Alison Saar: STILL

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is covered in coal dust, naked, and swinging on ropes made sticky with smears of tar. The swing
hangs from a tree root jarringly reminiscent of the lynching of African Americans and the weighing
of slaves sold at market by the pound.
In Undone, a black female figure levitates overhead, sitting on a chair hung from the wall. A
translucent white gown, clutched in her hands, cascades about 16 feet to the ground, the edge
stained red as though soiled by blood from an umbilicus-like cord dangling down between her
legs. Made from tree branches, the cord has an arterial, unfinished, and almost abortive feel. The
mature woman in Undone is ghost-like, suggesting funerary shrouds and death, which in many
cultures represent not the end of life but rebirth into the realm of ancestral spirits that guide
humans through difficult and challenging times.
Like the murky residue left inside old glass bottles tied to the umbilical cord, this sculpture relates
to the fermentation not of potent liquors but of new ideas, “some unformed, others not followed
through.” This woman, though undone, is an extension of Saar herself, gravitating toward a
transformational moment when the old begins to fade and the new comes to fruition.
Saar finds herself, as a mature artist and mother of young adults, in a metamorphic state, still
undefined but “approaching completion.” She beautifully captures this notion in Rouse, a life-sized
sculpture of a light-skinned woman, attached like an embryo to a massive nest of antlers growing
from the head of a sturdy graphite-colored figure. The reclining and hollow figure is molded from
rice paper and glue, thus reinforcing her fragile nature. Despite her visceral and incomplete form,
like Saar, she is coming out of a state of hibernation, arousing from “the incubation of ideas to a
new self, the pupa stage of insects, or the shedding of old skin and the formation of the new.” Saar
explains that Rouse is about her daughter Maddy leaving for college and the fragile nature of her
emergence into the adult world.
In stark contrast to the fetal figure, the standing figure—representing Saar’s own primal animal-self,
the fierce mother trying to protect her offspring—is made from a patchwork of unrefined
blocks of carved wood. Her spent antlers litter the ground as symbols of protection, maturity, and
the passage of time. Not yet derelict, she is nonetheless beginning to show “the fissures of a body in
decline… preparing for and holding it together long enough for the next one to take over… to come
to term.” Speaking from a stream of consciousness, Saar expounds that Rouse, like the other works
un·done:
not done; accomplished or completed; unfinished; unfastened; untied; brought to destruction;
ruin or disaster; destroyed; erased or effaced…
Saar’s “still,” Black Lightning, is comprised of a pair of boxing gloves hanging from the wall and
a mop and bucket. Red fluid pumps from the bucket through copper tubing into the clear glass
boxing gloves, which when filled with the red liquid begins to trickle out of holes in the wrists.
Saar created this sculpture as a critique of the inequitable and stereotypical labor options
attributed or open to black men. While the visual reference to boxing as suicide becomes
particularly poignant in a contemporary context in relation to the high rate of violent death
among African American male youths today, this sculpture also points to “the still prevalent view
that if you’re an African American male you can either be a super star, like Michael Jackson,
or a janitor. You can’t be President. Even though we have a black president, people don’t believe
it, still!”
Saar’s personal struggle with her own mixed heritage makes her especially aware of the racial
politics associated with President Obama’s bi-racial identity. She is particularly troubled that
both the European American and African American communities deny him kinship. “Whites say,
no, he’s not white. Blacks say, no, he’s not black enough.…All of this stuff is now coming to the
surface [because] racism is still deeply, deeply ingrained in American society.” Black Lightning thus
subtly expresses the artist’s rage over the persistent and blatant expressions of racism in American
politics and public commentary, which seem to be reverting to a time when racial slurs were an
acceptable norm. “That’s what got my blood boiling. It’s got me simmerin’, so to speak.” As a
nation, we remain still… continuing now or in the future as in the past.
Saar carefully selects found objects imbued with the marks of their former lives and histories and
often incorporates them into her work. For example, Weight features a young black girl on a swing
dangling from a cotton scale. She is counterbalanced by a coalscuttle, its contents spilling out toward
the ground: an iron ladle, horseshoe, sickle, lock and key, shackle, pair of scissors, potato masher,
shovel, hot comb for the hair, rope, boxing gloves, skillets, flat irons, and chains. “I started thinking
of it as a kind of cornucopia,” Saar explains, “about [the girl’s] opportunities, and what
her value is… as a slave or as a domestic. She can be a hairdresser. She can work in the field. She can
be a seamstress, a cook…. but,” Saar pauses to point to the tattered pair of boxing gloves, “she has
to fight her way out.”
Theoretically, a cornucopia symbolizes wealth, harvest, and good fortune. But Saar’s version relates
to cotton wealth, made possible by the exploitation and dehumanization of slaves. And although
the image of a young black girl on a swing commonly alludes to youth, innocence, and hope, this
child is precariously balanced by a “cornucopia of troubles and turmoil.” The removal of a single
object from the coalscuttle will send her crashing to the ground. More importantly, the young girl
weight:
measure of heaviness; object used to exert a force; standard of comparison; object used to hold
something else down; counterbalance; heavy object; corpulence; oppressiveness; burden of responsibilities;
preponderance; importance…
rouse:
awaken from unconsciousness; activate; energize; stimulate; incite; instigate;
provoke someone’s anger or action; hunt; force; or drive out; displace or chase away; turn back...