Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In the spring of 1997 I visited Kara Walker’s exhibition “Upon My Many Masters” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). One of the works I saw that day was a physically imposing installation titled The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (figure 1). It was a huge piece that spread across the gallery walls like a shadow drama being played out by actors hidden behind a scrim of white fab- ric. Each of the work’s many characters was presented in formally ele- gant profiles that froze the motions of their wildly gesticulating bodies in erotic satiric and violent poses that were both attractive and repul- sive. Many of my fellow gallery visitors stood before the piece jaws slack and eyes wide staring in puzzled disbelief at what they were seeing or at least at what they thought they were seeing. I too was stunned by the graphic nature of the piece its violence and its hard-core sexual content the way that it seemed to attack the clich?s and stereotypes about plan- tation life that have become a part of the popular understanding of the past. It was a moment of communal visuality in which the act of viewing within the space of the gallery became a spectacular spectacle a cyclical scopic activity in which museum patrons watched other museum patrons watching them back. The phenomenological effect of the installation its very “thingness” following Martin Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” was like a physical blow to the observer; it rendered many viewers temporarily disoriented and speechless. (LL)