On our second stop of the night, a show at Material that hadn’t drawn anywhere near the crowd it deserved, I heard someone who shall remain nameless remark that they tended to like the artists that showed at the Power House if not always the shows themselves. I hate to admit it publicly (partly for fear of offending my friends who work for the organization and partly for fear of castigation), but I tend to be of much the same mind upon leaving a show there. Even great artists are sometimes presented with the space and then seem to freeze. It’s such a formidable space that it tends to demand a formidable response, which some people are either unwilling or unable to provide. With her show opening tonight, “sleeping heads lie”, Wangechi Mutu proves she is capable of just such a formidable response.
Mutu begins by transforming the white walled modernist north gallery into a muted and pockmarked expanse for her mixed media collages to reside in. The walls themselves are a pale blue and pitted with small rust colored craters which seem to convey a past of violence or perhaps just the neglectful ravages of time; even outside of the art world it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.
Each of the eight collages is an enthralling assemblage of fashion, nature, pornography, chrome and a smattering of distinctly African images compiled into menaced human forms (mostly heads), many of whom seem to be imploring something of their viewers. It is the nature of this kind of collage to dehumanize its subject (think De Kooning), but in the hands of Mutu the technique does exactly the opposite. The figures in these collages, for all their disfigurations, seem almost more human than any straight rendering of form could be.
The cavernous south gallery contains an installation called “Muddy Water.” It consists primarily of a dozen or so clotheslines lighted from above, holding a wide range of mostly dark colored, worn clothing. Viewed from the balcony looking down into the space, the highest row of clothing was on the far wall, at about eye level. From the lower floor, however, the clothes provids a fascinatingly textured visual ceiling. Sharing the space with the viewer are ten hot plates scattered around the burnt orange floor, bearing pots of water and wine of various colors and stages of boiling. This gave the room a certain musk, which seemed to lay claim to the environment that the artist has created for her viewers.
Critically I find this work to be an invigorating struggle that I’ve still not fully resolved. I found myself trying to make sense of what my eyes were telling me and I kept running into frameworks I know to be false. Any construct I have of femininity or Africanity (a term I’m borrowing from Olu Oguibe) is based on Colonial notions contrived to support the ideas of people the likes of which I’m trying very hard not to become. I found myself staring into these faces and wrestling not with their Otherness, but my own.
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The artist is giving a gallery talk tomorrow afternoon at 3pm and I hope anyone who happens to read this will seriously consider going. And since you'll be in the neighborhood, you could always hang out and go the Lantana Show afterward (nudge nudge, wink wink).
