Kara Walker’s Dance Theater
- Malcolm Ryder
- Sep 23
- 6 min read
SF MOMA Fall 2025
The word conjure neatly accounts for how a lot of art works. But what is it?
I’m confident enough in my education to say that this AI-generated summary of “conjure” stands well for what I mean:
To conjure means to produce or create something as if by magic, or to evoke a memory or image. The word's etymology traces back to the Latin verb coniūrāre, meaning "to swear together" or "form a conspiracy". This original sense of a solemn oath or agreement evolved into the modern usage of performing magic or calling spirits, and later extended to metaphorically create something, often from nothing, or to summon a strong image or idea to mind.
In that description, the point is that we may experience something on the surface that is not attributable to an explicit means. But being unseen does not mean absent.
It’s interesting to review what might qualify as the explanation of something’s emergence. A concept, a deal, a formula, a motive – such things can, without our knowledge, be the origin of what we experience, by somehow prescribing what something’s expression can be like.
When we have an artist’s statement of why they generated the artwork as displayed to us, we might judge whether that reason is in itself valuable enough to us to want to embrace the artist’s work. But another thing can happen: our consideration might instead be of whether we buy that there is a connection between the aesthetics of the presented form and the “reason” the artist gives for it.
We’re asked to bundle the idea pursued by the artist and the motivation for it together and shrink wrap that as the artist’s “Intent”: the important “what” with the important “why”. Then the intent conjures the work.
***
Walker’s SF MOMA installation – which furthers the museum’s role as a gallery – is a theater-scaled tableau of very stylized but differing characters, both female and male, all played by robots. Highly charged by portrayed distortions or apparent violence, many of their bodies appear to have emerged, ashen and zombie-like, from a bed of boulders that feels (for me, perhaps not for you) greatly like a coffin filled with coal.
Rendered entirely of black and white materials, the characters are mostly mannequins but one or two are more clearly “statue” sculpture. This difference is not in itself necessarily important, but statues don’t move. Most of the time, most of this work’s figures are not moving and in that stillness we are impressed more by how statuesque they are. We contemplate their body language and read into it what presumably is going to be the link between Walker’s intent and her effect. In the parlance of semioticians, the figures are “iconic”, relying on resemblances rather than earned symbolic associations.
However, in this work’s arena, one figure of uncertain gender, centrally positioned among the group, slowly rises and descends, ambiguously either impaled or attached, on a pole that either displays the body like a trophy slaying or complies with the figure’s desire to get a ride up to heaven. While most of the figures invoke a sense of the sluggish “undead”, this one is the most highly animated, its legs and arms flailing in slow motion. The effect is that we are in one moment seeing someone in agony, but in another moment someone in childish joyriding, and finally even potentially a sexual on-the-back surrender, whether consensual or not, to a more powerful but invisible presence. The wide range of interpretation invoked by this figure somewhat models the overall potential for drawing meaning from the installation.
Another of the figures, an iconic hostess of the tableau, stands separated from the rest and holds what seems for a while to be an unbroken gaze of inspection, magnetically holding order in place, the “right” places. It is tempting to read this figure as a stand-in for Walker herself, and that continues even when at last this overseer begins to move and eventually points to her own eyes. Then, that gesture acts as an invitation to consider what we ourselves are seeing or not seeing.
And in counterpoint, the most sculptural of the figures is a man who sits among the other figures but does not move and is facing away from the group, as if refusing to look at them. One can also sense from the man’s posture that the entire tableau is being imagined by him, the visualization of that dream being on display in the funereal ring of stones and cabinetry that takes up most of the space behind him. If we identify this posture as a psychological separation from the rest of what is going on, then it is not difficult to consider whether he is a proxy for ourselves or whether we are meant to have a more purely historical sympathy for his envisioning. Is he a tormented survivor, or perhaps he is the Devil?
***
The most obvious parallel to this overall presentation is Dance, and furthermore the notion of Dance Theater. In general, what “theater” adds to dance is an environment, a setting, that communicates a narrative context of the dancing, either explicitly or by implication. Having robotic mannequins moving in slow motion through a scripted choreography of gestures is the single best description of the dynamic logic of Walker’s presentation.
Not just by coincidence, I left the installation thinking about Kabuki. As cited in the online text Kabuki Dance Definition, History & Terms:
What is the origin of kabuki dance?
Kabuki dance originated in Kyoto, Japan, around 1600 in the early Edo period when Izumo no Okuni formed a dance troupe with all women. In 1629, due to connections with prostitution, the government banned women from performing kabuki. Adult men ultimately replaced women in kabuki dance and theater, and this remains the custom today.
That is, theater has a complex history that is artistic, political, and in other ways constrained culturally.
Likewise, I’m comfortable with the description generated by using Gemini AI to pinpoint Kabuki’s distinctive features, such as this one:
Emotional resonance through storytelling: Plots often centered on historical events or everyday life, pitting human emotions such as love and revenge against societal morals. This created powerful dramatic conflicts and tragedies that resonated with the audience. After a heavy, tragic story, a purely dance-based act might be performed to provide a lighthearted feeling.
One mission of much theater is to find ways to either disrupt or exploit those constraints to generate new forms of theater. The cultural layering of Walker’s piece includes the contrasting “period settings” of apparently the 1800’s or earlier (the “Past”) and current era automatons (the “Future”), with the understanding that the future might primarily reiterate. the past. This is an idea that descriptively fits Walker’s creation with no hint of irony or deception, regardless of her intent. But also, among various other implications, one is that the Past reduced Black humans to being virtual automatons in the period’s dominant culture, and by extension that implication raises the question of whether today’s culture still continues to do so likewise.
The hints of resurrection, abuse, and rigidly defined togetherness do not immediately correspond with the notion of immortality or timelessness, much less relief from effort, that Walker’s title for her work and the interpretation offered officially by SF MOMA’s show marketing. Walker names this bleak undated scene a “garden”, the evident recall of suffering “intelligence”, and the confrontation with it “respite”. There is no particular reason to read those cues as something other than irony.
But SF MOMA asks us to do otherwise: Walker’s Gardeners evoke wonder, reflection, respite, and hope…
I think this contradiction is a significant issue. As drawn from the dictionary publisher Oxford Languages, we have this definition of irony:
a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.
The problem this exposes at the Walker show is that while the “characters’” portrayals are pretty straightforward as meaningful content, we don’t have a reason to believe that the characters are unaware of their plight. What SF MOMA’s statement expects to do is to tell us, the audience, what meanings to be aware of, but with little to account for it.
Rather, it is already enough to take Walker’s own titling of the piece as being explicitly ironic and furthermore leaning towards sarcasm as the rhetoric of her instructive aesthetics. This in no way devalues the impact of the work; rather, it amplifies its status as being intentional critique – an actually timeless function of art.
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