Shadowy past
Silhouette show illuminates Dixie-fried art form, then and now
The 19th-century cut-paper silhouette is what you might call a paradoxical form. One minute it is sublimely nostalgic and vintage-erotic. The next minute the silhouette is a stop on kitsch’s highway, where disreputable truck stops are naked lady mud flaps and peeing kid yard art.
You get both the spiritual and the screwy in Silhouette: The Art of the Form at Spruill Gallery, a group show that runs the gamut from classical examples of the form to conceptual responses by silhouette debunkers such as Kara Walker and Tina Dunkley.
For better or worse, Silhouette is an object lesson in what artists like Walker have founded their pissed-off careers on. Spruill prominently features Walker’s spiritual nemesis: the classical 1930s-and-beyond silhouettes cut by Charleston artist Carew Rice.
Rice’s works incorporate hackneyed tableaux of Old South huntin’, fishin’ and black folk, as well as Spanish moss-draped grottos filled with Disneyesque animals that can make one weep with nostalgia for a vision of the Olden Times that’s as sweet and simple as a page from a child’s storybook. If only he’d let it go at that. Instead, Rice expands the focus of the “Good Ole Sunny South” to encompass African-American caricatures (complete with exaggerated features) engaging in a variety of undignified activities.
To the show’s detriment, and the genre’s illumination, the lopsided focus is on such traditional silhouettes created by not only South Carolina grandfather Carew, but his grandson, Clay, who carries on the family’s snippy tradition. The Rice family’s often beautiful, often naive silhouettes are the backbone of a show that celebrates the legacy of the multigenerational art without questioning its content. The dreamy worldview perpetuates a plantation mentality of white people finding relaxation value in black labor, while peaceable “darkies” appear thankful to be in the land of cotton, despite the bitter taste of slavery on their tongues.
Even as late as 1969, the Carew iconography remained fixated on antebellum Dixie memories. The viewer must struggle with how to appreciate the enormous technical craftsmanship and often charming qualities of a form that also creates such denial-charged visions of the South.
Freakiness abounds, from a 1949 silhouette of that lovable old crackpot racist and miscegenist Strom Thurmond — back when he had a chin — to one of the genre’s typical “race” vignettes of a dejected husband trailing behind his fancified missus. Such tableaux belong in the same historical junk pile as old-school Mammy cookie jars, watermelon-eating babies and other examples of another generation’s racial “joshin’.”
Contemporary artists like Walker have ass-whooped the silhouette at its own game, sending up the decorative charm of the form to reveal its undercurrent of racism in white gloves. A series of five silk screens from “The Emancipation Approximation” features Walker’s by-now famous mimicry of the master’s lyricism, in which the same cock-of-the-walk gestures, lilting romanticism and stylized racial features of the silhouettes are turned against The Man. In Walker’s implicitly violent scenes, emancipation is far from true freedom. Instead, white shit rains from storm clouds and birds, or a haughty, drained-of-color black woman is an impossible burden held aloft by her more ordinary, dark-skinned sister.
While Walker offers a race-centered response to the silhouette, many other artists in the show connect most with the purely aesthetic, signage quality of the form. Teresa Sims creates charming photos of the silhouettes among us, while Drew Conrad and Matt Welch use the silhouette as hipster shorthand to indicate the features of “cool” in an abstracted, marketing-oriented form. On a purely formal level, Beth White’s gorgeous lacelike silhouettes tap into a history of female craft and technical grace. Her exquisite detail trumps even the talented Rice family.
Other artists such as Andrew Ross and Scott Lawrence may not open the racial can of worms, but they do point out the silhouette’s connection to denial and a partially written history. Ross creates humorous Polaroids of silhouetted buffalo, once native to the South, cavorting amid the overpasses and strip malls of contemporary Georgia. And in creating silhouettes of Wal-Mart workers, Hope Hilton taps into a Rice-ian strain of status, depicting an underclass of workers (in this case, badly paid chain store underlings) but giving them back their identities by naming them. Likewise, artist Dawn Dedeaux’s photographs restore the strong, ennobled identities of African-Americans stripped away in racist caricature.
Even racism becomes doily-precious and charming beneath the silhouette scissors, its offensiveness neutralized — or so silhouette fans perhaps once believed. But silhouette-making is by definition an act of elision, in which a single piece of black paper is impressively scissored until it becomes a recognizable figure. Left out in its symbolic snipping of pleasant scenes is the ugliness of real life.