NOT SO SWEET
When I went to see Kara Walker’s A Subtletly, or Marvelous Sugar Baby at the Domino sugar factory in Williamsburg, I spotted two young black women in the crowd wearing knotted turbans and impassive pouts. They were paying tribute to Walker’s monumental statue of a black woman, coated with 30 tons of white sugar, and they were taking back the image of the mammy.
I don’t think these two women really looking at the sculpture. Sitting Sphinx-like, naked except for the turban, with exaggerated breasts, buttocks and vulva, it’s a caricature of a black woman’s body, one that evokes racially and sexually charged popular and pornographic images. The statue is, intentionally, obscene. Sitting inside the abandoned factory, the work recalls historic roles of black women in the production and distribution of sugar, as slaves on plantations and servants in houses, which subjected them to physical and sexual abuse. The artwork seems more concerned with a black woman’s body than any image of her body.
I don’t think anyone was really looking at the sculpture. Because of strong press and word of mouth, the installation landed on everyone’s (including my own) list of Fun Summer Things To Do. Visitors brought along elderly parents who were visiting from out of town, and babies in strollers. There were ladies in cocktail dresses and heels, lads in soccer jerseys, and French tourists with backpacks and guidebooks. Middle-aged dads allowed their kids to run around, playing on the sticky, sugar-stained floors, as they took selfies in front of the statue’s saucer-sized nipples. Amateur photographs with long-lensed cameras incorporated the work into artful compositions, seeking its reflection in the pools of water scattered around the factory floor. And many visitors, like myself, simply stood back and took in the happy commotion.
Walker’s best-known work, her cut-outs, require a viewer to step up and look closely inside in order to grasp the narrative, to see beyond the supremely elegant, abstracted graphics to the historical scenes they depict, and to let their facts (rape, pillaging, abduction, torture) rush in. In contrast A Subtletly demands no inspection or introspection, and carries no complicated political charge. One sees it from the front and then the back, one gets it, and one doesn’t think too hard about it. The work’s gigantic size and scale overwhelm its content. As installed at the Domino sugar factory, A Subtlety is less a sculpture than an artsy urban spectacle, like The Gates in Central Park. And the spectacle is so successful, so big and so loud, that it suspends thought.