The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Kara Walker · a temporary installation in the raw sugar warehouse of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, presented by Creative Time · a colossal sphinx of carved polystyrene blocks coated in white sugar, with the head, kerchief and features of the American mammy, and figures of boys set about the floor of the warehouse on the approach, some of them of dark sugar and molasses, which softened, cracked and in some cases fell in the heat during the run · open to the public from 10 May to 6 July 2014, about eight weeks, and destroyed at its close · the unit scored is the installation as made and as recorded, the sphinx, the boys, the darkened building and the title as one work: no part of it can be shown as it was, and what stands now is the record, the photographs, the video and the criticism
Mode
A site-specific temporary commission at the scale of public statuary: sugar sculpture made as a monument, in the industrial building of its subject, the audience made part of the material
Mythos
The sphinx, guardian and riddle, joined to the mammy of advertising; the mother and source exposed behind; the medieval subtlety, the banquet’s sugar sculpture, built at the scale of a temple
Phase
Open from 10 May to 6 July 2014; the boys softening, cracking and falling during the run, the sphinx white to the close; destroyed at the close, and now held in record
Presentation
A colossal sphinx of carved polystyrene coated in white sugar at the end of the raw sugar warehouse; small figures of boys with baskets or fruit on the approach; the darkened building; a title of forty-four words
Register
Uneasy grandeur turned at each step toward pity and dread; a hush before the figure, and laughter, posing and argument in the room
Scale
One white figure and her attendants, in one long shed, for eight weeks, on the eve of the plant’s demolition
Governing Proposition
At the end of the raw sugar warehouse of a refinery about to be pulled down, its walls and beams dark and sticky from decades of refining, Kara Walker set a colossal sphinx coated in white sugar, with the kerchief and features of the mammy of American advertising, and along the approach to her, small figures of boys, some of dark sugar and molasses, that softened, cracked and in some cases fell in the summer heat while she stayed white. The refined product endures and is displayed; the raw labour is used up and swept away. The work gives that law the scale of a temple and the form of the commodity itself, at the place where the commodity was made, in the weeks before the place was destroyed, and its public, posing and photographing, enacted the appetite its title names. It was built to be destroyed, and it survives as the record its viewers made.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Kara Walker, born in 1969, made the work for the raw sugar warehouse of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Creative Time presented it. It was open to the public from 10 May to 6 July 2014, about eight weeks. Its full title runs to forty-four words, and the title is part of the work: “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 title names everything the work holds: a form, the subtlety, the sugar sculpture of the medieval banquet; a figure, the sugar baby; a dedication, to the unpaid artisans; a route, from the cane field to the kitchen; and an occasion, the demolition of the plant in which the work stood. It states the work’s law in a sentence. What the visitor met was the building and what stood in it. The warehouse was long and dark, its walls and beams stained and sticky from decades of refining, lit from high windows, and it smelled of molasses.
The parts are few, and nearly every one is required. Without the site, the sphinx is a large sugar statue in a gallery, an allegory of slavery’s sweetness at a distance from any sugar house; here it is a homage paid on location, in the last link of the chain. Without the sugar, the white surface over a Black woman’s features is only white. Without the boys, there is no time in the work. Without the title, the subtlety is lost. What could change without loss is small: the exact props the boys carry, some detail of the posture.
Movement II
The approach was down the length of the hall. First came the boys, small figures set about the floor, carrying baskets or bunches of fruit, some of them made of dark sugar and molasses. Then, at the far end, the white figure: a sphinx at architectural scale, carved in blocks of polystyrene and coated in white sugar, lying with her forepaws before her and her head raised, glowing in the light from the high windows against the dark of the shed. Then the turn behind her, where her sex is exposed to whoever walks round.
The visitors’ accounts and the photographs agree on the scale and on a real hush before her. The grandeur is of an uneasy kind, and it is repeated: at the arrival, at the face, at the turn behind, at the fallen boys. The second register runs against the first at every step. The attendants are small, brown and decaying, and they turn awe toward pity and dread. Much of what the room recorded was also laughter, posing and argument, and that was by design, not only by failure.
The making bears the load. The figure’s proportions read true from the far end of the hall and from beneath her; her surface is even enough to glow; her face is modelled with restraint, so that the stereotype is stated and not caricatured. The boys were made to soften at the rate the run required. The fabrication was by others to Walker’s design, and the decisions are hers: few, and well judged. The modelling is broad, as the scale and the material demand, and the form of the sphinx is the stereotype’s given form.
Movement III
The sphinx is the guardian with a riddle, the monument that outlasts its makers. Walker gave her the kerchief and the features of the American mammy, the servant of advertising, so that the oldest monumental form of a sovereign is joined to the cheapest image of a servant. The riddle becomes the question that the sight of her puts to the visitor. Behind, the exposed sex makes her also the mother and the source, the fertility figure, and the body put to use. There is no one woman here. The figure is a type by intention, and the stereotype carries much of what the form builds.
The material carries the rest. A coating of white sugar over a carved core makes refinement a skin, laid over the features of a Black woman: the refined product, whitened from dark cane, made in the image of the labour that produced it. The boys, of molasses and dark sugar, the rawer product, softened, cracked and in some cases fell in the summer heat during the run, while the sphinx stayed white. Time and the climate performed the wasting of labour. In bronze the figure would be a monument, permanent and to that extent a celebration; in sugar, in the refinery, before the demolition, it dissolves.
Temporariness is form here, not loss. The work knew that it would not stand, and the knowledge is in its matter. What the form does not use is its core: the polystyrene beneath the sugar was a necessity of the scale, not part of what the work says. And much of what the work knows travelled at full strength in a photograph, which is why so many were taken.
Movement IV
What the work brings into the open can be stated. The sweetness of the Atlantic world was made by enslaved and coerced labour, and that labour was a body, chiefly a Black woman’s, made into a commodity and an image. The sphinx is the mammy of advertising and the refined white product in one figure. The refinery is the end of the chain from the cane field, and the work stood in it as the plant was about to give way to housing for the prosperous. The history itself was known and long argued; what the work uncovers is its weight more than its fact.
Its form disclosed something it set out to provoke and could not script. Visitors posed against the breasts and the vulva and photographed themselves doing it, and the appetite the title names was enacted in the room. Walker made a video, An Audience (2014), from footage of them. The work recorded its own consumption, and the questions it raised were argued at once: whether the audience completed the work or defaced it, and whether the artist intended both; whether a stereotype at the scale of a god is a critique or a restatement; what a homage paid on a developer’s site means; how an image of a Black woman’s body serves a crowd largely white.
One law governs the whole, and it is sugar’s: the refined product endures and is displayed, the raw labour is used up and swept away. The white figure and the brown boys sinking into the floor obey it. So do the building, a refinery about to become housing, the title, an homage to the unpaid paid on the occasion of the demolition, and the public, who consumed the image as the product was consumed. Nothing in the work contradicts it, and its range runs from the court banquet to the cane field to the real estate of 2014. Once grasped, the law is single, and the title states it.
Movement V
On 6 July 2014 the work closed, and the sphinx was broken up. The boys had softened and cracked through the run, and some had fallen. No part of the work can be shown as it was. What stands is the record: photographs from every angle, video, the criticism, and the artist’s own film of her viewers. The loss was built into the work, and losing the matter takes less from it than from a sculpture meant to stand. But the scale, the smell and the site do not survive in any record, and after twelve years the work is a form held in record only.
Its reach was wide and immediate, in attendance and in argument, and it became a reference point in the debate about monuments, and about whose bodies they show, that grew through the decade; Walker’s later commission for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern (2019) continues it. It enlarged what a temporary commission could carry. That it redirected the practice of other artists is not shown, and part of its fame belongs to the photographs its visitors took rather than to the sculpture. Its inheritance was Walker’s own, the silhouettes and cycloramas; its departure, from the wall to the colossal figure in the round and from black on white to white over black, was real, and the subject and the provocation were hers already.
Beside it on this desk stand The Weather Project, at 7.7, an installation also dismantled and known as record; The Dinner Party, at 8.0, an installation on history and the body; Monticello, at 8.0, a house built and kept by enslaved labour; and Beloved, at 8.9, the literary measure of the same history, which it does not reach. It stands at the foot of Tier IV, held from the summit by what time has not yet given it and by what its form gave away. The figure was white and the boys were brown; the boys fell first, and at the close the white figure was broken up as well.
Act III · The Twelve
The parts are few and the subtractive test bites hard on most of them. Take away the site and the sphinx is a large sugar statue in a gallery, an allegory at a distance: the warehouse, its molasses-stained walls and the demolition the title names make the piece a homage on location. Take away the sugar and the white surface over the features of a Black woman stops being refined sugar, the whitened product of dark cane. Take away the boys and there is no time in the work: they soften and fall while the sphinx stays white, and their collapse is labour spent. Take away the title and the medieval subtlety is lost. What yields is the exact props the boys carry, and some detail of the posture.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the work brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. The sweetness of the Atlantic world was made by enslaved and coerced labour, and that labour was a body, chiefly a Black woman’s, made into a commodity and an image: the sphinx is the mammy of advertising and the refined white product in one figure. The refinery is the last link of that chain, on the spot where it ended, about to give way to housing for the prosperous. And by its form the work disclosed what it provoked and could not script: visitors posed against the breasts and the vulva and photographed themselves, and the appetite of the title was enacted in the room. Held short of the top because the history was known and argued; the work uncovers its weight more than its fact.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The elevation is grandeur of an uneasy kind: a white figure at architectural scale in a long dark shed, lit from the high windows and approached the length of the hall, with the smell of molasses in the air and the floor tacky underfoot. The accounts of visitors and the photographs agree on the scale and on a real hush before it. Against it runs a second register, the attendants, small, brown and decaying, which turns awe toward pity and dread at each step. The height is repeated, not single: the arrival, the face, the turn behind her to the exposed sex, the fallen boys. What holds it lower is that much of the response recorded was laughter, posing and argument, by design and not only by failure, and that the work can no longer be stood before.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Archetype is built, not only evoked. The sphinx is the guardian with a riddle, the monument that outlasts its makers; here she is given the kerchief and features of the American mammy, so that the oldest monumental form of a sovereign is joined to the cheapest image of a servant, and the riddle becomes the question the sight of her puts to the visitor. Behind, the exposed sex makes her also the mother and the source, the fertility figure, and the body put to use. The subtlety of the title is a real form, the sugar sculpture of the court banquet, built at the scale of a temple. Held below the summit because the particular is a type by intention: there is no one woman here, and the stereotype carries much of the archetype.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is Walker’s own: some twenty years of cut-paper silhouettes in the manner of the nineteenth century and cycloramas of plantation violence, which made her reputation and its controversies. Behind that stand the public monument, the site-specific commission, Creative Time’s own tradition, and the use of food and sugar as sculptural matter by artists before her. The departure is real: from the wall to the colossal figure in the round, from black on white to white over black, from the gallery to an industrial ruin in the open city, at a scale she had not worked before. The stake was high and partly paid: a mass audience, the risk of offering the stereotype she had always attacked as a spectacle to be enjoyed, the certainty of misuse. But the subject and the provocation were hers already.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the work knows much less. In bronze it would be a monument, permanent and to that extent a celebration; in sugar, at the refinery, in the weeks before demolition, it is a commodity in the form of the person whose labour made it, standing where the commodity was made, and dissolving. A sugar coating over a carved core makes refinement a skin, which is the point. The boys of molasses and dark sugar, the rawer product, soften and fall in the summer heat, so that time and climate perform the wasting of labour. Temporariness is form here, not loss. Held below the top because much of what the work knows travelled at full strength in a photograph, and the polystyrene core, a necessity of scale, is making the knowledge does not use.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Twelve years, so the axis is forecast in part, and the work can be returned to only through its record. The questions it sustains are real. Did the audience’s behaviour complete the work or deface it, and did the artist intend both? Is a stereotype shown at the scale of a god a critique or a restatement? What is a homage paid on a developer’s site, in a building about to be pulled down? How does an image of a Black woman’s body serve a crowd largely white? These were argued at once and are argued still, in writing on race, spectatorship and public art. But the well so far is mostly the argument about the event, and return yields the photographs, which repeat what they showed.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The field is American public and installation art of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: a real enlargement of what a temporary commission could carry, a history of labour, race and sex given the scale of public statuary and set in the industrial site of its subject, with the audience made part of the material. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide and immediate in attendance and in argument, a reference point in the debate about monuments and whose bodies they show that grew through the decade; Walker’s later commission for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern (2019) continues it. That it redirected the practice of other artists is not shown, and part of its reach was carried by the controversy over the visitors’ photographs rather than by the sculpture. Force and reach both solid; neither epochal.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at twelve years. Form: the work cannot be shown. The sphinx was destroyed at the close by design; the boys softened during the run and some collapsed; the building was named for demolition in the title. What can be shown is the record, which is extensive: photographs from every angle, video, and the artist’s own film of her viewers. Because the loss was built into the work, losing the matter takes less than it would from a sculpture meant to stand; but an installation is weighed on what can still be shown, and the scale, the smell and the site cannot be. Presence: wide in 2014 and steady since, and fame is not proof. Fabric: none, by design. This is the lowest of the twelve: a form held in record only.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Read to the same standard as any medium, with the fabrication by others to Walker’s design credited to the work. The command is high where it bears load: a figure at architectural scale whose proportions read true from the far end of the hall and from beneath her; a white surface even enough to glow in the light of the shed; the face modelled with restraint, so that the stereotype is stated and not caricatured; the boys made to soften at the rate the run required. The placing in the long hall, with the attendants on the approach, is exact. Held below 8 because the modelling is broad, as scale and material demand, the sphinx’s form is the stereotype’s given form, and the artist’s choices are few and well judged.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the sphinx’s white, refined, monumental surface and the brown boys sinking into the floor. They obey one law, sugar’s: the refined product endures and is displayed, the raw labour is used up and swept away. The same law governs the building, a refinery about to give way to housing; the title, an homage to the unpaid, paid on the occasion of the plant’s demolition; and the audience, who consumed the image as the product was consumed. Nothing in the work contradicts it, and it covers a wide range, from the court banquet to the cane field to the real estate of 2014. Held below the upper band because the law, once grasped, is single and is stated by the title, and the range is held by concept as much as by sight.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held are many, and one figure in one place integrates them. Labour, enslaved and industrial, in the sugar and the refinery; the body and sex, in the figure and its exposure; childhood, in the boys; commerce and the Atlantic trade, in the commodity; history, from the medieval subtlety to the plantation to the closing plant; the city and its capital, in the demolition and what was to follow; the sacred and the monumental, in the sphinx; and the public, made part of the material. What holds the axis is the form: one figure and her attendants, with no narrative, and much held by implication through the title rather than in the sculpture. Wide for a single sculptural work, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.5, then The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 8.3, and The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2. A form that makes refinement a white skin over a dark figure and lets the raw sugar of the attendants waste in the heat, so that the temporariness is the knowledge; a disclosure of the commodity made in the image of the labour that produced it, enacted by its own public; one law, sugar’s, governing the figure, the boys, the building, the title and the crowd; parts nearly all required; and the sphinx and the mammy joined in one built figure.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable at 7.4: the sphinx destroyed at the close by design, the boys softened and some fallen during the run, the site named for demolition, and the work held now in record only, its scale, smell and place lost to every photograph. Next above it, The Encompassed at 7.6: many orders held in one figure, with no narrative and much carried by the title. Then The Bottomless Well at 7.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8: twelve years of real questions, returned to only through the record, and a wide reach in argument with no redirection of practice yet shown.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, The Swerve at 8.1, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 and The Imperishable at 7.4 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Imperishable, 7.4, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.0, an average of 8.00 that displays 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate and the Universal Minimum, and the aggregate, a whole point short of 9.0, would withhold it besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work’s record; the installation was not seen for this reading. The work is known well in its form, its site, its title, its dates, its principal materials and its reception, and thinly in its figures, its fabrication and its exact counts; where a judgment turns on presence in the hall it is held more loosely. The work scored is A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, by Kara Walker (born 1969), presented by Creative Time in the raw sugar warehouse of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, open from 10 May to 6 July 2014, as made and as recorded: one work with its parts, the sphinx of carved polystyrene coated in white sugar, the figures of boys on the approach, the darkened building, and the title. The sphinx was broken up at the close, and the boys softened during the run and some collapsed; no part of the work can be shown as it was, and what stands now is the record, the photographs, the video and the criticism. The loss is weighed on survival in proportion to what it takes, and on no other axis. Walker’s video An Audience (2014), the photographic record made by Creative Time, the press and the visitors, and the later fate of the building and the site are context: they bear on survival as record and on reach, and are not scored as the work. No words are quoted but the title. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the sphinx, the tonnage of the sugar, the number, size and exact materials of the boys, the gesture of the sphinx’s left hand, the attendance, which fragments and figures the artist kept and where they were later shown, and the present state of the warehouse.