Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Kara Walker
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art
81%
The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin. 2015. Cut paper on wall
This piece is highly symbolical, yet it doesn't seem to demand — even allow for — any kind of simple semiotic reading. It's a maelstrom of metaphorical significance, but its power as an artwork derives from those metaphors' resistance to saying what it seems at face value they're attempting to say. Take that leftmost of the three central equine silhouettes: a black girl carrying a (presumably white, southern) horseman on her back is, of course, an image of racial oppression. But why is the horseman wailing (or belting)? Maybe it's to highlight the unsettling pathos of his own role as a slaver. But then what's that dwarf to the left upraising against him? Is this an attack or some reverent or empathetic gesture? Such ambiguities of meaning find an analogue in the basic pictorial and representational ambiguities of Walker's silhouette style. Do the horseman and his assailant even occupy the same pictorial space? There's not only a literary sort of uncertainty to the significance of any of these characters' actions, but also a basic visual uncertainty to their social attributes (race, garb, affect) and even the ways they relate to each other in space. At every level, this artwork possesses, at once, immediacy and mystery; that's something art as such aspires to. (TFS, 2025)