Force Majeure

Time Out New York, April 20 - 26, 2006

The premise is almost unthinkable: finding inspiration in the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. Yet that disaster moved artist Kara Walker to organize After the Deluge, an exhibition tucked away in a mezzanine gallery at the Met, where Walker pairs a roiling selection of tangentially related paintings, prints and collages from the museums collection with her own works. Touching on a multitude of themes - from the representation of blacks in American art to mans primal fear of water - the show is an eloquent expression of one artists frustration at the enduring legacy of racism in this country.

At times, After the Deluge sheds new light on familiar works in the museums collection. A homey genre scene of a black family getting ready for a carnival, painted in 1887 by Winslow Homer, abuts John Carlins 19th-century canvas of sailors accosting a black woman. In this context, Homers glib objectification of his subjects is hard to miss. Such racial stereotypes are echoed in nine miniatures of 19th century New York City by William Chappel: whites are at leisure, while blacks are shining shoes, collecting garbage and peddling fruit.

Walkers survey of representations of black Americans holds a mirror up to social injustices that prevail to this day - as witnessed by the harrowing images relayed in the wake of Katrina. This association is underscored here by the inclusion of paintings depicting raging waters, a scene of hell (painted by an unknown 16th century Dutch artist inspired by Bosch) and a 19th century Congolese fetish figure, originally created as a ritual object to remedy community strife.

Walker also displays a selection of 19th century silhouettes, some of which are surprisingly similar to her signature cut-paper silhouettes of antebellum life, notably an overtly erotic image and several intimations of mixed-race relationships.

But with roughly two-thirds of the show given over to work from the museums collection, Walker fans who make the trek to the Met may wonder why the artist ceded so much space and attention to her host, particularly since the profusion of attention-grabbing material competes with her own, mostly small-scale contributions. The answer is simple: by placing her work in this context, Walker lends authority to her own interrogation of history, as seen in the 17 pieces from her 2001 American Primitives series. These accounts of interracial degradation and revenge - a slumped slave flanked by abusive masters, white bodies that are dismembered - are placed at intervals throughout the installation.

The show includes four of Walkers large-scale works, whose images evoke the degraded social roles of women. One female figure melts into a primordial ooze; another holds a half-human, half-crocodile child in disgust by one of its braids; a third self-immolates, while a fourth beats a fallen (or maybe a dead) horse. While these images are stark and powerful, it is the least formally spectacular work in the exhibition that is the most deeply felt and catalyzing. In a group of typewritten index cards from 2001, Walker conveys a radical ambivalence about contemporary black identity. Her manifesto of disgust at self and society disparages everything from complicity with straggly white folks to emasculated fathers. In just a few small cards, Walker elicits extreme discomfort as she indicts both the willful cultural amnesia of the black middle class and the ineffectual guilt of white liberals.

These cards are all the more powerful for the fact that they predate the Katrina disaster - they are not an off-the-cuff reaction to the social inequities unveiled in the aftermath of the storm. In After the Deluge, Walker performs a gimlet-eyed institutional and cultural critique, cross-examining the Mets collection - and art history - while investigating the consequences of racism in America with category-five force.