Reviews: Maine

8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker
Bowdoin College Museum of Art • Brunswick, ME • www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum • Through February 14, 2010

Since first unveiling her cut-paper silhouettes in 1994, Kara Walker has consistently addressed “the terrain of racism” in America in an often disturbing manner, drawing on the imagery of slavery in the antebellum South in all its factual and fictional infamy. Walker’s means to provoke have ranged from ink drawings to video animations, each format featuring her signature cut-outs.

The sixteen-minute, black-and-white, shadow-puppet film, 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America (2005), highlights many of Walker’s themes, from racial and sexual dominance to the myths of the pre-Civil War South. Accompanied by old-time fiddling, a slave hymn, and other period music, with subtitles and bits of dialogue flashed across the screen in the manner of silent films, the piece provides a kind of mock-historical storyline for the origins of black America.

Part of the power of the film lies in the silhouettes, from the Flying Dutchman-like slave ship coursing across the waves with its torn sails, to the lynching tree bearing its strange fruit. Walker manipulates the figures with a kind of jerky precision (on several occasions during the film, we see her in action).

A number of commentators have remarked on Walker’s bitter humor, but it is a dark humor, too. Slave bodies awkwardly sliding down the gullet of the “Motherland” island is comic—not laugh-out-loud funny, but capable of inciting a nervous chuckle. The artist’s twitching tableaux often elicits mixed emotions. Watching the shadow play of a white cotton farmer fellating a slave, for example, one experiences fascination and repulsion.

The sources for Walker’s critiques have ranged from Eastman Johnson’s Old Kentucky Home to Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. Targets here include Walt Disney’s Song of the South, based on Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, as well as a 1793 broadside for Eli Whitney’s cotton gin (the newly reissued The Black Book underscores the wealth of such material). “As soon as you start telling the story of racism,” Walker stated in 2007, “you start…creating a monster that swallows you.” That monster consumes artist and audience alike.

—Carl Little