An excellent review. Thanks for giving a different, and deeper, perspective.

Carol, a fascinating piece on the political connections of Domino, but I would like to respectfully disagree on a few points.

I think it is a mistake to attack Walker on the gratuitous titillation charge. As original conceived in her first exhibition at the Drawing Center, the black paper silhouettes were radical partly because of the way they implicated a viewer's imagination with its store of racial and pornographic stereotypes in order to complete the piece. It was the ambiguity that gave the early work that power.

It was only after the attack by the black intellectuals that you mention which scared her off her original premise, that Walker started to weaken and temporize her work with text, illustration, and general dumbing down and lack of trust in the original power of her work, making explicit and obvious what was before ambiguous and requiring a complicity on the part of viewers.

This is the first really great work of hers since then, because it again requires that complicity. Rather than temporizing the Domino connection it throws it in their face. No one having seen this piece can now innocently buy a Domino product again. She has made visible something hidden, and easy to stay unaware of, and in a way that brings the full horror of it home.

It is important for groups that have been oppressed to take back the stereotypes that oppressors have used to define them, emphasizing their degrading nature. And people who criticize Walker for doing this don't really understand the artistic power in the way she has most successfully employed it. The work (at its best) is not really titillating, it is discomfiting. But you are correct that the criticism of the instagrams is disingenuous. They were to be expected. I don't think it was Walker that criticized them.

I think this piece is more problematic for Domino, especially with your research, than it is for viewers or Walker. As for Two Trees I am afraid that being in bed with them is pretty self-defeating. I urge artists not to participate in their open studio celebrations which just raise the value of the real-estate and hasten their own eventual eviction.

Sugar is truly evil stuff. The karma of its history is coming back to ruin the health of those that consume it, whose forbears tormented so many to produce it.

Sugar is the heroin of food. Thank you for your research and insights. Materials are content.

Kara is such a genius. Even your response is a part of the performance.

Even your response, misguided and devoid of empathy as it was, is a part of the subtlety and that's why Kara Walker is a genius.

Bringing Domino into the collective attention isn't necessarily advertising on its behalf.

When they are a sponsor of the work it is certainly advertising on their behalf

Dennis, Just to reply to your point about Domino -- the piece isn't problematic for Domino at all. But donating the sugar they essentially keep Creative Time from pointing a direct finger at them--consider it a pay-off. And the publicity they get goes way beyond even the people who actually came to see the piece. They sponsored a work of art…makes them look great. After all, a major article in Vanity Fair and two shockingly explicit documentaries about their abuses didn't touch them, so how big a deal, really, is a sculpture?-- especially one that doesn't connect the dots.

Your essay borders on offensive. Only a few current writers have had the insight and intelligence to write comprehensively about Walker's "Subtlety". I smell jealousy.

Dear Carol,
THANK YOU! Thank you for your research and insights.
Howardena

What I want to know is this: who were the people who actually built the sculpture and what were they paid? Were they artists? Construction workers? Were they paid fairly, treated decently? There's so much talk about the terrible treatment of the people who worked in the sugar factory itself - I want to know about these other folk. I don't for a minute assume that everything was groovy for them. Anybody know?

Laurie, I think there are videos on youtube that show how it was constructed. From what I understand they were white guys, artist types, and no one was disgruntled.

There is also another very disturding issue......Walker found the images for the children from online figurines produced by african artisans......she then had them enlarged by computer and copied......did she get permission?..did she pay any royalties to the litlle paid worker who made the original figurines?...does anyone know this?......or is this just another big name artist exploiting the work of others?

Oh, for fuck's sake. Kara Walker is not the enemy. Global capitalism, with the racism that enables it, is. That is the point of Walker's work. You're shooting the messenger.

....and all those people standing in front of the statue of David are.....

….not making fun of it. At least I've not noticed that to be the general response.

I wonder how many of the people who visited the site will stop buying Domino sugar. I wonder how many will go home, get on the Internet and research the history of the imagery they saw, i.e. Sarah Baartman who was made to shake her nakedness before all-white audiences at the turn of the 19th century. Or the anti-Black stereotypes that permeated popular culture from the ante-bellum period until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. How many will connect the dots from these eras stretching back 300+ years?

Carol - Incredible in site and context. I have not seen the installation however, many of my friends in the art business have - gallery owners, art advisors and artists. What I found interesting was, they only commented on the "reverse" side of the installation. It was the first and last thing they discussed. I wonder Walker intended that as the main "take away" from the project. All other meaning was lost. There was no social commentary, no greater meaning. The imagery and message taken for viewing the piece by "art insiders" was the hind end of the installation.

Wow back with a vengeance! Excellent post Carol.

Dumb article. Smart artwork.

Carol--

Smart, provocative piece. Thank you for taking a strong position, which is really what the work begs for.

I'm a fan of KW-- even as I've asked myself many of the questions you ask here. I agree with Dennis that her work is not titillating sexually (I personally am not into deformity, rape, and humiliation), but do think that it's titillating politically-- and I admire it for that. It puts everyone on the spot, because we can't stop looking even while we tremble at the dangerous forces that have been put in play.

Well, where is the trembling here, at this massively public Domino installation? That's the problem, as you point out.

How is it that a work that SHOULD seem outrageous as a public art piece is now just another tourist attraction, not to mention a Barnum-esque real estate stunt? Considerably more subtle, perhaps "misunderstood" public works in Chicago, DC, and elsewhere have been removed after protests from the activist black community. Between Walker's Drawing Center debut in 1994 and twenty years on, what was once genuinely risky (for a quasi-public institution such as the DC), or at least avant-garde-risqué, has become mega-cultural –– so much so that African Americans from non-art walks of life, it looks like, are coming out in droves to see the Domino piece. I would guess they are coming with pride at the success of a black artist, on her own terms. I would also guess there have been many heated discussions about her tactics -- but I have not seen the sort of roundtable discussion with black intellectuals, artists, and political activists that you might expect in the mainstream press and media had there been there a significant groundswell of protest. Maybe black voices are being squelched by a conspiracy of official (liberal, white) museum culture and official (liberal, white) critical culture, but I doubt it.

As for earlier loud and clear protests by Betye Saar, Howardena Pindell and other black artists, Walker must have known that she would not be embraced with open arms by previous generations who had cleared the ground she was now setting bonfires in. But she in turn has cleared even more ground, which has made being an artist of color into a whole new ballgame for subsequent generations.

That is sometimes how it works. Carol, you submit an unthinkable counter-example of Jewish provocateurism-- but actually, if an audacious, talented Jewish artist took up your idea of Nazi-dick-sucking, big-nosed concentration camp victims she'd probably succeed brilliantly. (Because it's so WRONG, and far enough in the past.) William Kentridge laid the evils of Apartheid at the feet of Jewish industrialist Soho Eckstein-- and no one seemed to notice, except insofar as it established Kentridge's avant-garde political bona fides. Come to think of it, Portnoy's Complaint WAS vilified in Jewish circles high and low as an anti-semite's (genuinely titillating) wet dream. Are Walker, Kentridge, and Philip Roth exploiting outsiders' guilty pleasures, throwing their own people to the wolves for careerist gain, or are they Promethean heroes, breaking the rules? From my perspective (white, Jewish, 5th decade) Walker has possibly liberated political art as Roth liberated the ethnic novel.

(continued)

I think Walker's brilliance, power, and twisted complexity as an artist has simply run roughshod over even the most principled second thoughts, white and black, yours, mine-- and maybe even her own. I am never sure what to make of her work-- it is not at all a comfortable, easy read, and thus the critical/corporate endorsement of the present installation is truly a strange thing to contemplate.

My last comment, Carol, concerns your valuable revelations about the evils STILL THRIVING in the sugar industry. I don't agree that Walker's critique of the history of slavery plus sugar points only at the past. I expect she was under less of an illusion about how sugar is produced today than most people are when buying consumer goods and food staples (such as shrimp-- see a recent Times article) produced, essentially, with slave labor. Even so, there are degrees of abuse, and what is going on in the DR with Haitian labor is horrific and we must stop it.

So maybe Walker should have refused to source sugar from the overtly racist Domino kleptopoly-- and that would have made its own Hans-Haacke-like point, with moral clarity. But then again, it's right up Walker's alley to over-inflate moral clarity like a balloon (or a styrofoam sphinx) and then puncture it. The fact that modern-day sugar slavery might be smeared all over a historicizing racist image makes that image more excruciatingly present, more unavoidable. In the factory space you can't even tell if the pervasive molasses stench is from what once was, or from what still is. Let Domino Sugar put its logo all over that.

If Walker's sugar Mammy functions for many visitors, nevertheless, as chic, naughty nostalgia, or as a Domino or Two Trees ad -- well, is that really Walker's fault? Could she hit us over the head any harder without cracking our skulls?

I see the wink. Ms Walker is taking the money Domino never paid for slave labor, rape, and other exploitations. I hope she charged them an arm and a leg. As for the art, the vulgar and vapid instagram reactions are extensions of white historical positioning. This article is a tangent of liberal? conservative? white condescension. As if Ms Walker didn't know who and what was paying for that monumental Sugar Baby. There is no separation from our or your ancestors in that room. Whites are happy and cavorting and Blacks are shamed and indignant. Everyone is uncomfortable. I have been to the bateys where Haitians are indentured in sugarcane fields. I met a man who came to the Dominical Republic when he was 20 to find his sister and found himself in big sugar's debt. He was 91 and has never seen his sister since. Ms Walker had better take Domino's money.

From Anne Healy: Carol, As a public art artist and site specific sculptor, I have to defend
Kara Walker's marvelous piece. Ms Walker stated her intention for the piece
in all the press for it and in Creative Time's press release. Why can't
critics and others just accept her intention? Why burden the work with investigative reporting on the source of the commission, the source of the
money and the source of the space to deem her and her work hypocritical at
best? It is a beautiful, grand and intense piece of public art that creates
in that vast space a hallelujah to the beauty of the thousands of black
women and children forced to work in the slavery of the sugar industry. All
of your investigations have nothing to do with the piece...NOTHING. I
think it is the second best work of public art that I have ever seen and experienced, the first being the Vietnam Memorial, another work weighted
down with other people's political interpretations. No work of art should
be burdened with that kind of weight. As to Creative Times Mission
Statement in the '80's, I cannot address that as I do not know it, being in
Ca from 1981 to 2008. BUT, I did the first site specific piece for Creative
Time in 1974 at 55 Water Street, a new building with a vacant, huge ground
floor space that Anita Contini was very happy to acquire for my show, SAIL.
I can assure you that as Anita, her husband and I piled into his truck to
go to City Island to pick up actual sails from sailmakers that we had
talked into lending us for the show, no one was thinking of the social significance of this work. We just wanted to make an installation that was beautiful and grand showing the beauty of ordinary objects in space.That
was my intention and Creative Time accepted and supported the artists' intentions. It still does.