Kara Walker: The Louis Armstrong of Contemporary Art?

Kara Walker, Untitled (Girl With Bucket), 1998.

Via Jezebel: Would Kara Walker agree that her success is "a form of oppression"? She certainly seems to have anticipated that notion with her work.

Walker's medium is the cut-out, the silhouette. That medium, to put it plainly, is cheesy. With only a few exception in portraiture, it barely has any history or precedent in fine art. It has some commercial applications—I'm thinking of cartoons, or the zoetrope—but more than anything it falls within a folk category of images. Certainly, it doesn't hang in a traditional hierarchy of media: It's not painting, it's not sculpture, it's not drawing. It's not pedigreed.

So Walker is setting her work up for exploitation. It's folk-ish and it's concerned with black historical narratives, but it's sold and seen by a world that is predominantly white and moneyed. Walker isn't naive to these facts. She's staging her works to be considered in that context. What you see in her work is one narrative, but when you see them—the see-ing of her works—that's narrative, too. And it's a somewhat different narrative from that in her works: A level of institutional critique to add to work that might otherwise come across as resonant but potentially one-dimensional.

Betye Saar never gave her enough credit when she said that Walker sold out black women. At root Walker's images are about the sale of black people—about chattel slavery. What makes them great contemporary art is that their situation makes a similar statement. When you see Kara Walker's work in a museum, alongside the typically white painting and sculpture with which they're inevitably paired, you cannot help but notice those circumstances.

Not every black working artist is going to appreciate or care for this fact about Walker's work, or necessarily agree that her consciousness approach to her situation matters absolves her from potentially playing token in a commercial art world that will only take diversity so far. It's that tension that Henry Thaggert and Jeffry Cudlin had in mind for "She's So Articulate", I think, and it's that tension that both Jessica Grose at Jezebel and Jessica Dawson in the Washington Post are responding to.

To my mind, Kara Walker holds the same controversial ground that Louis Armstrong did in the 1940s and 50s.

Other musicians, most notably his peer Dizzy Gillespie, were uncomfortable with Armstrong's peripatetic relationship with white audiences. Armstrong's performer persona was a minstrelsy shtick that set white fans at ease but simultaneously interrupted the language that white oppressors would use to mock a man like Louis Armstrong. Even Armstrong's critics within the black community would have to acknowledge that even if his humor failed to present a progressive model, he was the leading figurehead of the most subversive, liberationist art form of the generation, possibly even the century: jazz. Walker, like Armstrong, knows exactly what she's doing.