kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
(via Border Crossings Magazine | Issue 105)
BORDER CROSSINGS: What emerges in your work is that collage is a natural way of recognizing how you view the world. If the world is a broken place, then is collage a way of demonstrating that brokenness or a way of putting it together again?
WANGECHI MUTU: It’s both. Because in the end, the image has a beauty to it. It’s not something I’m afraid to address and I’m not trying to dissuade conversation. I’m optimistic and I believe we grow and will learn to heal. I guess I’m in this in-between situation, culturally, economically and socially, where I’m not ignorant about how these things relate to one another and the bridges between them.
I love collage because I studied sculpture and I’m fascinated by material. The kinds of things I choose in the collage have a very particular resonance for me. So if I pick up a National Geographic or Motorbike magazine, it’s about what it stands for and who reads it and why. What is its purpose and how are women’s bodies used in there?As a woman of colour, how I’m represented in these publications is of absolute relevance and importance to me because it tells me where I stand in that particular culture. So, in that way, collage tells us not just what cultures have produced but what they’ve fostered.
Q Your art is beautiful, but can also be difficult to look at. Why is it important for you to conjure both?
A I think the fact that we can’t agree on what is beautiful and ugly is one of the things my work is founded upon. I don’t go out of my way to do either one or the other, and I don’t see massive divisions between them. It is hard when I ask people what they find beautiful and disturbing in my work, because I don’t always agree. I’m like, “You don’t find this beautiful? It’s beautiful to me.” But the discussion of what is beautiful and what is ugly is really deep and visceral. It’s also a point of contention, because we often have beauty standards that only work in one direction. …
Wangechi Mutu observes: “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.”
Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s collages explore the split nature of cultural identity, referencing colonial history, fashion and contemporary African politics.
on Wangechi Mutu
from egodesign: “Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s elaborate collages mimic amputation, transplant operations and bionic prosthetics. Her figures become satirical mutilations. Their forms are grotesquely marred through perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or self-inflicted improvements of plastic surgery. Mutu examines how ideology is very much tied to corporeal form. She cites a European preference to physique that has been inflicted on and adapted by Africans, resulting in both social hierarchy and genocide.”
ahnka: “i would see wangechi walking up the block and want to stop her and ramble on and on about how the first time i came in contact with her work, i was shook. but she was always looking busy and i was a little intimidated by gorgeousness. then one summer(?) i was in down home and miami art museum was exhibiting a series of her work and she was doing an artist talk. where was i? front row, wide-eyed, taking notes while she spoke of reconfiguring black bodies with magazine photos and watercolors.”
(via exiledsoul)
