Wangechi Mutu: Cultural Cutouts

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan collage artist living in New York. Her collages generally feature the black female figure, however, not classically depicted. Rather, her work is formed by the media she collects. Mutu's collages question the lack of depiction of the black female in American media, from television shows to magazines. Her work is not about the female figure, as much as it is about the absence of representation that women like Mutu get in the contemporary world. The collages start from a series of cutting and dismembering and destroying, then “surgically” combining again. In doing this, she is also destroying the hierarchy of color and norm of representation which she does not agree with. Mutu’s work deconstructs reality (or a representation of it, anyways) to create a dream-like fantasy of her own. She is able to bend reality into something that makes more sense to her and her background. The composite images are dynamic, moving, and something she finds would inspire women like her.

Mutu’s work is hand-collaged, rather than digitally composed, unlike the assignment we are about to begin. Because of this, her work tends to reflect a different meaning. Her collage technique, too, is different from how we will render our final images. Her works are done through organic shapes carefully cut and reassembled to fit together into new forms. This is unlike how we will combine images in rectangular cuttings to create a pixelated grid of overlapping and cropped images. Conceptually, these are very different. Mutu physically cuts into the world’s ideals to recreate her own world. She makes representation out of the lack of it. Alternatively, we will likely use the digital format to make comments on digital mass-media forms and that relationship to the physical real world. I think that Mutu’s work is especially intimate in its handmade nature, and this is a perfect way for her to assemble her own representation and identity. I think that our work might represent ideas less personal, and perhaps more about the more impersonal world (I’m not quite sure how to put this into words). For example, we may create amorphous pixelated images of media’s impact on the environment or on the human psyche. These are broader issues that don’t necessarily have to do with my family and my heritage and my people, rather, the consequences of technology on everyone. Digitally-rendered works are beneficial for this kind of accessibility and almost anonymity while still remaining the integrity of an original combination of images to speak a certain message.