The Brooklyn Rail

Before delving into the social issues that Christian Walker wrestled with in his relatively short but vibrant career (spanning the mid 1970s through the mid 1990s) his quieter formal achievements should be considered. The formal and social buttress each other in his work, but it is Walker’s symbolic cropping; his use of gestural and painterly interventions as in his “Miscegenation” series (1985–1988) or “Performance Counts” series (1987-88), or textual overlays and sidebars, as in Junkies Don’t Care About Bleach (1989) or the “Mule Tales” series (1990–95) that represent a truly impressive contribution to the discipline of photography. In “The Theater Project” (1983–84) Walker nimbly positions rarefied patches of light floating within a thick blanket of encompassing velvety darkness—abstract blurs which constitute the murky presences of patrons going about their business in the Pilgrim Theater, a “porno palace” in Boston’s Combat Zone neighborhood. Walker’s technical choices are capable of weaving a fictional or magical testimony into that which has been chemically imprinted. The control of a blurry outline of a ghostly presence—or bleaching out the silhouettes of two figures commingling or masturbating in the Pilgrim Theater’s bathroom stalls, so that they achieve a blinding and luminous presence—is so deft and controlled that it speaks to a masterful agency and intentionality in this most mimetic of art forms.

In the “Evidence of things Not Seen” series (1990), images are severed, clipped, and their figural inhabitants reconstituted into a new and methodical rhythm that has the analog quality of celluloid tangled in the projector, showing us the stopped frames of life—in this case moments of racial tension and disparity. Walker’s more painterly approaches materialize in the “Miscegenation” series—quite arch and theatrical, a collection of elbows, chins, hands and tongues of two men of different races—the differences in their skin highlighted by pigment rubbed into the print and the addition of varnish. These play at a sort of aestheticized pornography, specifically created to contradict the objectification of Black men in Mapplethorpe’s Black Males (1980) and Black Book (1986) and like Mapplethorpe’s photography they are perhaps too finished. In the “Performance Counts" series, the surface of the photographic prints are brushed with oil and ink, creating a maelstrom of fine lines uneasily sitting on the glossy surface. Walker uses this technique to isolate the figures and reduce visual background noise. In an image centered around a billboard with the words “Vantage. Performance Counts.,” a tall white woman matches gazes with a smaller Black man. In the black and white print they stand out in the original graytone of the photo while the rest of the image is discolored by the artist. It calls out her nice dress and his shopping backs, and like an Assyrian frieze where more important figures are bigger, we can immediately read the racial and class divide.

At the center of the gallery a monitor plays a lecture by Walker, part of the exhibition Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest (recorded Jan 27, 1991). His voice is casual, almost like a spirit emerging from the grainy images of forbidden places and forgotten people he presents in his talk. Walker narrates his process through various series, laughingly mentioning the criticism various projects received, buoyed by his disarming cheerfulness, and willingness to acknowledge that often the critics had a point. The subjects Walker tackles in The Profane and the Poignant are myriad, and his deep understanding of the medium and his ability to manipulate it for both the aesthetic and sociological are clear and direct, but he has a very gentle touch. The exhibition begins with his series of portraits taken at a home for special needs individuals “Untitled (group home)” (1979–83), and the images are consciously a celebration and interpretation of Arbus’s work on the same subject and ends with his “Vivisections” series (1993). “Vivisections” seems to refer to the artist’s own act of unpacking, or even more brutally wrenching out the components of his own life/practice and questioning them with text intrusions. He pulls from all the above mentioned series, negotiating his own sexuality, race, and addictions, as well as softer matters of love, yearning, and affection. In the late nineties, Walker moved into a self-imposed exile in Seattle, far away from friends and family, and died in a halfway house there in 2003: it is thought that much of his work was lost when he died. The fact that this show, curated by Jackson Davidow and Noam Parness, is able to showcase the amazing breadth and depth of his work is nothing short of miraculous.