33 Artists in 3 Acts (8 page)
Wangechi Mutu
Me.I
2012
I
n Wangechi Mutu’s mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for “artist.” The closest term is something like “magician” or “a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,” says the Kenyan-born artist. Mutu has synthetic blue and black braided hair extensions that are rolled into two buns on either side of her head, making her look like an African Princess Leia. The artist, who is almost forty, moved to America when she was twenty years old and has lived here ever since. She still speaks with a light British colonial lilt. Although the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is a huge, cosmopolitan city—full of “talented folks” who aren’t just making “tourist paintings of giraffes,” as Mutu puts it—most artists with well-developed careers lead much of their lives outside Kenya. “A
contemporary
artist,” she explains, “is engaged with foreign culture.”
Mutu and I are in a brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. For some, Bed-Stuy is a black ghetto where white people rarely tread. For Mutu, it’s an immigrant neighborhood with a lot of cultural diversity, tension and energy. Unlike the hubs of the Brooklyn artist community (such as Williamsburg or Bushwick), Bed-Stuy appears impervious to young, single, white hipsters. However, the area is increasingly home to professional couples and artists do live nearby, mostly quietly with kids. Mutu makes a good living as she is represented
by high-end dealers such as Barbara Gladstone in New York and Victoria Miro in London. Yet she enjoys the alternative pace here. “When you leave Manhattan,” she says, “things calm down and you can think.”
Mutu’s studio is on the parlor floor of her home. It has exposed red-brick walls, hardwood floors, and nineteenth-century moldings painted white. It is packed with well-organized clusters of magazine clippings, rolls of paper bundled in baskets, and stacks of colored duct tape. Mutu tells me that her assistants did a major cleanup yesterday in anticipation of my arrival, in part to prevent the environment from making me dizzy. In the center of the room is the artist’s “operating table,” where she pieces together her complex collages. An insomniac with a two-year-old daughter, Mutu relishes the comforts of home. “It isn’t the most studio-esque kind of space, but it has great light and it suits my weird habits,” she says. “I can walk in here at 4
A.M
.” (The artist has another studio in an old navy yard where she makes larger-scale works, sculptures, videos, and installations. It has a concrete floor and a freight elevator and is anything but domestic.)
Three sizable works in progress adorn the walls here. They are all collages depicting fantastical women that look like crossbred aliens or futuristic witch doctors covered in body paint. “I am mostly, if not always, obsessed with images of women,” says Mutu. “As an African not living in my motherland, I’m also very sensitive to depictions of African people.” Two of the collages are in their early stages, and the artist refers to them affectionately as “infants.” One of these includes the silhouette of a naked female rock climber. “These strong women are in precarious positions, trying to get themselves up to a higher place,” she muses.
The third work, which is closer to completion, features a two-headed figure. The larger head looks out confidently at the viewer with one blue eye and one brown. A little man sits cross-legged under her perfect red lips and a snake coils like an elastic around her tree trunk of a ponytail. The other head could be a cyborg, with sparkly metallic jewelry in lieu of an eye patch. She tilts downward as if in submission, with antennae-like floral protrusions sprouting from the top of her head. Mutu has just decided to call the piece
Me.I.
even though she does not see it as a self-portrait.
Mutu’s women are mysterious,
jolie-laide
creatures that address the politics of beauty. “I like exoticism,” says the artist. “Anything that is different from the beholder’s perception of the norm is exotic. For me, blonde, blue-eyed Aryans are exotic. They are rare where I come from and rare to see on the street where I live now.” Her characters are such hybrids that they may be universally exotic. In other words, they are likely to be perceived as foreign by viewers from all over the world.
To say that her collages are multimedia is an understatement. These works in progress feature linoleum, fabric, animal pelts, feathers, sparkles, pearls, powders, paint, and more. “Materials have their own souls—their own chemical properties, gravities, and past lives,” she explains as she fingers a scrap of rabbit fur. “I really want them to speak within the work, not in a goofy, ghostlike way but in a practical, sensuous one.” The artist also has a broad range of media sources. She cuts out images from
National Geographic
, porn magazines like
Black Tail
, and fashion publications with good-quality paper such as
W
,
V
, and
i-D
. She also draws images from the Internet, “where everything comes from . . . the Eden of all our information.”
Immersion in the process of making is essential to Mutu’s art. “I am a hands-on intimate worker,” she says. “I am too obsessed with the emotions that my work exudes to outsource it.” The artist has a studio manager and three assistants whom she describes as “like-minded, empathetic, and rigorous.” The assistants work part-time and have their own artistic practices. Mutu does all the cutting, but they help with the gluing, moving, archiving, and administration. Dangling from a silver chain around Mutu’s neck is a tiny pair of scissors in the shape of a stork. “I’m a scissor maniac,” she says. “I cut everything.” In addition to her ardor for slicing and trimming, Mutu loves collage because it is so egalitarian. “Kids make collage, housewives make collage, even if it’s just birthday cards,” she explains. “It is a democratic art.”
Aware of the hierarchies of the art world, Mutu made the strategic decision to do her MFA at Yale. “It was a kind of elite, art-world boot camp,” she explains. “It was difficult but necessary in order to segue from making art on the side to making art as a full-time thing.” Although Mutu mostly works on flat surfaces, she chose to be in the
sculpture department because she felt painting suffered from more rigid orthodoxies. “Painting is sometimes taught almost like a religion in which you don’t question things,” she explains. People would tell her that painting was dead. She would ask, “Who killed painting? Why wasn’t I allowed to paint before the medium was pronounced dead?” All in all, Mutu didn’t feel painting classes were relevant to her experience as “a foreigner with a very different sense of art history.”
Still, Mutu appears to be haunted by painting. Among the many images taped to the studio’s walls is an old computer printout of a Jean-Michel Basquiat. Painted in his self-consciously primitive style, it depicts a man with a crown of thorns and a schematic set of sausage-and-two-potatoes genitals. His arms are outstretched as if he were crucified. Basquiat was a Brooklyn-born African American who started out as a graffiti artist, then became a neo-expressionist painter. He died of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-eight in 1988. Celebrated in his day, he is now the only black artist whose work sells for multimillions at auction. “Basquiat just came in and shattered so many barriers,” says Mutu. “When I discovered his work, I remember thinking, ah, that’s the way to paint, that’s the way to attack these pristine problems.” Mutu reaches out, trying to straighten the curled corner of the printout. “Tortured messiah boy,” she says tenderly. Mutu is grateful that she went to Catholic school even though her family was Protestant because, as she puts it, “Catholicism was great for the visual part of my life.”
Mutu likes to be open to other artists’ work. She loves Ai Weiwei’s
Sunflower Seeds
and even possesses one. “I call them his sperm because I see them everywhere!” she jokes. “He’s a sensationalist but I believe in a lot of what he’s fighting for.” She is less sympathetic to what she calls Koons’s “celebrity mania” but she likes some of his work such as
Puppy
(1992), a public sculpture made out of living flowers and other greenery. Mutu suspects that she and Koons come from “completely different ethical families.” She is not taken with the idea of art for art’s sake. “I’ve always felt that there are things that could be improved or that are unjust, skewed, covered up,” she says. “Successful art can be made by people who don’t worry about their responsibility to humanity, but that isn’t an option for me.”
Mutu’s work is not driven by messages or pedagogy but, unlike many in the art world, she does not sneer at didacticism. “Different art plays different roles,” she says. “Political art that is precisely geared toward sending an overt, urgent message can be great art.” She cites the work of several artists including Martha Rosler, with whom she feels an affinity because they are both “image vandalizers.” A collagist, photographer, and video-maker, Rosler is a feminist and antiwar activist whose artworks both campaign and endure.
Before saying goodbye, I urge Mutu to return to the problem of defining her role. “Contemporary artists have the job of being different from the rest,” she says with a symmetrical swoosh of both hands, as if she were conducting an orchestra. They are supposed to be “autonomous pioneers” prized for their “individualistic-ness.” However, Mutu prefers a less isolated model with a stronger sense of community. “For me, artists are individuals that speak for the group,” she declares. “We divulge the secrets about what’s going on in the family even if we’re not supposed to. We’re like a tattletale . . . or an alarm-raiser.” Sometimes the secrets are revealed furtively. Other times, intelligence is disguised as innocuous gossip. Whatever the case, persuasion is the goal. “Art allows you to imbue the truth with a sort of magic,” says Mutu, “so it can infiltrate the psyches of more people, including those who don’t believe the same things as you.”
Kutlu
Ataman
JARSE
(detail)
2011
AtamanW
ith a population of over sixteen million, Istanbul is the biggest city in both Europe and the Middle East. Since it ceased to be the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the metropolis has been perceived less as a center than a crossroads between East and West, Muslim and Christian, old and new. The Istanbul Biennial, which has been held every second September since 1987, has taken advantage of this hybrid cultural identity, establishing itself as one of the world’s most important contemporary art events.
This year, the biennial is taking place in two huge warehouses on the banks of the Bosphorus, the waterway that divides Europe from Asia. Set away from the life of the city, the warehouses are swarming with art-world professionals, including many of the 130 artists from forty-one countries whose work is on view. Some artists arrived well before the official preview to help install their works; they stroll into the 11
A.M
. opening, freshly showered, knowing where to go. Others have just landed and show up with carry-on luggage, disoriented.