Kara Walker at the MAC: 24 Jan - 27 Apr 2014.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] my name is Kara Walker and the title of my show we are exceedingly proud to present an exhibition of capable artworks by the notable hand of the celebrated American Kara Elizabeth Walker I started working with the silhouette I started cutting paper after I abandoned painting okay I was studying painting and wanted to be a proper oil painter and I was trying to make very large gestures and and I realized that painting wasn't working for me in a lot of particular ways and as I was going through this sort of quest to understand my own identity I also want to understand my artistic identity or the language that I that I was using and what was my relationship as a black woman to the history of you know grand oil painting and why did I like it so much because I associated it was a kind of power like a kind of a masculine power that goes hand in hand with you know exploring new worlds and colonizing them I wanted to find out why I was so into this power relation share why I felt that this kind of painting wouldn't have me there so I'd put aside the brushes for a while and tried to find my way into art making figure you know sort of reading and looking at other images and and writing stuff or just like I can't really call it writing but sort of like you know to have these like mad typing Jags sort of just kind of put everything out there and it was like this huge flood of information that was living back there in my mind that came forward you know about history and about you know being a woman being black being you know living in the south for the period of time that I lived in the south and the kinds of narratives that were informing this like this body you know I was like constraining this body as you know who age could be or what I could say and I sort of decided to embrace some of those constraints as far as like a southern narrative or a narrative of blackness and eventually I found myself either unable to make a picture of anything initially just writing stuff or you know but with this huge need to you know continue to draw because that's kind of what my you know love is where I got my you know desire to be an artist in a way the the cutouts the silhouettes were results of a drawing practice and it was also a result of this thing that's questioning that Indian had me sort of removing something you know you cut something out and you remove it from the from the hole and then you've got you know two sides you could look at you know you've got your your positive and your negative and I really liked that dialectic there and then of course that lent itself immediately to silhouette cutting and the history of silhouettes and the image making and you know you've got silhouette portraiture and you have silhouettes scenes you have images of African slaves rendered in silhouette so you have the history of physiognomies and you know this kind of race studies that you know would posit you know facial angles as you know indicators of race and intelligence and and all of that and there was suddenly so much information about you know this profile and about this blackness and about this avoid you know it was like a void that was completely filled with stuff in the last year or so I was kind of immersing myself in a couple of texts that are specifically white supremacist texts there's one from the late 19th century the Klansmen written by Thomas Dixon jr. and then there's another called the Turner Diaries which is a sort of sci-fi like late 70s text which has kind of been a manifesto for current wait supremacist groups and fringe right-wingers who have you know imagined that the war that they have maybe internally or the war that they have with the government as a race war and a few people like Timothy McVeigh and they've been others who have tried to activate this this book like it's an actual Bible so I immersed myself in the book to the point that I was completely paranoid about the future and I did a piece for Chicago that was kind of like trying to reconcile these two extremely limited narratives that are written for a reader who's not me he was not black who's not a woman and I found myself trying to sort of compare and contrast you know the genteel form of racism versus the scorched-earth variety and at the same time sort of trying to complicate that or trying to understand where does a black figure have agency within these texts that would have you know the reader herself destroyed so the fallout from that exercise was to sort of step back and do these sampler pieces so the titles of the far-end works anti Walker's sampler arose from this idea that was kind of just making like a piecemeal quilt of you know free associating ideas that come from these texts that come from my own kind of you know desires to maybe defeat those texts this sentiment that I know lives in the United States but I think it kind of its kind of a maybe contemporary illness of this desire to return to some kind of an origin to return to a time when things were simpler or to return to a particular battle scene in order to sort of recreate it or maybe negotiate the outcomes of particular Wars in my case the American Civil War has always been interesting for that you know people play dress up and go out into the fields and that kind of recreation aspect is sort of present at least in the civilians piece characters wearing their sort of porkpie hat some both guns and bayonets [Music] often grace his hippies blue tail is kind of the epic length 18 minute it's kind of a story with interruptions an attempt to kind of understand the the mythology or the the mythic white woman who was the I guess the excuse given to so many murders of black men and the American South in particular but across the board and yeah there there's something very intimate I guess about working that way and kind of exposing the sort of giddiness of animating things because as soon as you start playing around with puppets you're a child and you and you are playing and if you're playing with seams that are touchy or delicate or or just hurtful and then and that do hurt it's it's a kind of a perversion I guess it's a perverse kind of play [Music] [Applause] but the art that I've always brought up being interested in you know across the you know the world of art always has this kind of quality of sort of you sort of inside the artists peculiar vision at the same time as you're kind of looking out at their world and how they saw it you

Channel: TheMACBelfast

Views: 80,243

Rating: 4.8512158 out of 5

Keywords: art, kara walker, kara, walker, the MAC, MAC, Belfast, Visual Art, international, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress, Camden Arts

Id: 5QbXdPv-O1g

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 14 2014