Some Thoughts After Seeing the 2023 New Museum’s Retrospective Exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined”

Art Review by Walter Holland

Some Thoughts After Seeing the New Museum’s Retrospective Exhibition “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined”

The Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu recently received a full retrospective of her art at New York’s New Museum. Mutu’s art is multi-media in nature. Mutu, born in Nairobi in 1972, in the exhibition notes is said to have gained “acclaim in the early 2000s for her collage-based practice.” Her art is further described as addressing “legacies of colonialism, globalization and African and diasporic cultural traditions in a distinctive style that fuses mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references.” Her sculpture, video, drawings, paintings and collages offer “new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.”

            Mutu who moved to New York in the 1990s focused on anthropology at The New School as well as pursued art studies at Parsons School of Art and Design. She earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 1996 and a master’s degree in sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2000. After many years in New York City, she moved back to Kenya in 2014 to focus on art based directly on her African heritage, using found materials such as Kenya’s native red soil to augment the sense of place in her work.

            In Mutu’s statement on her view of art she says:

                        Art allows you to imbue the truth with

                        a sort of magic . . . so it can infiltrate the

                        psyches of more people, including

                        those who don’t believe the same

                        things as you.

            It is to this end I responded greatly to her work. In viewing the exhibition, I underwent a sort of psychological disorientation in which the Western cannon of art and its Eurocentric iconography was imaginatively displaced or wholly transformed—I have not yet decided which is the more accurate account.

            Mutu’s bold imagination essentially eludes the Judeo-Christian mythography, even the Greco-Roman classical tradition, and later ideals revived during the Renaissance when humanistic thought in art and literature and culture prevailed.  The Aristotelian and Greek schools of thought revered concepts of logic, reason and mathematical precision, where elements of time, mass and proportion and perspective acted in a balanced unity. In the Renaissance these ideas were applied to more realistic representation in art. Religious art championed the Christian Biblical narratives and religious dogma. Secular forces in Europe eventually brought the sciences and ushered in the Age of Reason. However, the Western tradition also fostered political structures and hierarchical systems of thought and social order and rule. Colonialism and imperialism, where one group of people were defined as “heathen” and another as “educated” or “saved” created years of brutal schism. Western philosophy was built on Cartesian values and linear cause and effect. It was also the product of a patriarchal society and power system which valued solely the male gaze and the male view in aesthetics, be it the proper subjects for representation, the proper dissemination of ideas, techniques or concepts, down to the very material and medium for art’s production. Certainly, patriarchy controlled, censored, and restricted the female imagination. Even art’s history, development, and reception bore the imprimatur of the male aegis.   

            What impressed me in Mutu’s work was her lurch toward a world of fantastical organic forms and her rejection of schematic figuration and even conceptual abstraction, which both have so dominated Western art. The use of red volcanic soil found in the Kenyan highlands as a recurring material in her work, an integral red earthy color in her overall palette, immediately veers from the Western cultural color traditions in art which have for so long dwelled in primary color unities, impressionistic pastels, and dark dramatic hues in Italian and Spanish religious art. Even Vermeer’s experiments with natural lighting and the rich colors of the northern European landscape, or in Holbein or Cranach, are here replaced by Mutu with the colors of the Kenyan landscape. This factor in Mutu’s work in essence gives her art a totally different orientation and context, one that does not aspire to represent the European or North American experience or heritage.

            This otherness is palpable when I looked at the exhibition as a whole. Her figurative sculptures take their referents in African culture and myth and beyond that the direct elements of the Kenyan terrain. A mysterious figure laced with wood, red soil, pulp, ash and pine cones, Mutu’s sculpture “Sentinel VI, 2022,” appears part alien creature, part shamanistic and anthropomorphically clichéd “primitive” warrior as well as Afro-futurist “Star Wars” Chewbacca standing tall and appearing to menace the viewer. It has the aspect as well of a Yeti or an ape-like creature, and in its totemic display, silent, rigid, and earthy, plays upon Western fears of the unknown, the phantasmagorical and the “primitive.”

In one of her collages Mutu depicts a female figure-creature as fused above with a root system of jungle-like trees and underbrush. Vivid tropical flower blossoms ornamentally surround her and outline of leaves and other natural flora also suggest native plants of Kenya. These roots and vines morph into veins and arteries, the inner workings of a human body and lead toward what seems the human heart organ in the middle of the female figure’s form. While the central placement of this figure relays perhaps divinity, drawn from female creative power, and suggest a Christian Eve as well in the garden of Eden, or the trinity of Christian Marys, the figure is subverted by its overall animalistic imagery. A serpent-headed creature or reptilian figure emerges from her genitalia. The figure’s Blackness is at once Paganistic, her body sexualized and intertwined with fertile natural flora and fauna. Her nude black flesh however lays claim to her “primitive” and primal otherness. But this otherness is also the cliché of the white European gaze which intellectually cannot escape its own racist perspectives. Mutu however creates an art that works on so many levels of perception and irony, as both racial, gender and colonialist critique, but also as imaginative project to restore a Black-centric tradition, to create images and iconography and female perception enough to reach, if not find parity or move beyond the Western tradition’s hegemony. It is indeed wise the New Museum fills its galleries with a complete retrospective of Mutu’s work and thereby gives it the expansive and protean “truth” that can saturate the Western- centric viewer, fully infiltrating the psychic space that has so long existed as vacuum when it comes to African and Black art. Mutu’s female figure contradicts and remains distinct from a hundred years of female representation in Western and Christian art.

            To use Mutu’s phrase, I was indeed infiltrated psychically by the looming scale and massive breadth of Mutu’s creative vision which defied easy Western references: Rousseau’s dark lion in a forest canvass with its strange Black gypsy flutist in an enigmatic fantastical setting;  the spiritual surrealism of French symbolist painters like Moreau who dabbled in exotic “orientalism” and the derangement of the senses; or even Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings which reveled in a “primitive” tropical decorative style bound to a French colonial perspective. This perspective often drew as we know from the white male gaze, but here Mutu brings her own female vision, one that resynthesizes or redresses what was purely produced by men in a world where men were the primary cultural workers, and a white world at that, which grotesquely deformed the global community.  

Mutu’s frequent use of bronze in her sculptures, while suggesting an archaic Greco-Roman Western tie, is subverted by the subject matter these materials are used to portray. Bronze, the portentous material of noble Western patriarchal historical representation as in statues of warriors, soldiers, dictators, conquerors, leaders, and kings, are here applied to female and Black figures. This reversal and appropriation inverts both the power relationships and captures the matriarchal aspects of African history.

On the top museum floor, a bronze yoga mat extends over the bronze body and face and partial limbs of a female form lying underneath. Mutu takes on a more contemporary subject for her work—the female figure’s hands have colored nail polish on them and the feet are still in high-heels. However, by giving such elemental weightiness to both this central human form and the earthy fibrous mat, as well as her trappings of femininity in the shoes and nails, Mutu draws forth a larger theme of death and mythic consequence almost noble centrality. The woman is the central figure of this weighty “statue” and in her supine corpse-pose with hidden face, she is at once both powerful, a ceremonially draped austere subject, or maybe quite the opposite, a female crushed and defeated by the various oppression she has been born to bear.

            Mutu’s interspecies transformations suggests the very fluidity of the natural world and of Earth and moves far from the more rational Cartesian orderings of a Western tradition of biologic order and classification. Hers is not a world of patriarchal division and linear thinking. Her imagination is wholly in synch with her Kenyan roots and she empowers all her art with a feminist strength and non-linear narratology where, perhaps in its essentialism of binaries, female-male so long fixed in Western thought, is a more fluid and transitional way of thinking. Female figures abound in Mutu’s work but ones that are transformative, elliptical, all-embracing and protean.

            In her video work “The End of carrying All” 2015, Mutu, playing herself embarks on a journey across a Kenyan landscape carrying a large basket on her head. The basket is progressively filled with various consumer items, bicycle wheels, oil towers, an entire city until she is forced to collapse under their weight and turns into a molten mass which dissipates into the earth. Indeed, as the exhibition notes, this video piece “plays as an allegorical warning of nature’s capacity to correct for the flagrancies of destructive consumerism.” But I would also suggest, the artist herself has carried the weight so long of the Western Tradition and Western culture and its artistic cultural iconography, that she ultimately collapses under this aesthetic tradition. Instead, she merges with the African land and its essence, to reconstitute and transform her art. At the same time, she attests to the need to return to a maternal kinship with the Earth, especially in regard to Climate Change and Western culture’s race toward technological prowess and consumer luxury.

            It is no surprise that several of her animalistic sculptures and Black creaturely forms appear to come of Egyptian historical mythography and cultural imagery. Egypt as we know represents a Black culture reaching far further back before Greco-Roman civilization. The hybrid gods of hieroglyphics and the unique way Egyptian civilization integrated the natural rhythms of the Nile into its culture, deifying sun, moon, and Earth, perhaps is Mutu’s rich source for inspiration.

            A complex artist, I found myself contemplating Mutu’s work long after leaving the museum. Her protean imagination has appeared to have seemingly overnight shifted the paradigm of Eurocentric Western modern art, toward one richly Afro-centric and Post-colonial. Her work questions by its distinct alterity the very underpinnings of Western modernity.

By Walter Holland, April 2023, NYC