"...I wanted to activate the space in a way and have
these overhead projectors serve as a kind of stand-in for
the viewer, as observers."
"I entered into this project, this idea of being a
black woman artist, from the perspective of a person who
has been presented with a pre-dissected body to work from."
"I think these figures are phantom-like. They’re
fantasies. They don’t represent anything real, it’s
just the end result of so many fabrications of a fabricated
identity."
"There’s a way that this work is two parts research
and one part paranoid hysteria. And I’ve always kind
of liked that, that impulse."
"Overhead projectors are a didactic tool, they’re
a schoolroom tool. So they’re about conveying facts.
The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those
facts."
"I think of the work in that way that you have dream
images, and the door and the hippopotamus actually represent
the same thing. They’re all stemming from the same
impulse somehow, which is something like a will toward
chaos..."
Projecting Fictions: “Insurrection!
Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On”
ART:21:
What are your first thoughts
about this piece here at the Guggenheim?
WALKER:
Well, this piece is called "Insurrection!
Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On." I always
wind up going back to the very beginning of everything with
my pieces, so it seems like it’s a continuation of a
series of work that I’ve been doing with large, narrative
silhouette
scenes, building around this idea of the cyclorama or a kind
of historical exhibit. In this case it’s somewhat hysterical.
The idea at the outset was an image of a slave revolt at some
point prior to me. And it was a slave revolt in the antebellum
south where the house slaves got after their master with their
instruments, their utensils of every day life. And really
it started with a sketch of a series of slaves disemboweling
a master with a soup ladle. My reference in my mind was the
surgical theater paintings of Thomas Eakins and others.
ART:21:
And the overhead projectors came
about how?
WALKER:
I knew for a while that I wanted
to make a piece that tried to engage the space a little bit
more directly then the pieces that are just cut paper on the
wall. And I had been using the overhead projectors as a kind
of a shadow play tool. Not really as a tool for making the
work—they’re usually hand drawn. But I wanted to activate
the space in a way and have these overhead projectors serve
as a kind of stand-in for the viewer, as observers. And my
thinking about the overhead projectors connected with my thinking
about painting as far as creating an illusion of depth, but
in a very mundane, flat, almost didactic way.
But back to surgical theater...before I even started working
with a narrative
that circled around representations
of blackness, representations of race, racial history, minstrelsy,
and everything that I wanted to investigate, I was making
work that was painterly and about the body and the metaphorical
qualities of the body. So I always think about this work and
think about history in terms of the body. And this act of
excavating that’s been such a current and recurring theme
(particularly in the histories of feminist artists, feminist
writers, African-Americans, people of color) is about investigating
and eviscerating this body of a collective experience, a history,
sometimes to the point—at least in my reckoning—to
the point of leaving nothing intact. There’s just this
pile of parts and goo. And I entered into this project, this
idea of being a black woman artist, from the perspective of
a person who has been presented with a pre-dissected body
to work from. A pre-dissected body of information. These gall
bladders and hearts and stomachs are all the things that would
make me complete should I choose to use them correctly and
put them back together. So in a way it’s Frankenstein-like.
ART:21:
Do your pieces, like "Insurrection!"
always have a particular narrative that you want viewers to
follow?
WALKER:
Actually, talking through my
work has been one of those problems. There’s a way in
which I’m more interested in what viewers bring to this
iconography
that I’m constantly dredging out of my own subconscious.
And as I dredge, I’m often surprised about what comes
up and what seems an up-holding of my own invention—what
seems connected to a series of representations
of the vulgar as paired with the blackness that have already
existed and have been regurgitated over several hundred years,
or over a history of African-Americana. So I couldn’t
really name these characters or caricatures
in the way that the wall texts at the museum or reviewers
who’ve looked at my work have sought to, or have elected
to. I think these figures are phantom-like. They’re fantasies.
They don’t represent anything real. It’s just the
end result of so many fabrications of a fabricated identity.
ART:21:
And yet your own name often appears
in the title of your works as well? Are you treating yourself
as a fictional character?
WALKER:
I think part of that is a game
that I’ve played with. The naming of the pieces and the
way that I’ve sort of represented myself as the maker
of these images, always with this jab at the notion of privilege
or entitlement as it’s been doled out occasionally to
young women in my position: African-American, female, young.
I was interested in slaves narratives and the romantic novel
of now one hundred and fifty years ago. When Phillis Wheatley’s
book of poems had to be verified by upstanding white men in
the community and they put their stamp of approval on the
authenticity of these words as though it were an impossibility
that a black woman could think of anything on her own. Now
it’s debatable, you know, how artistically worthy what
she thought of on her own was, but that’s really not
the point. I like the idea of suddenly finding myself in the
desirable echelons of the art world and presenting myself
in this manner. So I am incredibly grateful for the approval
of white society who understands that I am an anomaly. It
should raise questions I think, maybe more than it does.
ART:21:
It seems like you keep a lot
of information in your mind simultaneously, numerous perspectives.
WALKER:
There’s a lot of information,
but it’s not nearly as researched as I want it to be.
It depends really from piece to piece and from moment to moment
in my life. Things have sped up so much with the career aspect
of being an artist that I always have my suspicions that that’s
to keep me out of the books. But no, it’s twofold you
know. There’s a way that this work is two parts research
and one part paranoid hysteria. And I’ve always kind
of liked that, that impulse. I’ve always possessed that
impulse of concocting half-baked theories based on the reading
of a selective tome. I mean, I don’t trust it. I don’t
want to put it out there without some self-consciousness,
without being reflective about it. But it’s a fascinating
slippery slope when you start.
When I started investigating my relationship to my identity
and what my identity means, it was in the context
of artists doing identity-based art. I envy and have a love
for people who research in great detail history or some moment
in history, say feminist history, and then present it in a
way that’s somewhat didactic and matter-of-fact. And
really with an effort, a sincere effort to throw meaning out
to an audience that maybe isn’t conscious of this aspect
of history. But I’m incredibly suspicious of that impulse
too. I think that it’s all going to be filtered through
one’s subjectivity and my subjectivity, as a young person,
as a person at the end of the 20th Century, my subjectivity
is of a sexual woman, as a person who makes sometimes really
bad decisions.... There was no nobility in trying to do research
like that and in trying to filter my sense of self through
the lens of a larger history. It was going to get complicated
and I liked the complications that I was finding.
ART:21:
Where does "Insurrection!"
fit in the more recent projection works?
WALKER:
This is the first piece I did.
I used the projection and overhead projectors as a feature.
And I exhibited it in Geneva, at the Center for Contemporary
Art there. I built the piece in a very painterly way.
It’s actually the antithesis of the way that I think
that I should work: starting with the backgrounds and moving
to the foreground and then reworking the backgrounds, and
basically cutting and pasting these colored gels, and drawing
on the top and slapping them on top of the overhead projectors
in a very slapdash way. The images, they grew around this
central piece with the surgical theater or whatever you want
to call it—evisceration, insurrection—and I decided
to build it into a triptych based on the space that I had
at the time. All of the pieces that I worked on have transformed
depending on the space where they’re exhibited. But this
one was built as a triptych with the indoor scene in the center.
The windows came on top of that. And then I thought I’d
have what’s going on on the outside and try to reduce
the mayhem that I was envisioning to a few set incidences
where there is some turbulence, there’s some give and
take: castration and self-castration, offerings and stealing.
ART:21:
What do the projections mean
to you?
WALKER:
Projections came about as one
of a series of steps. It’s an easy answer to the idea
of projecting. Projecting one’s desires, fears, and conditions
onto other bodies, which all of my work has tried to engage
with using the silhouette. And it also created a space where
the viewer’s shadow would also be projected into the
scene so that maybe they would, you know, become captured
and implicated in a way that is very didactic. Overhead projectors
are a didactic tool, they’re a schoolroom tool. So they’re
about conveying facts. The work that I do is about projecting
fictions into those facts.
ART:21:
And the fact that they're beautiful.
How does that play out?
WALKER:
Beauty is just an accident.
Beauty is just a happenstance. Beauty is the remainders of
being a painter. The work become pretty because I wouldn’t
be able to look at a work about something as grotesque as
what I’m thinking about and as grotesque as projecting
one’s ugly soul onto another’s pretty body, and
representing that in an ugly way. I have always been attracted
to the lure. Work which draws a viewer in through a kind of
seductive offering. Here’s something to look at, stay
a while.
ART:21:
Did you discover something for
yourself when creating this piece?
WALKER:
Have I discovered something for
myself? Well, this way of working was new with the projections.
It was actually a lot of formal
discoveries. Spatial relationships, things like that.
I think one of the things that’s happened here and there
with the work that I’ve done is, because it mimics narrative—and
narrative is kind of a given when it comes to work that’s
produced by black women in this country—is there’s
almost an expectation. I feel an expectation for something
cohesive. There’s an understanding within America about
where that resolution is, you know, what that means to have
a "Color Purple" scenario where things resolve in
a way and a female heroine actualizes through a process of
self-discovery and historical discovery and comes out from
under her oppressors and maybe doesn’t become a hero,
but is a hero for herself. And nothing ever comes of that
in the pieces that I’m making. And I’m increasingly
aware of wanting to make that clear, that to some extent there’s
a failure for that kind of resolution and she doesn’t
become a.... You know she’s not evil, she’s not
a hero either, but then she sort of engages these oppositions
constantly and keeps it open, always knowing that the next
question is "Who is she?"
And she is...I just say she is "dot, dot, dot..."
That’s where I have this problem with language and naming
right now, the Negress of earlier titles, the "Negress
of noteworthy talent," who is me, who is not me, who
is that entity of somewhat powerful sisterhood negritude,
that is an idealization that stems partially out the black
power movement and partially out of a mainstream desire for
the juicy strange other, the Josephine Baker banana skirt
kind of desire. Otherness embodied and otherness that embodies
herself and otherness that plays at otherness. But who is
she? Is she one or all of the characters in the work? I think
of the work in the way that you have dream images and the
door and the hippopotamus actually represent the same thing.
They’re all stemming from the same impulse somehow, which
is something like a will toward chaos or a will toward attempting
resolution with the certainty that chaos reigns.
This is so hard... Yes, she’s an idealization, disembodied.
And also a re-embodied presence, with a will and a desire
towards chaos. There is a will towards resolving that chaos
with a certainty that it will never quite end. It will never
quite reach a clear conclusion. It will progress.
