Art and The Body

Kara Walker-
How does Walker represent ‘Art and the body’? Walker’s central issue (as many of you already know from writing all about her!) is the continuing portrayal of African American women as veracious sexual beings, shaking their ample bosoms and abundant booty at the venerable male collective; of which is generally accepted to lack the self restraint required to ignore these temptations.
This mythos is born from the times of slavery, where respectable decent folk (more than likely the sexually reserved lady folk of these times) would have been threatened by the tantalising bodies of the slave girls, broadly available to their men. This dual oppression of both racism and bigotry is what Walker addresses, what it means to be a black woman today and how this parallels with past experiences of African American women.

Walker has chosen to emphasise her references to human afflictions, with the use of the body, simplified into black cut out silhouettes. These cut outs create lurid scenes such as the ones in ‘Gone: An Historical Romance of the Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart’. Fat lipped pickaninnies appease the sexual desires of formally attired white men, while these same men disappear up the flowing skirts of slave girls. Dancing minstrel like silhouettes give birth to doomed and falling foetuses. Beautiful women with secrets hidden under their skirts, stare submissively up at lords who absentmindedly sodomise devil horned children who hold dead animal offerings. All of these happenings are obvious to the viewer, but more because of their own imagination then the clear imagery of the silhouettes. Walker uses this, the bringing to light of ones own relationship with graphic and obscene imagery to express that everyone, on even a base level, has absorbed and retained the degrading image of African-American females through societies derogatory representation of those women in everyday life.