A Subtlety by Kara Walker: Teaching Vulnerable Art

This article stems from one of the intersections among visual art, literature, and critical and creative thinking, around which I developed a course, Women's Literature in International Perspective, at my institution in Spring 2015. In this course I paired a selection of contemporary women writers and visual artists from the Caribbean, Western Africa and the Middle East who reside in Europe and the USA. Pedagogies of comparing, contrasting and integrating knowledge and practices in different art forms are particularly rewarding when the subject matter is what our class defined as both "sticky" and "fertile," and when an inattentive eye easily misses the subject's complexity. To unravel that complexity, we employed cross disciplinary approaches and kept our minds and hearts open. My students are visual artists, which also makes them art viewers and critics. Many are also future art educators, so they wish to teach future generations how to be empathetic and engaged artists and to integrate values of equality, cultural competency and social justice within the fabric of the art they create. (3) This article integrates my interpretation of Kara Walker's 2014 installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, in light of works by feminist critic Audre Lorde and Guyanese poet Grace Nichols, with my students' responses to the installation's multiple layers of meaning. Kara Walker is an African American artist and faculty member in Rutgers University's MFA program. Her signature work has been the series of grotesque, daunting narratives she creates from black cutout silhouettes drawn from 19th"century history book illustrations to represent the antebellum South's racist brutality. Through both ingenuity and disturbing beauty, Walker's silhouettes expose scenes of violent sex and the lashing, mutilation and lynching of Black bodies.  In Spring 2014, the nonprofit organization Creative Time commissioned Walker to create her first large scale public installation. Hosted in the industrial relics of the legendary Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, Walker's A Subtlety interacted with the building, its surroundings and its history in complex ways, by virtue of its physicality and the artist's powerful intention.  A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby, comprised a gigantic woman sphinx, evoking any (female) body that toiled in the global plantation south. The sculpture was made out of 80 tons of confectionery sugar coated over a foam structure, and was surrounded by a number of life size sculptures of "attendants" made out of molasses covered resin. In this article I articulate how Walker's A Subtlety defies the risk of reproducing the spectacle and objectification of the Black female body and the history it contains, by creating a space in which viewers can engage with the "vulnerability" of the subject matter, and consequently, with their own vulnerability. What do I mean by 'vulnerability' in the context of Walker's installation? I argue that vulnerability finds its way into the formal aspect of A Subtlety, its historical framework, and the multiple layers of hypertext created around the installation, which includes social media, a digital project in the Creative Time website, and surveillance like techniques by Walker. Vulnerability in the arts, as in life, works best when modeled upon. Artistic vulnerability is a productive strategy when it is neither the simple exposure of the artist's emotions, such as anger, fear, or pain, nor demanding of the artist to relinquish the meaning of her work entirely to the viewers' emotional response to it. Creating "vulnerable art" is a brave enterprise, and must generate meaningful questions as well as answers. An artist taking risks by tackling an uncomfortable subject and making herself vulnerable to it, and to her viewers, gives those viewers space to wrestle with their own response to it: to open up to it, or to cringe and act out their own discomfort with it.