December
2019
2019
On ‘Subtlety’
Jocelyn Hawkins
The entire installation, titled: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, was meant to serve as a monument to the slaves whose labor drove sugar cane plantations and the commonly caricatured yet undervalued roles of black women in kitchens. In an interview with Art21, Walker explains how her preliminary research led her to discover the concept of "a subtlety." "A subtlety is a sugar sculpture made out of sugar paste, marzipan, fruits, and nuts, that was sculpted to portray royalty and could be consumed by royalty, nobility, and clergy. [It] presents this opportunity to make a figure that can embrace many themes that is representative of power in and of itself."1 By choosing the mammy archetype to be the subject for this specific type of sculpture, Walker not only thanks black figures of the past for their service to the industry but credits them for the industry's success. From the sheer size of the piece to the context behind the title, it is clear that Walker is trying to reframe the mammy lore and place her in a position of power as opposed to her typical subservient portrayal.
Like all of Kara Walker's works, something is disturbing about the manner of presentation. While the woman's sphinx position is a powerful allusion to the history and art of the African diaspora, the usage of blackamoors plays on the history of the objectifying and commodifying of black bodies in European art. "The servitude of the Blackamoor both in narrative content (depicted as carrying trays, or holding other functional objects such as boxes, clocks, and lamps) and in an artistic form (decorative domestic ornament) fixes its presence in courtly spaces as a foreign body redeemed only through the implied submissiveness of a servile posture."2 In combining the two forms, Walker summons audiences to consider the different types of black depictions throughout history and their intentions. Exaggerated African features detail the mammy figure's face. Features that racist depictions in the 19th century would have demeaned, such as wide set nostrils and full lips.
Meanwhile, she is wearing the same tied kerchief as the original Aunt Jemima character, a pair of earrings, and nothing more. The rest of her body remains bare, and Walker has allowed her to display her breasts, buttocks, and vulva impenitently. Traditionally, the mammy is an older woman only depicted completely adorned in housekeeping attire. There has been much debate between art historians and critics alike about what the sphinx's nudity represents within the piece. If she is to be presumed as vulnerable, then it is fair to assume that her nudity is a commentary of the denial of consent that black women have historically faced. Dr. Emily Owens, a professor at Brown University who specializes in the history of slavery's effects on sexuality, writes that "Enslaved black women were summarily denied the capacity to consent: held as property and not people, their bodies belonged to masters and not themselves, and the law refused to hear them when they uttered 'yes,' or, more to the point, when they uttered 'no.'"3 While the other potential meaning behind her nudity is still related to consent, her nudity may be a proud reclamation of her autonomy rather than a representation of trauma. Walker forces audiences to confront her sexuality through the sheer size of her body alone. This confrontation can represent an act of voyeurism, which draws on the dialogue of the black female body and its objectification. It can also serve as a reclamation of self, which is a way for this figure to present her body on her own terms.
While Walker herself is vague about the meanings behind this piece, she did remark that "while she's bent over in this gesture of, sort of, supplication, I don't feel like she's there to be taken or satisfied, or abused in any way. She's withholding. I don't want to make her into a non-sexual caretaker of the city."4 This analysis holds validity to both sides of critical speculation. The figure's nudity, combined with the pose of "supplication," calls awareness to the history of her body's exploitation. However, by making the mammy appear indifferent despite her subjection to the gaze—Walker frees the mammy figure from the bounds of her narrative. "I don't want to make her into a non-sexual caretaker of the city" is to say that she does not want the mammy to return to the role she once occupied.
As a whole, the installation served as a closing event for the old Domino Sugar Factory. Impermanence serves as a significant theme in the ensemble. Its stage, the factory, would be destroyed while housing the art show. When speaking of the factory's condition in 2014, Walker continuously touched on the ways molasses had naturally formed over the skeleton from loose sugar and heat. "Molasses on the walls, molasses on the raptors, globs of sugar fifty feet in the air, just left over from this refining process. It was such a cathedral to the industry. Such a cathedral to one commodity."5 The metaphor of the factory as a cathedral strengthens the sense of memorialization that Walker created throughout the space. Hence, "an Homage to the unpaid and overworked." Decades of molasses covering the entire infrastructure also speaks to the concept of time. Just as the mammy figure is an agglomerate of centuries of racist Southern folklore, the molasses around her is an agglomerate of centuries of sugar produced by plantations. The child labor figures constructed of molasses reacted the same way as the molasses in the factory. They slowly melted in globs throughout the installation period, reminding viewers of their inevitable destruction. On the effect this had on the show, Walker remarks that she "really love[d] the fact of these figurines melting and dripping. And they're very much like the interior of the Domino Sugar Factory...still sort of weeping this substance."6 As the children's faces were all joyous, it is interesting to consider how their melting must have lent nightmarish qualities to them, chilling imagery being a quality that Kara Walker brings to all of her work.
Another theme behind the installation revolves around time. When organizing a chart of the different sugar byproducts during her preliminary research, Walker ended her map of findings with "ruins." She concluded that sugar and its production leave ruins. It is fair to say that many consider the Sphinxes to be the ruins of ancient societies to which we cannot return. With that in mind, could the Mammy-Sphinx be Walker's way of communicating that racist characterizations such as the mammy are from a part of American history to which we should not and cannot return? Raquel Kennon, a California State University professor, writes, "Walker's Marvelous Sugar Baby brilliantly evades confinement. Her 21st Century Mammy monument itself even melts away. Existing now only in the digital photographic record and countless social media accounts, this is a fugitive sculpture, fabricated to be deconstructed, always already in ruins, an ephemeral monument persuasively countering what Paule Marshall calls 'the use of the Negro woman as an embodiment of myth and fantasies'."7
1 Art21. “Kara Walker: ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’.” (2014). YouTube.
2 Shohat, Ella, and Awam Amkpa. "The Specter of the Blackamoor: Figuring Africa and the Orient." Re-Significations: European Blackamoors, Africana Reading (2016): 95-115.
3 Owens, Emily. “Yes Means Yes and the Problem of Consent in the Law.” African American Intellectual Society
(2016): 24.
4 Art21. “Kara Walker: ‘A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby’.” (2014). YouTube.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Kennon, Raquel. “Subtle Resistance: On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker’s A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose.” African American Review 52, no. 2 (2019): 143-164