Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Voyage

Transcription

1 King Rucks November 2013 Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Voyage Four female singers from Nigeria perform lively songs in both English and Yoruba in the grand event hall at the Brooklyn Museum. They perform some of the songs of the most internationally acclaimed Nigerian musician of the 20th century, Fela Kuti, the Afro-beat king and prominent African artist-rebel. They dance and sing and teach the audience lessons on life in a way only Afro-beat can. Near the end of their performance, they pay homage to an African artist who is based in Brooklyn, Wangechi Mutu (born 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya), who is herself reinvigorating masculine genres and mediums

2 and placing women at the center. All the while, the work exhibiting in Mutu s first major retrospective, Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Voyage, sits one floor above, whisking viewers into this fantastical space where futuristic Africanized female protagonists symbolically act out the struggles of our postcolonial world. Wangechi Mutu is considered by many to be one of the most important and acclaimed contemporary African sculptors and artists working today, and her work has exhibited throughout the world. Mutu works in many mediums, though she is best known for large-scale collages on Mylar depicting female figures part human, animal, plant, machine, or monster in fantastical landscapes that are at once sublimely surreal and gruesomely ghastly, but always alluring. Mutu works by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Her collages and sculptures are all Rauschenberg like combines that may include paint, clippings, wood, tape, cloth, garbage bags, furs, and any number of found materials.

3 For Mutu, this a practice in found materials points to global over-consumption and waste, particularly in the eyes of an artist born in Africa where waste was a luxury few could afford. This idea is expressed quite horrifically in Mutu s first-animated video, The End of Eating Everything, created in collaboration with recording artist Santigold. In the video, a monstrous female created from machine and organic parts flies through the sky gobbling up a flock of flying birds. Mutu s works explores the themes of gender, globalization, post-colonialism, African traditions, consumption, race, and identity, and these specifically related to the centrality of the female figure. Mutu has said, Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body. Mutu's works often make the female body central, and confront the viewer with "plant-like or animal-like elements and intertwined abstract patterns" that merge the organic and the surreal with human forms. These female forms are usually engaged in flight or fight scenarios, pitted against monstrous or strange plant and animal creatures. Mutu describes some of her figures as triumphantly escaping or in victory stances atop the dead body of its enemies. Mutu has said, The power for me in this work is to keep the story of female in the center; to keep discussing and talking about woman as active, as protagonist. Good, bad, whatever it is that they are, they are part of the reason we are here. That s important. Originally from Kenya, Mutu was educated in Nairobi at Loreto Convent Msongari ( ) and later studied at the United World College of the Atlantic, Wales (I.B., 1991). Mutu moved to Brooklyn, NY in the 1990s, focusing on Fine Arts and Anthropology at the New School for Research and Parsons School of Art and Design. She earned a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in 1996, and then received an MFA from Yale University (2000). Then, Mutu spent more than a decade in a bureaucratic fight with U.S. authorities for the right to stay, even as she collected accolades and built up a portfolio. She couldn t leave the U.S. until her bid for a special talent-based green card got out of red tape so she couldn t visit her family in Kenya and she couldn t attend openings the world over in places like Berlin or Brussels.

4 This immigration experience is evident in Mutu s work, a where her Africanized female creatures traverse landscapes Mutu dreamed up during her time as a trapped traveler. I was struggling with this idea that perhaps the reason I was in this situation is I turned into something that didn t belong. I didn t belong at home, I didn t belong here. I didn t exist, or I shouldn t exist, in that weird way. Like I d left and grown on my own like these creatures that grow on Madagascar that are such anomalies. Mutu nearly identifies herself with her creatures, and if not with her creatures, with the surreal futuristic world in which these creatures exist. This is the space where these conservative demarcations of nation and state and culture are soon going to be archaic, in which stories in an African tradition are the same as stories in an American tradition, for it is the future and there is no longer an Africa or America nation to speak of. Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation, yet we may consider them as the psychological space in which Mutu arrives back in Kenya, now the

5 hero carrying the magical heart of the dragon that will heal the sick and feeble in the home tribe. "I feel like I've spent a lot of time imagining home, and thinking about a dream-like place as opposed to a real place because that's not what I was able to do, meaning go home or be home. So I think a lot of my work leans towards the fictional, and the dreamlike, the imaginary space and sort of idealized space. Memory space. It is in her works that Mutu struggles, fights and flees, from a world still unclear of its own racism and sexism. Just as her female figures triumph in the face of the monstrous obstacles before them, so did Mutu. After finding new lawyers, who filed a lawsuit against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on her behalf, she won her case and got a green card last year. Wangechi Mutu s individual works are nearly always completely ambiguous, escaping any cohesive narrative, yet her practice taken as a whole seems entirely unambiguous, and this is where the power of her work lies. With the African patterns and elements and look of her figures, Mutu conjures in the viewer something ancient, something primordial. One is tempted to contemplate Eve, the first African mother who contained all of the traits of every woman to come after her, like these figures with African noses and lips and Asian eyes and Caucasian skin. However, Mutu refuses us this interpretation, for though we are captivated by these figures, they are far too ghastly to be our mother. Mutu has transported us to a poetic prehistory, in the tradition of so many African griots, and she has made the original protagonist a woman but not a passive mother. In Mutu s work, then, we are given snapshots of the life and trials of woman in general, from prehistory on to the future of space exploration. This is the cohesion of Mutu s work, to displace the male protagonist and male artist-savant with woman, to place female at the center of our human story from the origin of culture and stories, Africa, out into the foreseeable future of our story, space travel and alien creatures. In her own way, Mutu is the Fela Kuti of art today, dancing and singing and teaching us in a way only she could do so beautifully.