ATTENTION TALKINGGRID Heads: artist Nancy Baker, Brooklyn resident, and Frau Kolb in California; have met, on-line, and had an intimate and revealing, private ART CHAT of monumental significance… Baker is an excellent source of HOT MUSE NEWS and ART DISCOURSE. YEAH! We discussed the work of famous artist, Kara Walker!
What an informative, prize-worthy, art chat! I’m pleased to have spoken with artist, Nancy Baker this morning. She is an outstanding art thinker and educator, the kind of person who speaks with candor and confidence based on a lifetime commitment to art practice. This morning she transformed my understanding of an artist whose work I’ve repeatedly dismissed. Baker speaks eloquently on the necessity for political art and on how that singular urgency manifests in her own art practice. She is, moreover, an effective advocate for Kara Walker’s work. Prior to our conversation I had serious reservations around the Walker’s work (scroll down, see below for more on my initial reaction to Walker’s magnificent achievement was repulsion). I thought of it as toxic waste in lacy silhouette cut-outs, to which which I was exposed in 1998 at the Drawing Center exhibition in New York. The work is famous for its ability to defy critique by being unassailable “art smart.” Baker is defending Walker from other artists who, quickly label Walker’s new work as being related to Jeff Koon’s puppy pieces in their high polished bling-bling luster, gigantic jewelry, catering to the tastes of the rich and fashionable institutional collectors. In other words, work which in my book is industrial scaled commerce and therefore, “NOT ART!”
In my experience, Baker is a seriously sound addition to any team, I’ve studied her work and visited with her in person during her participation in a group show in Chinatown, Los Angles, several years ago. It was striking, today, during our art chat to listen to Baker, an artist I admire; speak with sincere admiration for Walker’s achievements. To hear an artist’s whose work resonates with me, speak with such intense appreciation of the more famous artist’s oeuvre quickened my heart and invited reflection, pause, and… I had to rethink my position and wrap my brain around Baker’s more informed and expansive take. I’m glad I did. Because, now I feel so at ease; like a convert to a “better,” religion.
Walker, may need no defense, she is her own excellent advocate being experienced in verbal self-defense; possessing master-class public speaking skills, terrific good looks, the prowess, and–––indispensable––– early training in mental acrobatics which are required of any artist whose work is not merely pretty but rather unsettling, disturbing, and like quicksand… such as Baker, who produces haunting collages of finely cut filigree paper emblems and logos; seductively glittering like a winking whore on speed…have impressed me so on-line that I went out-of-my-way to see them… to see the little knife slit paper pieces; cut and precise in a unforgettable rather than, deadly embrace; one finds the hurt of generations long ago; or the minor nuisance of a broken nail… or of coagulated pain of others, to whom we are nonetheless kin. Dealing with the legacy of institutional pain to which we all belong; is no individual experience, rather a binding one.
The sound of screaming: “The Horror! The Horror!” goes both ways, down a hall of mirrors, into the far corners of eternity, the screams of tortured souls; beaten, starved, hurt, and humiliated… creating work which gives voice to some of the repressed grumblings… ah, now this resonates on deeper levels and begins to erode my decade-long, entrenched, aversion to Walker’s, MONUMENTALLY SCALED dirty work.
In other words, Frau’s views were reshaped, chiseled into a new understanding, of Walker’s world class mastering of the symbolic material of language. Her use of the ancient, Sphinx of Giza harking back to arguments that prove that Grecco-Roman civilization was in large part inherited from Egyptian predecessors; attributing to the African Continent; the source of all advanced Western thought… being the spot; that some like to say, which was chosen by Napoleon’s troops for target practice… others blame the Muslims… for the Sphinx’s missing nose… who knows? In the context of contemporary art; the “Mammy” revived from pancake boxes and early cinema glory; is BACK; which makes perfect sense, when Andy Warhol’s work is taken into account! The Sugar Babies flanking her are no longer quite as offensive to me; until earlier today I was fuming over the… sticky melting monstrous vulgar rat attracting mess… now the Sugar Babies and the White Sphinx blaze in Frau’s freshly washed brain; unmasked and transformed from cocktail banter to… significant art; no mere catering to the master’s taste for sweet guilt and bitter pills; Walker’s work may be considered national housecleaning. Ah! Eureka!
Finally, terms which Frau Kolb can comprehend the necessity for art to cleanse the past… If SUGAR BABIES are the way… so be it.
After speaking with Ms. Baker, I see clearly… sparkly, even…my view of Walker’s work was previously tainted by my own prejudice, of course, I know that… Thanks to Baker’s surgical understanding of the methods and motives maybe fueling Walker’s meteoric rise to Art World Alpine pinnacles of recognition and empowerment, Frau Kolb is feeling more enlightened. Laughingly, Baker report’s of an anonymous friends comment upon seeing Kara Walker and her white sphinx at the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn… as mirroring the fetid shiny surfaced giant puppies of Koon’s factory output. For Baker it was the sugar babies; “melting back into where they came from which,” the sugar factory floor… touched her… moved her, despite the fact that most of the mainstream conversation has focused on the central “White Sphinx,” piece, dominating the exhibit.
Photo published with permission; ©Nancy Baker, 2014