A twisted sister returns home
“I was a loner and the visual arts were a perfect lab for my kind ... and besides, there were tons of similar cold-shoulder experiences from my family that made me more and more comfortable with the idea of creating in solitude and postponing, or completely eliminating, the need for an audience’s reaction.
“Figuring things out for myself ... tinkering around with materials and images to fulfil my own epiphanies was something I learned very early.”
The fact that Mutu is an internationally renowned Kenyan artist born of a high muckety-muck Gikuyu bloodline who has lived and worked in a Bedford–Stuyvesant, or Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn brownstone for nearly a decade should be, by itself, enough to qualify her as an “Afrofuturist”.
If only you, or anyone else, actually knew what an Afro-futurist really is. We could hazard to say that Afro-futurism, like Afro-punk, Afrosurrealism, and neohoodooism, are the default black cultural nationalist imaginaries of this historical moment. This is to say, they are all broad umbrella terms for black née Gikuyu creatives and black née Kenyan collectivities that privilege black née African identity, black née postsoul self-determination, black weirdness, and black SF (alternately and fluidly meaning the genres of science fiction or speculative fiction, to critical theorists of the genre).
Duke Ellington once said that the only music and musicians he was interested in were those who were “beyond category”. He also told Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie that the worst thing they ever did was let critics name their (black) art “bebop”, because it boxed them in.
Charlie Parker himself once observed: “They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But man, there’s no boundary line to art.” Once upon a time bassist and composer Charles Mingus begged us to consider All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother.
If your father and mother were the grandson and granddaughter of Gikuyu chieftains you could conceivably be Wangechi Mutu by now. Even though Mutu will tell you she doesn’t know where the funk she came from. She, who answers positively to the charge of being a cultural anomaly. “I sometimes look at my parents and wonder, ‘Where in the hell did I come from?’ ”
Mutu recalls her devout grandmother almost never discussing the Gikuyu’s cultural past. On the other hand, she also recalls her Mau Mau generation grandparents as being far more politically radical than either of her parents. She has made a series of videos in which she as protagonist symbolises the horrors of the Middle Passage [the Atlantic slave trade], Rwanda, madness, homelessness.
Her installation Exhuming Gluttony can be seen as her riff on How the West Was Won, though there are subtle allusions to her bovine-throat slitting Maasai homeboys in there too if you look hard enough. We could not begin to tell you what is undeniably Kenyan or Gikuyu about Mutu’s art.
“There’s still so much to do. Not the least of which is returning home. As much as I feel like I was dropped into my family from some alien spaceship — an aquatic being in the land of hills and rusty soil — my work will not mean enough to me or any one I truly care for until I can make it from back home. My work will be most fulfilling when I connect it with my history, my people, my land.”