HISTORY IN THE ARENA OF DESIRE

In a 1997 exhibition of Kara Walker's black-paper silhouettes, one of the life-size cutouts features a woman leaping joyfully through a field (see Figure 1). Antebellum dress billowing, body aloft in the stylized abandon of dance, the woman seems a picture of innocent pleasure. Yet the graceful lift of one arm directs us to the decapitated head perched atop her own like a trophy. We come belatedly to the realization that the image is not sentimental but gothic, the postponement of horror made possible by the way the head's shape and significance emerge slowly, reluctantly, out of our disbelief. Its meaning arises as from a Rorschach blot, the head assuming all sorts of shapes – the figurehead of a ship's prow or an elaborate bonnet. Or perhaps, most convincingly, it seems to bloom like a strange flower from the woman below it, her own head nodding gently under the deadweight of the other's, precisely as the grass stalks at her feet bow under the heavy pods topping them. With the organic symmetry between plant and person, Walker naturalizes a most unnatural sight: decapitation seems as ordinary and inevitable as grass gone to seed. This kind of subtle aesthetic conspiracy invites us to forget for a moment the violence necessarily preceding the dismemberment – for who gives up one's head willingly?