Concerning Consequences STUDIES IN ART, DESTRUCTION, AND TRAUMA Kristine Stiles The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London KRISTINE STILES is the France Family Professor of Art, Art Flistory, and Visual Studies at Duke University. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2016 by Kristine Stiles All rights reserved. Published 2016. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 12345 ISBN­13: 978­0­226­77451­0 (cloth) ISBN­13: 978­0­226­77453­4 (paper) ISBN­13: 978­0­226­30440­3 (e­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226304403.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloguing­in­Publication Data Stiles, Kristine, author. Concerning consequences : studies in art, destruction, and trauma / Kristine Stiles, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978­0­226­77451­0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978­0­226­77453­4 (paperback : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978­0­226­30440­3 (e­book) 1. Art, Modern — 20th century. 2. Psychic trauma in art. 3. Violence in art. I. Title. N6490.S767 2016 709.04'075 —dc23 2015025618 © This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48­1992 (Permanence of Paper). In conversation with Susan Swenson, Kim Jones explained that the drawing on the cover of this book depicts directional forces in "an X­man, dot­man war game." The rectangles represent tanks and fortresses, and the lines are for tank movement, combat, and containment: "They're symbols. They're erased to show movement. 111 draw a tank, or I'll draw an X, and erase it, then re­draw it in a different posmon.... But when they're killed they're erased and fl A gh0St image­ 80 the erasing is 3 vefy 'mPortant elemen of the war drawings.... The important thing is that it's always 2005^ (SUSan Swenson' conversation with Kim Jones: April 25 0 1 4 W"°rkC'ty; WarP™<*™^ NY: Pierogi 2005], 4). Two years earl.er, Jones described his "war drawings" as mages 0 , hat ^ ends„ ^ q ^ ^ ^ A Studio Vuit wuh Km Jones, a fifteen­minute video codirected bv ' David Schmidlapp and Steve Staso (2003). Wangechi Mutu's Family Tree (2013)' Listen to Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan author and winner of the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing, commenting after an encounter with Wangechi Mutu's art. "Your power to rearrange what has been presented to control you is your powerful weapon," he explains, "for you can make what you want with your world."2 While Wainaina implicitly nods to a plural "you, believing us able to transform the world, he refers directly to Mutu's resourceful invention of composite portraits of the metaphorical "we" that she continually reforms in images, objects, and actions. Mutu works in every medium to invent this hybrid, from drawing, painting, and collage to sculpture, installation, performance, and film. She cuts into what separates us with the precision of a surgeon before suturing our reconstruction from fragile visual slivers of the wounded family of humankind, already fragmented, deformed, and traumatized. This essa\ is about Mutu's two-decades-long visual analysis of world culture and its plane tary rootedness in racial, sexual, economic, and national divides; war; and the violence of privilege. It is about Mutu's refusal to accept as invincible the con ventions of otherness that have been culturally naturalized to isolate and con quer; it is about her exacting reconstruction of shared states of collective sub­ jectivity and cultural agency; and it is about her effort to, in her words, reclaim an imagined future."3 INTERSUBJECTIVITY "The idea of clear-cut binaries — African/European, archaic/modern, and re ^ gious/ pornographic, I've never really believed in that, Mutu once commented To undo these binaries, she fuses the history of colonialism and its iconograp shards of diaspora, displacement, migration, and globalization with image, cybernetic, postbiological, hyphenated black, brown, and white bodies p proach to artmaking belongs to what Mary Louise Pratt described in 1991 as "arts of the contact zones" in which artists attend to the social spac ' cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. 5 Mutu s collage an ^ tion work delivers visual creolization as the corollary of contact construction of hybrid images of the family, Mutu pictures us, figure by figure, as prosthetic animals in all our contemporary creaturehood and bestiality, zoo­ philes morphed with English roses and African kings in a postcolonial rendition of natural curiosities and unnatural monstrosities.6 Contrary to the suggestion that she aims to create "something that is whole," Mutu rejects myths of unity and attempts "remaking the world as we once all were/are, animal/ human/ multi-shaded."7 This comment implies not homogeneity, but rather her ac­ knowledgment of the infinite intertwining and fluidity of life, and it suggests the point of view from which she unites our thick, convoluted history. Unencumbered by didacticism, and informed by theory without adhering to its dogmas, Mutu works with the cool reason of a world citizen and intellec­ tual whose art embodies the cosmopolitan ideal about which H. G. Wells com­ mented in 1939: "All history is against it. But all reality is for it."8 What "reality" (namely the multiplicity of truths that comprise the real) is "for" is the ideal of intersubjectivity "across principles of subjectivity," as Peter Hitchcock put it in 2007.9 Such an ideal is what Gayatri Spivak described when she wrote of a "planetarity" unity realized "through the transforming work of imagining the impossible other as that figured other imagines us."10 This intersubjectivity is also the I/we that Jean-Luc Nancy has described as "being singular plural," and which Hitchcock has called "the logic of the both."11 Merging subjectivities might produce the ideal of a multiethnic, multiracial, pluralistic amalgam of imperfect, eccentric composite beings that "the family" already is, but which it has yet to bring to full collective consciousness, social recognition, and politi­ cal realization. Mutu's art is the pictorial embodiment of this ideal, one that pic­ tures the awkward, failed, but philosophically moving attempt to arrive—even momentarily—at what must and can only be an image of constantly shifting needs, desires, identity, and knowledge in the effort to imagine the other imag­ ining us.12 I introduce these diverse theoretical propositions in order to place Mutu's work squarely within the domain of a philosophical conversation on intersub­ jectivity, as well as to introduce them from the "logic of the both" to suggest that Mutu's art conveys visually how one might appear as concurrently individual and collective —not as collective in a parochial sense, but rather as simulta­ neously human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and more. At the same time, while it pictures an imaginary "us," Mutu's visual language is critical. Mutu scrutinizes theoretical, art historical, and curatorial traditions, constructs, and practices, and remains a trenchant producer of transracial, transsexual, transnational, cosmopolitan, and urban images of heterogeneity in which intersubjectivity is a give-and-take between singular and plural. In these ways, she avoids the dan­ ger of the "elision ... by Western postmodernist theory of African artists living and working in the Western metropolis," which Okwui Enwezor has identified," and the mere rehash of entrenched modernist attitudes and methods" cloaked in new theoretical terms, which has been rebuffed by Olu Oguibe.14 Just to pose the question of where an African artist is born, Oguibe insists, is to raise the 344 I WANGECHI MUTU'S FAMILY TREE specter of colonialism. Still —biography matters. Mutu's life appears embedded in her art, with stealth and multeity, but in her recent attention to the family tree she classifies the origins of her work as belonging definitively to Africa. Born in Nairobi, where she was educated, Mutu attended her last years of high school in Wales, followed by college and graduate school in the United States. Thinking of Kenya as her birthplace, Mutu admits: "When you live in such a country it's easy to dismiss the role it plays in forming your identity. But after you live out­ side it for a long time, you realize that the big animals that inhabit the not-so- wild wilderness, a few indigenous locals, and sometimes a marathon runner or two are not a sufficient definition of your homeland."15 Indeed, Kenya is the site of "Turkana Boy," one of the earliest paleontological examples of a nearly com­ plete hominid, the skeleton of which was discovered in 1984 near Lake Turkana. Estimated to be some 1.5 million years old, Turkana proved Kenya, along with other east African countries from Ethiopia to South Africa, to be the site of the origins of Homo sapiens and, hence, the family tree. It is this history to which art critic and novelist Simon Njami refers when he writes, "It is impossible to comprehend fully what Africa is [because] none of our pre-conceived notions, certitudes, or intuitions would suffice to account for the schizophrenic reality of this continent";16 each country has adapted "in their own way" because "Africa is both very old and very young."17 All of Mutu's work traverses and conjoins the primordial with the imme­ diacy of the present, laying waste to origins and labels. In this process, Mutu realizes an approach to culture and art akin to what Oguibe advocates when he asserts: "To undermine the idea of the African is to exterminate an entire dis­ cursive and referential system and endanger whole agendas."'" Throwing into question and destabilizing normative categories of race, sex, gender, location, nation, and species, Mutu's art represents a singular effort to dismantle visual regimes that contribute to repression, using our family detritus, duplicity, and inherent capacity for violence against each other, and disclosing our uglv face in all its beauty and grace.