For a couple of decades now, Larry Walker has drawn his inspiration from the urban streetscape. The brick wall in particular represents a site for appropriation and social commentary and is linked with Modernist concerns for the flattened picture plane. He approaches the surface of this wall like a skilled emotional mason. Over the years this wall has had personal resonance for me and I am going to endeavor to take a closer look, for, as his daughter, I have been struck by our shared reticence to speak beyond formalities and surfaces. So here, like a child awestruck by the fortitude of this impasse, is an attempt to traverse layers of paint paper, wood and glue- some observations.
Walker’s recent show, Surface, Spirit Voices and Other Secrets, is a collection of large collage and found object paintings in somber greys and muted colors which appear to emerge from a deep new place; they come across like the dawning of self-consciousness. Much of Walker’s work reflects upon the conditions that lead to the formation of subjectivity, in particular, one, which metamorphoses from Being into being Black. Walker’s surfaces could serve as models of the process of ego formation as when white racism and economic inequality are encountered and succumbed to. Like illustrations for Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon’s seminal text, these painted souls vie for wholeness, while subtly destabilizing structures of segregation, including, but not limited to racial segregation. Larry Walker’s work embraces black vernacular and expands its universality. The large panels brood and front, they shout, rap and quietly suffer. Scratch at the mask of paint and Walker’s lively spirit questions the separateness of mind and body, of past and future. His paintings also betray a fear of resistance, the fear that oppressive structures are so much a part of their maker that resisting them would resemble a denial of self. This is a dark and fatalistic view, one that is shaped by experience as much as concept. As my father’s work shifts its emphasis from fortress to spirit, it is interesting to note the ways in which the risk of exposure and secret sharing unseat the worldview informed by a youth spent in an urban landscape.
Larry Walker was born in rural Georgia in 1935, the eleventh child of Cassanna (Wood) Walker - her “last rose in the garden,” as she noted on the back of his school photo. He’s told of one distant memory of picking cotton as a small child, and one of the cast iron stove on fire, and of that fire engulfing the house. All these stories I have heard, and I find incurably romantic, especially the heroic part about moving to New York, - to Harlem, where the picture goes from sepia to Technicolor, the moment the subway emerges above ground, revealing to Walker the 6 story walk-ups he mistook for skyscrapers.
In his essay Notes on a Native Son, James Baldwin reflects Harlem life in the 1940s. I found myself consulting this work to fill in the unknowns of my father's early life. Baldwin writes about the effects of education as an antidote to poverty and curiously as a form of rebellion against his father.
“It was a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I left home. We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to or from church...My father asked me abruptly, ‘you’d rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?’ I was astonished at his question-because it was a real question. I answered, ‘Yes.’ That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all we had ever said.” (Baldwin)
As a young man, Walker like the elder Baldwin, became aware of a local contradiction, that structures advocating freedom, were dependent on imposing limitations on its exercise. As a young man, Walker began questioning the failures and missteps of his environment, including the local church. Walker's paintings yearn to touch the philosophizing souls of others, eschewing dogma and violence.
“…Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto wall who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work.” (Baldwin) |
The vitality of the human spirit is one of the universal concerns in much of Walker’s work. Vitality and rage are complicated by an unspoken anxiety Walker inserts between gestures of uplift. Implements of oppression, like leg irons, or conformity, such as earphones, hover uncomfortably in the fissure between diptychs. Walker paints the twilight consciousness caught between self-preservation, drive and hostile coercion by oppressive structures.
Regarding the diptych Listen...(to da beat) Larry Walker says: " I am intrigued with the idea of dangling a microphone from its surface grip down to its connecting source - buried in sand. Perhaps much of what we 'say,' 'do' or 'hear' throughout the years is buried, not understood or diffused between layers.' Is there a relationship between unspoken thoughts and spoken silences? Is the non-responsive listening device actively disconnecting both speaker and listener from the burden of understanding? It is as though the act of sublimation is what is being illustrated. The implement that should be a conduit of energy buries itself in the sand. Walker asks us to listen to the muted voice.
In Talk to Me, Talk to Me light absorbing matte washes mimic the absorption of sound. A disembodied black phallus sits smack in the middle of a dark canvas in the form of a microphone. To one side the microphone plugs into the canvas support, into its own side. It is an instrument with an internal outlet, an unspeakable object. Like the mythological Echo, who was doomed only to repeat the words others spoke to her, Walker's collages and objects problematize ideas about absorption and assimilation suggesting to the viewer that the objet is wholly accepting - with limits.
“It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is and men as they are: in light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in ones own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength” (Baldwin)
I am holding in my hands a tattered copy of Man and his Symbols, by C.G. Jung, formerly the property of the Walker household. Scrawled upon its exposed, yellowing title page are ancient phone messages for “Dad.” When Larry Walker speaks about his work he talks about spirits and passageways, shadows and voices. His artistic language is informed, in part, by Jung’s writings on archetypes and the collective unconscious. In his studio he gestures with his impressive hands at faces and bodies hidden in the work and speaks of transcendence over obstacles as one of the objectives of the human spirit. For my father, making art is akin to a hero’s journey, - the journey’s completion comes in the act of viewing.
“If my work somehow helps lead a viewer to a position it is important to recognize that the viewer also played a role in getting there…and since the painting is an inanimate object…it will be primarily the responsibility of the viewer to take the necessary steps to gain access to the ‘other side’.”
Larry Walker's paintings perform the role of barrier and confidant, they offer themselves up to the viewer in order to instigate a metamorphosis from object to subject. Looking closely I realize just how the promise of a viewer lives within the work, like a little-known voice that lives inside our heads, influencing and transforming us. At other times, Walker suggests, paintings whisper back if you listen.
Larry Walker's paintings exist like living souls suspended in constructed spaces, like the umbra within overlapping shadows traversing the surface of a ruined urban structure.
- Kara Walker |
