Kara Walker is one of the most successful and widely known contemporary African-American artists today--remarkable for her radical engagement with issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Walker is best known for her provocative installations, composed of cut-paper silhouettes depicting fantastic and grotesque scenes of the antebellum South. This thesis examines Walker's work in silhouettes, text, and video in order to establish the unifying logic that unites her media. Walker's use of racist stereotypes has incited vehement criticism, and the debate over the political meaning of her work has been worked and reworked in the voluminous literature on her artistic practice. This thesis focuses on how Walker's defense and explanation of her own work functions as a performative and political component of the art itself. Walker's construction and performance of an artistic identity is an integral and intentional part of her overall practice and a key component to the interpretation of her work.

Cette étude a pour objet l’ensemble de l’oeuvre de l’artiste afro-américaine Kara Walker, de 1994 à 2009. Fondé sur une approche pluridisciplinaire qui fait intervenir les Études américaines, les Études afro-américaines, l’histoire de l’art et l’esthétique, ce travail met au jour la récurrence de la violence dans l’oeuvre. Mettant en concurrence les propos de l’artiste et ses créations, il tente de dégager les constantes et les évolutions d’une oeuvre qui s’appuie sur une esthétique de la cruauté, et repose sur l’équilibre fragile entre la beauté et l’horreur. L’oeuvre de Walker ayant fait l’objet d’une controverse qui a joué un rôle important dans l’exégèse prolifique produite sur les créations de l’artiste, les tenants et les aboutissants de cette réception polarisée sont examinés. Compte tenu du succès immédiat de Walker, devenue en quelques années seulement une star sur la scène artistique établie, il était nécessaire de réfléchir aux conditions et aux causes de ce succès. À partir de la notion de stratégie figurative, ce travail se concentre sur les différentes manières dont l’artiste explore les représentations produites et relayées par la culture dominante. Les œuvres du début de sa carrière, ses installations de papiers découpés, sont ainsi analysées comme la mise en question du principe même de représentation. Utilisant la figure humaine et l’histoire comme des trompe-l’œil pour souligner la persistance de ces représentations dans l’imaginaire collectif et particulier, les installations jouent sur l’écart entre le désir d’interprétation du regardeur et sa frustration constante. Au milieu des années 2000, un infléchissement de l’oeuvre de l’artiste se produit ; il nous paraît particulièrement saillant dans les créations réalisées dans le sillage de la rétrospective de milieu de carrière de Walker (2007-2008). Il se traduirait par une réflexion sur la possibilité de représenter la violence exercée contre des disparus réels sans la transformer en spectacle. En conséquence, la construction du corps noir en tant que site spectaculaire dans la culture occidentale, ainsi que certains exemples de réponses, de ripostes émanant de Walker et d’autres artistes contemporains, sont envisagés dans ce travail. Ce dernier aboutit à l’examen des oeuvres où la figuration est mise en crise par le risque du spectacle ou compensée par l’incorporation de l’artiste, dans des oeuvres à la fois exceptionnelles et emblématiques du parcours de Walker, lequel atteste une tension constante entre la conscience du gouffre entre les sphères artistique et sociopolitique, et la tentative de créer un art politique. / This work presents a survey of the work of African-American artist Kara Walker, from 1994 to 2009. Based on a multidisciplary approach conjoining American Studies, African-American Studies, art history and aesthetics, it underlines violence as a recurrent feature in Walker’s work. Confronting the artist’s statements and her works, we try to expose the constant threads and the evolutions of a work grounded within an aesthetics of cruelty, and precariously balanced between beauty and horror. Because Walker’s art has been the object of a controversy, which significantly impacted the prolific exegesis on her work, the tenets of such polarized reception are analyzed here. Given Walker’s immediate success – she became a star on the mainstream art scene in but a few years – a reflection on the conditions and causes of her success were also required. Starting from the notion of figurative strategy, this work focuses on the different ways in which the artist has explored representations produced and circulated within dominant culture. Her early works – her paper cutouts – are thus analyzed as questioning the very notion of representation. Using the human figure and history as illusionistic devices in order to expose how such representations endure within the collective and particular unconscious, Walker’s installations work within the gap between the viewer’s desire for interpretation and its constant frustration. In the mid-2000s, a new orientation within Walker’s work may be witnessed – most obviously in the pieces made in the aftermath of her mid-career retrospective (2007-2008). According to us, such a turn shows through a reflection on the possibility of representing violence as perpetrated on the bodies of actual beings without turning it into a spectacle. Thus, both the construction of the black body as a spectacular site in Western culture and the responses and counterstrategies from Walker as well as other contemporary artists to that issue, are also the objects of our investigation. This enables us to understand how the specter of the spectacle looms over some of Walker’s pieces between 2007 and 2009, throwing figuration into crisis. Both emblematic of and discrepant within Walker’s general practice, those pieces testify to the way her work evinces a constant tension between the awareness of the gap between the realm of art and the sociopolitical sphere, and the attempt to make political art.

Kara Walker, winner of the MacArthur “Genius” award and the Smithsonian Lucelia award, is one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary African American artists. Her work, especially her cut-paper silhouettes depicting grotesque antebellum scenes, has inspired as much outrage from an older generation of Black artists as acclaim from the mainstream media. This thesis gives an overview of the artist’s life, analysis of some of her works, and an examination of the controversy her work has caused. In the conclusion, I introduce the next generation of Black American artists, self-proclaimed “Art Stars,” including Atlanta artist Fahamu Pecou.