Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus at Tate Modern

The Draughtswoman’s Contract

Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, Kara Walker is an African-American visual artist. Her work became known in New York City in 1994, when she presented her first large-scale installation of cutout paper silhouettes at the Drawing Center. Appropriating and transforming the racist items and representations in American visual culture and Western fine art, Walker’s work addresses the long-term psychosocial and political consequences of slavery, confronting systemic racism and sexism. Highly ambivalent, both beautiful and horrific, her art questions the very notions of representation and history. Her pieces are part of major public and private collections; she is represented by Sikkema Jenkins (NYC) and Victoria Miro (London).

Fons Americanus, this year’s commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is Kara Walker’s second endeavor with public sculpture. [1] Modeled as the African-American visual artist’s response to Queen Victoria’s memorial on the London Mall, the entire installation soars at 13 meters high.

Based on her own experience of the space of the hall as a place of rest and play, [2] neither inside nor outside the museum, Walker brings public sculpture in the middle, proffering no less than a monumental fountain.

Sculptural Waterworks

Sculptural waterworks abound in Walker’s work, possibly because her imagery borrows from the would-be genteel lifestyle of Dixie. [3] And this is Walker’s return to the Tate Modern: no less than fifteen years ago, she was commissioned one of her “signature” installations of cut-paper silhouettes, known as Grub for Sharks: A Concession to the Negro Populace, (2004).

Mastering the scale of the hall, simultaneously embracing and deflating expectations of spectacle, Fons Americanus, whose unabridged title one will read printed on the wall, [4] successfully addresses the gigantic industrial space that has been the marker of the Tate’s leadership among modern and contemporary cultural institutions in globalized art worlds since the first Turbine Hall commission to the late Louise Bourgeois (2000). The work attests to Walker’s usual mix of horror and humor, and manages to turn the monumental into something close to dreamlike. The running water binds history and current events together: it is meant as a metonymy of the Middle Passage and the Mediterranean become mass grave. [5]

Walker often parodies the sources of her work in an ironic manner—one may remember how she derided Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the nineties, as a response to what those narratives did to the facts of slavery in their own racist context and in their rather delirious manner. [6] And although Walker’s work has addressed the history of slavery as a global issue for decades now, [7] explicitly confronting the U.K.’s key role in the triangular trade in a painting such as Terrible Vacation, [8] the visual artist had never tackled the very symbols and systems of representation of the former colonial empire so far.

An Ambivalent Post-Monument

In Fons Americanus, Queen Victoria is relegated to the back of the group instead of being its focus, and the memorial’s somewhat dour-looking figure of the deceased queen is replaced by a maniacally-grinning mammy-like figure whose lifted skirts reveal Melancholia as a crouching black male figure.

“Perhaps Victoria’s own,” proposed Walker at the press conference. [9] What could “Queen Vicky” [10] possibly be nostalgic about? The heavy burthen of queendom? Could her nostalgia be environmental? As sharks ominously roam about in the fountain pool, notably threatening a black male figure referred to as “K. West,” adrift on his three-dimensional version of a Winslow Homer’s painting, [11] might “Queen Vicky” indeed be pondering over the consequences of rising sea levels for, say, the Solomon Islands? [12] Might such brand of melancholy be postcolonial, rather? Most likely, as the “nautical theme” of the original memorial, an allegory of “the United Kingdom’s naval power”, [13] has been reduced to a proportionally minuscule boat that does not even bother to hide its incompletion as a sculpture. [14] It might as well be the toy of a child sailing it in a public park.

The fountain’s water, however, is also meant by the artist as “an allegory of the Black Atlantic, exploring the interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe”. And with historical allegorical representations of colonial empires in mind, [15] Walker, as often in her work, puts a black female figure back at the center of history—or, more accurately in this case, on top—with a figure out of whose jugular and nipples water flows. Perched atop its pilaster, the figure stands for Walker’s reinterpretation of Thomas Stothard’s now infamous “Sable Venus”, an eroticized depiction of a fettered slave woman, stepping out of a conch as Botticelli’s Venus, and guided through the Middle Passage by a flurry of cherubs and water deities.

Stothard’s engraving, rightly identified in the exhibition text wall as “propaganda”, reminds us of that not only did the exploitation of human beings have to be travestied into such visions, but more specifically in the case of women, that this exploitation was sexualized—in turn the way to legitimize systemic rape on plantations in the so-called New World. The idealized servitude that Stothard’s image constructs is rendered both sinister and absurd by Walker: her own Venus simultaneously spits water out of her wounded neck (implying suicide) [16] and breasts—harking back to the exploitation of Black slaves as forced wet nurses to white children, yet also strangely comical in its aggrandizement of bodily functions such as lactation. Walker’s Venus is both tragic and comic, while being the principle of life as flow: she is literally the source of the fountain. Thus, Fons Americanus does work as a counter-memorial, as a gesture against the erasure or misrepresentation of Black women in official history. Or at least, the kind of history that needs marble and gilded bronze to think it will last for centuries to come.

The balance between humor and seriousness in Walker’s work is tightly held in the piece, with the juxtaposition of grotesque groups (“Queen Vicky” and “Melancholia”), light-hearted elements (a figure scuba-diving; a sardonic allusion to Kanye West and his demons, poignant ones (the group showing a boy rescuing a figure from the water that Walker intended as a reminder of the murder of Emmett Till) [17] or chilling (the lynch tree, which seems to have stepped out of an expressionist picture by the likes of Joe Jones or Jose Clemente Orozco). [18]

Some figures appear as plain ambivalent, like the “Captain” at the center of the piece, a combine of Black historic figures such as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Marcus Garvey, [19] revisited by Walker’s fancy. Soulful and slightly comical, the “Captain” is flanked by abovementioned lynch tree, and by a figure kneeling in the gesture reminiscent of a famous 18^th-century abolitionist medallion. [20] Or that figure might just as well be a white man entranced in religious ecstasy.

Here, it must be reminded that one of Walker’s inspirations for Fons Americanus was Italian baroque sculpture. Indeed, the very large conch at the entrance of the exhibition, out of which a crying head emerges, owes as much to the grotesque, i.e. the mixture of the animal, human and vegetal that can found in many a fountain in Rome, as it does to Walker’s usual take on the grotesque disfiguration at work in racist caricatures. [21]

But again, the praying figure in a wig mentioned above might very well stand as a hypocritical politician, fashioned after Daumier’s satirical busts made out of clay [22]—one of Walker’s aspirations for the piece. Which brings me to my final point, and that is Walker’s take on the monument as a visual artist. By that, I am not merely implying her merry and exhilarating tossing of myriads of art historical and historical references together. And I would argue that Fons Americanus goes beyond a mere rewriting, or righting, of history.

Conjuring vs. Remembering

The piece brings up what the Victoria memorial leaves out; and while Walker’s installation certainly makes a powerful point within the current debates regarding historical monuments—what must be remembered vs. what must be celebrated; who remembers what, and why; what must be taken down vs. what must be set in context, etc.,—the Turbine Hall installation is, to date, her most formally successful take on public sculpture as the visual imposition of those narratives that are no longer seen as “great”. Walker’s earlier work addressing that topic, her Sphinx-like mammy made out of refined sugar, A Subtlety, or: The Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), paid an enigmatic tribute to the figure of the Black slave woman as the guardian of the memory of a so-called New World based on cane monoculture and slavery.

Powerful in the way the monumental sculpture showed how memory is actually embodied, [23] it was only through its ephemeral quality that it questioned the legitimacy of commissioned public sculpture as the vehicle of pseudo-collective histories. The violence that characterizes much of Walker’s work was mostly conveyed by the sculpture’s scale, rather than by Walker’s constant movement back and forth between the ugly and the seductive. In other words, Walker’s intentions and the formal result appeared unbalanced. [24]

A year later, Walker presented an exhibition at Victoria Miro Gallery entitled Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First, the result of an artistic collaboration with photographer Ari Marcopoulos, based on Stone Mountain in Georgia. A massive photograph of the confederate bas-relief on the mountain by Marcopoulos was presented along drawings, paintings and cutout silhouettes by Walker. One drawing showed Stone Mountains with the figures of confederate officers replaced by the following lines: “FUCKING IGNORANT NIGGERS NEED TO LEARN THEIR PLACE IN HISTORY”, with an arrow pointing “here”, to a black hole on the bottom right corner.

Here, Walker’s art was at its most efficient with her use of verbal abuse and the raw quality that pertains some of her drawings—as a response to the visual abuse of a monument that celebrates men who fought for slavery.

With Fons Americanus, the eeriness and sharpness of Walker’s drawings meet the large-scale three-dimensional. Both the figures’ shapes and texture have the urgent yet precise quality of Walker’s mark making. The figures in the fountain are “intentionally rendered in rough form…”. [25] As a matter of fact, they were done after preparatory clay models Walker made in her studio. Walker then worked with a U.K.-based fabrication company in order to “preserve the handmade feel of the pieces”, [26] and the pieces were eventually coated in “sustainable non-toxic materials” including a “solvent-free acrylic and cement composite”, [27] making them look “as if wet clay emerged from the concrete floor”. [28] Contrary to the fake sea treasures rendered in equally highly sophisticated technologies committed by the likes of a certain British art megastar (whose shark in formaldehyde Walker had in mind as she designed Fons Americanus), [29] Walker’s sculptures are firmly anchored in the “realm of fantasy”; [30] they assert themselves as unfinished, precarious; caught in the process of working things out through form; as testimony to the process of mark-making. Such is Walker’s way of addressing not so much the imagery of national and/or colonial memorials as their very efficacy as would-be iconic markers that “get the story wrong”. [31] Thus, it is first and foremost as form that Fons Americanus unsettles and undermines the monumental.

Distance

Even the situation of the fountain in the Turbine Hall literally provides a shift in perspective on the monument: while the sculpture holds its ground against the space’s monumentality, it is, so to speak, a memorial become history: a piece of the old institution brought into the new one. As a museum item, the memorial as form has been stripped of its authority; an exiled—(melancholic) monument, rather than a monument in exile. And as a matter of fact, many viewers can experience Fons Americanus from above, that is, from the walkways that link the Tate’s first building and its extension (the Blavatnik building). In this way, the visual regime and intention of the monument is reversed: no longer prepossessing, Walker’s alternative memorial can be apprehended from a physical distance that becomes metaphorical.

Once more, Walker’s art thus suggests that “history” can only be apprehended at a remove. And a high dose of distance—or aesthetic detachment—one will need, to take in the full extent, implications, and inner tensions of Walker’s Fons Americanus. Curiously enough, no mention of the Tate’s history as enmeshed with that of slavery, (despite the institution’s efforts to acknowledge it), is anywhere to be found in the texts surrounding the piece. Curiouser, the piece stands for the story of global capitalism come full circle: a revision of the rise of Eurowestern domination as relying on the Transatlantic slave trade, funded by a South Korean industrial conglomerate; [32] the reassessment of public sculpture in a privately-encroached “public” space: ironies of history that those sensitive to Walker’s type of humor may find worthy of note.