I think Walker's brilliance, power, and twisted complexity as an artist has simply run roughshod over even the most principled second thoughts, white and black, yours, mine-- and maybe even her own. I am never sure what to make of her work-- it is not at all a comfortable, easy read, and thus the critical/corporate endorsement of the present installation is truly a strange thing to contemplate.
My last comment, Carol, concerns your valuable revelations about the evils STILL THRIVING in the sugar industry. I don't agree that Walker's critique of the history of slavery plus sugar points only at the past. I expect she was under less of an illusion about how sugar is produced today than most people are when buying consumer goods and food staples (such as shrimp-- see a recent Times article) produced, essentially, with slave labor. Even so, there are degrees of abuse, and what is going on in the DR with Haitian labor is horrific and we must stop it.
So maybe Walker should have refused to source sugar from the overtly racist Domino kleptopoly-- and that would have made its own Hans-Haacke-like point, with moral clarity. But then again, it's right up Walker's alley to over-inflate moral clarity like a balloon (or a styrofoam sphinx) and then puncture it. The fact that modern-day sugar slavery might be smeared all over a historicizing racist image makes that image more excruciatingly present, more unavoidable. In the factory space you can't even tell if the pervasive molasses stench is from what once was, or from what still is. Let Domino Sugar put its logo all over that.
If Walker's sugar Mammy functions for many visitors, nevertheless, as chic, naughty nostalgia, or as a Domino or Two Trees ad -- well, is that really Walker's fault? Could she hit us over the head any harder without cracking our skulls?
My last comment, Carol, concerns your valuable revelations about the evils STILL THRIVING in the sugar industry. I don't agree that Walker's critique of the history of slavery plus sugar points only at the past. I expect she was under less of an illusion about how sugar is produced today than most people are when buying consumer goods and food staples (such as shrimp-- see a recent Times article) produced, essentially, with slave labor. Even so, there are degrees of abuse, and what is going on in the DR with Haitian labor is horrific and we must stop it.
So maybe Walker should have refused to source sugar from the overtly racist Domino kleptopoly-- and that would have made its own Hans-Haacke-like point, with moral clarity. But then again, it's right up Walker's alley to over-inflate moral clarity like a balloon (or a styrofoam sphinx) and then puncture it. The fact that modern-day sugar slavery might be smeared all over a historicizing racist image makes that image more excruciatingly present, more unavoidable. In the factory space you can't even tell if the pervasive molasses stench is from what once was, or from what still is. Let Domino Sugar put its logo all over that.
If Walker's sugar Mammy functions for many visitors, nevertheless, as chic, naughty nostalgia, or as a Domino or Two Trees ad -- well, is that really Walker's fault? Could she hit us over the head any harder without cracking our skulls?