Sugar is a cheap, seductive pleasure. But its sweetness belies a bitter history. For centuries it was a commodity harvested by slaves and refined into something white. Lately sugar has also become the villain of choice in the campaign to fight obesity. Leave it to Kara Walker, a provocative American artist, to turn the crystals into a work of art.
Last year Ms Walker was asked by Creative Time, a New York-based non-profit organisation that specialises in presenting art in public spaces, to create something for a cavernous disused sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Ms Walker was a clever choice.
For more than 20 years, she has been making work that is visually compelling even as it condemns some of the darkest moments of America's slave-owning past. Her best-known pieces use Victorian-looking silhouettes to depict brutal, racist scenes from the antebellum south. Surprisingly, these works don't nag. Rather, they are repulsively titillating, as if she is seizing skeletons from the country's closet and making them dance.
Ms Walker, now 44, has had her share of big museum shows, but she has never before filled a space as large or as freighted with history as the Domino sugar factory. More challenging still, she decided to confect her work out of the sweet stuff itself, in all its sticky grit.
The full name of the installation (capital letters included) says it all, and perhaps too much: "A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant".
The work itself is more subtle, and more powerful. A procession of amber-coloured boy sculptures, five-feet high, sweet-faced and creepy, guide visitors to the main attraction. At the far end of dark factory, hunched and glowing, is a gigantic sugar-coated sphinx.
With stereotypically black features, her hair wrapped in a bandanna, she crouches suggestively--perhaps submissively, despite being more than 35-feet high. Her powdery skin contrasts with the molasses-caked walls. A saccharine smell hangs in the air.
A monumental mammy sphinx hardly sounds nuanced.
And yet the work is both surprising and complex, evoking not only the slaves of the sugar trade, but also the women who became sex toys, as disposable as lollipops.
Like the sphinx in Egypt, this one presides over a site of ruins--after the show ends on July 6th, the factory is destined for the wrecking ball.
A shiny new waterfront development will be raised in its place.
Working with sugar was a challenge. Sculptures either melted or broke into pieces. Some of the boy figures fell apart days before the show opened. "No one works with sugar," says Nato Thompson, the curator. "Now we know why."
But for Ms Walker the real work involved transforming her ideas for the piece (which could sometimes be "finger-waggingly angry") into a work of art. Her aim was to create something that would be "sweet on the eyes", albeit a bit tough going down.
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