involve 'hybridisation, the mixing of categories
and the questioning of the boundaries that separate categories', the figure
of the kneeling white male (Fig. 2) with its attenuated erection and
coconut-shell bra, embodies perfectly the complex and contradictory
transvestism of racial subjectivity. As an amalgam of competing discourses the
figure functions as at once both black and white, feminine and masculine,
and savage and civilised, and echoes not only the iconography of nineteenth
century abolitionism but also the visual erotics of the early modernism of
Gaugin and Matisse, and the comic grotesqueries of 1940s 'race' cartoons.
Pleading, praying, or submitting, it shits out a perfectly formed miniature
version of itself in an act of simultaneous supplication and replication and, in
its febrile performance, points us towards the more brutal hybrid coupling of
the grappling figures to its left (Fig. 3).
Displaying the visual registers of disgust and desire that permeate primitivist
discourses, this pairing articulates the intimate relations between the erotic
surplus of colonial representation and the 'logics of power' that constantly
struggles to demarcate the boundaries between civilisation and savagery.
Paired as a series of synchronous encounters between black /white, savage/
civilised, nature /culture, and dominance /submission, the figures' frantic and
livid encounter reveals their profound dependence on those very categories.
But this is also a site of resistance, subversion, and category collapse. The
silhouette as a form determines that though we might identify two
individually racially coded bodies, we are at the same time looking at one
being. This hybridity is deeply unsettling, not only because it involves a
series of transgressive acts of phallic violence, but also because it violates the
categorical structures of bourgeois individuation. As the somatic, social, and
sexual boundaries collapse, what we see, then, is no longer two beings
struggling with each other, but one grotesque and hybrid creature in the
perverse self- cannibalising process of both fucking and feeding upon its own
body.
These transgressive excesses of the 'hyper sexual' point not only to the
violence at the heart of the colonial encounter, but also to the ineluctable
presence of the black African body in the white Western imaginary. This
Fig. 2. Kara Walker, Endless Conundrum (detail). (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
Fig. 3. Kara Walker, Endless Conundrum (detail). (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
19. Homi Babha, 'Remembering Fanon: Self,
Psyche and the Colonial Condition', in Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial body has functioned - and continues to function - as a zone for the playing out
Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader of Western anxieties over culture, nature, history, and subjectivity, in a process
(Columbia University Press: New York, 1994),
that Homi Babha refers to as 'the White man's artifice [being] inscribed upon
p. 117.
the Black man's body'. From earliest European encounters with Africa, the
black body was inevitably differentiated from the white. However, what we
might see as the full-blown pathological fascination with, fear of, and reliance
upon, the black body as a structuring element of Western cultural and moral
David Wall
registers, emerges as a consequence of the developing technologies of

assessment and communication from the late eighteenth century onwards.
Perhaps, the most significant consequence of those emergent technologies 20. Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader
was that, as a symptom of that 'immensely productive visual colonialism' (Routledge: London, 1998), p. 282.
that characterised the imperial project, the African body became something
21. Anthony Butchart, Anatomy of Power (Zed
always and everywhere to be looked at. Books: London, 1998), p. 2.
As a central feature of the colonial enterprise, the scopic presence of this
22. Butchart, 'Anatomy of Power', p. 175.
body found its way ubiquitously into every aspect of Western visual culture.
23. Pieterse, 'White on Black', p. 94.
Whether advertising tea or soap, running around after Fay Wray in the
back-lots of Hollywood, performing in the nightclubs of 1920s Paris, or as 24. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the
the object of emerging academic disciplines such as anthropology and Nature of Looking (Harcourt: New York, 1997),
p. 27.
ethnography, it became both subject to, and a product of, a broad set of
assessments, disciplines, and regulatory regimes. As Alexander Butchart
points out in The Anatomy of Power, there is a history here, one in which 'the
African body has been created and transformed as an object of knowledge'.
In this sense, as a construct for the Western gaze to consume, assess, desire,
and fear, and as the repository of a whole series of stratifications linked to
broader categories of culture, race, and sexuality, we might say along with
Butchart that the African body was 'fabricated not found'.
That we can legitimately talk of the 'fabrication' of the African body as a
feature of Western visual culture, should not lead us to forget, however, that
real bodies and real lives were destroyed routinely as a consequence of the
colonial presence of Europeans in Africa and the classificatory and disciplinary
regimes they instituted. Though an image exists entirely independently as an
object, it remains inseparable from those wider regimes of regulation and
control and often - perhaps always? - goes hand-in-hand with them. The
famous early -nineteenth- century lithograph of Saartjie Baartman (Fig. 4), for
example, is telling evidence of the ways in which multiple discourses of race,
gender, nationality, science, and sexuality are transcoded across the body as
they converge upon the image. It is, at the same time, an interesting and
self-conscious comment on the nature of the gaze, as this French satire projects
the whole process of looking- as -violation as a form of anti- British propaganda.
However, the print's relatively benign representation of the physical body of
Baartman ameliorates neither the sideshow exploitation of her real body nor its
visual fabrication as the conduit for Anglo-French antagonisms. Indeed, it
demonstrates quite clearly that to engage in any act of looking by which
'subject peoples are turned into visual objects' is, perforce, an act of violation.
In his analysis of an early-twentieth-century photograph of a eunuch (Fig. 5),
James Elkins identifies that combination of violation and violence as a
contingency of all visual objectification. While outlining the ways in which
the image was created as part of a medical procedure designed to allow for
the objective assessment of a body in trauma, Elkins demonstrates that the
claims to objectivity of those surrounding discourses are undermined by an
image whereby, 'seeing is not only possessing (the doctor 'owned' this case:
he was the authority, he got to lecture about it, he had the reproduction
rights to his photograph and his article) but also controlling, objectifying,
and denigrating. In short, it is an act of violence and it creates pain' .
As Elkins says, this is a difficult image to confront. However, the relationship
between image, body, and viewer is complicated. And removing it from the
context of medical assessment and away from the disciplinary strictures of La
Salpêtrière does not constitute an act of rescue. It is still subject to a whole
set of other invasive discourses, Elkins' book and this essay not least amongst
them. The act of looking is unavoidably aggressive and transgressive in its
Flg. 4. The Curious in Ecstasy, or the Shoelaces, 1814.
utter disregard for the privacy of the body, and forces us into a voyeuristic
25. Elkins, 'The Object Stares Back', p. 28.
complicity in the Violent hatred and sexual obsession' that Elkins suggests
26. John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, informs the photograph.
Catastrophe and Wir (New York University Press:
The diagnostic narrative that accompanies the eunuch's photographic record,
New York, 1998), p. 8.
and involves both a personal history' of the subject as well as graphic
27. Taylor, 'Body Horror', p. 14. descriptions of rectal and genital examination, serves, for Elkins, to underline
the status of the body as both subject and object in a continual process of
dehumanisation and re-humanisation. While sharing a concern with the
complex processes of representing the human body in trauma, John Taylor
suggests further that it is never merely disgust, horror, or fascination that
motivates or moves the viewer. In his analysis of the use of photographs of the
dead, dying, and deformed in public media, he argues that viewers will bring a
multitude of complex responses from horror, guilt, and shame to curiosity and
even, as he puts it, 'aesthetic pleasure'. He further adduces the importance
of transgression as viewers are offered the 'opportunity to stare at and become
enthralled by forbidden or taboo subjects'. For Taylor, this is seldom merely
a prurient exercise - though, on occasion it may be that as well - but an
acknowledgment that to reveal the realities of, for instance, war through
'body horror' photographs, has an implicitly moral purpose as an 'act of
David Wall
memorialising and remembrance' that presents truth by way of 'evidence of what

has been'. In this way, the transgressive act serves ultimately to maintain the
boundaries of civility that the act itself temporarily suspends.
Returning to a consideration specifically of the racialised body, it must be
noted that Elkins's analysis of the way in which the act of looking can 'turn a
human being into a ... medical condition' does not address the profound
importance of race. This image was, after all, produced by and for a white
medical establishment and must be seen as part of that general
pathologisation of the black body as a site of disease, diagnosis, instruction,
and comparison. Imbricated in the discourses of race and science, then, the
photographic record of the black body is, in fact, another location of its
narrative production; and the availability of that black body to the
scrutinising medical gaze of the white eye is aggressively enforced. Making
this point explicit in Allegory (1996) (Fig. 6), Walker depicts an apparent
medical examination in which a white youth has inserted a telescope into the
vagina of a young black woman. Employing a double entendre that is both
bleak and oblique in its reference to the 'middle passage', this perverse
re-deployment of that most innocent of children's games, doctors-and-
nurses, takes place in a water-filled dungeon. With her legs splayed, the girl
looks to the ceiling as if trying to remove herself from any awareness or
acknowledgement of the abuse that is taking place, an act that is
compounded in its vicious irony by the fact that she is forced to provide the
illumination for her own assault. The young man wants to literally get inside
the black body, to know it, to classify it but, and perhaps most of all, to
fuck it. In a culture formed by the complicated interpolations of pathological Fig. 5. Moroccan eunuch, from Nouvelle
denial and violent desire for the abject, sexual aggression, fascination, and Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, vol. 19, 1906.
longing is inscribed through the legitimating discourses of medicine.

In speaking to the histories of representation, and echoing both Taylor's and
Elkins' point that looking can be a most powerful and invasive form of 28. Taylor, 'Body Horror', p. 195.
possession the acknowledgement of the recoding, as opposed to the recording,
29. Elkins, The Object Stares Back', p. 27.
of the black body in this way is central to Walker's work. Confronting us with
30. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique
the deliberate and self-conscious processes of image-making forces us to
of the Judgment of Taste (Harvard University Press:
acknowledge the fictionality of the body and its representations. As Walker Cambridge, 1984), p. 3.
collapses narrative, landscape, space, and time, she subverts the logics of realist
31. Storr, 'Spooked', p. 69.
representation as embodied in the rationalist eye of the camera, and insistently
refuses the organising logic of the classificatory enterprise. In doing so she
ruptures our sense of engagement with the racial image in an effort to make
us understand that we never look 'innocently' and, as Bourdieu puts it, that
'the "eye" is a product of history'. Walker is not merely identifying the
distorting logic and contradictions of stereotypes or articulating deep
ambivalences over racial and racist desire, but by employing a 'simultaneous
mismatch between decorative elegance and taboo -breaking vulgarity', she
forces us to confront the suddenly glaring and obvious contingent relationship
between form and content and, thus, defamiliarises the act of looking itself.
Critical response to Walker's work has focused mainly on the large-scale
installations, not least because their imposing size is in itself a form of surplus
that adumbrates the impact of their excessive content. To confront a Walker
mural in a gallery space is a genuinely unsettling experience, again not least
because the size of the construction drags us into the visual text as participants
as well as observers. We become, in short, part of the installation. It is not
merely the shadows of others (and Others) that we see parading around us,
but also our own shadows thrown up upon the walls. In the case of pieces
such as Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary But We Tressed On) (2000) that
Fig. 6. Kara Walker, Allegory, 1996, gouache on paper, 63 (3/4) x 51 (1/2) in. (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
David Wall
utilise the projection of overhead transparencies, this might literally be the case as
our moving shadows can be incorporated into the image, creating what Corris and
Hobbs describe as 'a blurring of boundaries between self and shadow, black and
32. Michael Corris and Robert Hobbs, 'Reading
white' that is 'capable of destroying established and limited subjectivities'. But Black through White in the Work of Kara
metaphorically speaking it is always our own shadows that we see cavorting Walker', Art History, vol. 26, no. 3, June 2003,
p. 425.
through these nightmarish visions. Walker's employment of the shadow in the
form of the silhouette, a superficial rendering that was supposedly and 33. Shaw, 'Seeing the Unspeakable', p. 154.
paradoxically able to reveal deep underlying and hidden truths of character, 34. Wagner, 'Kara Walker: The Black- White
speaks to what Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw describes as those 'monstrous ghosts Relation', p. 93.
haunting the American imago'.

35. Patricia Yeager, 'Circuiti- Atlantic
However, the complexities, incongruities, transgressions, excesses, and Superabundance: Milk as World-Making in Alice
ironies of Walker's large-scale pieces are thematically and visually encoded Randall and Kara Walker', American Literature, vol.
78, no. 4, 2006, p. 777.

throughout her work and the smaller individual pieces still engender that
'discomfiting subjection of viewers to a radically destabilizing form of 36. Shaw, 'Seeing the Unspeakable', p. 39.
consciousness'. Indeed, images such as Consume (1998) and Before the Battle
(Chickin Dumplin') (1995) could just as well be details from larger works
such as Slavery! Slavery! or The End of Uncle Tom. Both speak, as Patricia
Yeager puts it, 'foundationally about the reproductive sources of a plantation
economy' as they appropriate and invert popular visual tropes, in order to
violate the discursive orthodoxies of racial subjectivity. Before the Battle
(Fig. 7) portrays a white Civil War soldier suckling at the breast of a young
black woman. There is a certain pyramid-like symmetry to this arrangement,
with the falling chicken leg to the left of the image echoing the shape of the
sack slung low across the soldier's back, that helps it work as an interesting
metaphor for both the rapacious gluttony of slavery and the co-dependent
reliance of mutual Otherness. Consume (Fig. 8) is a much more viscerally
disturbing piece with its inversion and perversion of a nurturing motherhood
that involves not only symbolic cannibalism but also the image of a small
child sucking on an enormous phallus. What Shaw describes as these
'magnetic and disturbing spectres from a mythical past engaged in an
apocryphal and pornographic, unsentimental master-slave dialectic',
however, find a no less dramatic expression in a number of minor gouache
and watercolour works unhinged from any sense of epic scale or grand
parodie narrative.
In the series Negress Notes (Brown Follies), there is an image of two white
men - father and son perhaps? - engaged simultaneously in a sexual act
with a young black girl. This image (Fig. 9) is shocking in its portrayal of a
young child being used in such a sexually explicit manner. More than that,
however, considering the nature of sexual relationships extant in slavery, the
three characters may even be father /daughter /sister /brother, thus adding the
shock of incest to the image's transgressive charge. However, for an act of
sexual violence and violation, this is a stunningly static image. The focus of
the two men is insistently and entirely on each other. The girl is hanging
lifeless, as though a carcass on a spit, and it is this humiliating reduction of
the body to an inanimate object that is the real event portrayed, for this
image is only tangentially about sex. Its real focus is the nature of power and
the ontological crisis of being /object that speaks to the heart of the
ideological and social landscape of racial identity and experience. Literal
objectification was, of course, the legal and social status of blacks in
antebellum America. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for all her ambivalences, was
emphasising this when she gave Uncle Tom's Cabin its original subtitle of 'The
Man Who Was a Thing'. Indeed, the ontological struggle to demonstrate
human-ness was the key feature of the whole genre of the Slave Narrative.
Fig. 7. Kara Walker, Before the Battle {Chickin' Dumplin'), cut paper on canvas, 1995, 48 (1/4) x
54 in. (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
So, when we see the men in this image toasting each other and holding hands in
mutual celebration, we are seeing their essential conviviality and communality
- their humanness - predicated on the literal and metaphorical objectifìcation
of the black body. All that notwithstanding, the surplus value of this image and
its unmanageable excess of content, makes its transgressive charge extremely
difficult to address. We are confronted with an image that shocks us into
considering both the nature of representation and its impossibility in bridging
the gulf between our experience as viewers and the experience of slavery.
This, after all, is what Gwendolyn Shaw is talking about when she addresses
the notion of Walker's 'seeing the unspeakable' - that effort implicit in her
work to 're-member' that which, as Adorno said of writing poetry after
Auschwitz, seems to stand beyond the capacity of the imagination to embrace
or express.
Walker's portrayal of fucking, sodomy, cannibalism, vaginal rape, oral rape,
anal rape, shitting, beating, whipping, and lynching violates the boundaries of
David Wall
Fig. 8. Kara Walker, Consume, 1998, cut paper on wall, 69 x 32 in. (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
Fig. 9. Kara Walker, Negress Notes (Brown Follies), 1996-1997, watercolour on paper, 9 x 6 in. (Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
David Wall
orthodox understanding as it unveils the profound connection between being,

sex, race, desire, and violence. But as we look at these acts of violence in
Walker's work, our looking is also an act of violence. As Walker performs
37. Teresa DeLauritis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism,
her acts of discursive and scopic violence in her violation of those normative
Semiotics, Cinema (Indiana University Press:
codes of visual and ideological containment she forces us, then, into Bloomington, 1984), p. 44.
complicity with those acts. As she systematically addresses not only the
38. Elkins, 'The Object Stares Back', p. 115.
dominant discourses of racialised image-making, but also the nature of
representation itself - by using the disrupted visual plane and landscape -
she addresses the deeply complex and complicated ways in which these
discourses are interpolated throughout the social and cultural body. We do
not merely witness them; we are not merely victim or perpetrator; and we
do not merely stand idly while the images do their work. As Teresa de
Lauritis put it in relation to cinema, we do not exist inside or outside of the
visual text, we 'intersect' the visual text as we are 'intersected' by it.
Walker disturbs our sense of looking by the deep ambivalence that she
generates in engaging all registers of racial representation that speak to desire
as well as disgust, excitement as well as excess, and to entrancement as well
as transgression. As much as we might want to obey the command of
Walker's installation and Look Away! Look Away!, we find ourselves drawn
ineluctably back to the spectacle before us.
Much of Walker's work, then, is addressing the act of looking, and the
relationship between victim and voyeur, the powerful and the powerless, and
those with the right to look and those who must accept being looked at.
However, an understanding that there is always a politics of looking, a
knowledge of the essential unreliability of the image, or an awareness that
pictures do not offer some unmediated access to the world, does not
necessarily make the images any easier to look at. As part of his analysis of
the eunuch photograph, James Elkins invokes Bataille 's suggestion that there
are certain things that we simply cannot see, the most powerful of which is
death. Describing a series of photographs of the skinning and evisceration of
a Chinese peasant woman, he argues that it is not merely the pain,
humiliation, violence, and dehumanisation that makes the pictures difficult to
look at, but that they 'hold the idea of death . . . trapped between the
frames'.38 I would argue that Walker's work brings us to a similar place, and
a similar traumatic confrontation with that violent and terrible space between
death and life, being and non -being, black and white, slave and master, and
voyeur and object. Indeed, it is in that space between - the gap, the
rupture, the split - where we are made conscious of the surplus of meaning
routinely hidden, the excess of desire, fear, trauma, and self- hatred that is
the cornerstone of racial representation.
It is in this context that I want to turn briefly to another well-known image
that locates the processes of looking at the centre of its scopic registry, Eastman
Johnson's Negro Life at the South (1859) (Fig. 10). From the moment of its first
exhibition at the National Academy of Design show in 1859 - only a few
months before John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry - this painting's
apparent ambivalence over the issue of slavery allowed it to be read as both a
representation of the essentially benign nature of that institution and, at
exactly the same time, a picture of its profoundly vicious and destructive
consequences. For supporters of slavery, the seemingly contented demeanour
of most of the painting's characters was evidence of the positive effects that
the guiding hand of white paternalism might have on the barbarous nature of
uncivilised blacks. Abolitionists however saw, in the image of dilapidation and
ruin, a metaphor for the corrosive depravity of an institution that destroyed
Fig. 10. Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, oil on linen, 1859, 37 x 46 in. S-225. (Collection of the New York Historical Society.)
39. Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion:

families, brutalised slave and slaveholder alike, and ate away at the religious and
Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century moral fibre of the state and body politic. As well as serving as an
(Thames and Hudson: London, 1990), p. 111. instructive example of the essential mutability of all images, these early and
40. John Davis, 'Eastman Johnson's "Negro Life contradictory responses to the painting - what Albert Boime refers to as the
at the South" and Urban Slavery in Washington 'cutting-edge between pro- and anti-slavery views' - reveal, moreover, a
D.C, The Art Bulletin, vol. 80, no. 1, March
significant and shared investment in the visual registers of realism, with each
1998, p. 72.
staking a claim to Johnson's painting as a truthful documentary record of
black life in America.
After its initial showing, the painting assumed its place in the roiling
heteroglot spectacle of antebellum visual culture and in becoming the 'most
popular genre painting of its day',4 thus demonstrated the utility of its
ambiguity to a broad audience. But Negro Life at the South is, of course, not
an objective document of social experience and its real cultural labour is to
offer a structured sense of racial identity for its white constituency. In
confirming for white viewers a sense of self-hood and social placement the
painting is emblematic in its mapping of the visual tropes and encodings that
shape the scopic regime of race and validate the 'white gaze'. In the young
white woman in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting, we see the
David Wall
full range of the white social imaginary as it looks at, embraces, and constructs
the black body. Fear, desire, ambivalence, voyeurism, scopophilia, distaste, and
eroticism are all traced through this white body as it acts as a prism for the 41. Philippe Vergne, 'The Black Saint is the
multivalent discourses of racial identity and anxiety. Hovering on the Sinner Lady', in Philippe Vergne, Sander Gilman,
threshold of entry, she holds back, both fearful of, and deeply compelled by, Thomas McEvilley, and Robert Storr (eds), Kara
Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My
the prospect of entering a black world.
love (Walker Art Centre: Minneapolis, 2007),
Her apparent ambivalence notwithstanding however, there is no suggestion p. 16.
that this voyeuristic gaze - a product of social and racial authority - is
42. Wagner, 'Kara Walker: The Black-White
anything other perfectly appropriate. It is by definition possessive in the Relation', p. 95.
broadest sense: possessed by the woman in the picture; possessed by Eastman
Johnson; and possessed by the painting's intended white audience. The value
of this painting, then, is an investment in possession: the painting can be
possessed; prints can be possessed; the black body - literally - could be
possessed. This function of possession as display and performance is,
therefore, built into the visual encoding of the black body for a white
audience in the most fundamental way.
Johnson's famous image is imbricated in Walker's work in any number of
ways. Her black bodies acknowledge Johnson's visual frame of reference by,
in their excesses and transgressions, utterly refuting them. And the dark and
destabilising transgressive fantasies of Walker's silhouettes are - ironically -
probably much closer to the 'truth' of slavery that Johnson's painting could
possibly be. Phillippe Vergne suggests that Slavery! Slavery! is actually a direct
response to Johnson's painting in the way that it 'asserts the absurdity and
incongruity of such depictions and exposes the other side of this
smoke-and-mirror image'.41 More than that, it articulates sexual desire,
whiteness, blackness, ambivalence, and anxiety as well as that implicit
violence of looking. The young woman depicted by Eastman Johnson as so
tentatively and politely stepping through the doorway is, let us not forget,
violating the black bodies she perceives just as surely as the characters in
Walker's Negress Notes. However, Johnson's painting occludes the excessive
and transgressive. Its surplus is hidden within the visual restraint of the
realism of a nineteenth-century genre painting that serves as what Tara
McPherson would call the 'lenticular' counterpoint to the grotesque
violations of Walker's work.
But this nineteenth- century painting is also a twenty -first- century image for
it exists in the present - as does the photograph of the eunuch and the
lithograph of the Hottentot Venus - and the painting's multiplicity of gazes
perform their cultural labour no less today than when it was first exhibited.
Any contemporary audience will still be subject to the use of blackness as an
expression and articulation of a white racialised subject position (and vice
versa), for a world in which Negro Life at the South no longer works to
articulate structures of racial identity would be a world in which racial
identity no longer exists. Walker's acute awareness of this is demonstrated
through her deliberate and self-conscious strategy to 'cross-breed past with
present'42 in her ubiquitous appropriation of sweeping cultural and historical
references and her continual collapsing of generically stylised black and white
bodies and identities.
Threading throughout her work, the focus on that complicated reciprocity of

racial identity that unveils the disturbing machinery of racial, sexual, and social
power has, as I mentioned earlier, caused a good deal of controversy. The
'anti- Walker' campaign instituted by Betye Saar and Howardena Pindell -
recently codified in a collection of essays, edited by Pindell, entitled Kara
Walker-No / Kara Walker-Yes/Kara Walker-? - contended that the artist was
invigorating the stereotypes rather than challenging them, with Pindell citing as
evidence a list of some of the images available in the work: 'In general, Walker's
subjects include stereotyped African- American men, women, and children
43. Howardena Pindell, 'Diaspora /Realities/
Strategies', p. 61. often portrayed in demeaning postures. Sometimes they are barefoot, nude,
defecating, and in some cases portrayed as child molester s and mutilators'.
44. Celeste-Marie Bernier, African American Visual
Arts: From Slavery to the Present (University of North
For Pindell, the transgressive offence is not that the images contain
Carolina Press: Raleigh, 2008), p. 210. molest er s , multilators, or defecators, but that it is the African- American
45. Pindell, 'Diaspora /Realities /Strategies',

body that is being offered up as such. Walker's work refuses, as
p. 60. Celeste -Marie Bernier puts it, to 'produce artworks which fit into the heroic
iconography popularized by the monumental, dignified, and progressive
46. Najjar Abdul -Musaw wir, 'Kara Walker:
Celebrating 21st Century Primitivism', in

works' of an earlier tradition of African- American art. Even though there
Howardena Pindell (ed.), Kara Walker-No/Kara is an art historical context to which Walker's critics can appeal, in focusing
Walker-Yes /Kara Walker-? (Midmarch Arts Press:
on the way in which her images work to 'attempt to persuade
New York, 2009), p. 6.
African- Americans to disregard history', Pindell 's argument is that Walker's
47. Gloria Dulan- Wilson, 'Kara Walker: A transgression moves beyond the realm of the visual and violates the sanctity
Negress on a Mission', in Howardena Pindell
of the African-American struggle for justice and recognition. Walker's
(ed.), Kara Walker-No /Kara Walker-Yes/Kara
Walker-? (Midmarch Arts Press: New York, transgressions are against history rather than art. In Kara Walker-No / Kara
2009), p. 250. Walker-Yes/Kara Walker-?, the emphasis of the vast majority of the essays is on
Kara Walker herself as a person. She is not only criticised for her supposed
48. Cay Fátima, 'Artistic Freedom', in
Howardena Pindell (ed.), Kara Walker-No /Kara minstrelsy and her marriage to a white European, but repeatedly
Walker-Yes/Kara Walker-? (Midmarch Arts Press:
pathologised as being in 'need of healing', possessed of a 'seriously
New York, 2009), p. 29.
disturbed mentality', as someone who 'is disturbed and has been abused',
49. Asiba Tupahache, 'My Complement, My and whose work and pronouncements are 'consistent with the construct of
Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love . . . Uh, What?', chronic abuse'. From the critical standpoint occupied by Pindell et al., not
in Howardena Pindell (ed.), Kara Walker-No/Kara
Walker-Yes/Kara Walker-? (Midmarch Arts Press:
only does Walker transgress the moral codes that structured the historical
New York, 2009), p. 98. and on-going effort for Civil Rights but the discourse of transgression slips
J- J' 50 i o
easily into the further delegimitising discourse of deviance that pushes
50. Jenks, 'Transgression', p. 89.
beyond the boundaries of acceptability 'those excreted, excluded, expunged,
51 . Quoted in Sander L. Gilman, 'Confessions of
like the bad, the insane, the deviant, the poor, i the marginal, o [and] the
an Academic Pornographer', in Philippe Vergne,
dispossessed J- J' .
Sander Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, and Robert
Storr (eds), Kara Walker: My Complement, My The heavy-handed nature of some of these attacks was rejected by many of
Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love (Walker Art Centre: Walker's supporters, not least amongst them Henry Louis Gates, who stated
that, 'only the visually illiterate could mistake . . . postmodern critique for
52. English, 'How to See', p. 23. realistic portrayal'. Walker deploys her parodie excesses in order to identify
53. W J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The
the complex and destructive intimacy of race and power, by way of
Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago articulating that 'history of unfixed power relations and counter normative
Press: Chicago, 2005), p. 303. desires as internal to cultural and national identity'. But, equally clearly,
oo
54. Berger, 'Sight Unseen', p. 4. there is a danger to this strategy. Surely an irrefutable part of Pindell and
Saar's point is that images of this kind, regardless of their critical and
55. Shaw, 'Seeing the Unspeakable', p. 115.
strategic placement have, as WJ.T. Mitchell puts it, a 'tendency to resist all
the strategies of containment' . Indeed, it is that very quality that makes the
transgressive image so powerfully unsettling. It is not unreasonable therefore
to think about these images in the context of a 'white gaze'. Is there
something in Walker's work, some trace of minstrelsy and perhaps even relief
granted the 'white eye' as it comfortably and legitimately encounters images of
racial degradation and violence long considered taboo? Martin Berger 's
suggestion that 'the long-standing white need for black others should make
us sceptical of claims that [even] well-meaning whites can transcend their
race's investment in depictions of non whites' should serve to remind us
that even the most progressive, thoughtful, and self- aware members of any
white audience cannot simply 'opt out' of this system. While Thorn Shaw's
argument that Walker's work is 'obviously targeted at whites'55 seems a
logical leap too far, to disregard the broader point would be to disregard the
David Wall
weight of history with which racial representations are burdened. The violence
of looking for both black and white, as the key element in the cultural labour of
racism as it is embedded in our visual landscape, goes on.
56. Reinhardt, The Art of Racial Profiling',
Walker, in wrestling endlessly with this burden, situates us, as provocatively p. 114.
as she can, within those gaps and fissures of racial discourse that occur at the
57. Julius, 'Transgressions', p. 50.
'intersection of desire and politics, of individual and public fantasy'. She
58. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
assaults us, as she assaults history and the dynamics of representation, by
(Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1984),
offering recurrent tropes of excess that, in the way of all transgressive art, p. 319.
'celebrates both the erasing and breaching of boundaries'. And perhaps the
59. Wagner, 'Kara Walker: The Black-White
most significant of these boundaries in her work is that of the body, as she
Relation', p. 95.
reimagines Mikhail Bakh tin's construction of the grotesque - developed
60. Francette Pacteau, 'Dark Continent', in Lisa
through his reading of Rabelais - and situates it firmly within the broad
Bloom (ed.), With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and
cultural registers of both the antebellum South and contemporary America. Gender in Visual Culture (University of Minnesota
, 58 ,
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is degraded, distended, protuberant, Press: Minneapolis, 1999), p. 92.
excessive, unmanageable, always in the process of becoming, multiple,
61. Reinhardt, 'The Art of Racial Profiling',
hybrid, and with all its orifices open to the world, as it 'fecundates and is p. 112.
fecundated . . . gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks,
62. Yasmil Raymond, 'Maladies of Power: A
defecates, is sick and dying'. , As Anne Wagner says of Walker's , bodies, Kara Walker Lexicon', in Philippe Vergne, Sander
Bakhtin 's grotesques too 'drip sweat, saliva, shit, sperm and milk; they Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, and Robert Storr
copulate, masturbate, and explode. They are often bestial in their bodily (eds), Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My
Oppressor, My Love (Walker Art Centre:
conduct, and sometimes bestial in bodily form'.5 Though missing that
element of joyful, regenerative laughter that Bakhtin posits as central to the
63. Rodolphe el-Khoury, 'Introduction', in
experience of Rabelaisian carnival, Walker's use of the grotesque nevertheless
Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia
serves to rupture our sense of somatic enclosure and question our investment Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury (MIT Press:
in the body as the site of individuation. In its presence 'at the edges of our Cambridge, 2000), p. viii.
existence . . . threatening to infect [and] pollute the sanitized zones of our 64. Laporte, 'History of Shit', p. 46.
subjectivities', the grotesque body that populates Walker's 'landscape of
raised skirts and dirty deeds' embraces all that is, in Kristevan terms,
'abject'. Nowhere is this made more explicit that in Walker's ubiquitous
employment of the excremental trope.
Throughout her work dollops, piles, and enormous heaps of excrement are
presented relentlessly, as Yasmil Raymond puts it, 'encoded with messages
about obscenity, disobedience, and defiance'. As the symbolic embodiment
of one of the most fundamental distinctions between the sacred and profane,
excrement carries the weight of Western culture. Indeed, Dominique
Laporte suggests that the 'history of shit' can be read as the 'history of
subjectivity'. Thus, linked to the emergence of modern Europe and the
development of market capitalism, in the relentless drive to cleanse and
make private the processes of the body's expulsions, 'shit becomes a political
object through its constitution as the dialectical other of the "public".'
Walker inverts this project so that the excremental becomes a public event
that transgresses and violates those dominant codes of social being. In her
work, shit's significations of, for example, waste, non-productivity, filth,
disease, the lower orders, blackness, illegitimacy, corruption, misrule,
degradation, etc. become overwhelming. In short, to paraphrase Marcuse,
shit is everywhere and in all forms.
In another image from the series Negress Notes (Brown Follies), we see a young
white woman in the process of defecating upon a table (Fig. 11). Displaying
many of the coded signifiers of southern femininity - whiteness, blonde
ringletted hair, hooped skirt, and skinny waist - she throws a look of coy
diffidence over her shoulder. And yet, at this very same moment, there is an
enormous pile of excrement coming out of her backside like soft-serve
ice-cream, creating a mountainous pyramid in front of a middle-aged white
Fig. 11. Kara Walker, Negress Notes (Brown Follies), watercolour on paper, 1996-1997, 9 x 6 in.
(Compliments of Sikkema-Jenkins & Co., New York.)
man. But what is the male figure doing? Collecting it? Trying to contain it as it
threatens to spill across the table and onto the floor? Is he going to work it and
mould it? Eat it? Excess here is provocatively inscribed across every brush stroke
of the image - the amount of excrement, the parting of her cheeks, the
possibility of what is going to happen to the ordure. One, perhaps obvious,
point to be made is that the excremental metaphor is surely offering us some
comment about what is hidden beneath the veneer of southern respectability.
In subverting the myth of white southern femininity that emerged after the
Civil War as a 'discursive symbol' for the gentility and nobility of the
David Wall
so-called lost cause the image subverts the whole myth of the South that rested
upon it.
Inscribed across the top of the image are the words 'MAKING A BABY' that
65. Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race,
encode the importance of the excremental as a discursive trope throughout Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke
Walker's own work. But the expression also signifies, in a Gatesian sense, on University Press: Durham, 2003), p. 19.
the story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, in its reference to pejorative 66. Stallybrass and White, 'Politics and Poetics',
racist terminology and the lesson of that folk tale that says to beware of p. 22.
intractable problems that get worse the more one struggles to extricate 67. Wagner, 'Kara Walker: The Black- White
oneself from them. These multiple significations, then, reach back towards Relation', p. 95.
the white man sitting at the table confronted with that shifting, 68. Yeager, 'Circum- Atlantic Superabundance',
uncontrollable mound of faeces. At what point will this pile of ordure p. 783.
become so uncontrollable that it begins to subsume him? The blackness of

69. Kobena Mercer, 'Tropes ot the Grotesque in
tar signifying even more strongly the metaphorical content of the image, the Black Avant-Garde', in Kobena Mercer (ed.),
speaks to ways that the excremental and effluvial was routinely transcoded Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (Iniva and MIT
across the black body in nineteenth- century culture. But to have the body of Press: London, 2007), p. 144.
the white Southern belle made grotesque adds another dimension of 70. Bernier, 'African American Visual Arts',
transgression to the registers of racial and social boundary collapse. p. 210.
Collapsing the symbolic hierarchies of high and low, Walker subverts and
inverts that dominant mode of representation in which the black body is
always low, abject, and grotesque while the white body is static, silent,
unmoving, and without 'openings or orifices' to disrupt the carefully
demarcated boundaries of a 'transcendent individualism'. There is also a
paradox, in this use of an expression more usually associated with the act of
sexual intercourse, that directs us towards an image of distorted productivity.
Offered within the economy of the plantation, the notion of production is,
for white owners, positive; but in this case it is associated only, and literally,
with shit. The plantation economy, then, is predicated on waste for there can
be no productive work within the confines of a system of dehumanisation and
trauma. There is, further, an implicit gesture towards the proximity of the
vagina and anus - and the simultaneity of the acts of giving birth and
defecating - that presents a violent collision between that which is
discursively constructed as a moment of ecstatic joy and that constructed as
waste and filth, to be denied, to be hidden, and to be refuted. In this image,
as it is throughout Walker's work, excrement is the dominant currency in the
economy of representation, the principal medium of exchange. It is yet
another act of surplus production that mirror's the silhouette's ieak[ing]
from its most vital and volatile points'. As an aggressive assault upon the
'underpinnings of white violence and superabundance', the image offers us
shit as excess in every sense.
As Walker's work makes abundantly clear, images live intricately
interdependent lives, their relationships determined by a whole series of
contingent and continually shifting social, historical, and cultural contexts.
Equally, that there is a consistency to the shapes and forms of the black body
in Western culture that points clearly to the 'iconography of the grotesque as
one of the primary visual languages of modern racism', is key to
understanding Walker's efforts to appropriate the violence inherent in the
process of image -making. It is worth keeping in mind that her work is
addressed as much to the 'heroic iconography ... of black progress and racial
uplift'70 that constituted a significant element of twentieth- century
African- American art, as it is towards the overtly racist imagery of
mainstream white American culture. Foregrounding the act of looking itself
as a source of meaning, enchantment, compulsion, infatuation, love, and
aggression, forces us to address how we look and not merely what we look
71. Shaw, 'Seeing the Unspeakable', p. 155. at. Excess, transgression, and violence are built in to the forms Walker utilises
72. English, 'Not About the Past', p. 167.

as well as the forms she parodies: melodrama, gothic, the slave narrative, for
instance, are all forms of discursive excess. Her efforts to 'visualise
73. Griselda Pollock, 'Feminism /Foucault -
unspeakable experiences' must surely then demand the same. As difficult as
Surveillance /Sexuality', in Norman Bryson,
Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (eds), Visual
these works are to confront, forcing us to look at that which we do not want
Culture, Images and Interpretations (Wesleyan to see is an integral element of the process of 'tak[ing] note of the 'dead and
University Press: Hanover, 1994), p. 15. gone' violences in order better to comprehend the multiply reshaped and
74. Jervis, 'Transgressing the Modern', p. 4. redirected forms they take today'. If we could turn the images discussed in
this essay towards each other, what kind of conversation might they have,
what commonalities would they see or seek, what empathies or antagonisms
might they express? Or, indeed, what might these images say if they could
speak to their audience? What would the eunuch ask of us? To be left,
finally, alone and in peace? And would 'in peace' mean no longer suffering
the intrusive violence of looking? As Griselda Pollock says, 'What is at stake
in representation is not so much a matter of what is shown as it is of who is
authorized to look at whom with what effects'.
As transgression is an act that simultaneously denies and affirms the presence
of boundaries, it is in the transgression that we cement our understanding of
limits. Though Kara Walker presents us with images that transgress the
accepted codes of racial representation, it is important to keep in mind,
then, that this is not a subversive or revolutionary strategy. As John Jervis
puts it, transgression in and of itself does not set out to destroy the boundary
but to 'interrogate' it in an effort to understand the 'frequently arbitrary,
mechanisms of power on which it rests . . . [and] . . .its complicity, its
involvement in what it prohibits'. Kara Walker's transgressive charge is
designed similarly to ask us as viewers to consider our own complicity in
producing, consuming, and, indeed, populating the vicious landscapes of racial
and sexual representation.

Transgression and Violence

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Transgression, Excess, and the Violence of Looking in the Art of Kara Walker

Author(s): David Wall

1 . Quoted in Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the

280 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010

9. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010 281

282 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 33.3 2010

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registers, emerges as a consequence of the developing technologies of

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Flg. 4. The Curious in Ecstasy, or the Shoelaces, 1814.

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memorialising and remembrance' that presents truth by way of 'evidence of what

longing is inscribed through the legitimating discourses of medicine.

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haunting the American imago'.

78, no. 4, 2006, p. 777.

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orthodox understanding as it unveils the profound connection between being,

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39. Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion:

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Threading throughout her work, the focus on that complicated reciprocity of

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45. Pindell, 'Diaspora /Realities /Strategies',

Celebrating 21st Century Primitivism', in

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become so uncontrollable that it begins to subsume him? The blackness of

transgression to the registers of racial and social boundary collapse. p. 210.

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72. English, 'Not About the Past', p. 167.

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