The raw and the cooked. This is your brain. This is your brain on Wangechi Mutu. Not crack, and not even quite as pungent as the crack you catch headbanging whiffs of on the A train at 3 in the morning. But a wake-up blast all the same. What happens when the raw is the cooked.
Some artists are smarter than their work. Others let the work do all the smart talk. Not many give you the sense that their work has passed through their bodies after leaking out of their brains. Whatever you think of the work--I've seen one set of folk bow down in awe while other folk stroll through unmoved and indifferent--you can't deny its spongy, bio-morphicbiomorphic roots.
There's something kind of Blade Runner-ish about Mutu's relationship to what she creates. Like she's more maternal genetic designer than obsessive-compulsive artiste (though that's in there, too). But in conversation, Mutu can make you feel like the figures in her drawings, collages and watercolors--as alive, or maybe even more alive, than you think you are. 'More posthuman than your posthuman' would be the motto if she was running the Tyrell Corporation.
The figures in Mutu's paintings and collages are survivors. "They're the survivor of all these moments in history that we've been through as a race," she says. "All of their history is written upon their bodies and in their hair. It's very clear where they've been. Some of them are missing parts, or have gained a new a part, be it an animal part or a machine part, as they've gone along. These are images of triumph and transgression. They're very contemporary even though they have archaic artifacts attached to them too and a vision of what can happen if we survive."
Mutu sees the figures in her pieces not as overripe superheroes but as goddess figures who are capable of giving you both regality and depravity.
"They're very much about seeing yourself as being part of the problem while existing within it. I'm not interested in the whole finger-pointing process, where you say 'This dynamic is wrong, and this is who created this wrong or injustice.' I think we're all responsible. This is where an autobiographical part comes in. I see these goddesses as critiques that are very much embedded in the problematic itself. So some of them have issues that we haven't broken through, but they're also sincere about that and still strong."
Her conflations of beauty and bestiality take their cue from substance providers Condé Nast, the porn industry, and National Geographic. She doesn't see any of these sources as mutually exclusive. "Sometimes I use the fashion industry as a fossil ground. I find limbs and extremities--parts of specific women. All these faces we see in magazines! Some woman out there has been reimaged in this media. I often feel like an archeologist, and what I think I'm doing is giving them a new role, reincarnating them into something else. The shifting of their roles, the re-amalgamating of them into one diva, is about making sure they don't become these throwaway, one-month-long moments of interest. So they become these immortalized beings. In fashion, in porn, in National Geographic, in all these places where women are recycled constantly, they're still underground. This a way to keep them above ground."
I would've imagined that rap music would have gone on inventing things and creating new space, but obviously it hasn't. People have bought into the thing they were told they were supposed to be.
You would think this cutting and sampling would have marked Mutu as a hiphop junkie, but claiming hiphop as a muse is a slippery slope these days, especially for anyone who possesses a Black feminist imagination. Mutu slyly elides the comparison without completely discounting it in the end.
"I can't say I reference hiphop either as a language or a philosophy. I do have things in my work that reference the last 15 to 20 years of history, and what I think is hiphop might be the more universal things that have been happening all over the world, which is that the generation of our parents didn't have the space to look at themselves outside of a very specific time. My parents were raised during the time of the Mau Mau, when the British were asking people to move to the side of the street and to get off the land--when it was our land. They come from a very specific moment when they were forced to go to school to sign a lease for their own land. Things like that. I was raised outside of that. I'm critical about the Black government and the things that haven't worked after independence and two Black presidents and self-government.
"So my generation tells our parents that things still don't work. I think that's about the cynicism of the younger generation, on the one hand, and, at the same time, about the creation of a language through critique that represents a breaking down of propriety and all the things we're supposed to have learned. So maybe in that sense I feel a connection to hiphop. And just maybe through all the sampling I do."
Because her generation of YBA's ("Young Badass Artists"; my term) is the first in history to find support as a group by the mainstream art world--nowadays often before they even finish grad school--they are also beneficiaries of the aura that hiphop, and specifically the aura that Basquiat, has come to cast across around all things Black, that the artful and the absurdist alike, are seductively, monstrously, marketable. Here again Mutu strikes her customary reserved tone of critical recognition and caution.
"What we're doing, I think, is two things. The generations before us had to do various things for us to be able to do what we're doing: Either they had to play the game of 'We can do as good as you, speak English as good as you, paint as good as you,' or they were constantly critiquing everything, and every time they made an image, it was accepted because it was about race and gender in a very particular, very readable, didactic way.
"I feel like the beauty and benefit of what I'm doing is that I don't have to focus on one particular critique or argument. I don't even have to be critical, as such. I am, but I don't have to be, and that's a really privileged position. Because you get to the point where you don't want to have to address the--poor choice of words--but, the oppressor, as such, every time you make an image. You also want to be able to bust out with your own cacophony and nonsense, and that in itself is a very liberating position. This generation that includes the Julie Mehretu's and the Deborah Grants, a whole slew of people, and Kara Walker to some extent, have all been able to get biographical and to mess it all up--to enter themselves into the work, and they don't have to keep dealing with the power structure every time they make a statement. That's a really amazing thing."
A large part of Mutu's thinking goes beyond her own career, and to the future of her whole generation. And that already marks her as different from the perceived image of the hiphop mainstream.
"I don't know what's going to happen to my generation. I don't know if the mechanism we're a part of isn't stronger than we are as individuals. I don't know if we're all going to be producing jackets and jewelry in the next couple of years that line up with our artwork. I do know that there's a kind of mysteriousness and an individuality about how we make our work that will hopefully keep it open. It remains to be seen.
"We're still so young, the generation that's been succeeding now. It's not been a five-year cycle yet, you know? You look at someone like David Hammons, at his ebb and flow, and that's 30 to 40 years of work. Twenty of those years he wasn't let into the doors of the museums that now crave to show him. So perhaps that's what has to happen. We go on to 40 days and 40 nights of fasting and thinking. I think it is still a place of real investigation. I trust that people I admire are more interested in being artists, and not names and superstars.
"But because hiphop is so visble about its success, we can also read through what has happened to hiphop. It has become quite obvious what happens if you don't take ownership of your ideas and keep moving and finding a new center."
The Black art and music worlds have been feeding off each other in an American context for 300 years, and for much longer in the rest of the world. Think Art Kane and the Harlem jazz set, AfriCOBRA and the early conscious rap of Gil Scott Heron, the first turntablists and the graf writers of the 1980s. But in the last century, as the world at large has fallen undeniably under the sway of Black musical genius, it has been slower to acknowledge the same in visual art. Mutu sees some ironic benefits in this semi-submerged position.
"Because there's not as much money in the art world as there is in the music industry, I do think there's a lot more space for unpredictability to keep things rotating, but I can't really say. I would've imagined that rap music would have gone on inventing things and creating new space, but obviously it hasn't. People have bought into the thing they were told they were supposed to be. Now they're the thing they were told to be. And they're going further and further into the assimilation of nonsense.
"I'd like to think I'm kind of unpredictable and a little more egocentric, where I don't think I'll get to where I want to be told what to be. But if it does happen, then maybe what happened to rap music and hiphop will happen to us, too. It's really a tragic thing, the franchising and corporatizing of the most creative. Guess we'll figure out how long we can hold out."
