You don't have to be queer to be a queer artist.
Take Kara Walker. At the UCLA Hammer Museum, her beautifully installed traveling exhibition of drawings, video animations and black-paper-silhouette murals is nothing if not queer. Walker's work gains its captivating power from a cheerfully ferocious deviation from the norms that typically characterize discussion of African American life.
Her subject is black experience in a proud nation whose prosperity and might were substantially built on the degrading legacy of black slavery. This historical truth is not news, but neither is the gruesome story confined to the remote past.
The refined, formal elegance of the artist's debonair design sense is put to the rudest ends, and an impure vision of racial and gender identity arises. No one escapes unscathed.
The first room of "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love" features a 50-foot-wide, 1994 diorama in which silhouette figures attached to the curved wall are slightly larger than life-size. The title is florid: "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart." A literary mash-up of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 "Gone With the Wind" and Thomas Dixon's 1905 "The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan," the diorama's scenes of courtship, lust, whimsy and depravity are depicted with the grandeur of an epic and the buffoonery of a minstrel show.
The cinematic allusions are apt. ("The Clansman" was source material for D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation.") The diorama puts you in the center of a curved space, as if the sweet and horrifying imagery on the surrounding walls was a projection of your own anguished mind.
Queer art arose in the 1980s. It was born of a profound recognition of the ways people project fantasies onto invisible sectors of society, and it was accelerated by the death toll of the AIDS epidemic amid gross government indifference. Walker's art queers the racial discourse.
She goes for the subliminal, just below a sensory threshold that divides the world into comfortable dualities of good and evil, purity and vice, conqueror and casualty. Victimization and desire are represented as externally imposed and internally constructed, while freedom is represented as a contested fantasy that fosters inspiration and calamity in roughly equal measure.
