I once accompanied a medical student down into the musty bowls of Cornell Medical School's basement to see the anatomy lab. Why? I thought it was time to make myself confront death. I'd cast my eyes over a roomful of cadavers in various states of dismemberment, and ‘get over it.'  Did my brave little plan work? Hardly. It was a horrific nightmare, one I will never forget, anonymous torsos cut from their heads and legs perched in pans of goo. (I won't talk about the meat slicer that makes hair-thin slices of brain tissue). To this day I can't eat cooked turkey meat since that's what embalmed, dead flesh looks like.

Since that day in the anatomy lab, years ago, I hadn't been quite so horrified as when standing before the highly disturbing imagery of artist Kara Walker's retrospective, newly installed at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, called "My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love". I felt the same sense of dread and nausea, mingled with an exhilarative anger, knowing this imagery would remain with me unshakeable like a sticky nightmare. 

Ms. Walker's imagery is super-charged from the get-go; her subject is that irreparable stain on early American history: slavery. She borrows her style from that prissy craft art of bygone days, flat black silhouettes of cameo portraiture. The imagery is waxed to walls, or, animated in mortifying shadow-puppet film-plays. She uses as her ‘actors' wince-inducing plantation slaves rendered in stereotypical caricature with fat lips, extended bellies, and pokey little braids. These unfortunates are shown violated sexually by their slave owners, thick-hipped wig-wearing white guys. No appendage is left unsucked, no orifice left inviolate.

And here, I issue a warning. If you are a Girl Scout, aesthetically delicate, or a well-meaning liberal with a crippling dose of white man's guilt, this show will send you into a well of remorse for ‘what my people have done.' But it's not just the Delicates and the guilty-whites who have these belly-deep reactions. Reading through vitriolic comments on Walker's work, I found that she inspires extreme reactions across the races - from anger to betrayal - for how her figures, cartoons and anonymous, are torn from context. Her nameless figures are rendered mute, compliant, and stripped of all humanity.

Let's get specific. With somber-faced, guilt-ridden others, I found myself half-watching (it's hard to look straight on at this work) an 11-minute shadow-puppet play entitled "...calling to me from angry surface some grey and threatening sea, I was transported." It is set to music of screechy country violins and, I guess, a bow saw. Here, a slave owner saws the leg off a slave boy - for skirt-chasing a white girl. The boy hobbles around for a bit, then kills everyone with his pokey crutch, his mother included, but not before the boy's mother sucks on the toe of his dismembered foot. The boy lies on the dead mother prone like a lover and sucks on her dead teat.

The imagery, though provocative, is not quite like porn. Being set in the context of a serious museum space renders it otherwise, and because the sex is far from frivolous. There is some serious business going on here: bodies used to debase, subjugate, and as vehicles for dominance and submission.

But hold on right there. Her work is fictive. These are made-up scenarios based on bits of historical fact - but using imagery borrowed from the history of black representation in art and literature. This means her images come pre-loaded. Hence the complicated emotions her work foments. 

I was most struck by this use of ‘kinda-fact' narrative in viewing her rendition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. A white girl in Stowe's story has sympathy for the slave's plight; in Walker's version the petticoated girl is an axe-wielding psychopath. And that's ok. It's art! She can do whatever the f she wants. But no man, woman, child, or little bitty baby is off the hook in Walker's world. No one escapes oppression, degradation, dehumanization. And this is something that the viewers should bear in mind so as not to run off and join Mr. Farrakhan's bean pie brigade, half-jacked.

So is this the end game of her work? To inspire aversion and anger? That her work does raise these extremes of emotion is remarkable in itself, but what is the work trying to accomplish? Maybe that's not the right question.

If you can get past the surface provocations, past the depictions of child sodomy, rape, suicide, thighbones shoved into asses, sucked nipples, arrows shot into vaginas, et al, this work is not, in its entirety, a social statement about racism. Ultimately, it is a complex vehicle for the expression of Ms. Walker's deep-seated personal concerns and issues. She admits to deep anger and self-loathing, apparently so intense to have fueled a life's work played out through nightmare-scenarios made ironical in cartoon-style form. But there is no comedy here.

This brings me the core of the work's powerful engine, it's mythical basis: the legend of Titan god Cronus, who, fueled by jealousy and anger, castrated his father king Uranus with a sickle – and tossed the offending member to sea. Raging Cronus would go on devour his own children.

At base, Ms. Walker's art is about this - the act of devouring. One of her images depicts a white man up to his shoulders inside the vagina of a black slave; in another a black woman's jaw is unhinged, as can a pelican's, devouring a white man. But who's devouring whom? That can't be determined and that's the point. It's the act of devouring that is an endless cycle in the bloody earth-cycle of asserting power through bodily ingestion, ownership and possession. Here, Francisco Goya shows similar proclivities in his Saturn Devouring his Son, 1823.

Leaving, I was relieved to find the sun still up in the sky, sending down warm and beneficent love. I sorted through the after-dross. I felt not robbed of my chi, which is the work of the energy-vulture, but occupied, consumed, devoured. Scarily, Ms. Walker had had me for lunch. Also roused was a swirly anger aimed at myself, that I, muffled white person, could probably never know the exhilarative expression of anger/an issue on such a grand scale, so effectively, and have it heralded in a serious arena where serious art is shown and serious people walk around with seriously-knitted brows taking it all very seriously. At least there was for me, escape. What of the mental health of the bleary-eyed museum guards left behind, standing all day in the dark and complicated grip of Walker's soul-gouging work and those screechy violins? I hoped they had good health insurance, a plan that covers psychological services - at least ten visits.

Now for the antidote. Some of you, after visiting this show, will act. Some will recoil. Some will send money to Mr. Obama to help realign the balance of power. Others will curl up in a corner in aesthetical shock and/or gripped in guilt. Others, like me, will steep in a bit of American silliness, heading for big boy Will Farrell in his Semi-Pro. The film, set in the 70s, the last decade in which many of us knew peace and happiness, is about, in the end, peace and love. At one point, on the bus to a game, Farrell's character Coach Jackie Moon turns to his bi-racial basketball team who hurl nasty insults at one another. He yells, "C'mon you guys," pointing to the team motto on a sign up front, "E.L.E. - Everybody Love Everybody". Yeah. Corny. Dumb. Good. Phew.

"Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love." At the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., 310.443.3000. March 2-June 8.

ROBYN EWING is LA2DAY'S Reporter of Aesthetics-at-Large

rae@la2day.com