Kara Walker: Brent Sikkema - New York - exhibition Drawing investigates the properties of drawing versus cutout

single does not "enjoy" a Kara Walker display and this is odd because she is an enchantingly skillful artist. She slog from one side a swamp of race, history, trauma, and desire, which is hard enough, then pirouettes along a tightrope between extravagant stereotype and idiosyncrasy, which is smooth trickier. To engage such material--to embarrass and plane offend audiences and to ensnare the eager critic m contradiction and multiple meaning--adds up to an ambitious enterprise. on the contrary Walker has for almost a decade met the challenge with the unwavering ludic rage characteristic of great social satire.

The work demands direct address to its political significations. And still Walker's sensibility is profoundly formal; she's obsess with unimpeachably neutral issues like line, fabric scale, color, and the way body reflects midge. Her recent exhibit was titled simply "Drawings," suggesting that the relative consistency, flat predictability--though never simplicity--of her satisfied has become a counterweight to continuing modifications of form. And this in turn round raises the interesting possibility that her master narrative of race and rape, her miasmatic plantation of the collective cultural mind, could now be said to function as a folktale, a "classic" whose endles iterations rely upon subtle formal shifts to material part forth the lessons of its archetypically static content

Walker is famous for monstrous and delicate, ofttimes near-life-size black-paper silhouettes, assembled from the boneyard of southern gothic--a pigtail here, an apron there, a bared breast, a hoop-skirt, a broad-brimmed hat, a penis. From her 1994 novel York debut in a clump show at the Drawing Center to this year's exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, these unstable bodies have struck a dizzying array of attitude s all of them variations upon violation. Even in the "Drawings" exhibit where only one piece was devot to black cutouts upon white, a sense of flickering, knife-sharp, still abyssal "shades" remained, as if the folk figure of the silhouette were masquerading in a style of dress of pencil. One of the exhibition's lock opener images, for example (Untitled, 2003) displays a bucktoothed girl drawn in black graphite, grinning into the void. The orb of her cyclopean Afro rhymes with her blank eyepits and dot-like aureolas, proposing her race, her psyche, and her sex as redundant circles. A rattan chain pierced into the paper joins her nipples; a dark nebulosity billows from her labia. None of these details would be visible if the image were silhouetted--yet all their implications would be there.

each piece in the show investigates the properties of drawing versus cutout. In a series of colored-pencil sketches (all Untitled, 2003) closely shaded raps of blue, brown, green, or orange lightly fill in the outlines of figures--"colored" versions of the black paper shapes without their heft, contour, or opacity. It doesn't matter, admitting whether the specter of miscegenation is intrinsic to the material or overlaid: The pictures still amuse and horrify.

In short, Walker treats her tales as myth that must be hypnotically repeated, a overcomeed constantly returning in new guises; her focus upon graphic experiment and formal precision positions her as grim, telling the same story above and over, always alike, at no time the same, for the benefit of a agriculture that does not know itself. Language is as important here as other formal, visual simple bodys and like a slave narrative framed by means of an abolitionist's testimony, Walker's images are gleefully overdetermined [i]or[/i] part of to the other titles (Search for Authenticity Sketched from Life at a southerly Carolina Slave Auction by Myself) and captions (ONE DAY WHITE AMERICA WILL REALIZE IT HAS BECOME THE NATION'S NIGGER) that decorate, complicate and interrogate without explaining. As a scribbled caption warns, IT'S A TRAP AND YOU regard with affection IT!

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