Kara Walker
Greg Kucera Gallery
Through June 2.

Controversy in the art world revolves more around matters of morality than matters of conscience. Think of the kinds of artists who are considered provocative: Robert Mapplethorpe (black men's genitals) or Chris Offili (Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung), or even the quieter furor around the work of David Wojnarowicz's alienated gay-love images. You really don't have to look very far to find offended people; the indignation switch is easily tripped.

The conversation over Kara Walker's work has been more complicated. Her life-size cutout silhouettes of imagined slave narratives are full of acts that challenge the most enlightened sensibilities--sodomy, pedophilia, severed limbs, scatological events. That these things are happening between antebellum slaves and their masters invokes a whole other set of reactions, not the least of which are guilt, discomfort, and loss.

When Walker started showing her work--right after finishing the Rhode Island School of Design's graduate program--it immediately got the attention (both flattering and not) of writers and art followers all over the country. She's not the first artist to address the ravages of slavery through art, but she seemed to have located a nerve no one was aware of. It's partly her spot-on choice of medium: The silhouette, a 19th-century portrait style favored by the well-to-do, is at the same time suggestive and reductive, like a stereotype, a connection Walker herself makes quite plain in interviews. In an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, she said, "I guess the 'truth' of an image or situation within a whole piece occurs when the viewer is enticed to fill in the blank spaces. She is faced with the discomfort of realizing just how many bizarre and sometimes violent fantasies already occupy her mind." No wonder people find her work upsetting; realizing this is akin to realizing one's own embedded prejudice (or its less kind cousin, bigotry).

These images are dialectical: fact working against fiction, horror shot through with whimsy, beauty that is also blasphemous. To say they are barbed is a terrible understatement, but it is also inaccurate to say that they are unequivocal in their meaning. In fact, they can be quite ambiguous. In a silk-screen being shown among Walker's work this month at the Greg Kucera Gallery, there's a man checking his watch in a leisurely manner while a small child urges him on: His features read as "black," he's wearing a shabby approximation of evening clothes, and he has an enormous, high-shelf ass. Is this a caricature of the lazy Negro? Or a real person who has survived only in crude, broad strokes? Is it funny or appalling?

The feeling that there is no right way to look at this work echoes down through the criticism and scholarship that has been written about it. White critics have been taken to task for describing Walker's hair (of all things) when writing profiles of her. That she wears her long hair in braids, and that non-blacks notice it, rings like an insult; it's a fetishization, another way that the white establishment presses down on black artists who do or do not conform to expectation. If this is true, then it's possible that a white viewership exerts the same pressure, and we are made complicit simply by looking at her work. We do, in a sense, consume an artist's work when we look at it; in this case, we are consuming the artist herself, and we are getting it wrong.

Kucera is showing mostly silk-screens, with one cutout and a suite of four etchings. The silk-screens are from a series called The Emancipation Approximation, and they're quite a bit smaller than life-size. This diminishes their power a bit, but only a bit. The images are still startling: two figures covered in bird shit, a woman in what might be tribal dress--or it might be abundant pubic hair--falling through space, a woman contemplating a field of severed heads. The emotional truth of the images proves them in a way that history books do not, which seems to be the ever-loving moral--and the conscience--of this slippery work: a disruption of history's confident stance. Walker does a damn good job of it.