September
1, 2014
Nancy
Spero, Kara Walker and Mythologies of Violence
Benjamin Buchloh observes in his essay Spero’s Other Traditions, that ‘history
and “painting” [show a] profound entanglement with myth’ (242). Nancy Spero and
Kara Walker are unique feminist voices who reflect their personal cultural
experiences. Each artist plays upon the sociopolitical concerns of their time, mythologizing
historical references to create work that focuses female rage about the
subjugation of women.
Walker draws her imagery from the annals
of American slavery and its record of the sexual exploitation of women. “Walker’s art culls stereotypical racial
figures including mammies, pickaninnies, plantation mistresses … from
historical sources as diverse as slave narratives, minstrelsy, and Harlequin
romance novels, and arranges them in complex imbrications of sex, subjection,
domination, and perversity” (Tang 144). Using the 18th century
medium of the cut paper silhouette, Walker evokes the tradition of the
monumental history painting or the cyclorama. The violent, perverse and
disturbing images that Walker depicts in her work trigger a visceral shame and
anxiety in the viewer concerning the atrocities committed against slaves in the
antebellum south. These images force us
to confront the darkest side of human nature, while Walker allows her own rage
to mythologize and fantasize these events. These displays allow the personal
and the political to “come together in points of profundity, excitement and
catharsis” (Belcove).
Spero’s
goddesses, athletes, divas, and Sheelas parade across the gallery space proudly
displaying their genitals, directly confronting shame concerning the female
body. These figures contrast with other images of violence against women
perpetrated by war and its accompanying torture and abuse. As Walker references the antebellum South, Spero
references ancient temple friezes with their emphasis on the heroic and
archetypal female warrior. Both artists
reference exploitation, rape and mutilation of women: Spero through the
atrocities of war, Walker through the atrocities of slavery. As Walker will not let us ignore or minimize
the horror of slavery, Spero will not let us forget the violence perpetrated on
women throughout history. Each artist employs a different strategy to transcend
her rage concerning these events. Spero celebrates the triumph of the female as
a powerful entity outside of gender control. She transforms the victim to
protagonist in her narrative. In Walker’s work “the black object has become the
black subject in a profound act of artistic exorcism” (Gates).
Each
artist brings a personal relationship to the concept of the victimized. Their
work forces us to look at historical evidence of violence against women in
order to make us re-examine our current relationship to racism and sexism. Each
artist has used her rage to confront complacency concerning these issues.
Spero’s work, with its uncomfortable, brutal imagery is a precursor to Walker’s
even more pointed focus on what we prefer to ignore.
Nancy
Spero came on to the New York art scene in 1964, an incredibly dynamic time for
artists as minimalism was being challenged by conceptual art and the women’s
movement created a rich field for artists like Spero to find a voice. Spero first turned her attention to the Viet
Nam war producing “angry works, often scatological manifestos against a
senseless obscene war” (Spero 30). Spero’s war pieces show “the phantasmatic
dimension of war…the infantile, sadistic and often sexualized mania that
pervades war violence” (33) (fig 1). The anal and ejaculatory metaphors
soldiers use to describe battle are used in her work to expose the “sexual and
sadistic obscenity of modern warfare” (36). Spero’s work in this series is an
unflinching examination of such obscenity. “These images are unforgettable and they are
made to be so. They represent Spero at her strongest: a conscience making art
to an unerring purpose, lest we ever forget the horrors of war.” (Cumming).
Spero’s monumental work of 1976 “Torture of Women” (fig 2) returns
again to the obscenity of violence, using contemporary testimony from Amnesty
International’s 1975 Report on Torture. Reflecting
on violence against women in mythology, Spero examines the pervasive and
persistent subjugation and sexual exploitation of women as something just
barely hidden by the veneer of civilization. Spero sees the mythological
references to the punishment of women in stories such as Marduk and Tiamat[1]
as the origin of violent behavior. Spero
often inserts text into her images that clarifies the intent of her imagery as
well as gives voice to victims and perpetrators. (figs2,3)
The graphic and voyeuristic nature of these descriptions of acts
of torture and images of punished bodies feed a hidden fascination with pain
and destruction. Spero’s images make us question our motives in the same way as
the images of sexual and scatological acts in Kara Walker’s work challenge our
sensibilities.
Walker was born around the time that Spero was
making her paintings about the atrocities of war. Later Spero’s Codex Artaud
and Torture of Women gave her a voice as a feminist artist. Kara Walker
grew up in racially mixed Stockton, CA where by the late 70’s racial
discrimination was suppressed, or at least well hidden. Moving with her family
to Georgia when she was 13 gave Walker a different experience of veiled
southern racism[2]
Understanding her early experiences gives the viewer a greater understanding of
her sense of freedom in both mocking and emphasizing African-American female stereotypes.
Kara Walker’s breakout
exhibition Gone: An Historical
Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress
and Her Heart contrasts the pretty, storybook quality of the cut paper silhouette
with imagery that is perverse, disturbingly sexual and ambiguous. (fig 4) Clearly
Walker is not afraid to confront and exaggerate racist and sexist attitudes, even
those of fellow African-Americans: “I remember being curious and perturbed by
the way that African-American male artists in the show were portraying their
role as protectors of women from injustices such as rape,” she says. The
constant reminder of being oppressed—not just being a victim but being
stereotyped as one—she explains, “was like furthering the abuse in some ways”
(Belcove). Walker’s perceptive analysis of the nature of victimhood mirrors Spero’s
ideas about victim verses perpetrator.
While Spero
transforms the rage of victimhood by retelling ancient myths, [3]
Walker uses her rage to exaggerate and fetishize the stereotypical exploitation
of black women’s bodies. Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues that Walker
employs stereotypes in order “to liberate both the tradition of the
representation of the black in popular and high art forms and to liberate our
people from residual, debilitating effects that the proliferation of those
images undoubtedly has had upon the collective unconscious of the African American
people.” He casts Walker’s art “as a
parodic reworking rather than a traumatic reiteration of racial stereotype”
(Tang 151). “Walker’s art becomes
a triumph of artistic self-mastery, an emancipating confrontation with the
demons of the past, and an assertion of subject hood that has the triumphant
finality of an “exorcism” (152.) Walker
uses text in some of her paintings and drawings to clarify her ideas and text
only in work such as Do You Like Cream in
Your Coffee And Chocolate in Your Milk? (fig 5), but the graphic intensity
of her cut paper installations makes additional text un-necessary. (fig 6)
These two artists both confront the
unspeakable in their own way and from the perspective of their own socio-cultural
milieu. Spero confronts taboos about the female body and our fetishization of
violence. Walker confronts taboo images
of African American female sexuality. Maybe as Michael D. Harris says “at this
historical moment, with its creeping popular cultural excesses, loudly speaking
the unspeakable may be the only way to be heard above the cacophony” (132). The
artists’ intentions are best described in their own words. Spero says “It is
also true that if we don’t speak nothing is left. There is no memory. So this
to me erases not only images but memory” (Spero 111). Walker declares “There’s a place in contemporary American
culture for African-American female truth telling. To tell it like it is or to
tell it like it isn’t or to tell it like you dreamed it up” (Belcove).
Spero’s last installation before her death in 2009 Maypole Take no Prisoners, (fig. 7) continues to remind us of the
horrors of war. Walker’s latest work 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, (fig 8) presents us with a monumental
though stereotypical black female body, while reminding us of the “bloody”
sugar trade. Truly the work of these artists continues to confront us with
evidence of that which is easier to forget.
[1] “Marduk caught
Tiamat in his net, and drove the winds which he had with him into her body and
whilst her belly was thus distended the thrust his spear into her and stabbed
her to the heart, and cut through her bowels, and crushed her skull with his
club. On her body he took his stand, and with his knife he split it like a flat
fish into two halves, and one of these he made a covering for the heavens. This
ancient Sumerian myth dating (5000BC) from one of the origins of human culture
tells what must have already been the timeless fear, hatred of and cruelty
directed towards women” (Spero 128).
[2] “Accustomed to hanging out with kids of all
races, she initially did the same at her new school. Then, while waiting at a
bus stop with some white friends one day, she was taken aback to hear them
using the slur to describe other classmates—and then to remark about Walker in
a creepily complimentary way: “Oh, she’s not a nigger. She’s just like us.”
Says Walker, I remember distancing myself on that day from that group’
(Belcove).
[3] “The Tiamat quote is about attacking this female monster or goddess
and disemboweling her in the most gruesome of means, then culminating the myth
on a fantastic note, using half her body to cover the heavens. It becomes a
lyrical….There are a number of elements to it: the torture of the female, the
female as representing evil but then transcending this and becoming a symbol of
resuscitation nature, and structure” (Pearson 107-8).
Fig. 2. Nancy Spero, Torture of Women Panel VII, detail, 2010.
the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her
Heart, 1994.
1997.
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Fig. 8. Kara Walker, 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, 2014.
Works
Cited
Belcove,
Julie. “History Girl: Kara Walker’s Art Mines the Past to Tell a Very Different
Story”W Magazine. March
2007. Web. 20 Aug. 2014.
Bird,
Jon, ed. Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy
Spero and Kiki Smith. London: Reaktion
BooksLtd,
2003. Print.
Buchloh,
Benjamin H.D. “Spero’s Other Traditions.” Inside
the Visible: An Elliptical Traverseof 20th Century Art in
and from the Feminine. Ed. Catherine de Zegher.
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996. 242-243. Print.
Cumming Laura. “Nancy Spero – review Serpentine Gallery, London.” theguardian.com.The Observer, 5 March 2011. Web. 20 Aug. 2014
Dixon,
Annette, ed. Kara Walker: Pictures from
another Time. New York:
D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers Inc. 2002. Print.
Henry Louis
Gates Jr., “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes.” International Review of
African American Art 14.3
(1997): 2–16. Print.
Harris,
Michael D. “Talking in Tongues: Personal Reflections on Kara Walker”. NKA
Journal
of Contemporary African American Art. 29,
Fall, 2011. 130-40. Print.
Pearson,
Lisa, ed. Nancy Spero: Torture of Women.
Los Angeles: Siglio Press. 2010. Print.
Piranio,
Michelle, ed. Kara Walker: My Complement,
My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love.
New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art
Publishers, 2007. Print.
Spero,
Nancy, et al. Nancy Spero: Dissidances. Barcelona:
Mueu d’Art Contemporani de
Barcelona, 2008. Print.
Tang, Amy.
“Postmodern Repetitions: Parody, Trauma, and the Case of Kara Walker”.
Differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.
2 (2010): 142-172. Print.
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