MAKING MEMORY MATTER

Strategies oJ Remembrance in Contemporary Art

LISA SALTZMAN

The University of Chicago Press Chicago e London

 FIGURE 8

Glenn Ligon, Unritied

(l'm Turning into o
NEGATIVE IMAGES Specter Before your

How a History of Shadows Might Very Eyes ond I'm

Going to Hount you),
llluminate the Shadows of HistorY 1992. Oil stick and
gesso on panel.
Philadelphia Museum

. . . all agree that itbegan with ttacing of Art. Courtesy of

the amist-
an outline around a man's shadow'

PLINY THE ELDER

of paintings' am:ng
In the early 1990s, Glenn Ligon produced a series
Thrown Against a Sharp White
them Ilntiiled (l Feel Most Colired When I Am
Background), [Jntit]ed (How It Feels to Be Coloted Me)' Untitled (l Am an In-
a Specter BeJote Your U/"
visible Man), and Llntitled (l'm Tutning into
'1'{
canvases of roughly htr -
an,1 l' m Going to Haunt You) ({igure 8) ' Vertical
not with frgurcs'
man scalc, tieir white ,.,'fucJt are densely covered'
of literary texts'r Thetcxt
but with stenciled black letters, fragments
Baldwin' Zora Ncalt'
flragments, takcn lrom the writin[s of James
the canvases with tlrt'
Hu?ston, Ralph Ellison, and Jean Genet run across
also the ruled papcr ol'
strict horizontality of the modernist grid, if not l

classroom, and repeat down the surface of tlrt'

l

thc elementa.y ,"hool

free impasto' Composed ol'r.ril
paintings with an increasingly thick and
to obsctrrity,
iar.t urfr gesso, the lctters"and words devolve from clarity
and thc irti
On each lunrur, figure progressively bleeds into ground'
gives way to Pure abstraction' Wlr.i['
'

tially legible pl"to".lul ;f*"

and entropit ilr
t-igons tl*t pulnti.tgs enact with a certain gravitational
th"it do"*.*ard movement from meaning to matcri'rlily'
".itubility to image, his formal insistence upon the opacity of tht' w"t '1"
f.or, *ord
and the painterlyilredium with which they are rendered docs not lirllt
that is' thcir claints 1o lr'l
undo their claims to semantic transParency'
words como t() lrc t oll
erence and meaning. For even as the stenciled
sumecl by the sheer-materiality of paint,
even as thc tt:xtttal li;rgtrtt'lil'
ih" very surlacc ot'thc t'arrv'rs' lllt'll'
come to be interred by and "pot'
Ligon's pairtlirtgs' Ilt'' '=t
subject, their social ."f"t"ttt, is not' In cach of
p",,",,."oIthcb]acksullicctinawhitc.w<lrl<lrctttlritts,lill..rllitsrrr.rtt
.ial ,rcclusi..,r, anrl r:vr:ntual ('t'ilsur'(', sttllrlrol'rrly, r'iVi<lly Pt-t'sr'ttt '
 Much has and might wcll still be said ol Ligon s painterly negotiation tral a presencc that haunts Amcrican social history and the white cul
of African-American idcntity, and, even more to the point, African- tural imaginary.
American masculinity, both in regard to this series of paintings and to As much as these stenciled worcls dcscribe thc expericnce of racial-
his work more broadly.2 In the case of this particular series of Ligon izcd identity in America, of self constituted against other, conjuring the
canvases, thc painterly rcndering ofstenciled black type against a white violence and violations of the penal system, wanted posters, station-
background functions as a means ofstarkly representing, even ifnot ac- house booking photographs, and policc line-ups, they also suggest the
tually picturing, the issue of racial difference, black sct against white. black body, dematerialized and yet also doubled, as spectcr, as shadow.
The black letters formally instantiate thcir obvious difference from And it is that spectcr, that shadow that I want to pursue here. As Ligon
the framing context, the whitc painterly field into and upon which they paints black words against white, his paintings intimate and instantiatc
are stenciled. At the same time, the lettcrs {brm words that cxpress a not so much the condition or category of painting, but another visual
set ofliterary responses to the inherited historical burden and ongoing stratcgy, another rcpresentational techniquc, namely, the silhouette,
iimitation of such categories of idcntity. On Ligons canvases, black that antiquated practice in which the lorm of the body, thc shadow of
vl,ords (both literally and figuratively) serve as the vessel for a language the body, thc body "thrown against a sharp white background," literal-
of color. They serve as a vehiclc for a literary and painterly encounter izcs and concretizes social conditions ofblackness.
with questions of blackness, and as a register of social and cultural What I want to suggest herc are thc ways in which that spectral pres-
experiencc. ence, and evcn morc, that spectral structurc, undergirds Ligods work.
Likc Jasper Johns's early paintings, to which Ligons are at once Indeed, a spectral structure is absolutely central to his rcpresentational
decply ancl manifestly indcbted, Ligons paintings literally represent strategy, formal and thematic, as is articulated, even accentuatcd, by
language. Thcy give us painted words, iterations that are at the same the apt and allusive appropriated textual fragments that ground his
time, imagcs. Like Johns, they rcnder as acsthetic, if not also, philo- picturcs. It is their invocation of invisibility, their speaking of spooks
sophical object, the systems of represcntation through lr.hich meaning and specters that gives additional resonance and reach to Ellison and
is at once clesignated and dcferred.r Unlike Johns's painterly use of lan- Genet's painted words.6 But so too is it the lunction of Baldwins w.ords,
guage, however, Ligons text paintings insist not just upon the fclicities which manage, in their social mcssage, also to anticipate and echo the
and failures of linguistic and pictorial signification, but upon those of very practice that will come to characterize Ligons work. Wherc Bald
social signification. And as such, the concern for languagc evinced in win writes, "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white
Ligon's work is less linguistic or scmiotic than political, for, as Ligons background," Ligon paints black against white, and in so doing, mate-
paintings make painfully clear, it is through words and language, if not rializes and monumentalizcs both typographic convention and social
also through images, that the subject is interpellatcd, and, moreover, condition, offcring spectrality as visual spectacle.
that prejudicc and discrimination endure.+ A conceptual structure for these visually renunciatory, foundational
Composed of mined and mimed words, Ligons canvases are at once paintings, thc silhouette emerges as a forthright lbrmal element in the
emphatically declarative and at the same time, silent, renunciatory. ensuing body of Ligon's work. For cxample, in his print series Runaways
Their refusal to depict what they describe offers in the place of an im- (1993), Ligon, in a complicated and displaced act of self-portraiturc,
age a form of painterly iconoclasm. Their (black) subjects are conjured appropriates the visual format of the nincteenth,century fugitive slave
in and by words alone "l am an invisible man," "l'm turning into a poster (figure 9). The prints feature textual profiles of Ligon, descrip-
specter bcfore your very eyes." To pursue the very words that Ligon tions culled and solicited from friends and acquaintances, who were
represents, their subjects hovcr somewhere in and between the cate- askcd to prctend thcy were reporting his disappearance to thc police.
gories of the "invisible" and the "spectral," their subjectivity neithcr Among thcm are such description as, "Ran away, Glenn Ligon. He's
fully speakable nor sceable.s That is, as Ligoris paintings both cnunci- a shortish, broad-shouldered black man, pretty dark skinned, u,ith
ate and enact, as much as blackness is that markcr of difference that glasscs. . Nicc tt:cth." Each profile is printcd in a box, set bclow
makes certain subjects visually rccognizable and socially lcgiblc, it is I-igor-r's approlrr-i,rliorrs ol'ninctt'r'nth ccntury dcpictions of slave mas-
also blackncss that rcnders ccrtain subjccts ultirnat<'ly invisiblc, spt'r, It'rs .r.tl .rrl,l\\,rls, irr l,l,rr,li ,rrrrl r.r,lrilt., .rr<l f r-cq.t'rtly, in pr.{ilc. 1'ht,

Nl Gn I tvl rMA(.r \ 1r
 T verbal accounts offer a series ofprofiles that do and do not capture
the
contemporary subject who is the young, black male artist.
I
.. In_lris painterly project Projle Series (1990 91), the very words, the
"profiles" ("A loner, shy and sad . . .,,) that purport to desiribe the
de_
fendantsin the Central Park Jogger Car", u.e partially darkened or
Iightened to produce looming shadowy profiles, yet another incom_
mensurable portrait of young black men (figure 10). Tapping into
public memory of the "wilding,, black boy, *ho allegedly rap"l u.rd
brutalized a white female jogger, the textual descriptiolns offerlndivid-
ualized portraits of the adolescent sutjects, u. th" images retain all
thc generality of the form of the prorile "u"r,
portrait. In both series of
works, the silhouette emerges as a significant and recurrent visual de-
vice for Ligon, a means of figuring something about historical
and even
quite recent conventions of depicting, or perhaps more appropriate,
capturin7 black male subjects.T
What I will suggest in the course of this chapter is the following:
the
return of the antiquated practice of the silhouette, of the shadJw as
concrctized form, is
lur, :l a larger logic at work in contemporary
ffimm ffiTMay, nr*nnr practice. It is a logic that allows for a particular kind of engagement
with the subject of history, or, even more pointedly, the ,rqJ"t"of hir_
S,lgpnx.tk:?* u mherrlt*h hr*nal-*trwntd*r*dl torical trauma. It is a logic in which the subject ol."p."r".rintion is
at
kXx*k rnsme pr.o**y dnrk"xklmn*do wlth once absent yet present, schematized yet utterly recognizable, neither
Slassr.*. Kind of silrrck.v. lends trl look dnr*n fully visualized nor materialized, but nonetheless, Iegib-le. It is a logic
in
nnd lurn ln rr,hem he u,nlks. ftclll shorl which the subject is conjurcd more than figured. ,,I",m turning iito a
kln&u nlmn*t tl$iltrlr Olothn* rrffim*d*errlplt specter before your very eyes and I,m going to haunt youj;
paints
x*m**hlrrg lint{:*n'd*Nrn crxd plmfd, m*ybrre Ligon, by way of Genet. Those words come to speak, not just from the
nnd shorlrr nnd snndals. lflds lou,pn laee authorial positions of writer and painter, but from th" ,".y condition
*lnd rrnrr"ts.' ilplxrr fac*. lUfu.t &.elh, of painting, of visual representation itself, and articulatc something
of
the logic that is at stake in such contcmporary practice, a logic thaf
is,
in some sense, in all of its pervasiveness and particularity, an ethics of
representation, a mode of encountering traumatic history. Silhouette,
shadow, specter: each form, as form, estabrishes an ethical reration
to
traumatic history, and, moreover, to its subjects, its victims. Such
forms acknowledge, in their refusal of material figuration and in their
insistence upon constitutive absence, at once the incommensurability
of representation and, in turn, the ways in which these unrepresentable
subjects, historical and human, come to haunt the p."r"rri while
de_
manding at the same time tlat they fundamentally deiy ."p."r"ntation,
and with that, rcc,gnition. In short, such forms establish an cthics
,RE 9 Glenn Ligon, Runowoys, I 993. Courtesy of the artist.
of
rcPR'scnllti.rr 1lr.rt is P|t'<licatc<l on a logic of spcctrality,s on marking
1r.t'r'ist'ly tlr,rl rvlrir'lr (.lnn()l 1,, rt'prt,st'rrtr:<1, yt't rnaking it sor.nchow,
It'gilrlt'
 {
If the silhouette is a facet of Ligons ranging practice, it is the defin-
ing method of Kara Walker's oeuvre. As I will demonstrate, it is
,${m:ffii$ Walker's use of the silhouette, that is, of thc technique o[ cut-paper
1,rt&fiffi profile, and her return to its historical form, if not its historical func-
tion, that lllly mobilizes such a logic and ethics of spectrality and ex-
{$jlffi ' ploits the possibilities of a fbrm that is, to cite Walker's own descrip-
tion of the silhouette, "both there and not there."e

I The silhouette takes its name from Louis XV's finance minister, Etienne
&S'qiI{,.....r ::"

de Silhouette, whosc miserly policies camc to be equated with the eco-

-.; d &nV
:IsS ,," -"-, nomical language of the cut-paper profile, a hobby he was known to in-
;.ffi$ue dulge . 1o The specific use of scissors and paper not withstanding, the sil -
houette stands not merely at the threshold of modernity, but at the very
threshold of visual representation itself. It is a representational prac-
tice, a representational form, which dates back to the mythic moment
when the Corinthian maiden traced the shadow of hcr imminently de
parting lover on the wall, outline left to stand as a melancholic memo-
rial object. With examples ranging from the petroglyphs of prehistoric
cave dwellers in the Paleolithic era to the projections and installations
of multimedia artists in the present, the contcmporary French artist
Christian Boltanski perhaps most promincnt among them,rr it is nei,
ther aggrandizing nor hyperbolic to claim that the shaclow stilled and
arrested as silhouette-has lundamentally structured a history of vi-
sual representation. I 2
Even before the silhouette became a commonly practiced and com
mercialized art form, a preferred mode of portraiture both prior to and
during the first decades of the advent of photography, it rn as an impor-
tant tool in physiognomic studies, foremost among them, those of the
Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater. For Lavater, whose larger
projcct was to classify and characterize people on the basis ofnational-
ity and race, the profile was seen as particularly revelatory, establishing
a causal relationship between physical appearance and moral charac-
;*Sr ter. 13
A conflation of empirical method and personal prejudice , the sil-
houette was a visual form that allowed just enough of the subject to co-
ffii
,,$
alesce for Lavater to isolate and deindividuate facial characteristics scr
S*,ri their proportions could be quantified in thc name of racial theory.
Givcn such a tainlc<l history, it is of further significance that in the late
It::*t:rril" ni'rctt't'ntlr ('('rt.r'y, llrt' silh.ucttc camLr to bc practiccd by a numbcr of
rGURE ro GlennLigon,ProfleSeries,1990-9l.Oilstickandgessoonpanel.Courtesyoftheartist Ali'it'.rrr Arrr.r'it.rrr "r'rrllt.r's." A l..l .rrct'usc<l i. thi'st.rvit,c.,l'.Pprts-

NFCAIIVI IHAGf5 55
sion was now firmly in the hands of the oppressed, as is cxcmplified by video piece The Dead Weigfu oJ'a
@rarrel Hangs, an invcstigation of the
Moses Williams, who made cut-paper portraits at Charles Wilson possibilities and limits of producing a history of the Lebanese
civil wars
Peale's museum in Philadelphia.la That is, dcspitc its tainted history in (1975 -91), the silhouette functions as an act of
social rcsistance.rr
the pseudoscicnce of physiognomy, the silhouette came to be a form of Composed of found footage from government cameras, lr

if not, given
visual representation available to, ifnot also constitutive of, the newly- Ra'ad's bh'r1ir,r* of fact and fiction, its berated simulation,
lreed black subject.
*" ,J" tn"
ways in which surveillance operations can be rendered
impotent in the iil
Take, for example, the case of Sojourner Truth. Born into slavcry face.ofsuch everyday occurrences as the blinding light
ofa setting sun. ll
in 1'797, Isabclla van Wagcncr changcd hcr name when freed and is As demonstrated by the video footage Ra'ad inci-udIs
in his piece] e ach
perhaps bcst known for her now canonical feminist speech "Ain't day at sunset thc activity on Beirut's Mcditerranean
boarhwalk, thc
I a Womari'of 1851. Sojourner Truth was one of the first African- corniche, escalates, a certain freedom affbrdccl by the very fact
that alr
American women to have her image widely disseminated, its sale a ofthe strollers and gatherers are rendered unrecognizabre
in such right,
means of supporting her preaching. Printed on a carte de visite was not their distinguishing physical features ancr facial att]ributcs
givrrg wa] to
only her image , in silhouette , but the words "l sell the shadow to sup the darkened sameness of the silhouette.le
port the substance." Manifestly understood as a "shadow," as a spectral Ra'ad's piece reveals something of the contemporary
_If history of rll
trace of subjectivity rather than an instantiation of "substance," the Lebanon, it also reveals something about the silhouetie.
whirc the sir-
silhouette popularizcd in its very formal qualitics the complex rela- houette as representational fbrm is predicated historicaily
on the possi-
tionship of representation to its human subjects. Certainly, there are bility of recognition, it can always, tr in some sense, must
ul*uy,
other aspects of the silhouette and its history that might well be tend with its other, anonymity. For the silhouette, based "o.r_
as it is rn the il,l
discussed here. But it is these particular aspects of the silhouette, projection of a shadow, is less a likeness, cven if the
profile securcs
namely, its role in the history of pseudoscientific studies of race and something of the identity of the represented subjcct, l1
than a scmbrance,
cliffcrcncc and, morcovcr, its placc in a history of African-Amcrican forgoing much of the catcgory of mimerir. That is,
thc silhciuette
sclf rcprcscntation, that are directly relevant to its reappropriation as hinges, as Victor Stoichita has so pcrsuasivcly argucd,
not on rcsem_
a visual sign in the work of contemporary African-American artists. blance, but semblance.20 Ancl ,"-[rlur.", if wc l<iok
to its ctymology,
What is thr: rclation of thc silhouette to its subject? Two othcr tcrms is a very particular reprcscntational catcgory. For
a sc,-rblarr"" ir, utlt,
that were used historically to describe the silhouette, narnely, projle etymological origins, a phantasm, in other words, a specter.
Conjured
shadels an<l schwnrz.e Kunsr (black art)r6 are relevant here. The first and then concretized, the practice of silhoucttc, likc
that of tlack
term., proJile.srhade, makcs manif'cst a simplc yet essential fact. For the magic, is indced a "schwarze Kunst,', a,,black art.',
silhouette to achieve legibility and approach likeness, it had to take on That the practice of this "black art" should return in
the work of sev_
the symbolic form of the profile .17 In other words, it had to represent eral.contemporary African-American artists signifi es more
than might
from the side. A shadow cast from thc fiont or thc back produccs the be allowed by this facile pray on w-orcls. whether
we look to the wik
human subjcct, and, more to the point, the human head, in nothing but of Glenn Ligon and Kara warker, or to that of the South
African artist
the most generic of forms, variations on an ovoid. It is only from the William Kentridgc, the appropriation of the antiquated form
of the sil_
side that distinguishing features are captured in cast shadow and that houette tends to share a certain subject. In each artist's
work, the sil-
recognition is, or can be, achieved. houette is used as a means of figuring the spectral bodies
of traumatic
But as the Lebanese video artist Walid Ra'ad's work makes patently national histories. That the silhouette cmcrges as thc
oblique means of
clcar, even the silhouette does not guarantee likeness, and in turn, thc rcpresenting and encountering traumatic history is at
issue in the pages
possibility of idcntification. As we know from such forms as the docu- that fbllow, as I fiun specifically to the work oi Ku.u
Walker. a""ri.
mentary film or thc ncws intervicw, subjects who fear thc consc: ing up with thc firrm of the silhouette the spectral bodies
of African
quences ofspeaking, appearing, or testifying are often "blacked out" to Amt'ri.., strlrit't'ts, K.rrl walk.r's work may bc secn as a fbrm of
pic_
preserve their anonymity, their darkened form meant to cloak rathcr l.rirrl st",rrrtt'. l;,r irr lr,,r'rr',rrr<, wrlkcr lrr:ings bat,k thc b.rli.s,
thc
than reveal their identities. In one particular sccnc ll-om Ila'a(l's lc)99 Iris(orir',rl srrlrjlr ts, ,,1 llr,. ,rrrlt.lr,,llurtr Sorrllr, .r,t,l r..,,r.l,,t.ri (,()n(,r(,1(,

Nl (rAt tvt tHALt \ \t

 {
lhc ways in u,hich those bodies, and that history, continue to haunt a ows, captured in outline, the tracings of bodies. Walker's works are
nation. quite simply, and obviously, silhouettes.
Silhouettes of stereotypes, in other words, negative images of ncga_
** tivc images. were pictorial representation a mathematical equation or
a linguistic construction, Walker's double negatives would cancel
ln 1997, Betye Saar launched a campaign against any fi,rture display of themselves out, become, instcad, positives, in other words, alfirma-
"the negative images produced by thc young African American artist, tions. But that is not their logic or signifying structure. At stake and at
Kara Walkcr."21 Enragcd by what shc took to be the reiteration and per play in Walker's work is negative form coupled with negative content,
petuation of datcd and demeaning stereotypes of black identity, Saar one reinforcing rather than ncgating the other, doubling rather than de-
saw Walker's work, and the institutional support for it, as a betrayal of fusing their powcr, a ncgativity at once unredecmed and unredeem_
all that she and her generation of post civil rights, activist artists had able. The dialectical structure of these lbrms demonstrates the ambiva-
struggled to achieve. Twcnty-five years earlier, it had been Saar's work lence of the stcreotype, which is, as Homi Bhabha writes,,,as anxious
that attemptcd to transform racial stereotypes into something positive as it is assertivc," an ideological construction ofotherness structured by
and powerful. As Saar claimed of hcr own work, "The 'mammy' knew the play of both "dcsire and derision."25
ancl staycd in her place. ln 1972,I attempted to change that 'place' by History as obscenc fantasy, fantasy as obscene history, Walker,s
creating thc series The Liberction oJAuntJemima. My intent was to trans, "negative images" instantiate a return of thc repressed: history and its
fbrm a ncgative demanding figurc into a positive, empowcred woman ugly iterations in both the culture industry and the cultural imaginary.25
who stands confrontationally with one hand holding a broom and the For walkcr's cut-outs revive not only the antiquatcd form of the sir-
other armed with [sic.] battle. A warrior ready to combat servitude and houctte and thc ambivalent power of the stereotype, but a set of popu,
racism."22 To Saar, then, Walker's work had diverged deliberately and lar genres as well. Take, for example, a massive, semipanoramic instal-
clangcrously from the path prcscribed for African-Amcrican artists. lation like Gone, An Historical Romance oJ'a Civil war as it occurrecl Between
Unlike a previous gcneration's uplifting and regenerativc practice, the Dusky ThiBhs oJ One Young Negress and Her Heart (frgwe 1l). First
Walkcr's work was not an exercise in unleashing black power through shown in the fall of 1994 at the Drawing Center in New york,27
an appropriation of iconic racist images culled from American vcrnac- walker's Gone stagcs somcthing .f a spcctacular revival and reenvision
ular culturc. Instead, its rcpetition of negative stcreotypes was seen ing of Gone with the Wincl, both Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel and its
only to rcinscribc social and psychic structures of degradation and 1939 cinematic adaptation starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. But
servitu<lc, a par-rclcring fbrm of minstrelsy, a full-scale version of the where in the film thc political and historical context of the civil war is
"nco-black lacc art" practiccd by the painters Michacl Ray Charlcs or, relcgated to a backdrop for the pcrsonal dramas and emotional up_
more recently, Beverly Mclvcr. In othcr words, rather than foment a heavals of Scarlett O'Hara, in Walker's work the backdrop takcs center
revolutionary politics of liberation, Walker's work was seen to partic- stage. In Gone, fictional and filmic point of reference and departure
ipate in furthering an insidious proccss of internalized enslavement.2s comc together with the cpic and monumental pictorial gcnre of history
But if Saar's conccrn was manifestly about the "surfacing of the sub- painting to emerge, also with indebtcdness to the protocinematic tech-
conscious plantation mentality" and the "reinvention of the negative nology of the panorama and the cyclorama, as a phantasmagoric tableau
black stereotypical images,"2+ her critique nevertheless points not just of the crimes and characters of thc antebellum South. A polymor_
to the ideological complexities and political implications of Walker's phously perverse performance of the American past, ri{'e with mam_
work, but to its very methods. For, what are Walker's silhouettcs but mies and pickaninnies, bellcs and dandies (if not here, as in other of her
"negative images." That is, not only do they traffic in the cultural real- epic r'vorks, sambos and carpetbaggers, too), Walker's stereotypecl
ity and imaginary of demeaning (i.e., negativc) stereotypes. But they shaclow-figurcs stage rn Gone their ou,n rclation to a sct of caricaturcs
are, in quite literal formal terms, negative images. Walker's works rc- anrl stc*'.1 yPt.s, .rrr<1, a1 thc samc timc, cnact the history olslavcry in
peat the conventions of prephotographic contact imagcs, ncgativc im- an<l .ts r rr,,, l,'* ol r .r rsly .rrrl i<lualr:<l visual spcctaclt:s. rs
r ior
ages befbre thc advent oltthc photographic ncgativc. Tht.y gir,,. rrs sha<l- Il'r',.r,1 li,rrrr l, lt lo ritr,ltl ((,prrr,'s t'x;tapsivr'<lilrt'rrsi.,s.r.c I Ix 50

NraAttvt tHAGtS !9
 FIGURE II
agentleman, on tip-toe, for a kiss. Though the hands and chests of the
Kara Walker, Cone, An
amorous pair touch, their lips do not. For this is not, in the end, the "ro-
Historicol Romonce of
o Civil Wor os it Oc- mance" at stake. Not only does a second pair of legs protrude from bc-
curred Between the neath the belle's ample hoop skirt, suggesting that betwecn the white
Dusky Thiglts of One
thighs lies, if not romance, certainly a more intimate act than the visi-
Young Negress ond
Her Heort, 1994. bly unfulfilled kiss. The gentleman's sword, loosely affixed at his belt,
Cut paper on wall. does not point forward toward the belle to complete symbolically their
Courtesy of Sikkema
union. Instead, it swings back to open the already disrupted dyad onto
Jenkins & Co., NYC.
another, the sword's tip just grazing the bottom of a nude black child
who has wrung the neck of a now limp and lif.eless swan.
FIGURE I2
Kara Walker, Cone In f'ront of the child sits a black woman, her long legs extended be-
(detail), I 994. Cut pa- fore her, her arm raised, her finger pointed, in a gesture of seeming ap-
per on wall. Courtesy
probation. Whether this gesture is directed at the violence of the child,
of Sikkema Jenkins &
Co.. NYC.
whose open mouth suggests a response to a reprimand, or to the
shenanigans ofthe couple(s) just behind her, is unclear. Just to the rear
of the womans back stands a disembodied head, at once a simple por-
trait bust but also, given the lurking violence of the tableau in which it
appears, perhaps the remains of a gruesome beheading. A close match
of the facial profile of the southern belle, though here, her lips arc not
puckered, but firmly closed, the unanchored silhouette ncvcrtheless
reads ambiguously. For at the same time that it is a femalc profilc,
whether the belle on the far left or not, what seems to bc hcr hair also
coalesces into the profile of anothcr lace, this onc sccmingly bcar<lcd
and masculine.2e As such, the bust is ncithcr onc nor thcr othcr, or, al-
',*-j:rmL,* ternately, it is at once one and thc othcr, an amalgam ol thc lirst tw<r
figures, the classic aesthetic and perceptual conunclrum of Ernst Gom-
brich's duck/rabbit actualized in the combination o[ rcprcscntational
acuity and ambiguity that structures the silhouctte.r0
The ambiguity, the oscillation, of the bust suggests, then, the poten-
tial illegibility of race. For example, even as we might feel secure ini-
tially in recognizing race, in knowing full well that the "romance" be-
gins not "between the dusky thighs of one young negress and her heart,"
but instead, bctween a southern belle and her gentleman, we can't be
entirely sure. For "identity," some "essential" self that may be linked to
a collective identity, is, in fact, potentially illegible.sl That is, even as
feet), the scene begins, if it may indeed be said to begin, under a moon sartorial codes, hairstyles, exaggerated lips and buttocks and so forth,
lit sky, beneath a framing tree, whose limbs are draped with the hang allow us to read and recognize these figures as racialized types, either
ing moss that typifies the southern landscape (figure 12). For, of course, black or white, we may indeed misrecognize them. And there lies the
to "read" Gone in this way presumes that Walker's work follows some particrrlar'.rrrtl pt'r:uliar powcr of the silhouettc as form. Not only docs
form of conventionalized narrative organization, which it may u,cll tht'sillrorrctlt r',',lrrt't'tlrt'sr-rbjt:ct of rcpresentation to schi:matic lbrm,
not, given Walker's compositional predilection lirr tlrt' lr'.rgrrrcrrl. Irr any to.r "pr-,,1i1, ," tr,,r ,i( nrl)l,urt t'llrat <lt'r'ivt.s its rt'lation to tht'hurnan sulr
casc, thcr(', bcncath thc sotrthtrrn trt't', a sottlltt't'tt 1,,'ll, l,'.rrrs itt to'uv,tt'tl it'tt ntotl lt,,ttt tt', rrr,l, rt,'.rlilt,llr,rrr ils it'6rrii'ily. lltrt it rt'rlut't.sall 6l'its
NrGAt tvr tHACf 1 6t
 negative
subjects, renders all of its Iigurcs, black' If the photographic
the interesti.tg tri.k of turning-black into white and white
p"io.-,
into black,32 the silhoultte levels all such difference' White moon'
white woman, black child, black woman, all are black in the traditional
of
practice of silhouettc. This leveling of difference, this production
that the southern belle' in sil-
tlu"k r".r, makes manifest the possibility
houette , could well read, were we not so acculturated in
the recogni-
tion ofthe markers ofrace, as "dusky" negress' A perverse visual en-
,,one drop rule," the black cut-out of silhouette in turn
actment of the
implicates the viewer in ihe social semiotics of reading and (re)produc-
ing racial difference.
ih"r" is a scconcl pairing of {igures that points as well, if not to is-
sues of recognition urr.l ,rrir.""ognition, to the hybridity
that.b,oth
founds a.td Jo.tfornds identity. The pairing, a young girl and boy
pcrchecl on a hillock, dcpicts another "romance" that is also not' in the
u romance . A young whitc boy stands with his pants
down' shirt
".r.1, If he is' as
flapping, whilc a young black girl, on her knees, fellates him'
"fr" is indeed
*o"fa tit ir-t ,rr"t , pui.i,,g, the master's son, then there
"ty which closes
no romance here. InsteaJ, this little scene pre{rgures that
out the tableau. There, a gentleman (the gentleman from the first visual
vignette? the young boy grown?) hoists a black slave woman'
still grasp-
head hidden beneath her skirts'
irr! U", b.oo-, ,p"or-, hit thouldcrs, his
ur'r".I her of] to another grassy knoll and framing tree (figure 1 3) '

"u.rie, lengthy title

If these, finally, are the dusky thighs alluded to in Walker's
In-
to the picce, this is, yet again, not a sentimental scene of romance '
stead, it is a scene oflabdu-ction, an abuse of power, a playing
out of the
clynamic of the antebellum South, master over slave' Emp-
structuring
has already
tied of the"classical weight of Leda and the Swan (for the swan
been strangled in an eirlier visual vignette; there is no safety
of alle-
gorical disilacement here),33 Walker's final image is instead rooted in a I
t
no
Eiffere.tt set of mythologies and violent histories'3a Jupiter needs
cloaking on the piantation, or, indeed, subsequently, in an Amcrican
culture-that has made thc sexual violence of a white man assaulting
a

black vr.oman visual spectacle. Think of such cultural landmarks

as

in the guise of the historical drama

Roots, where such violence aPPears
by
or such {ilms as Mandingo, *h"r" the violence is variously authorized
the forms of pulp fiction or the pornographic'rs
Rut before that {inal scenario of abduction and impending sexual
vi
olence,weseetwoothcrsingle{igures:onealoft,asifthrownintothe
tosscd this lig
air by the fellated boy, whose arm might be se en to have (,,rr
r rc u E t t Krr r W.rlhr.r, (,l"r.rrl), l994. Courresy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC
,." o*uy, and onc b"1.,*, at thc foot of thc hillock. I}trt itlst as tht: tlnt'
R
figurc (rather androgynous) floats abor,e the scene, unmoored, the they clo not prcsume that relation to the real that is history, even as they
clothing (a skirt?) at once a parachute and an obsccne, distendcd organ, depict its perverse realitics. Nor do they presume to speak from that
the other figurc, clearly a woman, lifts one leg to bear, in rapid succes- time , from that past, even as they makc use of a set of antiquated, and
sion, two children, babies dropping flrom bctween her thighs like thc thus, fbr that history, contemporaneous forms. Their temporality is
shit that pours forth from various figures, male and female, in other of other. The story told in Gone is not, as in Randall's work, offered from
Walkcr's more explicitly scatological scenes. That a finger on onc of the the point of view of a slave on the plantation. Nor is it, as in Morrison's
birthing mother's hands points back toward the coupling, albcit not novcl, depicted from a position of authorial omniscicnce. Instead,
procreative, on the hillock abovc her, suggests the possible parentage the story, if it is indeeil a story and not an assemblage of unrelatcd
of her progen), a mixed parentage, the miscegcnation that is figured as lragments and visual vigncttes, emergcs from between "thc dusky
well in the final pairing, white man and black woman, the abduction a thighs of one young negress and her heart," from a position of differ-
preludc to the act that, for all ofthe horror ofthe sccne, is not, though encc and desire, the diff'erence and desire of onc young negress in the
it is elsewherc in Walker's ocuvre, depicted. present, namely, the contemporary African-American artist Kara
Gone, An Historical Romance oJ a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Walker. If her authorial relation to thc "young negress" named in
Dusky Thighs oJ One Young Negress and Her Heart. Gone, emptied, cvacu- Gone is less than explicit, elsewhere Walker inserts hersclf quite se11'-
ated from this scene is not only a "historical romance" that was Gone with consciously into the work, either textually (in the panoramic Presenting
the Wind or any numbcr of its literary or filmic antccedents or inhcri- Negro Scenes Drawn Upon ,l[y ?assage Through the South and Reconfgured.for
tors. Gone is any pretension to recuperating that history as romance, the Beneft oJ'Enlightened Audiences l,lherever Such May Be Found, By fayxlf,
to transforming it into the visual pleasures of popular culturc, even as l4issus K. E. B. Walker, Colored, 1997), visually (in thc self-portrait [of
it plays on and with its antiquated forms. For all of the vaudevillian an- sorts] Cur, 1998),)7 or pcrformatively (in the 2004 Fabric Workshop
tics and protosurreal visual spectacle ofthe scene, in place ofa histori- pcrformance,/installation Ftbbergibbet and Mumbo Jumbo: Kara E. Walker
cal romance, thcre is only thc scene, if not the seen, of historical in Two Acts) )8
trauma. Less an act of belated witness for what would that mean If, to return specifically to Gone, a "historical rorrancer" cmcrgcs
herc?---Walker's work revels in an imagination fueled by the tcxtual from "between the dusky thighs o1'onc yolrng ncgrcss," ll-om lrctwccn
residue of everything from slar.c narratives to recent popular culture. the dusky thighs of artist and artistic pcrsona that is Kara Walkcr, thcn
Thus, unlike the 2001 novel by Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone, history's representation is presentcd and put lbrth hcrc, as something
which similarly, and even more explicitly, took Gone with the Wind as its of a natal process: artwork as offspring. Although such a possibility hcrc
point of departure , Gone is not an attempt to assert or reclaim thc his- proposes a rather essentialist, maternal model for artistic creation
torical voices of the oppresscd, in the case of Randall's work, Scarlett the (fcmale) artist birthing these "historical 1611nn6q5"--elsewhere
O'Hara's mulatto half-sister. Rather, it is an attempt to give form to the Walker positions herself as more ol a child, speaking of her "constant
repressed, to all that haunts the American imagination. Foregrounding need to sucklc from history, as though history could be seen as a sccm-
its own relation to the subject depicted, Walker's work is neither the ingly endless supply of mother's milk rcpresented by the black mammy
obvious act o[appropriation that may be found in Randall's work of his- of old," her "f'ear of wcaning," and hcr sense of progress "predicated
torical fiction, nor, for that mattcr, the virtuoso act of ventriloquism on having a vcry tactile link to a brutal past." le (Walker may bc said to
that animates Toni Morrison's extraordinary 1987 novel Beloved. In represent this image of suckling most forthrightly in the striking fig-
Morrison's novel, the traces of history (the tale of runaway slave Mar- ural group three women ancl an infant, linked mouth to breast
garet Garner, who, fearing capture, rathcr than see her children re ccntering her The End oJ lJncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau oJ Eva
turned to bondage, attempts to murder them) come togethcr with an in Heaven, 1995, if not elsewhcrc in her oeuvre.+o)
authorial imagination and voice to produce the story of an escapcd Whatcvcr thr: rclation of Walker's work to metaphors of maternity
slave, Sethe, haunted by the ghost of her dead child, Beloved. Walker's an<l nalalitv, n,lr,rl (,orrc suggcsts is that ifthat relation to "a brutal past"
work offers no such story. ist'r,t.rr1r,r'r,rs, lr rr,rrr-islrirrg(.rn<l or-rcnrightthinkhcrcof Paul Cclan's
The installations are not, thcn, as Thclma Gol<lcrr lr.rs r l,rirrrt'<l ol' lyrit','rttr,llttttt ttt "l tt1,111 ,rl l )t,rtlr",rl tltt'stlqkt'9l tht'<l1ath 1irr1;ts
Walkt:r's worl<, "thc slavc narralivt's thal \\('l'(' n('\r'r- u r ill, rr," t'' lirr- "l,l.r, k rrrill. ,,1 ,l.r1lrrr.rl. , rr, ,lr irrli 1,otr rnor-rrirrgs, ,rrrtl t'r,t'rrinls, \\'('

Nr(;AItVt tmACt! 6!
 T

drink you"), what it sustains is something other than life. Using a bod-
ily metaphor for the burden of historical trauma that invoke s carrying,
not so much a child, as a diseasc, Walker has stated, "History is carried
like a pathology, a cyclical melodrama immersed in artifice and unablc
to function without it."+l And it is thcn perhaps not surprising that
what emergcs from this traumatized, pathologized body, from between
the "dusky thighs of the young negress," is the legacy of that history,
given visual form, the resolutc blackness and stasis of thc silhouette, the
return of the represscd, the sublimated, matcrialized in and by the
ghostly trace ofthe inert "black art" that concretizes not presence, but
absence, not so much a stillborn child, as something undead, a ghost.

)k ,r

In his catalog essay fbr thc 2003 cxhibition, Kara Walker: Narratives oJthe
Negress, Darby English suggcsts that in her BeJore the Bartle (Chickin'
Dumplin') 1995 (figure 14), Walker "implicitly insinuates" herself into
Pliny's myth of thc origin of painting.a2 And while I certainly agrce with
English that Walker's silhouette practicc as a whole bears an intcrcsting
and quitc manifest relation to this antiquated strategy and its mythic
site of textual origins, and that Walker establishes a vcry self-conscious
relation to her subjects, I would suggest that thc tcmporality of this
work in particular, and Walker's work morc gcnerally, is significantly
different. And this difference in temporality, one that is already mani- cu E rq Kara Walker, Before the Bottle (chickin' Dumplin'), 1995.
Fr R cut paper on canvas. cour-
fcst in thc authorial framing of Gone, allows us to understand somcthing tesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., NYC.

of thc relation of Walker's work to history, and the historical cpoch her
work might be said to rcpresent. resentation. That is, they are done wcll aftcr the silhouctte had
Certainly, the title of thc picce , BeJore tbe Bar1e, stakcs its claims to achicved its placc in a history of eighteenth ancl nineteenth century vi-
a time before. The title may wcll be a rhetorical echo and assertion of sual culture and then fallen into clisuse, supplantcd by ensuing tech
a particular instancc of anteriority, namely, the Corinthian maiden's act niques and technologies of visual representation, photographv fore-
of pictorial inscription in the moment before her lovcr's departure. If most among them. And, perhaps evcn more important, Walker,s
so, this piecc, and Walker's work more gencrally, in fact establishes a silhouettes are conceived long after the history of modernism and
very diffcrcnt relation to the lost objcct. For Walker's work is, of the achicvements of the historical avant garde---remember the call
course, done not before thc battle, but after, many years aftcr. It is done of anothcr work of cut-papcr, Picasso's 1912 cubist collage, Guitar,
after the historical battle, or series of battles, for emancipation, from Sheet l[usic and Glass, newspaper fragment bearing the words ',Le
Jou:
the nineteenth-century battle of the civil war to the twentieth-century La Bataille s'cst engag6!" .-gave way to the postmodern, in all of its
struggle for civil rights. It is donc, with all the weight of the tcmporal- sclf-proclaimed posteriority.
ity of trauma, from a position of inheritance, and of bclatedness. The rclation ol Before the Battleto its lost objects is not one of antic-
Moreover, visually and artistically, Walker's work is also done aftcr. ipati.r'r lrrr1, irrslt'irrl, .nc of cxplicit ancl incvitablc belatcdne ss. That is,
It is not a point of mythic origin, from which a history of visual reprc llclitrt rltt ll,trtl,'. r'tt rr ,rs it u(1r'n<ls to thc historical momcnt "bcfbrc,"
sentation rvill follow. Rathcr, Walker's silhouc-ttcs arc crr'.rtt'<l a[it'r r t'('l)r'(s(u1tt11,.1,,1,,1,r,,; llr,..rrrtt'lrt.llrlrr 56rrllr a1<l lirkilg rrp lht.anli
an<l milcst.,';'rt.s i,,r l':islr';r.r''rl risrr'rl .r'1, rltt,rlr',1 t( llr(.,( nl.rlr"l,tl .,ll,rlr.,,l ,,l tlrt.sill16rrt'llt', slr,rr.t's rr,rtr..l lltt.

"',. ., ":,':_':::::"'""ccs
 {

anticipatory modality or antcriority of the Corinthian maiden's tracing Walker's work is a necessarily retrospective encounter with the past,
of the silhouette ol her soon to be cleparting lover. Walker's work with what remains. It is a working through of the past, as passecl, even
forthrightly and necessarily comes after, its sense of urgency precisely as that past haunts the contemporary imagination. Unlike, say, the im-
in its delay. It is a representational act that shares its temporality with ages that structured the 2000 exhibition at the New york Historical So-
the writing of history and the construction of memorials, even as it par- ci,ety, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,+) the horror of
takes of neithcr their methods nor their materials. Markers of lost bod, Walker's work is precisely the degree to which it reflects not the his-
ies, Walker's silhouettes create narratives without narration, memori- torical reality of slavery but instead, the cultural imaginary in its after,
als without monumentality, and, perhaps most important, figural form math. Whcre Without Sanctuary confronted contemporary audiences
without the figure. with its graphic images not just of lynching but of the crowds of leering
And that absence ofthe grounding figure, that human presence upon white spectators gathered to witness the act of atrocity as visual spec-
which the indexicality of the silhouette is predicated, is perhaps thc tacle, the documentary photograph, in this instance, both an unequiv-
most important point about Walker's revival of thc antiquated practice. ocal record of cruelty and an unabashed form of its cclebration,
For Walker's silhouettcs are not, in fact, done before a body in the stu- Walker's work gathers it, fb."" precisely for its relation to obscenc fan-
dio. Which is to say that they are not, in fact, silhouettes, at least not in tasy, even ifthat fantasy is prcdicated on precisely such an obscenc his-
their functional relation to thc process of creation and the presumption torical reality.
of a body. For all of their miming of the form of the silhouette, they do The shock of Walker's images, then, is the way in which, lor all of
not rcproduce its technical function. No onc stands before a raking their structural and temporal removc from history and its embodied
bcam of light. No one's prolile is captured. There are no historical subjects, for all of the ways in which they are profoundly, manifestly,
tablcaux created in studio. These silhouetted figures are neither trace anti-indexical, for all of their obvious Iictions and fantasy, they scem
nor tracing. Instead, these silhouetted figures cmerge from and con- hauntingly vivid, if not, of course, real. Combining the antiquated rep-
cri'tizt'thc boclies that haunt the historical imagination and its con- resentational strategy of the silhouette with the inhcritcd social symp-
tcr)rl)()rary inht:ritors. Thc material fact of thcsc cut-out imagcs is tom that is the stereotype, each prcdicated on thc re<luction ofthc hu-
nol tht'bo<ly as <lcpictcd through the visual strategy of the silhouctte, man subjcct to a recognizable lbrm, Walkcr's unrcal lrodics rcturn fiom
br-rt instt'a<|, tlrc borly as undcrstood through thc social system of the the realm of the apparitional anrl spcctral to takc hold of history ancl
stcrcotypr'. give it material fbrm in the prcscnt. And evcn if it is not "history,, that
Emptit:rl ol'any clain'rs to thr: inr:lr-:xical, to a relation of physical con- we recognize in Walker's work, the project of history here invoked as
tiguity, Walkcr's silhour:ttcs cstablish an indirect and oblique relation to some notion of the recuperable real, we are stoppcd by these works,
the historical {igurcs, historical bodics, and historical trauma they take arrcsted before them, precisely fbr how they activate the legible lcga-
as their subject. In Walker's work, thc index emerges as a form rather cies of slavery, for how they call forth the forces that haunt an Ameri-
than a {unction of rcpresentation, as a point of referencc rather than a can nation and imagination.
referential structure ofrepresentation, as a vestige rather than a viable
means ofreprcsentation. These silhouettes are not done before a body,
that is, in front of a body posed in the studio. They are done after, away
from the bodies, long after the historical trauma they take as their sub- To the extent that silhouette and stereotype share an epistcmological
ject. No longer establishing its claims to real bodies, Walker's work dependence upon legibility, that is, to the extent that both the silhou-
nevcrtheless stakes its claims to the past, to something we might call ette and the stereotype are predicated upon recognition, what might
history. otherwise remain purely in the realm of the phenomcnological, the
Walker's images are not documentary but instead, supplemcntary, pcrccptual (think, again, of Gombrich's duck/rabbit) riscs into the
marking history not from a position of witness but from a position of rcalnr .l tlr. s.r,i,rl, thc political, and, in the cncl, thc cthical concerns
posteriority and distance. As previously mcntioned, sharing thcir ti:m- ol'tlrt'pr','s,rrl.l,r'il'r'tc.gniliorrisa1 stakcinthcvisual rcprcscntation
porality with both the writing of history ancl thc vvork ,rl rrrcnrorial .l tlr,' lrrrrrr,rrr li,r rrr, ,,l llr, lrurrr,rrr strlrjt't1, il'it is .rly in an<l thr.r-rglr

NI CAI IVt IMAGI T 6O

recognition that a portrait coalesces as such, it is also in and through induce, may well prompt us to consider not just history, but its legacy
recognition that a human subjcct achieves political legitimacy, which is in the present. (And, moreover, that her reccnt installations cleploy
to say, a place in the social order. To rccognize is to acknowledge, so light and projection in such a way as to include our shadows amidst
cially and politically, the other, it is to grant to thc other equal rights.a those concretized on the gallery walls, furthers the dcgree to which we
Iflin recognition inheres thc utopian possibility ofequality, then rec- are implicated, as spcctators, in the depicted sccnarios.) Negative im-
ognition, er.en when it, as perceptual and social act, identifies cliffer that are, in the end mnemonic devices walker's silhouettes activate
ages
ence and calls up a history of inequality, it also holds within its activity not just historical mcmory, but its tracc, a trace that haunts the Amer-
the possibility of political progress. That Walker's work hinges on rec- ican nation, namcly, the stereotype, which, Iike the silhouette, is at
ognition is then significant, even as shc produces what many considcr once utterly without substance and yet remains stubbornly, intractably
"negative images." That she conjures up, materializes, the repressed present.
bodics of history, the obsccnities of the institution of slavcry, is not thc
only function of her work. She is neither the first nor the last to give vi-
sual form to atrocity, to depict the violence and violation, the subjuga-
tion and servitude, the dehumanization and degradation that structure William Kcntridge is a South Aflican artist whose work may be said to
a history of race and race rclations in America. What is notcworthy, bear a similar rclation to his nation's traumatic history of racial oppres-
then, is not that she represents that history, but how she represcnts that sion, his animated films of a recurrcnt cast of characters in the penulti
history. That she materializes this history through two forms predicated mate momcnts of apartheid and its aftermath from European-Jewish
on structures of recognition the silhouette and thc stereotype, is exile to indentured black subject-a form, like Walker's, not of exor-
w-hcre and hou,her work gathers both its potency and its potential. cism, but of persistcnt exploration and interrogation. Charcoal draw-
As spectators, we are forced to acknowledge that we recognizc not ing as a process of marking, reworking and crasure, questions of history
only those horrific depictions ofviolcnce, but also, those vivid and cn- and memory, the decimated South Alrican landscape and citics, its hu
during stereotypcs ofrace. There is no room for disavowal here. The man inhabitants and inheritors, all arc in a constant statc .f flux, thc
lbrce of Walker's work is prccisely the degrcc to $.hich her forms, as Freudian model of the wax tablet or the litcrary fbrm of thc
Palirnpsest
antiquatccl as they may appcar, remain entircly contemporarl; they as thc basis for an aesthctic, and, in thc cnd, cincmatic practicc. Ros
play on a sct of cultural images that remain utterly legible in the pres, alind Krauss theorizcs that in Kcntridgc's adoption of this singular ani-
cnt. Wherc Frcd Wilson collects and displays in museum vitrines (and mation technique, one that would seem to instantiatc the dclay and dis-
David Levinthal collccts and photographs) the incriminating vernacular tancc from its ostensiblc subicct, hc forgcs a ncw medium.+s I would
evidcnce of a postermancipation history of inequality, discrimination suggcst, howevcr, that we find in Kentridge's avoidance of a monu-
and prejudice, whcrc Spike Lee makcs of such American cultural mark- mentalization of memory less a ncw visual medium than a new modc of
ers as minstrcl shor,vs and racist memorabilia a film like Bamboozled, historical encounter. Kentridge 's charting of the bclated development
Walker fully avoids the actual tracc of the real, archival or material, of democracy in South Africa, through the figures of Soho Eckstein (the
emptying the indexical flunction of the silhouettc and using it solcly as dark-suited industrialist, whose image has been said t. be prcdicated on
artistic form. Instead of the tracc of the real, she offers, as and in the a linocut Kentridge macle in his youth from a photograph of his grand-
form of the silhouette , the trace of the imaginary, both the darkest fan father in a threc-piecc pinstripe suit) and Felix Teitlebaum (the always
tasies of sexual violence that haunt an American imagination and the nude alter-ego of the artist), is a visual modc of addressing his nations
very catcgory of the stercotype, that uttcrly abstract yet enduring traumatic history. Kentridge's body of filmic works-lro hannesburg, 2nd
form. That we recognizc these forms, these stereotypes, that they arc (1989), Monument (1990), Mtne (1991), Sobriety,
Greatest City aJter Paris
Iegible to us, now, still, demonstrates that even as we fall back into pat- Obesity QGrowing Old (1991), Felix in Exile (1994'), History oJthe l4ain
terns ofrecognition that would scem to repeat and thus perpetuatc thc Comploinr (1996), WEIGHING . . . and WANTING (199j), ancl Stereoscope
very stereotypes and structures of discrimination and incqtralitv thc,v ( 1998 ()()) rrol orrly slagc thr: pcrsonal struggk:s of thr:ir rccllrrcnt
support, Walkcr's "ncgativc imagcs," in the shock tlrll tlrt'ir s( ('n,rri()s t'lr.u.rt llrs, I'rrr ,rl:;,, rr';rrcst'rrt tlrt' slrrrgglt's r>l'l nation as it rnovt.s lionr

Nl GAI lvr rMA(;r ilr

a system of apartheid to the electoral victory of the African National
Congress in the first free national electionsin 7994, to the subsequent
proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.+6
If Kentridge has described the situation in South Africa as a struggle
bctween the forces of forgetting and the resistance of remembrance,
between amnesia and memory, or, in his words, between "paper shred-
ders and photocopying machines,"aT his work, both in its thematic pre-
occupations and its very material existencc, stands firmly on the side of
the production of memory. But if Kentridge's work is, for all its idio-
syncratic reliance on charcoal drawing as the basis for filmic produc-
tion, fundamentally cinematic, a recent piece makes clear its relation
to earlier forms of visual culture, to the shadows and shadow plays of
more antiquated visual practices. It is thus that I turn to Kentridgc's
1999 Shadow Procession, which, as opposed to his standard practice of al-
tering charcoal drawings, is composed entircly of torn paper cut-outs
and found objects, and, as opposed to the mise-en-scdne ofhis earlier
filmic works, brings crowds and processions to thc representational
fore (figure 15). A film in three parts: the first accompanied by accor-
dion and voice of Johannesburg street musician Alfred Jakgalemele F r G u R E r s William Kentridge, Shodow Procession, 1999. Animated film, 35 mm film, video, and DVD
joined in a song of grief and lament; the second, the continued proces- transfer, 7'. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
sion of the figures to a much livelier tune, a jaunty version of "What a
Fricnd We Have in Jesus," procession now a kind of dance; and the Shadow Procession, for that matter) are, as Kcntridge himsclf muses,
third, dance given over to a fully random and violent form of move- not the result of the willing suspcnsion of clisbclicf, but rather, of the
ment, frcnetic figures joincd as well by an actual cat and an eyeball, "unwilling suspension of disbelicf," which is to say, that wc are power,
looking lcft and right. Sfiadow Procession depicts row after row of Iess to stop ourselves from bcing fbolecl. Such a perccptual response
refugees, in the first downtrodden and burdened by material posses- to shadow play and shadow form, to silhouette, is not an act of gen-
sions and history, in the second, animated, if not dancing and fully cel- erosity or willingness, but simply what we do, an act of recognition.
ebratory, and in the final sequence, utterly anarchic, moving toward a Of course, as children, part of the delight of such playing with shadows
future that they (and we) do not yet know is that we know we are being fooled, we know it is at once a hand
What is particularly interesting about Shadow Procession is not only and a rabbit, we shilt betwecn reality and illusion, pcrformer and
what it depicts, an unending stream ofthc displaced and disinherited of performance.ae
South Africa. Rather, it is remarkable that Kcntridge realizes the filmic If Kentridge's work allows itself this element of play with recogni-
representation of the dispossessed solely on the basis of simple paper tion, so too, in the end, does Walker's. The "ethics of spectrality" that
cut-outs and found objects (scissors, gramophone speakers, tripods), I claimed fbr Walker's work at the outset of this chapter, then, is not
photographed as they are shifted across a translucent surface. In a de- only the relation her work establishes to history and its subjects, thc
liberate return to an artistic practice that repeats the conventions of a oblique and necessarily belated encounter with a traumatic history of a
childrens game before a lamp, in which fingers and hands can creatc nation that her simulated silhouettes structure. Rather, the ethics of
birds, rabbits, ducks and the like, Kentridge produces the procession as spectrality is also, necessarily, the relation her work establishcs to t-hose
a form of what he terms a "practical epistemology,"48 that is, picturc forms llrrrt lr,rrrnl thr. Amcrican psyche, the "shadows of history," that is,
making as realized in and through recognition. An optical intcrruption tht'rlt'grt't'lo rvlrillr lrcr work forccs us to conliont, through the acti,
of light, thc figurativc forms that we rccognizc in slr.rrl,rrv plry (or' vatiorr ol sllrrol\l)(., n()l jrrsl orrr nati<ln's gh<tsts, ltttt oltr <twn. Tht:

NLCAI IVI IHAGI S II

ethics of Walker's work lies not only in its historical or memorializing
impulse, that is, in its persistent return to the history of the antebellum
South, but in its forms, in its return both to the silhouette and, despite WHAT REMAINS
what Saar and other critics may say, to the stereotype. For in reimagin-
ing and reanimating these antiquated, spectral forms, Walker's work
It was through the service of that same earth that modeling porilaits
demonstrates that what may well be considered past, has by no means
passed away, and indeed still structures our perceptual and social econ- from clay wasfrst inventedby Butades, a potter oJSiq/on, at Corinth.
He did this owinB to his daughter, who was in love with a young man:
omies in the present.
and she, when he was going abroad, drew in outline on the wall the
shadow oJ hlsJace thrown by a lamp. HerJather pressed clay on this
and made a relieJ, which he hardened by exposure tofre with the rest
of his potterl; and it is said that his likeness was preserved in the
untit the destruction of Corinth bv Mummius'
::":::'!":'.::::hs

In 1995, the British twins Jane and Louise Wilson completed a piece
1
called Crawl Space (figure
. As is typical of the architectural sites fea-
1 6)
tured in their cinematic scenarios, the Victorian house depicted in the
Wilsons's Crawl Space is abandoned, bereft. Signifiers of dereliction
abound. A worn midcentury modern chair stands in the center of one
room, the lone survivor of an era other than the house's historical ori-
gins, a trace of one of the successive generations of inhabitants who
once dwelled within its Victorian walls. In other rooms, the floors are
strewn with trash or piled with discarded appliances, debris and disrc
pair yet another sign of the passing of inhabitants. In thc kitchen lie the
collapsed remains of a sink. In anothcr room rcsts thc mangled arma-
ture of a fan. With repeated shots of peeling paint, faded wallpaper and
sagging insulation, the camera documents and depicts a home that has
given way to the temporality of neglect. Its status is now that of the
ruin. Uninhabited because it has become uninhabitable, uninhabitable
because it was uninhabited, in Crawl Space, notions of cause and effect
are fundamentally suspended. Entropy is now the governing logic of
the domestic space as it gives itself over to the forces of nature.
But if entropy governs the overall space of the ruinous domestic in-
terior, what Crawl Space dramatizes is how another force operates as
well. This is a building that has become, through its abandonment and
dereliction, Iiterally unheimlich. That is, for all of its recognizable ele-
ments, in its lorsaking by its former inhabitants, the Victorian structure
is both no longer, and no longer 1itre, a home. The physical space of the
honr,'lras rt'lrrrnr'<l to being only, merely, an architectural type as op
post'.l 1,, ,rn ,rt ltr.rl rt'si<lcncc; it is now simply a housc. But it is un
lrorrrt'lik,'itr,rn,llr, t s( ns('ils wcll, nanrcly, ;;sychologit'al or al'fi't'tivt'.
74 CHAPTER THREE
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