ART-PREVIEW:Kara Walker Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale
Kara Walker’s instantly recognizable cut-paper silhouettes are visually striking and charged with racial, sexual, and historical tension, commenting on slavery, the Black American experience, and women’s place in society. The characters that populate her work are almost cartoonish, the reduction of human beings to pure physiognomy and exaggerated characteristics indicative of persisting racial and gender stereotypes.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
Kara Walker’s video “Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi’s Blue Tale” (2011), a work that highlights the artist’s compelling approach to difficult but crucially relevant subject matter, but also divided both the art critics and the public, is on presentation at Sprüth Magers Gallery in Berlin. The video is a shadow puppet narrative, which follows the travails of the heroine, Miss Pipi, intercut with shadow puppet “abstracts” of a surreal and violent nature. Miss Pipi, a “Southern Belle* in the pre-civil war American Deep South, has a sexual encounter with a black man, presumably a slave. When their tryst is uncovered, he is eventually beaten, castrated, and brutally killed by her jealous white lover and a group of white men. The subtext of the video is the mythology surrounding white Southern womanhood, historically cited time and time again as an entity to be protected from sexuality, in particular from the presumed hyper-sexuality of black men. Although fiction, this was the excuse for the murder of countless black men and boys in Jim Crow America. Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in Southern and border States, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. While Walker’s narrative moves forward linearly, it is interspersed with scenes that add a level of surreal abstraction: flowering trees scroll by, a man in a top hat dances to jovial music, a figure who is half-human, halfbicycle wheels across the screen. In addition, the artist offers viewers glimpses of the puppeteers themselves, of which Walker is one. This periodically breaks the illusion of silhouettes, adding touches of humor and jolting us out of the artist’s uncanny reverie and into the present moment. The video’s soundtrack moves from Delta Blues to 70s groove music to ambient noise, adding yet another complex layer to Walker’s ambivalent blend of cultural and historical references.
*The term Southern Belle represents a young woman of the American Deep South’s upper socioeconomic class.
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 27/4-8/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com
