Stark contrast repeats itself over and over again in Kara Walker's exhibit at the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Large lithographs hang in bold, black splashes to interrupt sterile whitewashed walls. The images themselves - altered reproductions of Civil War illustrations from Harper's Weekly - utilize only strong blacks on a white background, using marks to indicate depth and form. Walker's alterations appear in contrast - figural silhouettes superimposed over the original lithographs.
Walker is known for her haunting, sometimes grotesque images in silhouette. Often her work deals in controversy, specifically race, class, gender and sexuality. A number of her previous works have focused on the Antebellum South, which makes the current Fogg exhibit a logical next step for her.
Walker has reproduced several Civil War lithographs in large form and integrated her own signature work right into the image. The originals were illustrations featured in Harper's Weekly, which ran weekly updates on the Civil War as it happened. On their own, the pictures are simply direct reproductions of these images of war, with little notable artist interpretation or definitive style. The inclusion of Walker's alterations changes the feeling entirely. These simple, sometime hidden additions imply a much darker interpretation of the events depicted.
The figures are printed in a slightly different, slightly darker black ink, offset from the older original image. Initially, the lack of consistency in tone and texture is a bit off-putting, making the viewer wish that the figures had instead been fully integrated into the image.
However, one must consider the implications. These figures, clearly African American, depicted in scenes of discomfort or even torture, are deliberately offset. Given Walker's previous interest in issues of race and gender, it makes sense that her take on these Civil War images highlight the anti-black sentiment that did not end with the abolition of slavery.
The issues raised by Walker's additions don't just hearken back to antebellum racial tensions. "Buzzard's Roost Pass" depicts troops marching toward the titular landmark, with a disembodied figure in multiple parts floating ethereally in the sky. The figure appears to have been violently blown apart, while the troops dutifully march toward a battle as one. It seems an eerie homage to these extinct styles of warfare. Walker's disembodied figure echoes the images that come out of today's violent conflicts, while at the same time, romanticizing old school warfare. It seems to say that if war must exist, couldn't it have the social graces it once did?
In another piece, "Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp," massive cotton bales soak in the waters of a Southern bayou. Like a ghost visiting Ebenezer Scrooge, one of Walker's figures poses creepily on one side, framing the image of what seems to be Southern merchants fretting over what to do about a cotton glut.
The image chronicles a period following Lincoln's issuing a blockade on Southern cotton exports. As a result, the South was stuck with a huge surplus, sparking an economic crisis. With the specter of future crisis hanging overhead, the image seems a much more astute commentary than perhaps it was initially intended to be. The scene brings to mind the lasting devastation that followed hurricane Katrina, partially as a result of President Bush's failure to respond.
"An Army Train" shows troops on horseback as they stampede by two Walker silhouettes - one emaciated and one lying prone, seemingly dead. This, perhaps more than any other image, rings with contemporary meaning. The media is saturated with images fraught with visible pain, violence and suffering. Walker's tactic here does as much, if not more, than all those gristly pictures on the front page of the America's newspapers, to make viewers wince.
It's almost like telling the future. The horses of a hundred years ago are marching on the victims of today. It's the same conflict, the same tensions, with the same gristly outcome. Perhaps the strongest message Walker conveys is her disgust with the human tendency to fall into the same patterns and repeat the same errors.
With simplicity and grace, Walker makes a powerful statement about time and mistakes. She shows that we make the same ones again and again. Maybe if man were able to see what he'd done in stark relief, humanity wouldn't have to suffer the same transgressions repeatedly.
