The Stickiness of Instagram: Digital Labor and Postslavery Legacies in Kara Walker's "A Subtlety"

Abstract

The Stickiness of InstagramDigital Labor and Postslavery Legacies in Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" Sarah Brophy (bio) From May 10 to July 6, 2014, the African American artist Kara Walker's "A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby" existed as a temporary, site-specific installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York (Figure 1). A maximalist sculpture of polystyrene foam coated in thirty tons of bleached white sugar donated by the Domino Sugar Corporation, standing thirty-five feet tall, stretching seventy-five long, and featuring a face resembling the artist's own, Walker's sphinx-shaped nude was sexualized in ways that evoked "Hottentot," "Jezebel," and "mammy" stereotypes. It symbolized the slave system and the sugar industry's massive appropriation and mystification of black women's labor, including but not limited to sexual, domes-tic, and caring labor. While Walker's sugar sphinx has been extensively photographed and written about, equally significant were the fifteen five-foot tall figures of laboring boys—some made of molasses and resin, others of hard candy—who surrounded her, carrying baskets and field produce. In another ugly image of exploited labor, their decomposition in the heat led Walker to heap up the broken bits of their bodies in the baskets of the few boys who continued to stand (Figure 2). "A Subtlety" thus offered a dazzling iconography of the ongoing legacies of the slavery economy and the continuing effacement—the white-washing—of its brutality. This article explores and assesses the pivotal roles of self-inscription, mediation, and audience participation for Walker's project. I focus on the popularity and impact of the hashtag #karawalkerdomino, which saw six thousand user-generated images posted on social media platforms (primarily on Instagram but also on Twitter and Facebook) during the first two days of the exhibition (Ovation Staff)—a number that [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Installation View of "A Subtlety." Copyright Andrew Burton/Getty Images. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Installation View of "A Subtlety." Copyright Andrew Burton/Getty Images. [End Page 2] eventually rose to more than twenty-five thousand posts (Creative Time). "A Subtlety" directly solicited the making and sharing of vernacular digital photographic images by visitors, a strategy informed by twenty-first-century social media outreach trends in the museum sector (Kaufman) and by relational aesthetics, that participatory, audience-oriented mobilization of the avant-garde that has been a mainstay of art world institutions since the mid-1990s (Balzer 66–67). Through physical signs instructing visitors "not to touch the artwork" but instead to upload images on social media, #karawalkerdomino was built into the exhibition from the outset. Anticipated to be equipped with smart devices, visitors were invited, as the website reiterates, to "help build the Digital Sugar Baby, an interactive 3D version of Kara Walker's marvelous artwork! … This living tribute to Kara's work will evolve over the course of the exhibition. Visit this site each week to see its progress" (Creative Time). The implied premise was that no single shot could encompass an installation built on such an enormous scale, and so visitors' image-making would produce a composite whole from myriad points of view. The result was not only a digital version of the installation but also a successful promotional gambit directing traffic to the website and associated media accounts. The curated online exhibition of "A Subtlety" hosted on the website of the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time, produced by the digital entrepreneurs of its subcontractor Makeable, drew together 17,315 of the Instagram contributions, together with 1,788 from Twitter and 83 from Facebook (Creative Time). Highlighting what Walker has sardonically termed the exhibition's "ridiculously romantic angles" (qtd in Sutton), the selections that constitute the official 3D curated exhibition of "A Subtlety" emphasize the sublimity of the sphinx figure and a largely reverential attitude on the part of the audience. Produced through technological, cultural, and cognitive "filtering" processes that conspicuously "remov[e] unwanted content or impurities" (Walker Rettberg 22), this version of the exhibition's online archive is accompanied by a more disturbing obverse, for the exhibition's main claim to fame...