Unhomed Geographies: The Paintings of Julie Mehretu

As Greg Tate conducted Burnt Sugar: the Arkestra Chamber one night in New York City, his arm whipped the air with a directorial gesture that mirrored the dark elliptical line cutting through a painting by Julie Mehretu hanging just above the musicians with mimetic precision (see the photograph by Mehret Mandefro in the Visual Art section of this issue).

The memory of the painting that he stood facing for the entire performance lingers still. Torrentially circulating layers of real, internalized, and imagined spaces and signs communicated in a language that the improvisational performers understood. "Julie's not afraid of chaos. It's about not being afraid of finding rhythm," Tate tells me. "The essence of conduction is bringing chaos to order. You can turn all nomads into a tribe with one gesture." Mehretu has a near bottomless syntax of gestural marks that materializes the agency borne of itinerancy. She has found freedom in constructing narratives out of inimitable movements from around the globe, a sensibility akin to the nomadic consciousness consonant with film scholar Teshome Gabriel's concept of Third Cinema practice. Over time, Mehretu's painted and drawn marks have become a capacious phenomenological notation. Her inscriptive acts have created a language that tie gestating subjecthood to the spatial real.

The arc of Mehretu's trajectory, from making "story maps of no location" to a Whitmanian embrace of everyplace, first began with a self-ethnography. Born in Ethiopia, raised in East Lansing, Michigan, educated in Providence, Rhode Island and in Dakar, Senegal, and now living in New York, she approached her identity analytically, "systematically organizing and collecting stories and photographs of my family, reviewing family genealogies, delineating their separate geographies, and stitching it all together into an archive of resources" (qtd. in Ilesanmi 11). Turning one's own history into an archival resource became a shared process. In 2003, in conjunction with the Walker Art Center, she invited thirty young people of East African descent to conduct their own self-ethnographies using photographs, journals, and sound recordings. Yet the way in which Mehretu's personal history is fused into the work is through abstract and personalized gestures prompted by probing experiential questions.

"How do you recall Addis Ababa from Berlin?" she muses aloud with an excitement more consonant with an explorer than a bewildered traveler. Recently returned to New York from a sojourn in Germany to complete a suite of paintings for her Guggenheim Museum exhibition, she tells me,

There would be moments when I was driving in Berlin, like just off of Alexanderplatz and I would think of Piazza in Addis Ababa, the plaza of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, or near Teirgarten or Zoo I would think of Miazia 27th Square or maybe Menelik square; sometimes parts of Berlin would bring up the Jubilee Palace and other types of monuments in Addis.

(Interview)

She offers reasons why this could be: because of the spatial similarity of the international style of the early plazas of modernism, the old East, the urban structure, and maybe later the Soviet impact on both places. Yet none of the answers seem to fully address the core interest behind her question as do the phantom traces that have moved throughout her paintings, prints, and drawings. The visual effect of residual lines on her absorbent acrylic-silica surface even after erasure and sanding can be seen as a metaphorical answer to her spatial meditations: no matter where we now stand, we are never fully deracinated from the space we once knew.

To hear the artist describe the early stages of her process shows the marriage between subjectivities and space from the inception of her work in the mid 1990s. "At first the paintings were just composed of layers of drawing. There were a few characters that huddled together and created a community. As they migrated and mixed with other characters, they made new cities. Eventually a whole terrain would be drawing upon and entangled with narrative" (qtd. in De Zegher 18). In early works, such as Inkcity Le Grande Villa (the herd) (1996), her ink on paper lines coalesced nomadic...