Kara Walker’s full-blown mid-career retrospective, “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Organized by Philippe Vergne, deputy director and chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where the show premiered, it has also been seen at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. After its stint at the Whitney, the exhibition will travel on to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. There have been numerous New York exhibits of the artist’s work, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2006 show “Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge,” in which Ms. Walker responded to Hurricane Katrina. But “My Complement” — comprising films, wall projections, works of text, dozens of drawings, and room-size installations of the artist’s signature cut-black-paper silhouettes — is the first full-scale survey of the artist.

The Whitney’s major offering this fall, “My Complement” is a show that you will no doubt hear a lot about. Even before the exhibit opened in New York, the media was abuzz: A profile of Ms. Walker, who was born in 1969 in Stockton, California, appeared last week in the New Yorker, and “My Complement” is the cover story in this month’s Art in America. Her career is meteoric: Ms. Walker first exhibited her cut-black-paper silhouettes, depicting antebellum slavery, in New York at the Drawing Center in 1994. In 1997, at 28, she received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. In 2002, she became a professor at Columbia University, and she was the U.S. representative at Brazil’s 25th International Sāo Paulo Biennial. She received the Deutsche Bank Prize in 2004, and the Larry Aldrich Award in 2005. She has been favorably compared in the press to Daumier, Matisse, William Blake, Goya, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. According to her dealer, Brent Sikkema, the sales of her work are largely responsible for the success of his swank Chelsea gallery. In other words, Ms. Walker is possibly America’s hottest living artist.

Yet “My Complement,” and Ms. Walker’s career, demonstrates what can happen when an artist’s work is lauded for all the wrong reasons — for its subject matter and its slick delivery instead of for the quality of its form. The show reminds us just how far away we have moved from demanding that an artist not merely have something to say but also that she has the visual vocabulary with which to say it.

Ms. Walker has said that her father, who is a painter, talked to her about “push and pull in the use of graphite and the eraser,” which she referenced as “superficial things.” She has also said that she occasionally feels like “somebody’s pet project.” Indeed, she is: Ms. Walker’s art is the poster child for the continuing story of this country’s racial inequalities and transgressions. It is the go-to art whenever a curator wants to mount work that deals blatantly with identity politics and the hot-button issues of sex, racial inequality, oppression, black feminism, or slavery. Ms. Walker’s art forces us to look hard at ourselves — our past and our present — or so the story goes.

Ms. Walker’s work is graphic — in its black-silhouette-on-whitewall punch and in its sexually explicit and explicitly race-conscious black-and-white subject matter. She has appropriated the 18th-century medium of cutblack-paper silhouettes, and blown them up to mural scale narratives. She employs shock — strong language and caricaturist stereotypes of blacks and whites in acts of fellatio, sodomy, rape, bestiality, and child molestation, as well as those of lynching, mutilation, vomiting, and defecation — to get her messages across. Certainly, her work has a lot to say. Unfortunately, it lacks eloquence and depth. And because of this, her art often feels less like an exploration and more like exploitation — of both its subject and its viewers. When charged subjects remain too close to their source, when they are not transformed, and when they are reduced to platitudes and caricature, images merely push our buttons.

To understand what is lacking in Ms. Walker’s work, it is important to take it for what it is and for what it isn’t. Her narrative tableaus, which generally are big and black and bold room-size installations about the travesties of the antebellum South, are not without merit. Her overblown cartoon images of slaves, plantations, and plantation owners — engaging in fieldwork, sex, maiming, and murder — slap you in the face; and they are not without a lilting, sarcastic humor.

And her cutouts, especially when she creates feathery tentacles of smoke, grass, limbs, tatters, hair, fingers, bristles, and prongs, have Dr. Seussian flair: The forms trail at their edges with a fiery, wind-whipped flutter. Her wall collages, however, do not add up: Her narratives fragment. Images float like islands, and, without rhythm and musicality, they do not interrelate. The individual forms are sometimes difficult to make out, and their flickering edges do not speak to one another. Also, the cutouts, with few exceptions, are dead at their centers. Leaden between their contours, they have no buoyancy or tension in the plane. They never become volumetric and alive. The 800-pound gorilla in this show is that Ms. Walker, who believes drawing issues are “superficial,” cannot draw.

To understand what I am missing in Ms. Walker’s work, one only needs to look at the cutouts of Matisse, in which forms, because of the precision of their contours, simultaneously fall downward, as well as inward; soar upward, as well as outward; and penetrate, activate, and give volume to the plane. A single Matisse cutout may suggest plant, figure, vase, fish, bird, and star. It will twist in the ground plane, shifting that plane into air, liquid, and solid. It will open into blackness with the infinite depth of a night sky; and it will push forward, blossoming like a flower in full sun.

Ms. Walker’s cutouts possess little of this formal and metaphoric power, but her films incorporate movement, music, a layering of imagery, and linear narrative. Here, her cutouts — attached like puppets to sticks and strings that also resemble tools of torture and restraint — are pushed through the frame and are animated. They have the power to move us stepby-step through her stories, which sometimes are driven metaphorically. At one point in the film “8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker” (2005), an island rises, transforms into a head, and swallows slaves who have been tossed overboard.

But throughout “My Complement,” Ms. Walker’s graphic art betrays the figure-ground relationship — the graphic punch — that could be its strongest ally. At one point in the show, in the cut black-paper on white canvas “You Do” (1993–94), in which two female figures stand back-to-back, the Rorschach image has an emblematic kick, and the negative white space between their backs pushes forward to the plane, locking the women together with the power of a logo. But it feels accidental. Generally, the contours of Ms. Walker’s forms are merely descriptive, rather than interactive and inventive. The forms lack the “push and pull” necessary to give flatness depth and elasticity — the essential tension and movement that convince us that they are self-sufficient and alive.

A lot has been said about the metaphor of Ms. Walker’s “shadow” art — that its blackness stands for so many things, including likeness, race, emptiness, voids, stains, and the inescapable, black-and-white truth of her art’s subject matter. Yet for a metaphor to work, it must, through comparison and conflation, be controlled to create a new living thing: This is where Ms. Walker’s house of cards tumbles down. Her cutouts, without volume, weight, and formal intention, never become palpable. Because of this, they remain distant and intangible, leaving her exaggerations strident and her narratives adrift. Voids remain voids. Emptiness is empty. Black and white, never fully integrated in her work, are forces working against each other.

Until February 3 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).