Puppets are better than humans for plenty of reasons, but here's one: because of what they can get away with.

In Kara Walker's 2004 video Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (a still from it above; it's in The Puppet Show at the Frye this spring), the fat-lipped (read: black) girl with the broomstick is about to use that broomstick, Abner Louima-style, on that white slave.

In Testimony, the historical world of slavery has been flipped: "The whites, longing for fulfillment, sold their bodies to us," a text card reads at the start of the 16-mm puppet play, which features silhouettes being manipulated at times by the visible hand of the artist.

At the end of the video, the slave is hung, the girl sucks his dead erection, and then the camera zooms in on an image of her face, being splashed over and over again. Quite the money shot.

Walker has been widely criticized for being shameless. That seems somewhat the point. I've never been convinced that her world is so much different than ours. In it, nobody's innocent, ever. The 1960s dreams of colorblindness have been replaced by nightmares from which he haven't awakened, even though we like to pretend we have. She makes a bitter pill, and then she makes you want to swallow it. The transaction is always perverse.

If this is your introduction to Walker's work, or even if your opinion of it is just not all that set in stone, there's a great quiz about the controversy surrounding it here.

^{Pictured: a poster she made for a show at the Henry in 1997 ("Works of Certain Interest Created Entirely By A Young Negress of Unuual Abilities, Silhouettes Cut From Black Paper").}