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.
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.