Border Crossings Magazine

In 2001, after graduating from the MFA program at Yale, Wangechi Mutu began a series of mixed media, ink and collage on paper works called the “Pin-ups.” The women in this series were dressed in fanciful costumes, when they were dressed at all, and they were simultaneously alluring and gruesome. Their nakedness was mediated by the fact that all of them were missing limbs, their arms and legs bloody stumps that rested on wooden crutches or peg-legs. The “Pin-ups” were poster figures for the war in Sierra Leone, victims of a combination of greed and land mines connected to the diamond trade in that African country. They were the initial group of strange hybrids created by Mutu to address a complex set of issues that included African politics, gender and sexuality. Over the next two years, she made more series that constructed human and animal figures from images cut out of the pages of fashion, travel and porn magazines. Her ability to insinuate meanings that are political, aesthetic and psychological, without ever declaring what the images are really about, is unique. They are like warnings of medical and cultural problems to come. She employed the collage as a premonition, the drawing as a threat.

Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972. After attending the International Baccalaureate program at United World College in Wales, she came to New York in the mid-’90s to study art and anthropology at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art before focusing on sculpture in the graduate program at Yale. Her collages, videos and installations are irresistibly intelligent and seductive, and they are equally repellent. The collages are especially effective in combining a sense of the beautiful and the grotesque—her mottled and patterned surfaces are as exquisite as animal pelts and as disturbing as disease-ridden skin. She has an uncanny sense of gesture, so that her figures organize themselves gracefully in space but walk on chicken feet with the aid of mechanical limbs. In a collage called A Passing Thought Such Frightening Ape, 2003, a golden speckled woman/creature with an exotic face—heavy-lidded eyes and a full mouth—promenades with a deranged-looking primate, whose crotch remains covered by a discreet bit of foliage. Butterflies hover in the air above them and, for all intents and purposes, they look like a bizarre reimagining of the Edenic story: Ape Adam and Eve Talonfoot about to saunter out of Paradise. In another collage from the same year, The Bourgeois is Banging on My Head, a human/tree hybrid pushes a sharp blade into the forehead of a birdlike woman, her arms replaced by feathered epaulettes that curl over her shoulders. She seems to be in a state of ecstasy and her skin is a patchwork of textured areas that you could read as fungal or fashioned. To complete the picture, a ravenous shrimp-shaped thing with a single high-heeled leg and a ponytail is either about to suckle or consume her left breast. It is a beguiling, horrifying image. Mutu has made collages that picture disease (her Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, 2005, are especially gruesome and owe an acknowledged debt to Hannah Hoch’s From an Ethnographic Museum), but these creatures, made from pieces cut from fashion and porn mags, are as bizarre and compelling as anything she has ever done. In an artist’s statement, Mutu has referred to “the beauty and survival capabilities of the human imagination.” She could as easily be talking about her own instincts and achievement in a career that is only seven years in the making. In the following interview, she addresses the ambiguous effect of collage, the method of art making she has made her own in that short period of time. “When two ideas come together, it doesn’t always create a logical result, it doesn’t add up to what people expect, and you can’t tell where one begins and where one ends.” She’s right about all the unknowables. But what she hasn’t said is that those uncertainties are producing some of the most remarkable collages of the last 50 years.

The following interview was conducted by telephone from Brooklyn on Thursday, January 17, 2008, the day after the opening of "Collage: The Unmonumental Picture" at the New Museum in New York, which included Wangechi Mutu’s installation, Perhaps the Moon Will Save Us.

BORDER CROSSINGS: What emerges in your work is that collage is a natural way of recognizing how you view the world. If the world is a broken place, then is collage a way of demonstrating that brokenness or a way of putting it together again?

WANGECHI MUTU: It’s both. Because in the end, the image has a beauty to it. It’s not something I’m afraid to address and I’m not trying to dissuade conversation. I’m optimistic and I believe we grow and will learn to heal. I guess I’m in this in-between situation, culturally, economically and socially, where I’m not ignorant about how these things relate to one another and the bridges between them. I love collage because I studied sculpture and I’m fascinated by material. The kinds of things I choose in the collage have a very particular resonance for me. So if I pick up a National Geographic or Motorbike magazine, it’s about what it stands for and who reads it and why. What is its purpose and how are women’s bodies used in there? As a woman of colour, how I’m represented in these publications is of absolute relevance and importance to me because it tells me where I stand in that particular culture. So, in that way, collage tells us not just what cultures have produced but what they’ve fostered. You can tell what American mainstream culture is thinking by looking at a newsstand. For the most part, there’s a lot of misogynistic material, and a few things that have to do with sports and cars. If you want to know what an animal’s system is about, you look at its shit, like elephant dung. If you want to know where the animal has been and whether it’s healthy, you sift through its stool. That’s a little bit what it’s like when I look at media; it’s quickly processed, it’s not the most high-end knowledge but it definitely gives you a cross-section of what is going on.

BC: What was evident from the beginning is that you have a strong sense of how the body articulates itself in space. As a viewer, you can recognize the original gesture even though it’s been played with and distorted.

WM: Drawing the body is one of my favourite things. It’s always been interesting to me, even before I was quite sure how I wanted to work and what I was going to end up doing with my life. I was always drawing and doodling gestures and it built in an innate understanding of the body. For example, in dance, the body has the ability to describe and be a language in and of itself, so pain or surprise or dependence can be described using just the figure. That’s something I’ve done for so long that it comes quite naturally to me and now I’m able to put it to much more pointed ends in deciding how I want an image to communicate. I do mine a lot of gestures from the fashion world, gestures that are used to pose models in contrived ways. They sell fashion really well, but they’re the most uncomfortable things you can possibly ask a body to do.

BC: When were you first attracted to collage as a medium?

WM: I made some collages for my application to undergraduate school. I remember I put a number of collage works in the home test but I didn’t really know much about it then. The reason I ended up coming back to collage in the last seven years is that there was more available material and it allowed me to create narrative work but with a non-realistic element to it. I was messing around with perspective. I’d seen a few works by Picasso and I loved the way he looked at things from different angles and they still ended up in one picture plane. I really embraced the medium when I started making collage figures of the female body in the “Pin-up” series. At Yale I had used collage as a thinking ground, as a place to sketch. When I was creating a performance, I would make these little cut-out pairs. Sometimes it was as literal as a body and a head from somewhere else and I’d splice them together. (See Issue 105 to read the full interview.)