Entry #6: Wangechi Mutu Artist Talk, 4/12/2011

Wangechi Mutu in Vogue

On Tuesday evening at 6:00, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) presented a talk by Wangechi Mutu as part of its Visiting Artists Program. Mutu is the last visitor of the program's spring series, so it was up to her to leave the audience with enough artistic satisfaction to last through the summer. I arrived ten minutes early and the auditorium was already nearly filled, save for a few individual seats sprinkled around the room. I slid into the second row and waited. 

As more students and guests drifted into the auditorium, searching for empty spaces, a video played onstage. It was a woman alone in a field, aimlessly whacking a log that would not crack or break. What was she hitting it with? Why did she keep going with such a pointless task? The sun was going down behind her, and it was difficult to make out any features beyond her silhouette.

Finally, around 6:15, a woman emerged to introduce the artist. She described Mutu's work as "grotesquely delicious," and categorized her as part of a "feminist tradition [of artists] using collage to out" things like objectification and sexism. Mutu's materials "come from the trappings of our world," but she uses them to "redirect the focus" and call our realities into question. I was immediately reminded of Barbara Kruger, who takes very simple black and white collage (often images from advertisements) and superimposes forceful, provocative, bold-type words. Mutu's work turns out to be much more technically varied than Kruger's; she works in 2D and 3D with multiple mediums and, usually, much smaller magazine scraps.

When the introduction was over, Wangechi sauntered up to the big wooden podium, deeply but unassumingly cool. She was wearing high-waisted red plaid pants, heels, and a black top. Her afro was just tame enough to look purposeful. She is thirty-nine but doesn't look it; she still has a soft sparkle in her eye, especially evident when she would laugh a little about the things she was saying. She began speaking in a dark honey voice--quiet but assured, serious but not taking herself too seriously. 

The talk started with history. Mutu is from Nairobi, Kenya, and this heritage has strongly influenced her art. At 17, she moved to Wales to attend an international school, and she currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Still, however, she misses Kenya, and that nostalgia appears in her presentation as well as in her art. 

She showed a slide of a map of the British Empire in the early twentieth century, explaining that Kenya "is an invention of the British Empire," so we should look at both the possessor and the possessed. Next, she presented a picture of two African youth victims of Gangrene, a photo "symbolic of violence in the Congo." Each of the children was missing a hand, and Mutu saw this as a representation of her own "obsession with breaking things down in order to understand them." Her process of breaking down is often violent, morbid, or unsettling in some way.

Mutu explained that she uses collage because it is accessible. When she first started living in the city, she could work in collage on her kitchen table. Mutu liked working without having "a critical apparatus" around her; it freed her. (I assume that these days she couldn't claim to be floating in the same happy freedom.) She collects magazines and "rewrites their stories," leaving parts of them out and making other parts more feminine or womanly. To start working, she cuts magazines "voraciously" for weeks at a time, rushing through them while she listens to the radio or NPR. The way she described it sounded automatic, almost trance-like. She removes specific shapes and categorizes them into piles that she will later use. "I decided," she explained, " that [the models] had all lost something in the process of posing." The Gangrene image comes back to mind and we are reminded again of her fascination with breaking down and cutting off parts. Mutu's work, then, emphasizes the fact that we see what advertisers and manufacturers want us to see, not necessarily what is. Parts get left out.

Race seemed to be saddening to Mutu, but also extremely fascinating. She was not "racialized" until she came to the United States; she thought of herself in terms of her nationality, not her skin color. She spoke very powerfully about "the fiction of race," about her thoughts about bodies without skin, about how "if you flayed us all," we would be the same underneath this trivial exterior of epidermis. She created an Alien Series to explore science fiction and aliens--people who look sort of like us, but with slightly different features to frighten us. 

 

In the Alien Series, Mutu wanted to capture the "exotic" allure  of sparkly

 black skin and couple it with very white teeth or other "white" features. 

She also created a photo series mimicking and making fun of so-called "ethnic photography" and what people think Africa is--"the big everything, the big nothing," she called it. In the series, was very easy for her to make up things that people might believe to be authentically African--foreigners who have dark skin and wear banana skirts (even though no tribe has ever actually worn banana skirts). There is a "fiction of tragedy" surrounding Africa, especially in the National Geographic version of Africa. We hold on to that image of the continent, but it is not necessarily a realistic one. 

Even in the midst of all her seriousness, Mutu had light moments of laughter. She talked about her love of shoes, calling them "the pedestal of the female." (I thought this was very interesting in an empowering way, since I've heard professors say you can't be a feminist and wear heels.)  She answered questions about her posing for Vogue (twice), saying that across the world, women read these fashion magazines (she doesn't judge or fault them); they don't all read or have access to Art Forum. If, growing up, she had seen a woman like herself in a magazine that reached her, like Vogue, her mind would have been blown.

Maybe her work, with its severed limbs, its pornographic images, and its medical diagrams of female reproductive organs, "tend[s] to go into the gutter," but those gutter images offer us all a reflection of ourselves. Mutu described it like going to the doctor. Maybe we get fecal samples or urine samples taken--things that come out of us that we are ashamed of--but such things tell us so much information about ourselves. "Newsstands are our fecal matter," and they reveal the fabric of our society.

Mutu showed this famous National Geographic photo by
Kevin Carter as she explained the "fiction of tragedy"
in Africa. Image from Flickr.

Repurposed pornographic imagery from the
Mask Series, which explores both obscenity
and the fascination with the black female body.

Wangechi Mutu was so coolly eloquent that I immediately liked her. I did, however, find myself overwhelmed by the amount of material she presented in this two-hour presentation. Her thought processes seemed to flow together, but she still "has a few too many options under consideration, with mixed results," as one New York Times review puts it. 

Her collage work interests me the most. It is extremely detailed and intricate, and it also manages to be very intimate--a display of her artistic power to repurpose obscene of pornographic images and turn thousands of disparate magazine trimmings into beautiful female bodies. Her most visually appealing works are her multimedia female figures, often missing parts of their limbs. They seamlessly combine ink, color, and collage. (The ink and color parts reminded me of Eric Fischl's watercolors.) But her strongest conceptual works are the ones that deal with race and race fiction. IN these pieces, she implicates the audience in the perpetuation of ethnic "stories," where we see the sad story we are conditioned to see. This storytelling reaches much further than Africa. Such fakery is part of our everyday existence and consumption, and that is the reality that will stay with viewers long after they consider Mutu's art.