MY COMPLEMENT, MY ENEMY, MY OPPRESSOR, MY LOVE

On Saturday I ducked out of the AWP conference, half mad with artificial light, and walked to the Whitney to see the Kara Walker exhibit. Good call. Way more edifying than a panel.

Her silhouettes, which I have seen before, are of course stunning and upsetting, full of fucking and killing and bitter nursing and birthing, the literal inflation and lampooning of stereotypes--

(you can't see very closely here, but for example, that's Brer Rabbit humping a baby in the lower right)

--but I was most captivated by her drawings, which I had never seen, displayed in dense clusters. I love drawings more than almost any other form--I like seeing the fluidity of the line, the pencil shadows, the notes in the margins. In the drawings she is funny and excoriating and candid. I didn't take many notes, just eye-drank them, but I wrote down this deft/offhand comment (hers) re racism:

Kind of our national pastime
Loving to hate what we hate to love

In one film, as she moves silhouettes jerkily in front of the light, a child's voice says

I think he's going to hurt me.
I wonder what it will feel like?
I guess this is what happened to Abby.

(8 Possible Beginnings)

It chilled me to the bone.


One floor down, the tastefully muted gouaches and collages and taxidermied chickens of the New Acquisitions exhibit felt utterly run-of-the-mill by comparison. And What's-His-Name's I will not make boring art scrawling just read TOOL to me. But Jenny Holzer's aphorisms etched into a white marble bench had some apt wisdom:

MUCH WAS DECIDED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.

Photos: Whitney Museum site + good New York Times article