Related reading: The Flying Walentases (on the developers in NY Mag), Marina Budhos's Kara Walker and the Real Sugar Links, Nicholas Powers, Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit and the anthololgy, Kara Walker No/Kara Walker Yes/Kara Walker?
Monday, June 16, 2014
Dirty Sugar: Kara Walker’s dubious alliance with Domino
Photo: Dennis Kardon © 2014
There’s much that disturbs me about Kara Walker’s much-lauded
and wildly popular installation
at Brooklyn’s defunct Domino Sugar refinery, but I’ll start with its undeniable
beauty. Made of sparkling white sugar, this gigantic, crouching sphinx-like figure,
with curves like a Brancusi,
looms like a symbol of purity in the vast darkness and decay of the factory’s
interior. The sweet smell is overwhelming, and the piece itself is intended to
degrade over time; when I was there, skeletal dark lines were beginning to form
between the polystyrene blocks that form the core of the sculpture.
Conceptually and figuratively, it’s a virtuoso performance that brilliantly
fulfills part of nonprofit Creative Time’s
original mission to ”support
the creation of innovative, site-specific, socially engaged works in the public
realm, especially in vacant spaces of historical and architectural interest…while
pushing artists beyond their normal boundaries.” [See note below]
So why
does its beauty upset me? Because the installations’ sheer gorgeousness and
spectacle serve as a distraction from the insidious agenda that makes a mockery
of another part of Creative Time’s mission, to “foster social progress.” I have long felt that Walker’s work—in which Black people are portrayed as passive victims of slavery engaged in psycho-sexual drama—doesn’t invalidate, but rather
reinforces the stereotypes whites have imposed on them to justify racism. In addition, it is entirely dependent on the gratuitous titillation that violence and sex
inevitably engender, regardless of the context—or the race of the person who
perpetrates them. Walker’s sphinx conflates two familiar white parodies of Black women: the big-assed, sexually available Jezebel, with her vulva hanging out for the taking,
and her opposite, the maternal, large-breasted but desexualized Mammy, who sublimates her own needs to fulfill those
of her white charges.
Vulgar
photos taken by visitors posing with the “sphinx” are all over Instagram, and castigated online by writers who are upset that the artwork is not being shown
proper respect. Derived from minstrel
shows where
whites in blackface lampooned Black people, the Jim Crow caricatures Walker appropriates were
created with the specific intention of provoking ridicule. Should we then be
surprised when they succeed?
Roberta
Smith in the Times writes that Walker “evokes the history of the
sugar trade, its dependence on slavery and slavery’s particular degradation of
women, while also illuminating the plagues of obesity and diabetes that keep so
many American dreams unfulfilled.” Yet it can also be said that Walker is
providing massive advertising for Domino Sugar,
which donated the 80 tons that make up the sculpture. As a sponsor, the
familiar Domino logo is prominently featured on a wall at the site as well as
Creative Time’s website,
and a Google search for ‘“Kara Walker” Domino’ garners over 88,000 links. Statements
that speak of “history,” along with the fact that Walker’s images are based nostalgically
on our antebellum past, present a view of slavery that locates it dangerously
outside the present capitalist global economy—when it is still very much part
of it.
While Creative Time’s website includes a compelling
essay written by the narrator of a documentary
about the forced and child labor that constitute modern slavery, it doesn’t
name the mega-corporation that owns Central Romano, the plantation on which it was filmed: Flo-Sun,
of which Domino is its best-known subsidiary. If the people at Creative Time,
along with Walker, have seen this film—as indeed they must have in their
research—I wonder how they feel about the ironic possibility that Walker’s
sculpture might have been enabled by slave labor.
Pepe
and Alfy Fanjul, who run Flo-Sun, inherited the sugar empire from their
Cuban father. Dubbed
“the Koch brothers of Southern Florida,” they‘re said to be friends and
neighbors of the Kochs
who, in comparison with the sugar barons, look like Mother Theresa clones.
In the Dominican Republic, the
Fanjuls have been subject to repeated allegations of labor exploitation,
particularly of undocumented Haitian migrant workers with little to no legal
standing before Dominican government institutions. The U.S. Department of
Labor includes sugar from the Dominican Republic—much of which comes from
Fanjul-owned plantations or is imported to Fanjul-owned refineries—on its
annual "List of Goods Produced by Child or Forced Labor."
Both a 2005 Canadian Broadcasting
Company documentary [“The Price of
Sugar,” narrated by Paul Newman, view here]
and the 2007 film "The Sugar
Babies," narrated
by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat [author of the Creative Time essay] call attention to the working
conditions of impoverished cane-cutters laboring at the Fanjuls' Central Romana.
In the United States, meanwhile, opponents of U.S. agricultural
subsidies and government protections have long
criticized the Fanjuls for building their dominance in the domestic market on
the backs of artificially inflated prices and the U.S. taxpayer…. more
Essential
reading includes the 2001 Vanity
Fair article, “In the Kingdom of Big Sugar,” which inspired the
two documentaries, a CNN piece on how the Fanjuls
could be the “First Family of Corporate Welfare,” and this on their strong-arm
tactics with lawmakers, from Wikileaks.
You
could spend days, as I did, reading about the moral and ethical transgressions of
the Fanjuls, and just when you think it couldn’t get worse, it does: In 2010,
the Post’s Page
Six reported
that Pepe Fanjul’s executive assistant of 35 years is the ex-wife of former KKK
leader David Duke, and the current wife of Don Black, a former KKK grand wizard and member of the American
Nazi Party. He now runs white-supremacist website StormFront.org. A company representative
said, “While we may not agree with someone’s politics, we wouldn’t terminate
them for that….We will not discriminate against anybody….”
One
could also make an issue of the extensive advertising Walker is providing for
another sponsor, Two Trees Management, owned by Creative
Time board member Jed Walentas, who worked for Trump before taking over
his father’s real estate business, and will have 1700 luxury apartments to sell
in his massive waterfront development on the site (as well as 700 affordable
units, the number bumped up under pressure from Mayor de Blasio). And then
there’s the non-renewable polystyrene that went into this gigantic
temporary work that, like Styrofoam, could take a million years to break down. However
next to the question of how the 80 tons of Fanjul sugar were most likely sourced,
these are mere quibbles.
So
much for institutionalized protest—to paraphrase Banksy, this is art packaged to look like
radicalism while supporting capitalism at its worst.
Photo: Carol Diehl (2014)
***
Note: I lifted this
mission statement from Creative
Time’s Wikipedia entry, well aware that it is not same statement that appears on
their website. However having been Director of Public Relations (a somewhat
hilarious title, given that I was the entire department) for Creative Time in
the mid-80’s, when it was a pioneering organization and very true to its
nonprofit status, these were the words used to promote it and I feel best
represents the inspired vision of founder Anita
Contini.
Related reading: The Flying Walentases (on the developers in NY Mag), Marina Budhos's Kara Walker and the Real Sugar Links, Nicholas Powers, Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit and the anthololgy, Kara Walker No/Kara Walker Yes/Kara Walker?
Related reading: The Flying Walentases (on the developers in NY Mag), Marina Budhos's Kara Walker and the Real Sugar Links, Nicholas Powers, Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit and the anthololgy, Kara Walker No/Kara Walker Yes/Kara Walker?
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Winter Hiatus
Just a note to say that I haven’t abandoned blogging, just
taking a break after seven years and over 500 posts--and saving myself for drawing
and a bigger project, yet to be unveiled, that’s taking up all of my brain
cells. Right now I’m happily ensconced in Los Angeles, soaking up the sun, doing
kundalini yoga every day, and thriving in the relaxed atmosphere. I'll work
on trying to miss New York, because I’ll be back soon enough.
Happy New Year!
Carol Diehl, 2013, ink and pencil on Bristol, 11 x 14.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
I ♥ the Guggenheim
If anything, by completely obscuring Frank Lloyd Wright’s
architecture with his installation,
James Turrell reaffirmed my already
profound love for the Guggenheim
–like the new appreciation one might have for a healed limb after the cast has
been removed.
At the museum Friday for the Christopher
Wool exhibition, I was reminded of how Wright created not just a place for
art, but for people—a social space in one big room that hums like a party. In
most museums the other visitors are annoyances, always in the way, going the wrong
direction, talking too loudly or blocking the view—but at the Guggenheim
they’re fellow travellers. The ramp is like a sidewalk where you can stop and
chat (no need to whisper); it respects your pace. You can see what’s ahead above
or across the atrium and get exited about it in advance, stand as close or look
as far as you want. What other museum offers a view from over 100 feet?
Plus the natural light that comes in from the skylight at
the top….
In the usual rectangular museum gallery, I’m overly
conscious of the amount of time I’m spending in front of something, and am
always torn – should I be looking at this or this or is there something more
interesting behind me? What am I missing? And this time at the Guggenheim, when
I exited the ramp to see the paintings installed in the one conventional room,
they lost some of their dynamism. I didn’t want to be there, enclosed, with no
windows. I wanted to be “outside.”
I not only remember the work in exhibitions I’ve seen at the
Guggenheim, I remember where it was situated and how it felt to come upon it—the
“uninterrupted, beautiful
symphony” of architecture and art Wright intended.
Further, there’s a single toilet or two at every level, so
no need to descend to a dungeon and crowd into the usual bathroom
horribleness—how civilized is that?
Our forebears made art on the walls of caves with no right
angles. I think they had had the right idea.
Friday, October 4, 2013
An afternoon in Chelsea
18th Street, between 10th and 11th
Hauser &Wirth, 511 WEst 18th Street
20th Street
Eleventh Avenue
Bortolami Gallery, 520 West 20th Street
Tenth Avenue sidewalk
29th Street between 9h and 10th
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Robert Irwin on "Scrim Veil-Black Rectangle-Natural Light (1977)" recently at the Whitney
In my previous post about James Turrell at the Guggenheim and Robert Irwin’s re-installation of Scrim Veil-Black
Rectangle-Natural Light, 1977 at the Whitney (June 27-Sept 1, 2013), I suggested
that Irwin might have taken Marcel
Breuer’s trapezoidal window as his starting point, given that the window’s
narrow black frame appeared to share both color and dimension with his long horizontal bar and the painted black stripe that runs, also horizontally, around the walls. When I wrote to the museum for exact measurements, however, I was told “the curators are unaware of any correlation between the dim [frame] on
the window and the width of the black stripe.” Knowing the precise observation inherent in Irwin's work, I decided to put the question to the artist himself. In doing so I gained insight
into what Irwin was thinking when he first entered the Whitney gallery 35 years
ago, and how the philosophy that drove that piece is still at play in his work
today. The following is from a phone conversation on September 3, 2013.
Robert Irwin, Scrim Veil-Black Rectangle-Natural Light, 1977 (reinstalled). Photo: Vaughn Tan
CD: I wrote in my post that the window, whose black frame roughly matches the elements you added, appeared to be your starting point. Is that so?
CD: I wrote in my post that the window, whose black frame roughly matches the elements you added, appeared to be your starting point. Is that so?
RI: No. The first
thing that struck me when I entered the room at the Whitney, was the black
floor. Then there’s the ceiling, not handsome, but a factor, and the quality of
the light from the window, the way it disintegrates over the length of the space.
And, of course, the sheer size of the room – an empty room of that scale is
something you don’t generally encounter in New York. The window is the
architect’s revenge; the angles are a perfect perspective to the buildings
across the street, and it has a pictorial element, which make’s it almost impossible
to show a painting there. Most of the time they have to hide the window. The
window is a detail, but not a principal one.
Normally when you walk into the room you take a check—the
first responsibility of perception is to keep from being killed—so you check
coordinates, rapidly. But I did something at the Whitney that doesn’t stand
out, which was paint the wall opposite the window a shade that’s considerably
brighter than the other walls—if you were to turn a light on in the room at night, you’d see that it was about 65% gray. So when you come in, you know that
something’s not quite right, but only subliminally.
The situation was an opportunity to make a statement about
the idea of “conditional” —as well as how, and in what way, the conditional
acts in world.
What do you mean by
“conditional”?
Instead of being in the studio and conceiving things, the
artist isolated in the frame, the idea is that the perceiver can deal with the
world itself and make all kinds of value judgments, engage the cognitive self to
make decisions in the world. I was intrigued by the idea that rather than
creating a metaphor, an artist can function directly in the world….
…and eliminate the
“frame,” which includes wall text, labels—all the paraphernalia that designates
a thing as “art” and separates it from life.
Yes, in my very first show at MoMA, with Jenny Licht back in
1970, they put a label on the wall and I hired someone to come in and take it
off. So when you walked into the room you had to go through the process
of asking yourself “Is this thing
finished? Is it intended?”
It’s about using the same elements in the museum and the
outside world, making something, but not really making anything, just pointing
it out. If we take the history of modern art as a question, does “making” equal
“art”? Is it necessary to make something or can it be about operating in the world
as it is? I just took it one step farther.
The one thing that distinguishes each of my students from
the other is an individual sensibility; my job as a teacher is to help them
find that key element, and develop it. So I come to a situation and add to that
existing dialogue from what’s at the core of my being an artist.
I’m not a landscape designer, but made a garden at the Getty.
The same with the design of the Dia:Beacon. I am not an
architect.
Getty Garden. iPhone photograph. f/2.8. Copyright (c) Joanne Mason 2011.
I recently had a
conversation with an artist, and when I told him you designed the Dia:Beacon,
he said, “But there’s nothing there. He didn’t really do anything to it.” He
meant that your signature wasn’t on it. I thought you’d like that.
When I consider a space, I don’t have to bring to it other
kinds of abstract rationale.
The Dia doesn’t act as a piece of art. When architects
design museums, they are creating major pieces of sculpture. In the beginning,
they have pure intentions, but when it becomes big business, they start to act
as if they’re artists. It’s unethical to build a building that doesn’t function.
So getting back to
the Whitney, it can’t be coincidence that the frame around the window matches
the bar and painted stripe.
No, of course not. The window is definitely an element in the vocabulary. And there are only a few others in that
space: the floor, the disintegration of light over the space, the ceiling. Of those the
disintegration of the light was probably the most appealing aspect for me. The light is a subject that goes through this amazing exercise before your eyes, which the scrim then multiplies...sometimes opaque, sometimes transparent.
It’s interesting that
your show coincided with Turrell’s
at the Guggenheim – both involving space, light, iconic architecture….
But it’s not fair to compare Turrell’s current work with
something I did 35 years ago—35 years is a long time in a life. And when I did
it, it was like I threw a rock in a pond and there were no ripples. Now it’s a cause
célèbre; it just took that amount of time to get back to
me. The same with a column I made in 1971, that's just now found a home in the San Diego Federal Courthouse.
I can understand why, though. At the exhibition I saw at
Chicago’s MCA in 1975, you did two pieces: the scrim wedge and one that was
simply—to my mind at the time—a black bar running around the floor. I was
hugely affected by the scrim piece, but it was too early in my life as an
artist for me to understand the other. Now I would get it in a flash. Maybe
people are just catching up.
Robert Irwin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1975.
Further reading: Carol Diehl, "Robert Irwin: Doors of Perception," Art in America, December, 1999.
Robert Irwin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1975.
Further reading: Carol Diehl, "Robert Irwin: Doors of Perception," Art in America, December, 1999.
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