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15/10/2006

Kiki Smith

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

A Gathering, 1980 - 2005

Kiki Smith has an uncanny knack for transforming the mundane into the enchanted. She uses whatever materials suit her purpose, from blood to bronze and from glitter to glass. Her art takes the form of drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, books, performance, sound, video, jewelry, and costume design, among others.

Most of Smith’s visual art is related to the body and to the natural world. It often has a handmade quality to it, and it is deeply rooted in a tradition of art that values the final object as a marriage between vision and craft. Despite a strong physicality, her work also has a palpable spiritual component. She continually weaves together the internal and external, the physical and spiritual, the personal and collective.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has been acquiring Kiki Smith's art since 1991. The collection now contains work from 1983 to 2003 in many different media. The following selection includes drawings, sculpture, prints, and photographs that highlight some of the artist’s specific interests, and give an overview of her career.

Smith has explored different aspects of the body in her work--the skeleton and organs, the musculature and the skin, the body’s fluids and forms, in fragments and as full figures. Untitled (1985) compares an internal bodily form with the insect and plant worlds. A tangled intestinal shape creates a weblike design over a field of insects, leaves, and thorny branches. Edges overlap and one form reflects the other in this brightly colored screenprint.

Five years later, the artist made Untitled (1990) a pair of life-size wax figures that hang slightly above the ground, each on a separate pedestal. The sculptures are made of red wax on the inside and beeswax on the outside.1 Reddish splotches make the skin appear bruised or bloodied. Milk flows down the female’s torso, and semen down the legs of the male. Both of the figures are hanging with their heads bowed, as if in submission to their own natures. Smith has made the private body public. She spoke about this sculpture in an interview saying, "…[H]er milk nurtures nothing, his seeds nothing. So it was about being thwarted--having life inside you, but the life isn’t going anywhere, it’s just falling down." 2

Pink Bosoms (1990) is one of many works by the artist that depicts a female figure or a reference to the female. It is a screenprint composed of four different views of a woman’s hands holding her breasts as milk flows from them. The prints in the Whitney's collection are mounted one above the other and become a celebration of feminine fertility, or as Smith herself has described it, "…the mother as endless bounty or fountain."3

Many of Smith’s works are composed of multiple components, which she often assembles in different configurations. For All Souls (1988) the artist photocopied images of a fetus that she found in a Japanese anatomy book, and used them to make screenprints on fine, translucent paper.4 Each print is glued to another to form a single sheet that hangs unframed like a tapestry on the wall. In All Souls, the printed repetition of fetuses becomes a motif that reveals the similarities and inconsistencies inherent in reproduction--both physical and artistic.5

The artist made All Souls at a time when she was creating a body of work about birth.6 Her title, however, alludes to All Souls' Day, a Catholic feast day celebrated on November 2, when the faithful pray for the souls of the dead who have not yet fully atoned for their sins. This day also coincides with Di'a de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, a festival which Smith observed in Mexico in 1985.7 The spirits of the deceased return to their loved ones on the Day of the Dead, which is observed on November 1 and 2. Celebrants honor deceased infants on the first day and adults on the second. All Souls is infused with a spirit of birth; the work's title, however, implies a spiritual presence in death, and the connotations of that title further animate the work.

Smith was born in 1954 into a family of artists. Her mother, Jane Lawrence Smith, was an opera singer and actor, and her father, Tony Smith, was a sculptor. She helped her father when she was young, and over the years, she has continued to work with other artists, printers, performers, and architects.8 In the late 1970s, Smith began to participate in exhibitions with Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab), a group of artists who shared a desire to make their art more accessible to people outside of the conventional art world. At this time, she often made multiples, some of which took the form of pieces of clothing, that were sold in Colab venues.9 Smith’s art eventually entered the mainstream museum and gallery world, yet she continues to make some of her work--jewelry, tattoo prints, and printed announcements for exhibitions or talks, for example--available to a wide audience.
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In the early 1980s, Smith met the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), who became a friend and an occasional collaborator. Wojnarowicz worked with Smith on a performance which she recorded and used in her first solo exhibition, Life Wants to Live, in New York at The Kitchen in 1982.10 The following year, Smith and Wojnarowicz collaborated on a series of prints. These Untitled works have three distinct elements that are interrelated. Smith’s contribution was a color screenprint of a standard black-and-white Rorschach plate. The Rorschach images look like internal body parts, and the forms are strangely similar to the artist’s later drawings on glass, Cross Section of the Head (1989). The second element is a printed collection of childlike drawings, which was compiled from old records that Wojnarowicz found in an abandoned pier along the Hudson River.11 All three of the assemblages are different, but they each have elements that overlap--one includes drawings of women, one of men, and one of both men and women. Text printed along the border of each group implies that the images come from the Psychiatric Clinic of the Court of General Sessions in New York, an organization that administered psychological tests to criminals and drug offenders. Although the original source of the drawings is unclear, they may have been used for psychological evaluations.12 Wojnarowicz added the final element to the prints, a pair of barbed wires, one gray and one black, that form an X over the entire image. The wires have a sharp and forbidding presence, adding a dark sense of confinement or censure to the mysterious Rorschach forms and the innocent yet disconnected figures within the drawings.

Smith often uses elements of self-portraiture in her work, particularly in her prints.13 In the early 1980s, she asked Wojnarowicz to photograph her in various poses, some of which were based on songs that she had written.14 She used three of these photographs to make drawings for the print How I Know I’m Here (1985-2000), a four-part linocut that includes images of internal and external body parts and references to the senses. The images of the artist eating a pomegranate, putting her foot in her mouth, and picking nits out of a girl’s hair are all elements based on Wojnarowicz’s photographs.

Almost ten years later, Smith incorporated some of the same photographs into the collage, Puppet (1993-94). This composite also includes a photograph of the artist’s niece and etchings based on reproductions in a Dutch magazine article about nudist camps.15 Photography, drawing, and printmaking are interrelated in Puppet, as they are in How I Know I'm Here and in other work by the artist. Smith is fluent in many media, and it often appears that her involvement with one material inspires or leads her to another.

Working with printers at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Smith created Banshee Pearls (1991), a complex self-portrait composed of twelve lithographs. She used photographs, photocopies, plates from other prints, and drawings that she made directly onto plates to print multiple images of herself.16 In Irish folklore, a banshee is a female spirit that foretells a death in the family by wailing outside their home. Smith’s title also has a personal reference. Her father, who was ill throughout her childhood, used to say that she was "like a banshee."17 The inclusion of pearls in the title meanwhile implies something valued as an organic gem, and also refers to the name of her grandmother.18 In an interview, Smith said that she tries to "…externalize what I’m afraid of."19 Banshee Pearls exposes the morbid and the gemlike, the dark and the light sides of the artist, and ultimately affirms her multifaceted identity.

Smith uses photography to make new images and also to explore and expand upon her three-dimensional work. In My Blue Lake (1995) she used a peripheral camera owned by the British Museum in London to photograph her own body.20 Peripheral photography creates a rectilinear image of a cylindrical object. Working again with master printers at ULAE, Smith used the photographic negative from the peripheral camera to make a photogravure. A lithograph was made to give texture to the skin, and Smith added red and blue ink to the photogravure plate before each print was pulled, thereby creating monoprints in which every image is unique.21 In the final print, Smith’s body resembles a lake surrounded by the landscape of her hair.

References to myth, legend, and literature often appear in Smith’s work. By using elements of stories as jumping off points, she creates her own tales. In Sleeping Witch (2000) the artist, with the assistance of Joey Kotting, photographed her own hand resting on a bed of fall leaves and holding a black apple. This is one of several photographs that Smith took of herself dressed in a black, hooded cloak, and carrying a basket of apples.22 The Sleeping Witch series evokes the fairy tale Snow White and the biblical story of Eve. In both of these stories, a woman is devastated by the effects of following her own instinct. The title of Smith’s work indicates that the subject of her tale is a witch, but it is ambiguous whether the witch is a perpetrator or a victim. The apple in the witch’s hand resembles those in Smith's, Black Apples (1999), in which several cast bronze apples are strewn on the ground. The blackness of the fruit suggests an object infused with malevolence. It rests loosely in the palm of the sleeping figure’s hand as if one could reach out and take it, either stealing the witch’s power or releasing her from its curse.

Several other of Smith's works explore the witch as a subject. In 2001 she made prints of women with outstretched arms kneeling on burning pyres, and the following year she exhibited her "Pyre Women" sculptures in the installation Realms at Pace Wildenstein. She also made a portfolio of five images called Out of the Woods (2002) in which she again depicted herself as a witch. The artist described this series of photogravures as "…about a woman lost in the forest--a lost witch."23 She also said that she has "…always thought of myself as the crone."24

Untitled (from Lot’s Wife) (1993) portrays another woman who was punished for the use of her instinct and will. It is a photograph that Smith took of the head of her own plaster-and-salt sculpture by the same title.25 Both the sculpture and the photograph capture the horror and inevitability of the fate of Lot’s wife, who according to the biblical story was turned into a pillar of salt when she disobeyed God’s command and looked back at the city she was fleeing. Smith’s depiction of Lot’s wife with craggy and deformed features suggests that in her punishment, she lost not only her life but her identity.

Pieta' (1999) shows the artist’s continuing interest in both self-portraiture and legend or myth, as well as her deep connection with animals. The drawing, a self-portrait of the artist holding her dead cat Ginzer, is a private devotional that reveals a painful personal loss. Smith looks down sadly at the cat whose eyes are open and looking away from her. The cat’s paws are extended in a gesture that reflects its last struggle for life. Smith drew Pieta' on several sheets of a thin, slightly crinkled Nepalese paper, which emphasizes the vulnerability and pain of both the woman and the cat. Taken from an Italian word for pity, piety, or devotion, Smith's title recalls Michelangelo’s sculpture, Pieta' (c. 1498-99) in which Mary grieves over the death of Christ, whom she holds in her lap. Smith returned to the subject of her cat again in Ginzer (2000). In this print, the cat’s dark, fierce expression portrays the wildness of its nature and the fear of its impending death.

Tied to Her Nature (2002) is a bronze sculpture in which a young woman is tied to the belly of a goat. It is reminiscent of the story of Odysseus, who saved himself and his companions from Polyphemos by hiding under the bellies of the Cyclops’s rams. There is also a strong sexual element to the sculpture, as a rugged, horned goat, supports the smooth, nude figure of a young woman close to its body. Smith’s title suggests a subject that often reappears in her work--submission to an uncontrollable nature--and it may also refer to an astrological sign. Capricornus or Capricorn, one of the constellations and signs of the zodiac, is represented by a goat. Smith is interested in astrology and may have been inspired here by a belief in the connection between celestial bodies and human character traits.26 In this small-scale sculpture there is no struggle between the woman and the goat, instead a tender affection shows in the way her hands gently embrace the goat’s head.

In Spinning (1994), Smith took a simple ornamental object and imbued it with qualities that reflect the universe. This is one of several collages that the artist made using doilies once owned by the sculptor Louise Nevelson. With the assistance of Ruth Lingen, a printer at Spring Street Workshop, Smith made prints from the doilies, then put them into unique constructions with words that suggest feminine qualities or activities.27 In an interview, the artist said that the doilies are "…like cosmic mandalas sort of trickling down onto the coffee table, into daily life…. I cast some in bronze, and they become orifices…. In another one, they turn into eyes, and in others they become moons or cells or snowflakes." 28

The Whitney’s collection represents many aspects of Kiki Smith’s oeuvre--her concern for the body; her interest in the natural world, including animals and the cosmos; and her reflections on myth, legend, and literature. The Museum's holdings include her collaborative work and reflect her mastery of different media. The humor and irreverence that infuses Smith's work can also be seen in the Whitney's collection. Parts overlap, images repeat, sculptures become photographs, photographs become drawings-a cat is a child, a woman is a goat, and upside down is right-side up in the masterful art of Kiki Smith.

Opening: November, 16, 2006

Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue 75th Street - New York
Hours: Monday-Tuesday Closed, Wednesday-Thursday 11 am-6 pm, Friday 1-9 pm (6-9 pm pay-what-you-wish admission), Saturday-Sunday 11 am-6 pm.

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