Interview

KW: The trouble is that the traditional targets have been so co-opted. It's hard to know where to cast your aim. So much of what changed American society in the '60s had to do with a very strong set of targets-what we can physically do with ourselves and our bodies. Now it's much more subtle. It's almost debilitating in a way because we can't organize either, artistically or politically or socially, against any specific thing, because it's more like an essence, an ether that floats in the air, poisoning our ability to really have an authentic moment.

M: That's what I miss, being a real human. Like, I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times and I just go, "Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that."

KW: When was the last time you were back in Sri Lanka?

M: Just before September 11th happened. After that it was insane to even try to go back, with all the new restrictions. When I was there I was already having a machine gun held to my head every five seconds, and every 50 yards I'd have to show my ID. I wasn't a singer at the time-I was just a random girl, an artist. I was making films, and I had just graduated from Saint Martins in London. I thought I was invincible. Like, I'm getting harassed and I have a British passport. I have a letter from the Ministry of Defence! What if I were just a random Tamil girl from the village. I could be dead! It was the weirdest experience. I couldn't even make a movie because you can't make one without having it okayed by the Sri Lankan embassy. So you can only have a one-sided story. Do you think art in America is like all other industries? That there are certain parameters you can't go past?

KW: Certainly. I think I've come through the art-industrial complex-I've been educated in some of the best institutions and been privy to some of the insider conversations around theory and the evolution of art. But that doesn't necessarily get spoken about outside of a very small group. When you operate outside those rules, you are changing the vernacular. I think that's partly the success of my work-the ability to straddle both of those worlds, the ability to have a young black girl walk into the Brooklyn Museum and see paintings she recognizes not because of their art or historical influence but because of their inflection, in terms of colors, their specificity and presence.

M: Yeah, that's how I felt about your work the first time I saw it. It felt establishment, but it was also breaking it a little bit and twisting it. Do you feel a responsibility to teach something in your work?

KW: That's a question I have always grappled with. Is that even my job? Is that gonna slow you down?

M: In the beginning I definitely felt a responsibility because I was representing a bunch of people who never got represented before. I felt this responsibility to correct that situation, to be like, "Look, you can't discriminate against refugees and Muslim people and blah, blah, blah . . ." Now I don't feel that so much . . . It's complicated. Hold on a second. Are you there? I just got stung by a bee.

KW: Are you serious?

M: Yeah. It's the first time I've ever been stung.

KW: You have to be careful with that. Some people have
major allergic reactions!

M: I know. I'm wearing flower-print pants. I think he thought I was a bunch of flowers.

KW: Drawn in by the flowers. That's great.

M: Anyway, getting back, do you feel a responsibility?

KW: That's a very complicated question. When I was growing up and going to art school and learning about African-American art, much of it was a type of political art that was very didactic and based on the '60s, and a social collective. I feel sometimes constrained by the expectation that the work should be solely political. I try to create a type of work that is at the service of my own set of criteria, which have to do with beauty and a type of utopia that in some ways speaks to the culture I'm located in. But Americans are so overly fixated on racial identity-and on identity in general.

M: I know. As an artist I could either sit there with a chip on my shoulder and just chip away every day, or I could transcend all of it, which really makes it about what you're actually saying-not being based on the burdens of the past but trying to make the world make more sense to you. If I actually had a chip on my shoulder and started, like, race bashing, they would have been more used to that. In school I was like, "I want to be a filmmaker." And they were like, "Well, you can't be a serious filmmaker if you're not wearing a plaid shirt." You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. They were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. [Wiley laughs] I just refused to do it, you know?

KW: It seems incredibly self-indulgent.

M: I just couldn't be like that, because this week this is what's happening in my life: So-and-so is going to jail, so-and-so got evicted, I'm getting busted for this, and blah, blah, blah. There was just, like, real-life shit going down in my house all the time. There was no need for me to go to college and learn how to film a blue screen for half an hour. I did my thesis on CB4 [1993]. Everyone freaked out. They tried to have me kicked out of school. They thought I was disgusting.

KW: I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

M: Exactly! I want to find a taxi driver in India and ask him where he got the sticker that goes across his windshield. That decorative choice comes from the idea that maybe it's good to tell your vehicle apart from everyone else's when you get off of break.

KW: Right, very real.

M: They also do it because they want to show off. If they buy a shop, they're gonna name the shop after their kid. If they drive a taxi, they name the taxi after their mom.

KW: This sort of reminds me of growing up in South Central Los Angeles back in the '80s, you know, where so many people were flossing down Crenshaw Boulevard with their lowriders and hydraulics and stuff, and it was this major scene. For me it was always important to internalize that type of flossing. When I was at Yale, most of the students there were obsessed with this type of neo-minimalism that thought that any garish display or show of emotion or visceral beauty was something to be scoffed at. I think conversely it made me revert back to some of the more ornate or baroque features of black American culture.

M: That's exactly what happened with me. Because I spent time in L.A., too, growing up on gangster rap. My cousin was a gangster bitch, and she knew the Bloods and the Crips and she was Sri Lankan, so we'd go to all these clubs down on Crenshaw. Then I would come back to college at Saint Martins, and I was learning a whole other way. Like having that whole '90s hip-hop from L.A. and then going to Saint Martins, where it's all the Britpop stuff about being shy and hating yourself. I was a Sri Lankan refugee, like, the scum of society, and then I went right to Los Angeles, into African-American culture, and it was just incredible. I've never seen black people like that in England. In England black people still live within the parameters of white society. It was an eye-opener. Then I'd be in school and the students would be like, "I'm white, and I'm male, and I don't know what to do, I hate myself." I was just like, there is this contemporary culture in America that's writhing with so much good shit and bad shit that no one is really making art out of yet, you know?

KW: Sometimes there's that tipping point, where societies -embrace who they are without necessarily needing a dominant culture or center to recognize the periphery. I remember being in Nigeria back in 1997 and meeting a bunch of MCs practicing their skills outside this bar and I was just like, "This is an amazing scene!" And how many people really know about what was going on in the hip-hop scene in Nigeria back in the early '90s? These guys were really complaining about how they just couldn't get any play at home and how most of what was consumed in terms of black culture was American. Of course, now you go to Nigeria and it's a completely different scene. It's just overrun with amazing acts. And I think that's kind of indicative of a type of self-confidence that people develop when they recognize their own ability to create.

M: Yeah. Also, it could be the sort of declining grip of the American MTV-nation culture-the fact that MTV doesn't play so much music anymore. When I would go to Africa I used to get really pissed off that people would listen to 50 Cent in, like, a mud hut and want DVD players and a GPS in their SUVs, you know?

KW: Now, why would that piss you off?

M: I felt pissed off because I realized that you have to teach people in a clichéd way how to be happy-and happiness has become too one thing in American media. Achieving happiness is not really about having a flat stomach and the best car.

KW: Personally-and this comes from my experiences of seeing people from very hard lives, working their way toward a sort of middle class, and really wanting to embrace the signifiers for success-the question has always been, who am I to tell them that that's crap? You know, it's not for me, perhaps it's not my style but . . . [sighs] I know your feelings.

M: That's fine! You can say, "Get the SUV," but you can't say, "Get the SUV before you get a house." You know what I mean? Okay, there's a kid in a mud hut. I don't want to teach him bad habits because I live in Brooklyn. Brooklyn, New York City! And I feel like I'm living in the dead weeds of hip-hop. I live in the graveyard of what went wrong with hip-hop.

KW: Well, what went wrong with gangster rap?

M: It's not even gangster rap-it's just what's wrong with hip-hop. It became so one-dimensional; itbecame like a businessman thing. It's run out of creativity. It went so far off about making money that now everyone can do it.

KW: I wonder, though, because I think about this quite a bit when I think of someone like Jeff Koons, whom I admire quite a bit, but aesthetically this type of emptiness is the point-this type of soullessness and devotion to the signifiers of happiness and consumption. Are you prepared to say that that type of hip-hop-soulless, empty hip-hop-is interesting on some level?

M: Well, I would have said, "yeah, it was," 10 years ago. But now I've had 10 years-

KW: [laughs] It's not funny anymore!

M: Yeah, it's not funny anymore. It's good you're taking your work everywhere and you're making it global. I think all relevant work needs to be like that.

KW: One of the really great things about working in Lagos is that it's such a crazy assault on the senses. The population has been rising since oil was discovered there in the late '60s, but public sculpture has been there since even before the colonial years. All my models are asked to choose which pose they're going to assume, and those poses are derived from portraits of former colonial masters or generals or military dictators or what have you, many of them cast in public squares. What comes out of people's minds about which person they'd prefer to be, now that they've been asked to sort of open their eyes to what's been there in their own backyard-

M: I have this artist I work with called Afrikan Boy. He was on my album, and he's from Lagos, Nigeria, and he's always like, "I want to be the African dream!" I think that's so cool. I like the way he represents more than that modern outsider.

KW: If I were going to paint you, if I could paint you as any historical figure, who would it be? Now, you have to realize it's all your look and feel, but I'm asking you about the pose.

M: A historical figure?

KW: And think about it in terms of a preexisting iconic work of art. For instance, when Ice-T came by, he wanted to be this really great painting of Napoleon by Ingres.

M: It's really hard. There are so many people who -inspire me. I'll have to think about it and e-mail you.

KW: Okay.