The ladies with the sharp shears
Wangechi Mutu’s “Untitled”, 2003
History’s parade finds its way to cut-up specialist Wangechi Mutu by way of dada, of course, with Hannah Höch pointing out the path ahead and warning that it’s not always downhill. The course is littered with exquisite corpses.
Collage has always struck me as the poor country cousin in the art tribe, still at school and with no hope of ever actually graduating and joining the family business. I think that’s why the dadaists embraced it: It was a geeky, clumsy sort of art, more Anyman artisanship in fact, so it suited their anti-art ambitions. Plus, it involved piecing together bits of newspapers, snapshots and mementoes — putting the mundane on a pedestal — and left room for subconscious selection. And it could be done fast.
Hannah Höch’s “Grotesque”
Everyone keeps scrapbooks at some time or another, and In Europe at the time, collage was something your mother might do with her favourite pictures from the weekend magazine. Like the surrealists’ rounds of exquisite corpse, collage was something to be “played” in the parlour after supper.
But I still love collage, the big lug, and both of these women are very interesting, especially side by side — a German who, like Picasso, borrowed African art’s backwardness to push Western art forward; and an African native who cadges urban Americana to leap oceans and kick down social borders.
Back in Nairobi where Mutu was born, and in the other big African centres, contemporary artists like Bill Bidjocka, Odhiambo Siangla and Lubaina Himid have found a measure of fame, but Westerners keep asking their agents if they can get some tribal antiquities instead. These new fellows, the buyers presume, are just copying Modigliani, aren’t they?
Below, “Complete Prolapsus of the Uterus” from 2004, chiding the typical gender bias of yesteryear’s medical diagrams.
No wonder Mutu shifted to the West ASAP, albeit to study anthropology along with art at Yale. It worked out fine: Now about 36, she’s great at bending minds with her collages of women made from Mylar, flourishes of deco paint and a lot of thoughtfully chosen magazine clippings (National Geographic being an obvious source). From a distance it looks like you’re in for some eye candy, but up close Mutu’s exotic beauties turn out to be gargoyles on a feminist mission, some armoured, some haemorrhaging body parts or dragging around prosthetics.
“Mask”, 2006, archaic sculpture and modern tease.
Goddesses and glamour models there are, but they’ve clearly just been released from hospital following a horrendous accident. Their skin is inhuman and they’re at least partially bionic, not in a good way.
They are very much science fiction, but as we always discover once we get there, the future isn’t clean and stable — it’s a junkyard of the past. Our robots aren’t going to be young, curvy, soft-skinned Japanese handmaidens; they’ll be brides of Frankenstein, with serious issues that, like the glitches in Windows software, refuse to be resolved. See the rest.
