Showing posts with label Aunt Jemima. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aunt Jemima. Show all posts

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Sugar Sphinx

Artist Kara Walker Draws Us Into Bitter History With Something Sweet





Kara Walker was barely out of art school when she won a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, in 1997. Back then, her early work shocked audiences in part because her murals looked so charming from a distance. Black paper shadow portraits of colonial figures seemed to dance on white gallery walls; but lean in and you'd find your nose pressed up against images of slavery's horrors — mammies, masters, lynchings and sexual violence.

In other words, Walker is used to filling a room. But this spring she was asked to fill a warehouse — the abandoned Domino Sugar factory in New York. It's about to be leveled to make way for condos and offices, but before it goes, Walker was asked to use this cavernous, urban ruin for something special.




Walker took me on a tour of the show a day before it opened. The factory is covered in sugar — it almost looks like insulation or burned cotton candy.

"It's a little bit sticky in some areas ..." she said. "There's sugar caked up in the rafters."

I was so busy trying not to get molasses on my shoes that when I turned the corner, I was stunned. There in the middle of this dark hall was a bright, white sphinx. The effect is the opposite of those white-walled galleries; a dark space and a towering white sculpture made of — what else? — sugar.






"What we're seeing, for lack of a better term, is the head of a woman who has very African, black features," Walker explained. "She sits somewhere in between the kind of mammy figure of old and something a little bit more recognizable — recognizably human. ... [She has] very full lips; high cheekbones; eyes that have no eyes, [that] seem to be either looking out or closed; and a kerchief on her head. She's positioned with her arms flat out across the ground and large breasts that are staring at you."

Walker has dreamed up a "subtlety" — that's what sugar sculptures were called in medieval times. They were a luxury confectioners created for special occasions.






To understand where all this is going, you need look no further than Walker's teasingly long title for the show: "A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant."

I know, it's a mouthful. But Walker has this wide smile and as she sweeps her hands around in broad gestures, white tides of sugar dust ripple at the edge of her feet — and she sells it.




"It was very fun and childlike to, you know, have your hands in a bucket full of sugar, or a 50-pound bag of sugar, throwing it out onto the floor," she says.

She's doing what she does best: drawing you in with something sweet, something almost charming, before you realize you've admired something disturbing. In this case, that's the horror-riddled Caribbean slave trade that helped fuel the industrial gains of the 18th and 19th centuries; a slave trade built to profit from an insatiable Western market for refined sugar treats and rum.







"Basically, it was blood sugar," Walker says. "Like we talk about blood diamonds today, there were pamphlets saying this sugar has blood on its hands."

She explains that to make the sugar, the cane had to be fed into large mills by hand. It was a dangerous process: Slaves lost hands, arms, limbs and lives.

"I've been kind of back and forth with my reverence for sugar," Walker says. "Like, how we're all kind of invested in its production without really realizing just what goes into it; how much chemistry goes into extracting whiteness from the sugar cane."







Walker went down a rabbit hole of sugar history, at one point stumbling on some black figurines online — the type of racial tchotchkes that turn up in a sea of mammy cookie jars. They were ceramic, brown-skinned boys carrying baskets. Those were the size of dolls, but Walker's are 5 feet high, some made entirely of molasses-colored candy. Fifteen of them are posed throughout the factory floor, leading the way to her sugar sphinx.

The boys are cute and apple-cheeked, but they're also kind of scary — some of the melted candy looks a lot like blood.

"I knew that the candy ones wouldn't last," Walker says. "That was part of the point was that they were going to be in this non-climate-controlled space, slowly melting away and disintegrating. But what's happened is we lost two of these guys in the last two days or so."








Losing those figures in service of the sugar is the slave trade in a nutshell.

"Also in a nutshell," Walker says, "and maybe a little bit hammer-over-the-head, is that some of the pieces of the broken boys I threw into the baskets of the unbroken boys."

OK, that's not so subtle, but it's also not unusual for Kara Walker. She's dressed in a shiny, oversize baseball jacket emblazoned with the gold face of King Tut on it. I ask her if at a certain point she worries about doing work that is seen as being just about race.






"I don't really see it as just about race," she says. "I mean, I think that my work is about trying to get a grasp on history. I mean, I guess it's just kind of a trap, in a way, that I decided to set my foot into early on, which is the trap of race — to say that it's about race when it's kind of about this larger concern about being."

I tell her it's almost impossible to talk about our history without talking about race. She replies: "There [are] scholarly conversations about race and then there's the kind of meaty, unresolved, mucky blood lust of talking about race where I always feel like the conversation is inconclusive."

Inconclusive, but for artist Kara Walker, ongoing.




BLOGGER'S BLAH BLAH BLAH. When I first read about this today, I was astonished. It was the most innovative thing I'd seen in years, gorgeous in a scary, monumental way. It's Mammy as Ramses, as Isis, as Mount Rushmore carving, as the Venus of Willendorf with a scarf tied around her head. She's Goliath, she's Gulliver, she's everything God-sized and oversized and improbable. Everything about it, from the jutting fertility-symbol breasts to the enormous rounded butt thrust up either as an offering or a giant ass-up fuck you, to the face that is Sphynxlike and  impossible to read, is provocative and even thrilling.

But I always have a strange stab when I see art like this. I truly think, whether this is irrational or not, if I had been able to get a career like this going when I was that young, if I had had that much acclaim and affirmation, recognition of my talent, opportunities even, my life would have been totally different. Happier? Hell, it would've been ecstatic, and the problems I've had - oh God, let's not get into the problems I've had - never would have happened at all, because I would have been an Artist.




Logic tries to scream at me that women artists, in particular, can be self-destructive and even suicidal, that no amount of acclaim or even love is ever enough. And I don't believe it, because in the core of my doomed little brain I think success solves everything. I just feel that way, I am convinced.

But that's a mere sideline. This was a headspinning project that must have been built to scale by a huge team of people, and I am not sure how all that sparkling white sugar was layered on. I know there are other articles about this astonishing display, but right now I'm tired and I don't want to read any more. My own life is mystifying, not very productive it seems, and I'm not expressing anything of note. But maybe I should take heart in the fact that at least somebody is.





Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Fallout









When I flipped my calendar today, I noticed that this isn't just any old Tuesday. Y'all know what Mardi Gras is, right? Those folks in Nawlins sure know how to put on a party.

Most of us have some vague idea that it's tied to Easter, but are not sure how.

Well, they'd be right. But more than that, it's tied to the cycles of the moon.

Ever wonder why Easter's on a different Sunday every year? Why doesn't it settle on one particular date, like Christmas or Ground Hog Day?

Because it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon, that's why, and cuz the moon's on a four-week cycle, sometimes it's earlier, and sometimes it's later. Ask the Chinese, who celebrate the Lunar New Year in a similar way.

You may ask: what does this have to do with Christianity? Nothing. What does it have to do with paganism and goddess-worship and Druids all that moon-related stuff? Plenty. The early Christians were smart enough to graft their big event of the year on a very old tree.

Before Mardi Gras even came along, it was called Shrove Tuesday. Most Christians don't have any idea what Shrove Tuesday actually means, except that there's always a pancake supper in the church basement, that damp place that always smells like the inside of a pumpkin, with undercooked pancakes on paper plates and kids spilling syrup and running around on a sugar high.

OK then, Shrove Tuesday is the beginning of six weeks of Lent. So what's Lent? Some people have some idea that it has to do with fasting and/or self-abnegation of some kind. Then comes Good Friday (the day Our Lord was nailed to a post to die: so why is it called Good?), and Easter Sunday, the miraculous day of Resurrection.

But it all has to be carefully timed to the cycles of the moon.

My bit of research into Shrove Tuesday was strange indeed. "Shrove" is the past tense of "shrive", which means to confess one's sins, to be penitent and grovel for forgiveness, and hopefully be absolved ("hey, I had a bad childhood"). If one is so absolved, they are described as "shriven". An unattractive word, if you ask me, resembling "shrivel", "shrine", and "shorn".

So what does this have to do with all those pancakes? Plenty. Before Lent, the traditional time of fasting, you had to use up every bit of fat in the house so the next six weeks would be a culinary disaster, everything sticking to the pan cuzzathefact they didn't have them-all Teflon thingy-dings then.

So yuz gorged yourself on sweet carbs on Fat Tuesday (which is a reference to the cooking fat, though in Nawlins it can have other meanings), then go into a long stretch of dire austerity. But I have a problem with all this. If you've been shriven already, why fast? Haven't you suffered enough?

It's hard to square stacks of oozing pancakes, Dixieland bands and drunken riots with the dreary plainsong of Gregorian chant. But after praying and fasting for seven or eight months, I think I've found a common point here.
Sex.
Illicit sex.

Can you guess what I mean?

Can you?

Can you guess why the Catholic Church is scrabbling so hard to apologize for all the horrendous abuse that has gone unchecked among their most valued clergymen for generations?

When you wake up from Mardi Gras, perhaps stuck to the floor with your own vomit, you may not be able to remember just who you were with last night. Isn't this something like those sweet little 8-year-old altar boys who try to push out of their minds a memory so horrific that they know no one will believe them?

I've got nothing against sex, folks, but it's too bad it's so often associated with drunken revelry, things you'd rather forget, and little boys and little girls trying not to scream because this kind of love is "special". So special that they dare not mention it to anyone at all.

There is a certain culling. The ones who can't make it. We don't know what's the matter with those people, why they can't get it together! Some of them even leave the church because entering the sanctuary makes them feel unaccountably sick. These are the ones that kind of sift down, doing horrible things like sticking needles in their arm, and eventually die.

Fallout.

I used to eat the bloody pancakes, pray out the bitter, penitent six weeks (never quite sure what I had done that was so wrong), and make sure I suffered terribly on Good Friday, until I realized one day that I had goddamn well suffered enough.
And that I wasn't going to be fallout. Not for anyone.