I am jet-lagged and it is cloudy this morning in Los Angeles. I have that beautiful feeling of being home after a trip to New York City that took on the energy of a movie montage, flitting from Sam Irby’s QUIETLY HOSTILE launch with Cynthia Nixon at Symphony Space to the Scribner offices to meet the incredible team behind RIPE, then to a beautiful wedding between my friends Lincoln Michel and Mika Kasuga.
In between all of those big moments were smaller ones which were just as beautiful: A cackling dinner with Erin Somers, a movie and running errands with Sam Glatt. I understand if all of this sounds like name dropping, but here is the reality: these are my friends. These are the people I love. And the big and smaller moments with them are the only thing that keeps me going.
I’m in the liminal pre-publication space where I feel like a ghost. It is similar to the feeling you get in the weeks before you move to a new city: you’re still in the old city, but nothing that happens there is exactly real because there’s a future you waiting just around the corner, in a new place, a next life that’s in a perfect white egg about to crack open and hatch.
Everyone keeps asking “How’s the book going? It looks like everything is great!” and it is. I am not saying this to kiss ass, but my agents, my editor, my publicists, my marketing teams -- everyone has been absolutely killing it. The early reviews have been a blessing. And if you had told me in my early 20s that one day I’d be getting starred reviews from PW and Kirkus then flying across the country to take a yellow cab uptown to meet my entire publishing office at Simon & Schuster with my agent, I would have laughed in your face and done another shot of vodka before making out with a bad man and blacking out in my bed.
But there is also a way in which it is hard for me to be IN this moment. I keep trying to bring myself back into my body, but there is a disassociation that I can’t quite stop — at Simon & Schuster, one of the higher ups complimented RIPE and I couldn’t stop myself from gesturing at the copy of the book on the conference room table and blurting out “I don’t know who wrote that! Who is she!? Good for her!”
All of this to say: I am hoarding my moments of delight, the moments that pull me back into my body and remind me that I’m here and surrounded by people I love who are pushing their own art into new places, who are next to me, who are with me, who are finding love and making work, and who don’t let me float away from the earth entirely.
And in my quiet moments, alone, sometimes I burst into tears from the joy of it all, that life could be so bad for so long and then, finally, maybe, get good again, that all of the suffering it took to write this book might have meant something in the end.
But Why Am I Crying! In The New Museum!
But anyway, this is about crying. Let’s get back to crying. In New York, I stay in Soho which is the bougiest sentence I could possibly type. But I love it there: Every morning, I walk through the streets with a giant Starbucks (to quote Sam Irby: I LIKE IT!!!) and watch the sun come up through the slits between the buildings, the stores opening their doors like sleepy mouths, the hip people navigating the blocks, the art behind the glass windows that I can see but can’t quite get to because the galleries have erratic hours and I’m never there at exactly the right time.
I can’t stay in New York for much longer than three or four days without devolving into a monster because the city is too chaotic. But for the first few days, it is incredible to be there, to pretend I live there.
But the best part about staying in Soho is that I can walk to the New Museum. And here’s why: There are many museums I love in America, but the retrospectives I’ve seen at the New Museum blow me away more than most places because they are so in-depth and such a thorough look at an artist’s life. Even if I have no idea who the artist is before I walk in the door, by the time I leave, I feel intimately acquainted with their life’s work.
And that’s exactly what happened with the engrossing, explosive Wangechi Mutu retrospective, up now through June 4. I walked in at noon on a weekday, alone, with my headphones on, my preferred way to see art.
I had a light understanding of Mutu — I’d seen a few pieces pop up on Instagram that I loved, including this piece, Yo Mama, which the artist made as a tribute to Fela Kuti, an Afrobeat musician. Instead of painting the musician, Mutu painted Kuti’s mother, Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti, an activist who worked to fight against female genital mutilation, a powerhouse feminist who is also said to be the first woman in Nigeria to drive a car.
This portrait gives you a hint at Mutu’s practice, although certain important elements are lost in photographing the piece. Mutu leverages complex, delicate collagework to make these pieces, and here you can see some of her trademark elements come into play: The black suns/cells are done in glitter, the disco balls hover in a liminal pink space as Anikulapo-Kuti stomps on a beheaded pink snake, her body made up of cell-like tumors and shapes, her black glitter stiletto stomping on the snake’s neck. It’s a piece that draws you in with apparent femininity and softness, but once you are close, you can see the absolute power of the woman.
Entering the New Museum, the first pieces of Mutu’s you’ll find are enormous sculptures. The first, In Two Canoe, presents two bronze female figures in a bathtub or birthing tub, their bodies half sunk in running water. Here, I was drawn to the figures having no real faces — instead, their faces are replaced with leaf-like patterns, while their fingers and toes sprawl down to the floor like branches or roots.
In the piece beside it, another figure built of branches and soil spawns up out of the floor with another tree-like root system, small bells embedded in the limbs.
When I found the title card for this piece, I let out a sharp laugh: For Whom The Bell Tolls. This would become a delightful reoccurring part of the exhibit: Mutu’s heartbreaking work would make my heart hurt and then she’d offer up some tongue-in-cheek title that would make me cackle.
I liked these two pieces well enough. I thought something along the lines of “Ok, this is working.” But then I got to the second floor.
The Mutu retrospective works best as a narrative if you wind your way up through the floors, as it unfolds from her early work into her latest pieces and you can see, over the decades of her practice, how her initial work led to what she is making now.
The second floor offers up Mutu’s early collages alongside two of her more well-known pieces, and this is the floor where I became a believer.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what our earlier work establishes about our later work — partially I’ve been thinking of Martin Scorsese’s heartbreaking quote about finally understanding what movies are about, but being too old to make them now. I keep wondering how that applies to novels — in my early work, even in The Book of X, I can see what I was trying to do, but I can’t help but be humiliated by the flaws I can see so clearly now, years later.
I have sympathy for the part of me that wrote the book, how she was trying to understand what a novel can do, and how it serves as a gesture at what I might grow into. And I can’t help but wonder if other artists feel that way too.
At the Mutu exhibit, you get a glimpse into the vulnerability of that early work.
Take Untitled (Pin-up no. 5) on the left from 2001, where you can see the trademark sadness of Mutu’s faces and bodies taking shape in this early watercolor collage. In Ghouls On My Back Celebrate Murder, on the right, made in 2005, you can see even more of the hallmarks of her work roughed out: blood splatters, butterflies, lace, legs, high heels, insect limbs, cell-like patterns morphing into a collaged face that’s just off center enough to be unnerving.
Something about seeing her early work made me choke up a bit, an intimacy tantamount to reading the early journals of your favorite writer who isn’t dead yet.
Mutu’s evolution from this piece becomes clear in the next room, where two of my favorite collections of her work take up two walls.
In Sleeping Heads (2006), Mutu collages eight sleeping heads, made out of motorcycles and hands, iridescent stilettos and breasts, jaw bones and tumors.
But perhaps what was most compelling about this collection of work was the wall it was presented on, which was handmade by the artist to be covered in wounds, as if the wall was a piece of sky blue flesh rotting from the inside.
The other wall that knocked me out was next to this one: Mutu’s mother worked as a nurse, which directly inspired the artist to take medical illustrations of uterine tumors and turn them into faces. These pieces, scattered with her trademark black glitter, made the grotesqueness of the tumors into beautiful, compelling works. They reminded me of Carol Rama and Louise Bourgeois, but through Mutu’s incredible, singular lens.
As I made my way through the sleeping heads and uterine tumors, I started to tear up. I wonder all the time why certain works of art make me cry and others do not move me at all — but I’ve come to believe it is when the pain of my life recognizes intimately the pain of the artist’s life. And although Mutu makes her pain beautiful, it is still there, beneath the glitter and sequins and motorcycles and stilettos, it is still there, pulsing, driving the work.
As I continued through the exhibit, Mutu’s later, larger collages put her early themes on steroids: In one room, the viewer is surrounded by towering collages of cells, diagrams of the body, plants, motorcycles, iridescence, teeth, lips, gold, black glitter, sequins, breasts, fake nails, stilettos, armor, wilted flowers, insects, pearls, tumors, butterflies, frogs, snakes, diamonds, and splatters of black or red blood.
Whenever a piece broke my heart a little, I’d get closer and the levity of the title would take some of the sting out: Riding Death In My Sleep, The Naughty Fruits of My Evil Labor, Lizard Love.
On the third floor, Mutu’s work evolved from colorful collage into sculptures that took on darker hues. Many of the works were made from African soil, embedded with pearls, human hair, and cowrie shells.
But one of the most incredible pieces, perhaps my favorite, was that of a sleeping woman turned into a fed snake.
This piece was revelatory to me — I couldn’t step away from it. I wanted to be near it constantly, as if something deep inside of me recognized itself in the work.
I don’t want to spoil the fourth floor for you — but it exploded open in a brightness that was a sharp contrast to the darkness of the second and third floors, imbuing the entire retrospective with the journey of an artist from the pits of pain to — hopefully, if you can survive it — the bright brilliance of joy that comes later, after all of the agony.
Anyway, that’s some art I loved. Really deeply loved. I’m back to the pre-publicity book grind now, but a few things to note here:
I’ll be launching RIPE on July 11 with the icon Roxane Gay and tickets are low, so grab yours now
Pre-orders matter a lot, so if you are in the mood, today is the day!
The new Lana Del Rey single is what I have been listening to on repeat today
I spoke with USA Today about loving Zelda to deal with grief and pre-pub anxiety
Current Book Stack: