A rainy day, so what better to do than visit the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum on Unter der Linden on a Monday when admission is free. We were in luck, for we were able to see an impressive new show of selected works by Wangechi Mutu, an artist born in Kenya in 1972 and educated in the U.K. and in at the Cooper Union and Yale in the U.S. Wikipedia sums up her work as follows:
She creates painted and collaged images of female figures, first painting outline images on PET film, then adding detail with photographic fragments of idealised women collected from print magazines. She uses a variety of materials including archival adhesive, ink, glitter, paint, soil and pearls.
Further,
The figures generally feature grotesque distortions of form and skin texture, which critics read as commentary on a variety of feminist and racial issues ("of the history of women's representation, of cultural migration, global identity; of a litany of historical violence and destruction; of colonial legacies, exoticism and voyeuristic fascination").
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a dark, murky video projected on a dark banner hanging from the high ceiling called “Mud Shower.” A naked black woman initially stands in a twelve foot high kind of shower-stall made of stones, open at the top and to the camera and the viewer, while water and clumps of mud rain down on her body. She gradually leans over and then folds over seemingly defeated in a fetal position as the water and mud pelt down on her body with increasing intensity. Fade to black. The images are moving and telling.
Mutu disclaims solely African imagery or concerns. She wants to provide a vision of a future in which “more and more people, as migrants and permanent travelers, are becoming part of the ‘AlieNation.’ In her view, cultural identity is no longer determined by geographical origins, ancestry or biological disposition, but is increasingly becoming a hybrid construct that people can determine and change themselves.” [Can you say, Barry Sotero?] [From the Museum program, and before that from every book that Semiotext(e) at Columbia University have been publishing for twenty years.] I would comment: fair enough, provided that that state of affairs continues and that movement of peoples continues to be financed and motivated by prosperity in the parts of the world that are attracting in-migrations. If the world economy stagnates, no one moves.
The program essay concludes:
“With their masses of (re)produced images and materials, Mutu’s collages and installations address the issue of waste, the daily overload of media pictures, consumerism, ruthless exploitation of natural economic, and spiritual resources, a world where bodies have become commodities.” [To which I reply: Well, kinda and sorta. This might reflect some of the intent of the artist, but it appears more to reflect the intent of the curator. Thankfully the images are about so much more, are so richer and are such fantastic art.] The program then quotes Mutu: “I have a theory that there’s an incredible waste of resources, imagination and ideas – although they are right in front of us. Often you find them in places you’d least expect: in areas with incredible poverty, with people who seem to be the least educated, but who are actually quite ingenious because they’re still alive despite the conditions they live in. In a way, my exhibition is a homage to their systems, to their way of working, to this kind of tenacity and ingenuity.”
Several comments: (i) The idea of the noble savage dies hard. (ii) Most of the people of the world are constantly overlooked because by definition the dominant cultures have a short attention span and are myopic. This will never change, no matter how hard Ms. Mutu tries. (iii) Most of these people are “still alive,” unless they have been killed by machetes in Ruanda or by suicide bombers in market places by people who appear t be equally spirited, ingenious and tenacious, as well as also being environmentallyt destructive. (iv) All of the ideas propounded by Ms. Mutu have been current in the post-Marxist literature for at least 30 years, witness the writings of the redoubtable French psychiatrist/philosopher/activist, Felix Guattari,* among others, who focused on the creativity and social change he believed could result from social interactions of people freed from domination of (to use imprecise shorthand) economic necessity . He said:
“It is quite conceivable that a different kind of society could be organized, one that would preserve processes of singularization in the order of desire, without entailing total confusion at the scale of production and society, and without entailing generalized violence and an inability on the part of humanity to manage life. “
"Singularization is what enables us to produce, both in the material field and in the subjective field, the conditions of collective life and, at the same time, the conditions of embodying life."
*Guattari, Felix, and Rolnick, Suely, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Translated by Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2008, originally published as Micropolitica: Cartographica de desejo, 1986, page 319 and page 91.
No matter. It’s a terrific exhibition.
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