Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg
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Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Art and Design Theses Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design 12-2009 Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg Nicole R. Smith Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/art_design_theses Part of the Art and Design Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Nicole R., "Wangechi Mutu: Feminist Collage and the Cyborg." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2009. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/art_design_theses/51 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art and Design Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WANGECHI MUTU: FEMINIST COLLAGE AND THE CYBORG by NICOLE R. SMITH Under the Direction of Susan Richmond ABSTRACT Wangechi Mutu is an internationally recognized Kenyan-born artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. She creates collaged female figures composed of human, animal, object, and machine parts. Mutu’s constructions of the female body provide a transcultural critique on the female persona in Western culture. This paper contextualizes Mutu’s work and artistic strategies within feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial narratives on collage, while exploring whether collage strategies are particularly useful for feminist artists. In their fusion of machine and organism, Mutu’s characters are visual metaphors for feminist cyborgs, particularly those outlined by Donna Haraway. In this paper, I examine parallels between collage as an aesthetic strategy and the figure of the cyborg to suggest meaningful ways of approaching differences between women and how they experience life in contemporary Western culture. INDEX WORDS: Wangechi Mutu, Collage, Feminist art, Cyborg, Donna Haraway, Western art, Postmodern art, Postcolonial art, Contemporary art, Machine, Organism, Kenya, Female persona, Assemblage, Photomontage, Constructed identity WANGECHI MUTU: FEMINIST COLLAGE AND THE CYBORG By NICOLE R. SMITH A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2009 Copyright by Nicole R. Smith 2009 WANGECHI MUTU: FEMINIST COLLAGE AND THE CYBORG by NICOLE R. SMITH Committee Chair: Susan Richmond Committee: Amira Jarmakani Kimberly Cleveland Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University December 2009 iv For Nick v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Georgia State University staff and students with whom I have had the opportunity to learn, explore, and share ideas. Together they have provided an encouraging and open environment within which to pursue my education and this thesis. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Dr. Susan Richmond, whose courses and continued guidance have proven invaluable along the way. I also wish to acknowledge my committee members, Dr. Amira Jarmakani and Dr. Kimberly Cleveland. Their insights and perspectives have greatly strengthened my thesis, and I sincerely appreciate their willingness to serve on my committee. To my colleagues at the High Museum of Art, thank you for your understanding and your support throughout this process. I must also thank my family and friends, who never failed to believe in me nor doubted my abilities. Last but not least, I wish to extend my appreciation to Heather Medlock, whose editing expertise was a huge help during the final stages of writing my thesis. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v LIST OF FIGURES vii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. WANGECHI MUTU, COMPLICIT RADICAL 5 3. FEMINISM AND COLLAGE 42 4. RETHINKING CYBORGS 69 5. CONCLUSION 87 BIBLIOGRAPHY 89 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Wangechi Mutu, Untitled, 1997 21 Figure 2. Wangechi Mutu, Untitled, 1997 22 Figure 3. Jean-Paul Goude, Grace Jones Revised and Updated, Cut-Up Ekta, 23 New York, 1978 Figure 4. Jean-Paul Goude, Grace Jones, Roseland Ballroom, New York, 1978 24 Figure 5. Installation of pin-ups at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 25 2003 Figure 6. Wangechi Mutu, Pin-Up, 2001 26 Figure 7. Wangechi Mutu, Pin-Up, 2001 27 Figure 8. Wangechi Mutu, Pin-Up, 2001 28 Figure 9. Wangechi Mutu, Figures, 2003 29 Figure 10. Hannah Höch, The Sweet One, from From an Ethnographic Museum, 30 ca. 1926 Figure 11. Hannah Höch, Strange Beauty, from From an Ethnographic Museum, 31 1929 Figure 12. Wangechi Mutu, various from Classic Profile series, 2002–2003 32 Figure 13. Wangechi Mutu, The Hunt, from the Creatures Series, 2002 33 Figure 14. Wangechi Mutu, Fungus, 2003 34 Figure 15. Wangechi Mutu, Fungus, 2003 35 Figure 16. Wangechi Mutu, The Bourgeois is Banging on My Head, 2003 36 Figure 17. Wangechi Mutu, I Am Your Brokenhearted Fantasy, 2003 37 Figure 18. Wangechi Mutu, installation detail of The Ark Collection at Sikkema 38 Jenkins Gallery, New York, 2006 Figure 19. Wangechi Mutu, Untitled, from The Ark Collection, 2006 39 viii Figure 20. Wangechi Mutu, Untitled, from The Ark Collection, 2006 40 Figure 21. Wangechi Mutu, Mask, from The Ark Collection, 2006 41 Figure 22. Wangechi Mutu, Le Noble Savage, 2006 63 Figure 23. Wangechi Mutu, Misguided Little Unforgiveable Hierarchies, 2005 64 Figure 24. Candice Breitz, Rainbow Series #1, 1996 65 Figure 25. Candice Breitz, Rainbow Series #6, 1996 66 Figure 26. Fatimah Tuggar, Fusion Cuisine, 2000 67 Figure 27. Fatimah Tuggar, Robo Makes Dinner, 2001 68 Figure 28. Wangechi Mutu, Try Dismantling the Little Empire Inside of You, 2007 85 Figure 29. Wangechi Mutu, Preying Mantra, 2006 86 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Wangechi Mutu is an internationally recognized Kenyan-born artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. She creates artworks ranging from sculptures to variously sized collages on paper and Mylar, site-specific installations, and videos. Regardless of the medium, collage and assemblage are important artistic strategies for the artist, who uses them to explore gendered and racialized identities as mapped onto the female body. Her collages on paper and Mylar often present female figures composed of human, animal, object, and machine parts. Among the sources for her mismatched fragments and decorative patterns are pornographic, fashion, travel, and automotive magazines, in addition to colorful coffee-table books on African art produced by and for Western audiences. Mutu fuses an assortment of body parts and extremities with hand-drawn and -painted elements. It is often the female body in an endless variety of new formations that she chooses to construct. In so doing, she provides a transcultural critique of the female persona as dramatized and represented in Western culture. Mutu’s choice of collage as a specific aesthetic strategy might seem insignificant— simply a reflection of the way collage is widespread within contemporary artistic practice. Collage and montage are perhaps taken for granted as part of everyday life in contemporary Western culture. Collage informs the way Westerners experience their image-saturated, consumer culture, with media outlets of all varieties adding to the cacophony of juxtaposed advertisements, commercials, and live news feeds available any time of day or night. Against this backdrop of contemporary culture, has collage become passé? Has it lost its subversive and critical potential due to its co-optation by mass consumer culture? What might it mean for Mutu, 2 a contemporary female artist addressing issues of gender, race, and the body, to employ collage as a specific method and aesthetic strategy? Do these choices limit her work, make it less forceful, in some way? Such questions ground my examination of Mutu’s collage work. This thesis first provides an overview of Mutu’s works from the late 1990s through the present, focusing on a few of her more prominent series, including Pin-Ups, Classic Profiles, Figures, and The Ark Collection. The artist’s comments and descriptions of both her motivating interests and her constructed figures themselves serve as the guiding voice in this overview. I begin with a close look at Mutu’s early student sculptures of “fake” ethnographic specimens and artifacts. Her critical stance on gender and racial stereotypes, assumptions, and misconceptions, as well as her biting wit, are evident from the start. Her titles are at times ironic and provocative, teasing and pushing the viewer to look deeper into the collaged layers that comprise her figures. In addition to her predominantly small-scale series listed above, Mutu also began creating larger- scale collage figures around 2003. While the smaller collage series are often paper-based, the larger figures are generally created on a plastic film or Mylar substrate. In both formats, Mutu experiments with photographic-based collage elements intermixed with decorative or abstract patterns, which together fuse into simultaneously familiar and otherworldly beings framed within the artist’s charged and sardonic titles. Following this initial overview, the “Feminism and Collage” chapter contextualizes Mutu’s work and her artistic strategies within various feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial narratives on collage. While accepted accounts of collage in art history situate its origin within modern art of the early twentieth century, feminist histories of collage tell a different story. The feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s, who were engaged in reclaiming lost female