I saw the Kara Walker show with Matt J. I took my time and watched films, read text, inspected paintings and drawings. I think that a good quality to her work is that it requires or mandates that you spend time with it for a while. Saying that Walker's work is charged is both an understatement and oversimplifying the matter. I think that her work offends me at first, and then as I spend time with it, it offends me more deeply and in a more complicated way. When I say "it offends" I mean that it never allows me rest easy and I find my self laughing at things that are horrifying.
Kara Walker doesn't get along with feminists very well and I bet there are lots of African American artists who don't like what she is doing. I think that she is not one-dimensional, but rather she employs and combines modes of artmaking that are one-dimensional to create blurry often contradictory and very messy pictures of race, gender and sexuality. I see this kind of work as necessary in a country which has been dominated by political authorities that want to perpetuate their power and this war by polarizing debate in black and white terms and playing on the fear of the people.
Vote people.
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6 comments:
That's all well said and I will mull over and get back to you, Brian.
About voting thoughts:
This website seems pretty good: http://www.2decide.com/table.htm
It's a table of how each candidate supports different issues. Pretty handy.
who wrote this? Steph?
-Brian
yea = me = Steph.
I just sign in as roundtablereads cause I don't have a gmail account in my own name. So, generally - this is me.
ok, great.
thanks steph.
I agree about well said. I also agree that she is not one dimensional. I would argue though, that unlike some artists, she had the great opportunity of hitting it during the political breeze of the nineties. This allowed for her to use race on many levels. Now, she can continue to use it. Sometime good. Sometime I don't give a fuck. I would love to discuss many levels of what the PERSONAL means/is when we meet in person. Thanks again Brian for your comments. FF
Isn't it hard to judge things on a critical level? I think it's more often about a feeling of "with-it-ness" that tells me whether something is good or not.
"Is this with-it?" I ask myself. "Doesn't this person get-what's-going-on?" That's the real question. What's-going-on could be any number of things except what isn't and that's plainly obvious and we all know it.
There are several levels of "with-it" that apply at any time. What are these levels? We ask ourselves. We have the "outsider art" not with-it and the "it's not cool to talk about that" with-it and the "that's to elitist to be with-it" with-it. There are many. We can think of a couple at once for some things. We all know what they are and what it means but sometimes it's not with-it to talk about it.
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