"Black and White, but Never Simple"

“Slavery! Slavery!” (1997) is among the more than 200 paintings, drawings, collages, puppetry, videos and light projections by Kara Walker at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

....Ms. Walker first came to art world attention in 1994, when she was 24, with a mural she produced at the Drawing Center in SoHo. It was a narrative panorama with a long, goofy, old-timey title: “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart.” And it was made in an unusual way, from black-paper silhouette figures cut by hand and affixed to the gallery wall.

With its mock-antique form and Old South flavor, the piece had the airy, Valentine’s Day prettiness of a romantic ballet. But this was no love story. It was a danse infernal of sex, slavery and chitlin-circuit comedy. Moms Mabley and the Marquis de Sade were the choreographers. Margaret Mitchell did sets. Flannery O’Connor cued the lights.

“Gone” was an instant hit. And placed at the beginning of the survey, “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” it still packs a punch at the Whitney. The scene is set, with the sparest of linear means, on the banks of a bayou with a full black moon overhead. Under a swag of Spanish moss, a Southern belle leans toward her courtly suitor for a kiss. But something’s wrong: an extra pair of legs, thin and bare, emerges from beneath her crinoline. To whom do they belong? And what can their owner be up to under there?

So much for romance. Nearby a child strangles a duck and offers it to a woman whose body doubles as a boat. A second woman lifts a leg and two infants drop to the ground as if she’s defecating babies. Seen in profile, she has caricatured Negroid features, as does a man who floats in the sky above her, buoyed by balloonlike genitals. In the center of the picture, a prepubescent black girl fellates a white boy, possibly a slave-master’s son. Nearby the master is caught in a slapstick coupling with a black woman who spits out her corncob pipe in surprise.

We stay in this freakish world, or its environs, throughout the exhibition, which includes, along with other, larger, more elaborate panoramas, dozens of drawings, collages, prints, text pieces and shadow-puppet film animations. The consistency of the imagery — hapless masters, uppity slaves, tragicomic violence, uncensored sex — is one reason the show feels so concentrated and absorbing. Once you’re in it, you’re really in it. You can’t just stroll through....

At the Whitney drawings form interludes between more structured work, like the cut-paper installations and projected film animations, one of which, “8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker” (2005), is a highlight of the show.

Like the 19th-century moving panorama paintings on which it is modeled, this film is epic in theme and clearly handmade, with silhouette puppets manipulated by sticks, strings and fingers. It opens with a ship in a stormy sea and bound slaves being pitched overboard. They float to an island called Motherland, which turns into a giant mouth. It swallows and excretes them into the American South, where they are put to work as slaves in cotton fields.

There, in a typically hard-to-interpret scene, one black male slave is impregnated by his white male master after they share a tender embrace, and has a child. In an ordinary film the birth might signal hope, change, a brighter future. Not here. Instead we get lynched slaves hanging from a tree and the recorded voice of Ms. Walker’s young daughter saying, “I wish I was white.”

So, no answers. History remains this weird, tragic vaudeville show, a free-for-all shootout with everyone gunning for every one else. Some people will object to this as too open-ended a view: art should give answers, yes or no, bring closure. Others will find Ms. Walker’s work too narrow: same themes, same images tweaked from piece to piece, show to show.

For me these are not problems. In refusing conclusions, Ms. Walker draws an important one: The source and blame for racism lies with everyone, including herself. ...

“Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” runs through Feb. 3 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.