Exhibitions of the Stereotype in Kara Walker’s A Subtlety

In 2014, Kara Walker opened the controversial exhibition 'A Subtlety' in the soon-to-be demolished Domino Sugar Factory. The centrepiece was an enormous sugar-coated sphinx whose face resembled the stereotypical Mammy. Unlike in the classic Oedipus tale, this sphinx did not speak or pose riddles in a literal sense. Rather, she embodied a riddle herself by bearing features of the deliberately desexualised Mammy that contradicted her explicit sexuality. Mirroring the bourgeois confection from the Middle-Ages, the sphinx indeed resembled a giant dessert, waiting passively to be enjoyed by the visitors. However, the scope of this exhibition extended far beyond the walls of the factory. Within days after the opening, the sphinx’s enormous breasts, prominent buttocks and brazenly displayed labia became the object of thousands of pictures on social media. Visitors uploaded selfies in which they sexualised and fetishized the sphinx, posing as though licking, pinching or touching her breasts and genitals. Unknowingly, the audience was captured on film by Walker. The after-movie, titled An Audience, worked as a mirror to reveal the audience’s reactions to the stereotypical and sexualised imagery. In analysing how this exhibition functioned to challenge notions of the stereotype, I have taken the question posed by Mitchell as point of departure: “what if the materials of memory are overwhelming, so traumatic that the remembering of them threatens identity rather than reconstituting it?” These ‘materials of memory’ could be interpreted as stereotypical imagery, confirming the notion that the reductive qualities of the stereotype are sustained by iterating them. Re-examining Bhabha’s, Hall’s, and Rosello’s notions of the stereotype, I argue that this exhibition invokes a reconfiguration of these ‘materials of memory’, putting into effect processes of reconsideration and overcoming. In conclusion, A Subtlety marks the difference between the impossible stereotype and the fluidity of individual identity.