Review of Kara Walker: Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First and Kara Walker: Norma
Kara Walker
Victoria Miro, London, UK
By Anna Coatman
On 17 June 2015, a white man opened fire on a prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people. Nine black people or, rather, ‘nine more’, as the US artist Kara Walker puts it in an interview with photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos, published alongside ‘Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First’ – the first of two solo shows across Victoria Miro’s London spaces. After the shooting, pictures emerged of the gunman posing in front of the Confederate flag – a relic from the Civil War, now shorthand for white supremacy – sparking protest over its continued display in a number of US states. Racism was supposed to be a thing of the past, so why was a symbol so closely associated with it still flying?
It’s a contradiction that is familiar to Walker: at the age of 13, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, a city that boasts Stone Mountain as one of its dubious attractions. This massive Civil War monument is situated at the so-called spiritual birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan; Martin Luther King Jr. referred to it in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963 (‘Let freedom ring from the Stone Mountain of Georgia!’). The mountain remains a tourist spot to this day, continuing to promote what Walker describes as ‘a living ahistorical fantasy war’: a fabricated version of past events.
Walker returned to Stone Mountain following the Charleston shooting, and this trip was the inspiration behind ‘Go to Hell or Atlanta …’, which opened at Victoria Miro’s Wharf Road gallery in October. In the exhibition, Walker exploded the mythology and visual symbolism surrounding the controversial monument. On the first floor were Four Idioms on Negro Art (all works 2015): four large-scale paintings rendered in a folksy style. The Idioms depict minstrel-like figures tangled in orgies of violence, rape and police brutality. Walker here recycles and subverts racist and sexist tropes, digging them up from the recesses of culture.
These paintings were accompanied by 12 preliminary sketches, Tell Me Your Thoughts on Police Brutality ‘Miss Spank Me Harder’, revealing more about Walker’s process and providing thematic signposts. One lists the distinguishing features of high art (‘upper class’, ‘masculine’) vs. low art (‘low class’, ‘feminine’); underneath each category the artist has scribbled: ‘That’s Me!’ Others appear to reference the killings and assaults that have fuelled the Black Lives Matter campaign. There’s a drawing of a black man in what looks like a body bag, under which the all-too-familiar phrase ‘unarmed black man’ is written. Another shows a naked black woman being straddled by a clothed white man, recalling the viral video footage of police officer Eric Casebolt wrestling a girl to the ground at a house party in Texas in 2015. The Idioms may look archaic, but these sketches ground them firmly in the present.