Ap Art History Framework Image 247 Preying Mantra Wangechi Mutu 2006 Mixed Media on Mylar

Wangechi Mutu, Preying Mantra, 2006, mixed media on mylar (Brooklyn Museum) © Wangechi Mutu, all rights reserved

Using the medium of collage, the artist Wangechi Mutu creates new worlds that re-imagine culture through the realm of fantasy. Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya and educated in Europe and the United States. Her art is global in nature and she clearly relishes complicating both Western and non-Western cultural norms, questioning how nosotros run across gender, sexuality, and even cultural identity.

Wangechi Mutu's artistic exercise includes video, installation, sculpture, and mixed-media collage. One of her recurrent themes concerns the violence of colonial domination in Africa (particularly in her native Kenya). Her images incorporate the female trunk, specifically an imagined "African" body, subjected to sexism and racism on a global scale.

Sources for Mutu's collages include fragments from style magazines, pornography, medical literature or even popular magazines such every bit National Geographic. Inspiration for her collages can be traced to the early on photomontages of the High german Dada artist Hannah Höch (below left) and the American artist Romare Bearden (beneath correct). Mutu appreciates Bearden'southward use of collage—how it emphasizes community and the African American traditions found in jazz, while the spliced images in Höch'due south photomontages reflect Mutu's interest in disrupting societal convention in art. Mutu creates a space for exploring an informed consciousness about beingness "African" and female that incorporate these artists' techniques all the same develops a new visual vocabulary.

Left: Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Federal republic of germany, collage, mixed media, 1919-1920 (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin); right: Romare Bearden, The Calabash, 1970, collage (Library of Congress)

Preying Mantra centers on female subjectivity, exoticism and the notion of hybridity—both in concept and imagery. Hybridity is a concept oft used in postcolonial studies. It describes how mixing the cultures of colonized and the colonizer tin produce a third space for newer and often disruptive understanding of cultural identity. Colonialism in Africa, which began in earnest in the nineteenth century, violently wrested power from Africans for the benefit of European nations through the enforcement of strict military and administrative controls. Every bit colonialism waned during the mid-twentieth century, other social and political bug emerged. Mutu's piece of work was shaped by this complex history and by issues such as the rights of women that came to the fore at the terminate of the century.

Wangechi Mutu, Preying Mantra (detail), 2006, mixed media on mylar (Brooklyn Museum) ​© Wangechi Mutu, all rights reserved

In Mutu'sPreying Mantra, a female brute appears to recline on a geometrically patterned blanket that is sprawled between copse or maybe on a tree branch. The blanket resembles a Kuba cloth (traditional material created by the Kuba people). Legs tightly crossed in front of her, the effigy stares suggestively at the viewer with her right mitt positioned backside her head, which is surmounted by a cone-like crown. Her relaxed posture is camouflaged by her pare, which appears dappled past sunlight and which mirrors the colors of the tree's leaves. Like the female body, the tree is emblematic of the cosmos myths found in many cultures, including Mutu'due south Kikuyu ancestors in Kenya. In her left hand, the effigy holds a green serpent that rests on the blanket which fills much of the scene. The serpent, linked with the role of Eve in the biblical creation narrative, provides yet another cultural source for Mutu'south protagonist. The tree envelops the female figure, reinforcing links betwixt history and fiction, African and Non-African cultural myths as well every bit natural versus unnatural phenomena.

Wangechi Mutu, Preying Mantra (detail), 2006, mixed media on mylar (Brooklyn Museum) ​© Wangechi Mutu, all rights reserved

The title Preying Mantra, recalls the praying mantis—an insect that resembles the protagonist in Mutu'due south collage, with her prominently bent legs. Equally a carnivorous insect, praying mantises cover-up themselves to friction match their environment, snaring their casualty with their enormous legs. During mating, the female can get a sexual cannibal—eating her submissive mate. Such imagery and its association with natural phenomena creates a primal sensibility. Despite this reference to a existent praying mantis, Mutu's "preying mantra" is also vulnerable to our gaze, suggesting that the figure may exist a victim that is "preyed" upon by "mantras." Mutu creates a natural, even primitive, fictional surround that entices and disturbs us even equally she invites us to explore stereotypes about the African female trunk as explicitly sexual, dangerous, and aesthetically deformed in relation to Western standards. Given that elements of the collage are assembled from sociocultural documents found in popular literature from the West, the figure may be preying on the viewer'south own fears and desires.

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Additional resources:

This work at the Brooklyn Museum

Wangechi Mutu on Failure (Art21 Mag)

Wangechi Mutu (Art21 Web log)

Wangechi Mutu + Santigold – The Stop of eating Everything – Nasher Museum at Duke, animated video by Mutu

Artist Breakfast With Wangechi Mutu (artnet video)

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journeying (video from the Brooklyn Museum)

Trevor Schoonmaker,Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (N Carolina: Nasher Museum of Art at Knuckles University, 2013)

mullenuncloyesseen.blogspot.com

Source: https://smarthistory.org/wangechi-mutu-preying-mantra/

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