Kara Walker’s signature style, where she arranges tableaux of cut-paper silhouettes directly on to gallery walls, is one of the most immediately recognisable in contemporary art, not to mention one of the most overtly graphic and violent – full of unsettling scenes of sex and sadism set against the historical backdrop of American slavery and the Civil War. If anything, during the past 20 years the American artist’s imagery has become more extreme, more extravagantly grotesque. Her current wall piece at Victoria Miro, for example, features slaves being hanged or tortured, white Southerners impaling or blinding themselves, and a half-naked slave woman feasting on the severed limbs of her former owners.
Other pieces in the show, though, see Walker moving away from her trademark silhouettes to produce a series of small watercolours or a large, charcoal triptych. While the subject matter is just as deliriously depraved as ever, involving all sorts of degenerate racial and gender stereotypes, you also get the sense of her experimenting with different modes of representation and playing with ideological traditions. In the same way that her silhouette pieces adopt the visual format of genteel, nineteenth-century parlour games as a sort of ironic counterpoint to the appalling violence and exploitation that underlay such polite society, so the three largest works on paper here are designed to evoke, or perhaps satirise, what she calls ‘Idioms on Negro Art’ – in this case primitivism, folk art and graffiti. Sure, the painting styles may not actually vary hugely between the three pieces – though the libidinous, orgiastic frenzy of ‘No 2: Graffiti’ is the most arresting – but the point is how each work projects a sort of fantasy of black identity, teasing apart stereotypical notions of African-Americans being somehow more expressive or sexual, more in touch with their raw, ‘authentic’ selves, more ‘street’.
Gabriel Coxhead