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.
“Backlash Blues”, 2004
Mutu’s 2001 “Pin-up” series, featuring 12 preening, topless women, all amputees, came out of the “blood diamond” violence in Sierra Leone — people getting killed so that other people could look posh wearing shiny rocks.
In her 2003 “Creatures” series, scantily clad women had hyena heads, not a nice reference in Swahili, apparently. The “Centipede” series from the same year used insects as a metaphor for colonialists.
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“I Have Peg Leg Nightmares”, 2003
If Mutu has suffered culture shock, it was duly expressed in an exhibition she once mounted called “Problematica Mutu”, the word “problematica” referring to zoological specimens of unknown origin or, a propos to her case, familiar fossils found where they shouldn’t be.
Comentators like to compare artists so they can get a better handle on them. Sometimes it’s helpful; usually it’s not. Merrily Kerr in Art On Paper brought up Cindy Sherman’s bizarre bodywork and the extremism of the French surgery nut Orlan, seen here, who was medically sculpted into a Mona Lisa.
In the Contemporary Art Quarterly, David Hatcher invoked Hans Bellmer (1902-75) and his life-size pubescent female dolls of the 1930s — les poupées — ostensibly a protest against Nazi beauty worship, but more likely psycho stand-ins for the teenage cousin he couldn’t have.
However, both critics cite Hannah Höch as the primary reference point in Mutu’s creations, and of course this makes sense.
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Hannah Höch (1889-1978) showed up at the Berlin Club Dada on the arm of her Viennese boyfriend Raoul Hausmann, but though she was its “the bob-haired muse” and, with Hausmann, tried to keep it on a more aesthetic course, the politics was a bit much for her, and she settled down in Holland instead with her girlfriend Til Brugman, a poet.
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“Pretty Maiden”, 1920
Then, back in Germany ahead of the war and already well acclaimed for her collages, she married Kurt Matthies, a pianist who was a lot younger than she and, as some people do, began sorting out the inner world rather than the outer.
Politics had always been the spur for the dadaists, though. Early on, Höch had watched her landlord splice his face onto a photo of an “ideal” German soldier, and she knew right away where she could take collage next. She assaulted the drearily rotten Weimar Republic a pair of scissors.
First the knife, possibly the same knife with which Tristan Tzara had stabbed a dictionary in Zurich and come up with the word “dada ~ n. Fr. slang: a child’s hobby horse”.
“Cut with the Kitchen Knife: Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-belly Cultural Epoch of Germany” is a 1919 slice-up that layers military, industrial and profoundly bourgeois imagery on top of newsprint, a few splotches of paint and a sloppy sheen of glue. In the midst of all the German pretension that would give birth to the Third Reich are the emancipated women of the age, Greta Garbo among them, and a map of Europe highlighting the countries where women could vote, with a picture of Höch admiring it. There are bathers and ballerinas, Marx and machinery, and a swan dive for a moustache.
“Abduction”, 1925, a European woman carried off by strangers.
The “Ethnographic Museum” series of the early 1920s was where Höch laid some of the groundwork for Mutu. Images of African and Asian sculpture melded with Western body parts, and everyone left wondering which culture was the primitive one, and what was exotic. Stereotypes wouldn’t suffice, let alone be tolerated.
Below, another piece from that series, and “Tamar” from 1930, actually titled “Dompteuse”, in which the sea lion in eye makeup seems more in charge of things than its tamer.
Höch’s feminism was intense but not militant. If she could demonstrate truth to a world of lies in feminine ways, that’s what she did, creating elegant, even delicate paintings and collages from embroidery patterns, and at the same time venturing into the still-very-new realm of abstraction.
In between there was surrealism ripe on the branch. Below is “Die Treppe” from 1923-26.
And there was iconic expressionism. Below is “Two Heads” from 1926, originally titled “Imaginary Bridge”. Höch — depicted at right in a 1992 digital photomontage by American illustrator Alan Magee — was caricaturing herself and Hausmann, who used mannequin heads in his own work. Höch’s niece, Eva-Maria Rossner, has said she was illustrating her frustration at being unable to have a child by Hausmann, who was married. On his neck is a tableau like a prehistoric cave painting showing a woman screaming at a man, evidently the wife, while an infant floats between the heads.
