Voluptuous horror

Wangechi Mutu harnesses the power of violence and beauty.

By Glen Helfand

The room has an odor somewhere between those of vinegar and yeast. It's a comforting scent, yet one that suggests something has gone bad.

Smell, as we're often told, is the most powerful memory trigger, and so encountering this complex perfume will invariably provoke intense associations. The gallery is visually dominated by three antique New England chairs with tall legs, extensions grafted on to create what seem like thrones with spindly spider appendages. Above them, where the head of a seated person might be, are bottles suspended from the ceiling. They slowly emit single drops of wine that filter through the chair seats and create expressionistic splatters on the floor, along with that unmistakable smell.

For those who have become familiar with Wangechi Mutu's artwork – insistent, dazzling collages that have quickly entered international museum collections in places like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Chicago, New York City's Museum of Modern Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and have been published in glossy magazines – these sculptures come as a pleasant surprise. In her powerful "New Work" exhibition at SFMOMA, the artist offers concrete evidence of her skill at creating images and environments that conjure both beauty and horror.

A bloody mess

Mutu, 33, was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and moved to New York in the mid-1990s to study anthropology. She later studied sculpture at Yale, where she earned her MFA. In person, Mutu is wonderfully articulate and poised: She considers questions seriously but is not above punctuating her explanations with an occasional self-effacing smile. Her winning manner has a way of making it clear that the horrific elements of her pieces are very consciously tempered with wit and a rich sense of beauty.

Her work is also quite focused on images of women and violence. Her female figures are constructed with a colorful range of elements snipped from glossy porn publications (which feature, she's stated, the most realistic depictions of brown skin), fashion rags (in all the alluring tones of this season's cosmetics), and newsmagazines. The intricate interplay of these elements is used in the service of creating lush landscapes and characters engaged in struggles that often result in blossoming spurts of blood, which take a few moments to comprehend. Mutu has an impressive facility for representing the complex, ambiguous range of issues that arise from powerful actions.

"There are elements and references to violence, but my work is not about violence," she explains with a British-tinted accent. "It concerns what brings about violence and ideas of power – female power, how history is proscribed or worked out on the bodies of women."

In the case of her SFMOMA installation The Chief's Lair Is a Bloody Mess, it also plays out on the walls of the institution. The two collages extend beyond the boundaries of their surfaces: Images of gunshots are expressed in a splatter of blood-red pigment that sprays off the picture plane and onto the white gallery wall. Even more impressive is an architectural installation composed of small gouges, resembling gunshot holes and festering wounds made directly in the massive gallery wall. As Mutu exposed the internal plaster, she tinted it red, creating fleshy shapes that fan out like a constellation.

The artist offers that these works are inspired by war-ravaged walls in places like Pakistan, Iraq, and Sarajevo, but while discussing her work, she also readily acknowledges her observant perspective as an immigrant living in the United States, post-9/11.

"One of the things I've noticed about living in the States is that people rarely see true images of places where brutality is played out on civilian lives, places where it's not just a war between soldiers or people who want to be violent," she says. "People assume it's someone else's responsibility to fix things – a leader can sit on his seat and tell people to go out and fight the wars they have created."

In creating this installation, she continues, "I position myself as a violator, a person who destroys. There's something horribly satisfying about it. Institutional walls become my playground, my place of transgression. People have to clean up after you. You don't just put out negativity and create havoc in the world. It's a cycle that comes around. Someone has to come around to heal the wall. And it takes a lot to repair – perhaps more than it does for me to create them. It's also creating that cycle of responsibility that's part of the performance of this piece."

Fittingly, Mutu acknowledges choreographers Pina Bausch and Bill T. Jones among her inspirations. "They're people who use the body as a language," she adds. "Nonverbal, visual means of communicating ideas I care about." She also nods to scientists, environmentalists, and feminist activists as her mentors.

In her head

In discussing the exhibition's centerpiece, a large 2005 collage titled Bloody Head Games, Mutu comes across as nothing if not responsible. She has well-articulated, clearly thought-out rationales and inspirations for her images and admits to having a "Catholic-obsessed mind." That perspective stems from attending Catholic school, an education redolent with darkly glamorous and grisly images of martyrs and saints – of "people drinking puss, holy things that made humble characters larger than life." Likewise, the collage depicts a powerful female whose stance combines Jesus on the crucifix with a warrior who poses with her feet atop her bounty: four decapitated male heads.

"She's got a stance I've seen in hundreds of photographs in Kenya – men putting a leg on the head of their prey," Mutu says. "It's sad – they're usually big animals. I wanted to have that image of triumph and arrogance." Yet, like all her work, those troublesome attributes are further complicated by the lushness of their rendering.

And Mutu is rightfully proud of her creation. "I think she's gorgeous – even though she is a murderess," she says with a friendly laugh.

'New Work: Wangechi Mutu' runs through April 2 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. Hours 11 a.m.-5:45 p.m. daily (except Wednesdays); open till 8:45 p.m. Thursdays. $7-$12.50; half price on Thursdays, 6-8:45 p.m.; free the first Tuesday of the month. (415) 357-0971.