Wangechi Mutu. Eat Drink Swan Man, 2008; watercolor and collage on paper; overall dimensions, 43 x 63 in. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Wangechi Mutu will never experience the heated backlash that Kara Walker experienced. No one will call Mutu the “patsy of the white art establishment,” accuse her of selling fellow black artists down the river, or launch a letter-writing campaign to keep her artwork from being shown. There are good reasons for this: unlike Walker, the Kenyan-born Mutu does not share the slavery lineage of African-American artists and she does not make work with a lucid historical context. Yet Mutu’s work is often as disturbing as Walker’s, reconfiguring sexualized representations of women and creating visceral collages that appear more pornographic than critical.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: Is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, she has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion, and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

Kara Walker. Philadelphia, n.d. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Like Mutu, Walker jumped through the hoops of academia. She graduated with a BFA from Atlanta College of Art and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. After her breakthrough show, Selections 1994, at The Drawing Center in New York, Walker became controversial. Despite, or perhaps because of, accusations that she promulgated stereotypes, Walker’s career flourished and she won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1997. Walker’s mid-career retrospective, My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, is on view until June 8 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mutu’s current show, Little Touched at Susanne Vielmetter Projects runs through May 3.

Mutu’s and Walker’s concurrent exhibitions call to mind a gut-wrenching scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In Morrison’s novel, a heartbroken Hagar tries to reclaim the self-esteem her lover took from her. She buys panties, a night gown, heels, a little yellow dress, perfume, and red lipstick. Walking home with her purchases, she gets caught in a storm that destroys her finery; still, Hagar is determined to make herself beautiful and lovable. She uses the soiled finery to turn herself into a garish, overly made-up caricature, then collapses in exhaustion. At the end of the chapter, Hagar dies, destroyed by her desperate attempts to feel attractive.

Wangechi Mutu. You pretty, no you pretty, 2008; watercolor and collage on paper; overall dimensions, 14 x 23 in. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

A similar self-destruction occurs in Little Touched. Mutu’s You pretty, no you pretty (2008) consists of two drawings in which opulent watercolor stains morph into approximations of faces. Mutu has collaged photos of vegetation, leopard skin, and a human figure onto the stains, inviting sleek magazine imagery into the discussion of prettiness. But the discussion can go nowhere since the materials silence each other. The magazine imagery allows no room for the stains to assert themselves and the drawings become passive. Like Hagar, You pretty, no you pretty disappears in a puddle of aimless finery.

Wangechi Mutu. A’gave you, 2008; mixed media collage on mylar; 93 x 54 in. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

Mutu’s A’gave you (2008) pushes the problem of passivity to a further extreme. A large work on Mylar, it uses an assortment of materials and collaged body parts to depict a woman’s figure. Her body is in an excruciating position, exploding as if struck by a grenade. Yet the lusciousness of the materials turns the violence into something decorative. This seems to be Mutu’s obsession: the violent seduction of mass media images and the places where the violence and beauty converge. Violence appears so natural that we react to the opulent imagery of Mutu’s work more strongly than we react to its confrontational content.

Betye Saar declared war on Kara Walker in the mid-1990s because she feared that Walker turned stereotypes into seductive, formally compelling imagery. Saar had reason to fear; Walker’s art is lyrical. Her large paper cut-outs and her projections work together like a perfect poem in which each word plays an irreplaceable role in the overall composition. Yet the work also has an unavoidable brutality.

Kara Walker. Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress, n.d.; cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the Artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

While an unsuspecting viewer could approach Walker’s Excavated innocently enough, the narrative portrayed by the installation will eventually set in: baby-kidnapping, genital grabbing, defecating, and other vulgarities. This contrast between visual lyricism and content does not make Walker’s work didactic; instead it makes the work unsettling in the worst possible way. There is nothing we can do about nineteenth-century representations of slavery and Walker’s work does not give us an easy prescription for making the world a better place today.

The videos in the show depict scenery reminiscent of Gone with the Wind—silhouetted hand-puppets move rhythmically across the frame with sunsets and mystic rivers in the background. But Walker’s narratives uninhibitedly probe rape, mutilation, and death. Anyone who does not leave the exhibition feeling sick to the stomach has not truly seen Walker’s work.

Kara Walker. Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress, n.d.; cut paper on wall; 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

The problem with Walker’s work is that it’s as deadly and confrontational as it is lyrical. On the other hand, Mutu’s is as visceral as it is beautiful, but it is not confrontational in the least. The two artists occupy different spheres—Walker the sphere of context-specific, historically driven art and Mutu the sphere of diffuse, media-driven art. Yet both artists have a similar net effect: They seduce us with sensual, rich imagery but ultimately leave us feeling destroyed.

"No Olvidado - Not Forgotten", 2010. 23 graphite on paper drawings. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

There are very few artists today who willingly take a direct political position in their work. Often artists neglect how powerful artwork can be as an instigator for social and political change. In many ways art and politics, or art and activism, have gone hand in hand throughout history, helping to over come social injustice. But, just as often, artwork has acted as a tool to help further social and economic inequalities by declaring ownership and possession.

As an artist that has committed her work to implementing social activism through art making, Andrea Bowers’ drawings and video eloquently document the lives of those who directly interact with the political system, through such issues as illegal immigration and land ownership. Her methods of representation help to humanize and quantify abstract concepts, such as the number of deaths caused by border crossing, through subtle interactions and involvement with her documented subjects. When modern media often explores these issues in a removed and politicized manner, Bower’s work reminds us of the individual. The simple act of documentation gives a face to those who are otherwise overshadowed by the dominating political sphere.

After viewing her recent exhibition at Susanne Veilmetter Los Angeles Projects, which closed last week, I had the privilege of meeting with the artist to discuss the roles of artists and activists, the function of memorials, and personal commitment to public issues.

"No Olvidado - Not Forgotten", 2010. 23 graphite on paper drawings. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

Julie Henson: To start with, could you tell me a little bit about your show, The Political Landscape, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects?

Andrea Bowers: The Political Landscape continues my recent exploration of contemporary issues associated with the genre of landscape.  It focuses on contentious locations where countries and corporations are willing to cause environmental degradation or human rights violations for the purpose of attaining or maintaining power.  One of the earliest functions of the landscape picture has been to provide evidence of ownership; in this project I aim to reveal the abuse of ownership. For the exhibition, I have made two different projects that focus on two different sites in the American West: public land in the state of Utah and the Mexican/American border.

JH: I find it interesting that you choose to use drawing as a method to interact with those that are on the forefront of the current immigration debate. It seems to me that the act of creating a photorealistic drawing becomes documentation of the individual’s personal narrative. How do you relate to the individuals that you portray? How does visually capturing the individual relate to the dialogue around the social issue that affects them?

AB: First of all I should explain that one strategy that I use in my work is photorealist drawing. In the current exhibition at Vielmetter, I made a series of black and white pencil drawings of protesters at the recent Mayday March here in Los Angeles. Each drawing contains a protester holding a sign or wearing a slogan somewhere on their clothing. I am focusing on their political position at that particular moment. I’m choosing to honor these individuals in my drawings because I agree with the political ideologies they’re promoting and I think that these political subjects should be apart of historical discourse as well as art discourse.

"Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (We voted for a change We are waiting for it)", 2010. Graphite on paper. Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

JH: It seems to me that one consistent element of the show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is this idea of honoring those who are otherwise forgotten in the mainstream media and current political sphere. The large drawings clearly have a strong relationship to many large public memorials, like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How does the memorial function for you and in what ways does it change once presented in the gallery versus the public realm?

AB: No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) is the largest drawing project I have yet made.  It is comprised of 23 graphite drawings, 50” x 120” each. The piece acts as a memorial honoring those who have died crossing the Mexican/American border.  Unlike most memorials, this is an incomplete list and will always remain that way no matter how many names are added or collected.  So many people that have died migrating to the U.S. from Mexico over the years will never be identified.  The list of immigrant deaths comes from the organization Border Angels, whose mission is to stop unnecessary deaths of individuals traveling through the Imperial Valley desert region and the mountains surrounding San Diego County, as well as the area located around the Mexican/American border. A high percentage of these unnecessary deaths have been the result of extreme weather conditions, while some have, sadly, been the results of racial discrimination crimes. The Vietnam Memorial is government sanctioned and paid for—I wanted to make this memorial because I don’t believe the government would ever sanction and pay for a memorial like this.

JH: I also find it very intriguing that the drawings are more delicate and fragile than the traditional memorial and the list of names visually represents something seemingly abstract. There is something very precious about how seemingly impermanent the drawings are. What are your thoughts on the repetitious act of drawing and listing a record of an almost indefinite number of lives?

AB: I think the impermanence of graphite and paper versus a more traditional material for monuments, like stone or bronze relates to not only the fragility of the situation at the border but also, again, the lack of  U.S. government sanctioned support for people migrating to this county. The issues have only been abstracted by the American corporate media and most of our government officials. I don’t think there is anything abstract about thousands of people dying in the desert who are simply trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. The act of drawing or mark making reveals my personal involvement with the subject matter.

JH: I completely agree that the nature of the border situation is a product of our political system. One thing that I really love about No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) is that it initially comes across as a finite recording of lives lost, and the more time you look at the drawing, the more you realize the innumerable nature of it. And the shear time invested in the act of drawing so many names gives you a place to recognize and humanize the political questions around the border. It seems to me that you assume a different position in The United States v. Tim DeChristopher than you do in No Olvidado (Not Forgotten). Somehow, you smoothly transition from what seems to me as a recording of a story to physically intersecting and numbering the seemingly boundless environment that Tim DeChristopher saved. What happens when you inject yourself into the video?

"The United States v. Tim DeChristopher", 2010. Single Channel HD video (color with sound). Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo credit Robert Wedemeyer.

AB: I don’t see them as all that different. The action of drawing is somehow in line or is similar to walking through the landscape. I have spent a great deal of time studying and teaching the history of gestural mark making in both painting and performance.  Paul Schimmel’s exhibition, “Out of Actions” had big impact on me when I was a young artist.  Some of the mark making in No Olividado was made by using a really big brush coated in powdered graphite.  Walking through the landscapes and brushing the negative space of the drawings are both forms of gesture for me.  Both reveal my personal commitment to the issues. This is where my subjectivity enters the work. As an artist, attempting to be neutral or appearing to not have a position only serves the powers that be.

JH: Well, there are definite similarities in your approach. The difference to me is that there is a visual representation of your presence in The United States v. Tim DeChristopher that I read as more involved, or at least more active, than in the drawings. To place yourself within the landscape rather than just documenting through drawing makes me more aware of your presence and your position within the work. It enforces the idea that you are standing in solidarity with the issues at hand, as opposed to simply documenting someone else’s point of view. It allows the work to be more subjective in nature and instills it with a sense of personal passion and investment that is evident to the viewer. This leads me to one thing I find really interesting, which is how your work relates to role of the artist and the role of the activist. Can you talk a little about these two roles and how you think they work together?

AB: Art and activism have always been intricately tied throughout history. It’s just the market of commodification that encourages us to believe they are at odds. I’m always looking for the commonalities between art and activism, as well as thinking through how each might serve the other.  My work is always very opinionated in its political stance.

The exhibition, The Political Landscape, corresponded with multiple events at the gallery, including a fundraiser and information session with Tim DeChristopher, an afternoon of talks, music and conversation toward humane migration reform and a performance by artist Cindy Short in response to the exhibition. Andrea Bowers upcoming projects include “Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years (1980 – Now),” The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, and  “Stowaways”, The Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Araba, Spain, among others.

Mickalene Thomas, "You're Gonna Give Me the Love I Need", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 144". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Gallery.

A group called R.A.I.D. (Random Acts of Irreverent Dance) regularly performs at the Echoplex in Echo Park. They appeared at Bootie L.A., a monthly mash-up party, this past Saturday, wearing shimmering orange body-suits and making awkward movements that somehow still seemed organic. R.A.I.D. practitioners have all different sorts of bodies—beer bellies, jutting hip bones, love handles—and they’re not necessarily good dancers. “No formal dance training required, in fact, having two left feet might be a plus,” reads their recruitment blurb on tribe.net. Sometimes they look like Isabella Rossellini did dressed as a snail for her Green Porno video: confident, cartoon-like and uncomfortably seductive. In costume and on stage, the dancers have a not-quite-human, object-like aura that makes them seem empowered, though it’s difficult to tell exactly what they are empowered to do.

I first saw R.A.I.D. the same night I saw Mickalene Thomas’s second solo exhibition at Susanne Vielmetter Projects. The bodies in Thomas’s garnished paintings also exude an object-like prowess and, like watching R.A.I.D., looking at Thomas’s work makes object, objectification, and objection all slide into each other. The bodies Thomas depicts become part of the fragmented, textured décor around them. And becoming décor, it turns out, can be as much a crutch as an asset.

Mickalene Thomas, "Put A Little Sugar In My Bowl", Installation view, Solo Exhibition Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, 2010.

Called Put Some Sugar in My Bowl, the exhibition includes ten glossy enamel paintings on panel, each embedded with rhinestones, Thomas’s favorite accoutrement. The exhibition’s title approximates the refrain of I Need Some Sugar in My Bowl, a saucily unhurried Bessie Smith song that later mellowed into a Nina Simone ballad. The exhibition, like the song, exudes a grown-up sense of longing that manifests through stuff—for Bessie and Nina, the stuff consisted of bowls, foodstuff and a little steamed-up clothing; Thomas’s stuff tends to be drapery, paneling and bling. But while the song has loose riffs and paced pauses between stanzas, Thomas’ paintings have jutting fragments of pattern and flourishes that collide with one another.

In Love’s Been Good #3, a black woman with daunting blue eye shadow and audacious red lipstick that makes her look like she could be in drag, sits in front of a sofa made up of so many collaged patterns it becomes difficult to identify. Her sarong falls open and drapes down onto the floor, leaving her legs exposed. Her feet—she wears purple, rhinestone-bejeweled heels—can’t seem to find a comfortable place to rest.

"Love's Been Good To Me #3", 2010. Rhinestones, acrylic and enamel on wood panel 96" x 72". Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

Thomas’s work is often discussed in relation Ingres’s and Matisse’s Odalisques. This makes sense. Thomas plays with art historical poses, her figures lounging across the picture plane, and odalisques tend to look slightly uncomfortable in their painted poses—sometimes because, as in the case of Ingres’s 1814 The Grand Odalisque, they have a few too many vertebrae, or, as with Matisse’s 1921 Odalisque, they seem about to tumble off a sofa. In Thomas’s repertoire, the women haven’t been made uncomfortable as much as they’ve made themselves that way–the way the figure in Give Me the Love I Need stacks her legs on top of each other would require steady muscle power to maintain, but she seems to know that. “Uncomfortable” becomes a self-protective strategy augmented by the patterned stuff that populates each painting and competes with the figures for attention.

Odalisques are property, concubines that belong to someone. Thomas’s women have property, want property, embody property. “I feel like the rhinestones in my paintings are like the really glossy lipstick that women wear,” Thomas said in an interview with Nylon Magazine. “It’s another layer of masking.” Kara Walker wrote about Thomas for Bomb Magazine a year ago: “Thomas’s Soul Sisters gaze out from between contrasting arrays of color and pattern. In her hands, the Black woman is both a bright and polished Ebony ideal and a picture of womanist yearning.”

Making yourself an object is a way of objecting to being made into anything by anyone else, and such an objection suggests the desire for something more than the Ebony ideal or a lipstick-inspired layer of masking. But while yearning can certainly be expressed by bright, polished, posed, rhinestoned masks, can it be met? My favorite line in Bessie Smith’s song is “Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go.” Thomas’s figures are always fixed up but intentionally stationary. They’re captive to their personae, but that’s why you create a persona in the first place: so that you can stay inside of it.

]]> https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/05/bright-and-polished/feed/ 0 https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/04/interview-with-wangechi-mutu/ https://www.dailyserving.com/2010/04/interview-with-wangechi-mutu/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:00:30 +0000 http://dailyserving.com/?p=4256 In February 2010, Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu was named the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year.” Her accompanying exhibition, My Dirty Little Heaven will open later this month at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum in Berlin. Recently, DailyServing’s Aimée Reed had a chance to catch up with Mutu at her studio in Brooklyn to discuss her upcoming show, as well as the con-current exhibition This You Call Civilization?, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Wangechi Mutu, "Royal Blue Arachnid Curse", (view of piece installed with damaged wall), 2005, ink, collage, contact paper on Mylar, 77 1/2 x 51 1/2 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Photo credit: Joshua White. Collection of Henry Kravis, New York

Aimée Reed: Tell me about the two exhibitions. Will both shows at AGO (open until May 23^rd, 2010) and Deutsche Guggenheim (April 30^th – June 13^th, 2010) feature works from the same series simultaneously?

Wangechi Mutu: No. They both come from quite a wide range of different works. AGO happened to have contacted me to work with them earlier than the Berlin folks. For example they have installation works such as The Ark Collection (a work that consists of four large vitrines displaying postcard-sized imagery of women from African Art) and Sleeping Heads (drawings of severed heads that are installed on a “damaged wall”, or a wall containing perforated holes that evoke wounds), which are both memorable and significant pieces. They also have a lot of my larger collages, the catalog Shady Promise (published by Damiani) and video works.

Wangechi Mutu, "Sleeping Heads (4 of 8)", 2006, Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, NY

AR: The last time I saw you was at Ballroom Marfa in 2007 and at that point, correct me if I’m wrong, I felt that you had your installation pieces, and then you had your collages, as separate entities. But with these new works, such as Sleeping Heads and Royal Blue Arachnid Curse (at AGO), you have really incorporated them together to become one piece.

WM: Actually, Royal Blue Arachnid Curse was done before Marfa, but it is such a difficult priority to combine the two, that I don’t always do it so successfully and I don’t always try to do it. But now I have really made an effort to reconcile the two dimensions. Now, I am working with both and finding ways that I can play with the two dimensionality of the collage. For example, Our Lost Minds, came out of an installation called Dutty Waters, which [when installed at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London] had water pumped in from the Thames River. This evolved into Our Minds [installed at the 10^th Biennale of Lyon, The Spectacle of the Everyday, curated by Hou Hanru] which also included a curtain with the imagery of fallen heads which related to a lot of portraiture I had been doing and has to do with this collapse and breakdown of a system, while Sleeping Heads was, to me, about the leadership vacuum at this moment where I feel that we have lost our sense of direction. I say “we” as in, I don’t know, this country or our shared culture…whatever you want to call it. The last ten years were insane which culminated into the economy crashing. But there were also many other things going on that were leading toward this paradigm shift. So these fallen heads are somehow emblematic of this shift in priority. A little bit of the emperor being revealed naked.

Wangechi Mutu, "Our lost mind finding a heart in dutty water", 2007, mixed media installation; Photo credit: Haupt & Binder, included in "The Spectacle of the Everyday: the 10th Biennale de Lyon. 16 Sept 09 - 3 Jan 2010"

AR: In regards to your upcoming Deutsche Guggenheim exhibition, how are you going to approach the selection of works? The space is beautiful but it is not that massive in size.

WM: No, it’s not huge. It is more like a project room of sorts. [Because of the size], we have to make these very particular decisions about what to include. We have asked a lot of people if we could borrow work so that we can have it there as an option. There is going to be a video in the space and there are to be these bottle pieces, and the piece Intertwined is going to be a central image. The video is going to be projected at the end of the space and as you walk in, there will be a wall so that you don’t see everything inside, and the windows [and walls of the space] will be covered in blankets.

Funnily enough, I’m going back to the plates, but they are very small plates and they are sitting on these tables that are derived from images found from Rwanda where bodies were dried out on white racks.

(In a statement from the upcoming My Dirty Heaven exhibition, Mutu defines these tables as, “ones found in post Genocidal Rwanda used for exhumed bodies preserved and set using lime.”)

Wangechi Mutu, "Intertwined", 2003, 24 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches (framed), Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; Photo credit: Gene Ogami. Private Collection

AR: I find it interesting that of the writing I have read about your work, people don’t really reference how much war plays into your ideas.

WM: I know. I think it’s because it is still one of the toughest things to admit to ourselves and it is happening right now and we are in it. Like now, Obama is in the process of creating a war. What did you expect? He is the President of the US – there is going to be a war in his time. There has been a war in nearly every President’s time.

AR: It is pretty much incorporated into our foreign policy at this point, I think.

WM: Exactly, and now, it is just about the American government’s decision to make this war a logical one that actually links to some ideology. As opposed to the way that Bush went about it by inventing a reason. I don’t think that there is any reason for war, but then again, that is why I’m not in politics.

AR: Besides the shows at AGO and the Deutsche Guggenheim, are you preparing for any other upcoming exhibitions this year?

WM: The works that are slowly forming in the studio right now are for my exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery later this year.

AR: This is your second show with her since you moved from Sikkema Jenkins Gallery, correct?

WM: No, it is my first show and I am really looking forward to it. I’m enjoying working on this upcoming show in Berlin, but my mind is also thinking about getting ready for the show at the Gladstone Gallery as well.

Besides these shows, I have other things for next year and the year after that are contingent on some of these things working out. I feel that it is a really good point for me right now because I am doing what you are perceiving – blending a lot of things and making whole spaces out of two- and three-dimensional works and video. I’m really trying to pay homage to the notion of the sublime and the abject together and using the aesthetic of rejection, or poverty, or wretchedness as a tool to talk about things that are transcendent and hopeful. Also, as a means to talk about on a very basic level, recycling and reusing because I think that there is such an urgency to come up with solutions out of things that have really been fucked with and destroyed. I think that unless we decide to have an apocalypse in order to clean the slate, in order to start again, we really do have to pick up pieces and remake and rework things and translate them into something new and hopeful.  This is what I’m trying to work through for the Berlin show and what I hope the feel of the show will be.

One of the fun elements of the Deutsche Bank Award is that they give you an option to create a series. They allow you to come at it from any angle: you can do a print, you can create an object – you can do whatever you want. So I decided I was going to do a puzzle of the image The bride who married the Camel Head. It’s printed on Corian, this beautiful white plastic that is a little bit like solid Mylar that has both the effects of enamel and matte. The box is going to be beautifully done so you can actually choose to do the puzzle and have it on your table, or you can just have the box of puzzle pieces and display it on your shelf. In one of the center pieces there will be a pendant and the puzzle will be built around it.

Wangechi Mutu, "The Bride who married the Camel Head", 2009, mixed media on mylar, 42 x 30 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Gallery

I think it will be fun because one of the things I have been running into is trying to figure out how I can make some of the works accessible – both price-wise, and as something that people can live with. Because I also want to own certain things and I think, “Oh man, I’m working at the same time as some artists and I can’t afford their work.” That is such a bogus thing. It’s so weird. But I also know that some of my larger pieces take me so long that I can’t think of any other way to price them. So, I think that [this puzzle] is a really great way to [approach] this issue.

AR: That is so inventive to do a puzzle because you are bringing the audience into the image and having them engage and interact with the work.

WM: Right. I think if people actually make the puzzle, you sort of see this wonderful thing. I mean, I know that some people do and some don’t, but you start to really see what is happening in the collage. You find the little figures and the incredibly tiny detail of things that come together to create this microcosms of an image. I’m pulling people into my obsessive behavior.

AR: One point that I want to return to is when you were discussing how we need to either have an apocalypse to start again or that we need to re-purpose imagery to lead to solutions. This, again, brings me back to how your images directly are referencing war and how nobody seems to really want to talk about that relationship. For me, this brings up the larger issue of why we (as a society) keep having that cycle because, as you made the point before, no one wants to address it.

WM: If you eradicate that memory, it seems like it is happening for the first time in our perspective lifetimes.

AR: Exactly. [With this in mind], returning to your work, I see you taking these severed heads, these very real and graphic things that are happening today, and you are making them into beautiful images to force people to actually see them. You aren’t tricking them, because I don’t want to use that word. But it’s like masking medicine for a child with a little bit of sugar.

Wangechi Mutu, "Our lost mind finding a heart in dutty water" (detail), 2007, mixed media installation; Photo credit: Haupt & Binder, included in "The Spectacle of the Everyday: the 10th Biennale de Lyon. 16 Sept 09 - 3 Jan 2010"

WM: Yes, and it is also a strategy of creating a monument to some degree. You embalm it, you catch it in time, you bronze it to say, “This is what is happening. This is now.” I guess this is my way of doing it by appropriating imagery, but also kind of trying to keep the references slippery as to what it exactly is. And actually, people don’t always go there. It’s not because it isn’t obvious, but because they don’t want to or don’t know how to deal with it. They have never seen such a thing. They wouldn’t believe it could happen. It is kind of a mass denial of our complicity in these kinds of situations.

So, I think it’s sort of trying to slowly place this image up front yet again, and again, and again. A lot of my work is about repetition; repeating the same thing, repeating the same image by going at it from different angles. I also think it takes a while for some things to be understood. I feel that what happens is that I have to keep continuing the work in order for it to be understood, “Oh, she kind of means it.” When you are criticizing a culture from within, it is a little bit harder sometimes for people to accept it.

Article by Catherine Wagley for DailyServing – Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“Eat Drink Swan Man”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 43″ x 63″ (nine parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, Mutu has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her, at least fleetingly, an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

Kara Walker, Philadelphia, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Like Mutu, Walker jumped through the hoops of academia. She graduated with a BFA from Atlanta College of Art and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. After her breakthrough show, Selections 1994, at The Drawing Center in New York, Walker became controversial. Despite, or perhaps because of, accusations that she promulgated stereotypes, Walker’s career flourished and she won a Macarthur genius grant in 1997. Walker’s mid-career retrospective, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love,” is on exhibit until June 8 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mutu’s current show, “Little Touched” at Susan Vielmetter Projects in LA, runs through May 3.

Mutu’s and Walker’s concurrent exhibitions call to mind a gut wrenching scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In Morrison’s novel, a heartbroken Hagar tries to reclaim the self-esteem her lover took from her. She buys panties, a night gown, heels, a little yellow dress, perfume, red lipstick. Walking home with her purchases, she gets caught in a storm that destroys her finery. Still, Hagar is determined to make her self beautiful and lovable. She uses the soiled finery to turn herself into ca garish, overly made-up caricature. Then she collapses in exhaustion. By the end of the chapter, Hagar dies, destroyed by her desperate attempts to feel attractive.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“You pretty, no you pretty”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 14 ¬º ” x 23 ¬Ω” (two parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

A similar self-destroying occurs in “Little Touched.” Mutu’s “You pretty, no you pretty” consists of two drawings in which opulent water color stains morph into approximations of faces. Mutu has collaged photos of vegetation, leopard skin, and a human figure onto the stains, inviting sleek magazine imagery into the discussion of prettiness. But the discussion can go nowhere since the materials silence each other. The magazine imagery allows no room for the stains to assert themselves and the drawings become passive. Like Hagar, “You pretty, no you pretty” disappears in a puddle of aimless finery.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“A’gave you”, 2008 Mixed media collage on mylar 93″ x 54″ Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu’s “A’gave you” pushes the problem of passivity to a further extreme. A large work on Mylar, “A’gave you” uses an assortment of materials and collaged body parts to depict a woman’s figure. Her body is in an excruciating position, exploding as if struck by a grenade. Yet the lusciousness of the materials turns the violence into something decorative. This seems to be Mutu’s obsession: the violent seduction of mass media images and the places where the violence and beauty converge. Violence appears so natural that we react to the opulent imagery of Mutu’s work more strongly than we react to its confrontational content.

Bette Sayre waged war on Kara Walker in the mid-1990s because she feared that Walker turned stereotypes into seductive, formally compelling imagery. Sayre had reason to fear: Walker’s art is lyrical. Her large paper cut-outs and her projections work together like a perfect poem; each word plays an irreplaceable role in the overall composition. Yet the work also has an unavoidable brutality.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

While an unsuspecting viewer could approach Walker’s “Excavated” innocently enough, the narrative portrayed by the installation will eventually set in: baby-knapping, genital grabbing, defecating and other vulgarities. This contrast between visual lyricism and content does not make Walker’s work didactic; instead it makes the work unsettling in the worst possible way. There is nothing we can do about 19th Century representations of slavery and Walker’s work does not give us an easy prescription for making the world a better place today.

The videos in the show depict lyrical scenery reminiscent of Gone with the Wind — silhouette hand-puppets move rhythmically across the frame with sunsets and mystic rivers in the background. But Walker’s narratives uninhibitedly probe rape, mutilation and death. Anyone who does not leave the exhibition feeling sick to the stomach has not truly seen Walker’s work.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

The problem with Walker’s work is that it’s as deadly and confrontational as it is lyrical. On the other hand, Mutu’s is as visceral as it is beautiful, but it is not confrontational in the least. The two artists occupy different spheres — Walker the sphere of context-specific, historically driven art and Mutu the sphere of diffuse, media-driven art. Yet both artists have a similar net affect: they seduce us with sensual, rich imagery but ultimately leave us feeling destroyed.