Situating Minimalism: Kara Walker’s Black Dimensionality

Minimalism haunts the production of the present, and over the last decade mainstream attention has been afforded to the graphic elements in contemporary Black arts and culture. Minimalist abstraction manifests the negation of Black life, notably as the "sunken place" in Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) and in Childish Gambino's This Is America (2018), contemporary re-imaginings of W. E. B. Du Bois's "double consciousness." A "peculiar sensation" and a "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others," double consciousness is, in part, about being cast off from the domains of civic society and respectability.1 But in Get Out and This is America, perception is coopted, disavowed, and stolen: a fugitive of the felt antagonisms of the earth, the Black figure sinks into the depths of an endless void. A new kind of consciousness is being cultivated—or refused altogether. The turn away from the politics of Black representation and respectability to that of minimalist aesthetic and cultural production is reflective of a broader anxiety toward the embodied and theatrical experience of the carceral state.2

In contrast to embodied figuration, minimalist abstraction affords a sensory mode that engages with the carceral state while remaining distant from it. Kara Walker's site-specific art is an example of what I call "Black dimensionality," by which I mean minimalist or non-referential abstraction, or what David Getsy terms sculpture's post-1960s "purge" of the human figure.3 As we shall see, Walker exhausts the figurative qualities of the subject, to the point that the distinctions between figure and ground, event and duration collapse in on themselves. That is the artist's minimalist refusal, and in this respect, "Black dimensionality" could be understood as minimalism's "de-subjectification," or what Michael Dango describes as an analysis "referred outward from the object and onto the space of the gallery and the experience of the audience."4 Of course, "dimensionality" holds a distinguished place in the history of contemporary art—most famously, the "art and objecthood" debate concerning painting's optical flatness (Michael Fried) and the object's theatrical relationality (Donald Judd). Moreover, the coinage "Black dimensionality" indexes the "veiled" abstractions undergirding the fungible extraction of the Black body (the afterlife of slavery), in addition to a "weak" theory (the social) being marshalled against "strong" theorical regimentation (the political).5 While abstraction could be interpreted as symptomatic of the unending present of capital, or the uneven distribution of cultural capital, I instead engage dimensionality as a haptic sensory apparatus. Kara Walker's installations directly thematize the limits of perception and the senses, and thus the processes of producing the position of spectatorship.

Walker's silhouettes capture the fugitive process of de-subjectification — particularly her debut, Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred b'tweeen the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), and its spiritual successor, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1997). Gone and The End of Uncle Tom trespass on a tradition of antebellum romance and conjure a racial imaginary — replete with images of scatology and incest among forms of racialized and gendered violence. Because these panoramic images evade representation, the silhouettes, situated against the white walls of the white cube, had become a flashpoint in a late-90s bourgeois culture war over the use of "proper" racial imagery. In July 1997, Walker was the youngest artist to receive the MacArthur; almost immediately thereafter, the assemblage artist Betye Saar famously started a letter writing campaign ("Kara is selling us down the river").6 And just two years after that, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) removed A Means to an End (1995). "Because there are so few informed curators available to bring a racially sensitive perspective to exhibition content and didactic text," Gwendolyn Shaw notes of the incident, the burden of curation and, indeed, representation, is put upon "citizens groups" limited to "trustees, local collectors, and collectors from the surrounding area, on the whole a conservative pool to draw from."7 To gaze upon this abject product of psycho-historical reconstruction, from Gone onwards, is to approach the networks of commerce (the art market), artistic "value" (aesthetic judgment of the autonomous work), and art history (the genealogy of sentimental images from antebellum culture). As minimalist praxis, the silhouettes refuse the specificity of witness, and yet the veiling effect is always embodying the insurrection of the commons: race is a spectacle in the commons precisely because it is unsayable; when race is made visible, we cannot ever believe what we see.

In subsequent years, critical responses to Walker's work have been directed to the ways that discomfort and ambivalence, as a byproduct of minimalist abstraction, deflate a politics of Black representation and respectability.8 "Dimensionality" is a useful concept in investigating Walker's recourse to paper arts, whether explicitly site-specific or deceptively flat. The silhouettes embody a particular type of Black performance — forever conscripted to the gaze and expectation of a white majoritarian public, always outside her own body — of which she is refusing. Walker's art, clearly, takes in a whole spectrum of image and object, from the two-dimensional (like Insurrection!), to the illusion of three-dimensionality (8 Possible Beginnings), to objects that occupy space, whether monumental or not (Fons Americanus, The Katastwóf Karavan, and A Subtlety). While many of us encounter her works as reproductions of the silhouettes — a flattened flat surface, if you will — she in fact takes great care in how her art is installed. This is obvious for something like A Subtlety (2014), but it is also the case when we are talking about the silhouettes. For example, with Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On) (2000), the experience is of being in an exhibition space with colored images projected onto walls (where the cut-out paper silhouettes are painted), with viewers' shadows necessarily falling onto them as they walk through the space. So, it is an intensely dimensional experience that is not conveyed by simply focusing on the silhouettes. This experience is less about excavating and evacuating anti-Blackness as it is about situating viewers in those structuring conditions. It is, in other words, the sunken place — whose representation is not to reform spectators but to make them deeply uncomfortable with the place in which their "good intentions" place Black people. 

With respect to minimalism, Walker's site-specific art functions as a sort of sensorium — the tactile embodiment of excess fleshiness. Weaponizing the sensory dynamics of the white cube, Walker disavows the individuation of perception and thus the hermeneutical privileging of sovereign subjectivity — a (de)subjectivized process of becoming that is materialized in the decontextualization, distortion, and defacement of the art-historical image, pointing toward the ways in which pleasure and pain and consumption uncomfortably structure one another. Again, what I am suggesting here is that Walker is opting for the dimensional over the representational — that she traffics in image culture so as to fundamentally transform the atmosphere of common space (and, whenever possible, the majoritarian public sphere).

Part of the challenge for me, someone whose spectatorship is imbricated in the uncomfortable position of the pedantic academic museum tourist, is striking a balance between a) not being too maudlin (slavery as absolute dominion denying the possibility of agency); and b) just being aware of the joke and the mechanisms of the set-up and the delivery (the white tourists who, as they take pictures of a Mammy's gigantic vulva, have decaying sugar shoved up their nostrils). If white supremacy is an intensely dimensional — and phenomenological — experience, then its totalizing effects demand from us appropriate countermeasures (and monuments). But what haunts me about Walker is the possibility that we cannot get underneath the surface, that there is no "there" there, and that is the horror and comedy of Black life.

While for considerations of space I am not engaging here in the normative debate on the ethical use of "positive" and "negative" representational imagery, I do want to acknowledge that a sense of uneasiness about the ways these installations operate within and against the historical frame is a perfectly legitimate response to them.9 Part of this has to do with minimalism's refusal of the figurative, but also the speculative value of art and commerce: for example, the laser-cut paper pop-up book Freedom, A Fable (1997), with a run of 4000 copies, regularly brings between $2000-$3000 at auction. The book thematizes the afterlife of slavery and thus the problem of historical transmission. While Freedom, A Fable is a postbellum frame narrative on the nonevent ("fable") of emancipation, the material dimensions of the object — the leather cover; laser-cut white paper stock; archaic fonts — intensify what is being deflated. The pop-up gimmick feels as if Walker is pressing the emergency button — that her art has been forced to inhabit a state of emergency. And yet, the emergency affronts the gaze of the spectator, in the guise of a children's book. In fact, Walker sets up the warring expectations of the audience for there to be a depth behind the surface, but because there is something inherently gimmicky about an art embodying its own concept, it forces Walker to be more and more outrageous. Put differently, while a Black critical establishment might expect there to be a depth behind the surface — about white supremacy or the destructive capacity of white innocence — Walker frustrates the expectation of depth. The spectator's position as victim or perpetrator is disturbingly indeterminate — Walker understands racism as an interracial collaboration — and I sometimes find myself pushing back against the architecture of the joke, or the formalist apology for deploying these modes of discomfort in the first place. Value and representativity are two unrelated possibilities for what the art could become upon its commodification. If Adorno has a sense of the impossibility of autonomous art under capitalism, then Walker makes that impossibility itself the subject of the art.10 Which, again, brings us back to the art market and the libidinal economy of white supremacy: Walker is using silhouettes to show a grotesque and cartoonish rendering of Black abjection, but because people can buy anything, it can often feel as though anti-Blackness is the product being monetized as "valuable" or representative art.

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Walker's turn to sculpture is notable because these monumental-scale three-dimensional works cannot be possessed as reproductions — or, as Amber Musser puts it, the scalar fix of Black liquidity is what "allows us to imagine formulations of brown jouissance in relation to fleshiness that exceeds the individual in multiple directions."11 Walker's very first large-scale public project, A Subtlety, exhibited between May and July 2014, was situated in the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, ahead of the structure's scheduled demolition. A Subtlety finds meaning in ephemeral conditions exceeding the autonomy of the artwork: social media outrage on Twitter and Instagram, with the signage preceding the exhibition reading "Please . . . Do not touch the artwork, but do share pictures on social media with #karawalkerdomino"; the demolition of the site, itself the ironic event of commemoration. A fleshy body of sensational excess, the thirty-five-foot-tall, seventy-five-foot-long Mammy Sphinx, is positioned toward the outer edge of the warehouse. Thirteen or so blackamoors, provocatively coated in a tar-like molasses, are scattered throughout the ghostly refinery space.  Obviously, these sculptures function as a sort of embodied index to the sugar industry and the ghostly accumulation of Black and brown bodies undergirding sugar's production and consumption — what the title-card names as the "unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World." Additionally, the Domino Sugar Refinery is a site of regulation and regeneration, a "racial iconography" which, as Jennifer Nash describes it, "the Black female body has rendered [ . . . ] a public site, a space onto which social debates and collective anxieties about morality, religion, policy, and the state are inscribed."12 Thus, a process of transformation is at work — a conjuring act, if you will — wherein Walker appropriates the stereotype of the Mammy, who in this instance is made a figure of impermanence, one that covers death but also the very processes of building a monument in effigy. That much is clear.

What is less clear, and a source of much vexation, are the overlapping temporal and spatial logics: the creation, circulation, and consumption of images, then and now. Yes, Walker carefully indexes the life of print and mediation: Fons Americanus (2019), that crowd-pleasing, pre-pandemic spectacle (it was among the most visited exhibitions ever in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall) situates viewers to the image of Atlanticism and print capitalism: an allusion to Thomas Stothard's The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to West Indies (1801) is the centerpiece. There is a conspicuous fictionality or bookishness on display, comparable to the slave narratives — that fugitive genre of writing legitimized by Northern abolitionists, suffragists, journalists, and lawyers. A print culture of novels and letters — prefaces, appendixes, correspondences, title-pages — are grafted onto the installation's apparatus, so as to legitimize the historical "matter" of Black life in the middle passage. That said, what is notable about Fons Americana (and A Subtlety) are the moments in which authorized discourse is exceeded, denied, and disavowed. While Walker is keen to situate the material culture and reading publics of Early America, that situatedness of the artwork, and the experiential means in which the spectator must necessarily engage them, provokes outright repulsion toward these materials.

Let us return again to the Mammy Sphinx, made up of 330 Styrofoam blocks and 162,000 pounds of Domino Sugar. Literally sugar coated, the Sphinx subverts the sentimental trope of the mammy, a supposedly asexual and apolitical subject of plantation life. There is an insurrection potential to her sentimentality because her flesh embodies the performance of the private which has been brought to bear in public space. The Sphinx's insurrection is as much contemporary as it is historical: we know Walker is pulling from contemporary source material because she has published her magazine collages or "study," in which a sphinx head is blazoned onto the tattooed thighs of a Black performer. This bodily disassemblement of excess flesh materializes an operative fantasy. That excess produces the theory and the politics, but it also actualizes Hortense Spillers' theorization on the flesh as a foreclosure — the flesh of the Black woman as a commodity available to everyone but the one who possesses it, "the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world."13 All of this is to say that while the claim to a biopolitics of feeling is often understood as a claim for citizenship — sentimentality as means to personhood — Walker instead points to a rubric of sensual excess. Walker is choosing what to disclose: the installation refuses the architecture of commemoration, respectability, and grieving, and when we are without the grief of our grievance we are left with melancholy, annoyance, anger.

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What, then, is the affective dimension (or emotional purchase) of epistemology? What is the character of affect? Where does envy and resentment come into play? What is the affective space of grief? And if this is an art to be mourned, then why is it that this mourning takes on different meanings for different people: as indifference to subjection, a syntax of estrangement and kinship, and a performance of (in)humanity? How Walker presents the sentimental subject in effigy is disturbingly resonant insofar as that, while Black maternal grief is taken as the exemplary grieving subject, the death of Black women is often taken for granted.14 There is a loss in the fact that there is a need to prove the fact of humanity — the making of claims, in and of itself, is a loss — and as such I am admittedly a bit weary toward the philosophical anthropology model of "spectacular suffering": the Christeologics that once you see the suffering, you will be motivated to repair it. We cannot assume suffering will be generative for people to respond to undeserving suffering. How, then, do we grieve these inconvenient and problematic harms that do not fit the model of white supremacy: the grief and commemoration of monuments?

Walker's repositioning of commemorative matters is a minimalist refusal. If Blackness is a "problem" of surface and vision, made literal in Walker's sculpture and silhouette and shadow play, then that minimalist abstraction constitutes a countermelancholic practice. And, as such, Walker cultivates a phenomenology or felt experience of race: the feeling of our movements not being one's own; the experience of our own corporeality with the scripts and gazes of another; of being a body conscripted to a set of white, normative expectations. Dimensionality, again, is useful, insofar the possibility for a politics of care, redress, or response would be impossible without it. Dimensionality is simultaneously the problem of and the resource attending to what is going on underneath the surface: the unfreedom and absurdity of minoritarian life.

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Acknowledgments: My deep thanks to Connor Bennett, Michael Dango, and Michael Docherty for their editorial stewardship; Lily Scherlis, Jack Chelgren, Esther Isaac for providing a wonderful forum at 3CT; and Glenda Carpio, Sarah Chihaya, Deidre Lynch, Jesse McCarthy, Kinohi Nishikawa, Tracy K. Smith, and Brandon Terry for their insightful feedback during the drafting phase.

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Wyatt Sarafin is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. He focuses primarily on post-1960s literature, media, and art in the Americas. His essays, on Chris Ware's "diagrammatic epistemology" and Wifredo Lam's "melancholy historicism," have been published in ASAP/Journal and Adorno's 'Minima Moralia' in the 21st-Century, respectively, and his reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Critical Inquiry. 

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