I'll kick off my own tribute to Women's History Month with a summary I wrote on Kiki Smith. Primarily known as a scupltor and printmaker, Kiki is a significant artist of this generation...
As I look at figures and images that
are suspended, animated, sometimes playful, I feel a most prominent
sense of grounding while viewing Kiki Smith’s work.
Mt first impression however is how fabulous
her dark sculptures look on The Whitney’s black stone floor. Truly
beautiful.
Her art is about essential things. In
an interview, she has said that in the 1980s she deliberately played
with and pushed forward certain unmentionables in American culture:
personal mortality, bodily decay, the brutality of dissolution. And
now she wants to play with an art-world unmentionable: sentimentality.
Her attitudes and expressions are clinically
precise and abstractly metaphorical. She has a remarkable simplicity
and directness.
In making work that's about the body,
she’s playing with the indestructibility of life, yet at the same
time, it's also about how you can just pierce it and it collapse, or
dies – demonstrated in her use of paper mache, beeswax, and other
fragile forms of media.
Kiki visualizes the use of skin (or lack thereof) as a sensitive
surface, a pierce-able surface, a cloaking surface and an impenetrable
surface. Some of these surfaces act as open shells, perhaps for
spirituality. Her wall and floor positioning adds a strong mystical
sense – what is perceived visually as a heavy physical frame is
positioned in a way that often defies gravity.
Perhaps her body of work is really a personal survey in visual
ideology. What each person sees and feels from her weighted or
un-weighted objects is exactly that – a reflection of their own
experience and perceptions.
I found a great quote of hers: “A friend of mine once said to me
that nobody was going to take the things that I or the girls I knew
did, seriously because we all worked in cardboard and stuff like that.
I think, for about five years after that I said, "Okay, fuck you, I'm
going to make everything really indestructible and you can't take it
away from me. You can say it's shit, but at least you can't say it's
shit because it's going to self-destruct."
7-Eleven will soon cater to the real life Homer Simpsons in light of The Simpsons Movie due out in July.
What else to do with spare time except play around on the World Wide Internet finding stuff people knew about two years ago. Like 
I'll admit I'm one, too... or at least I try to be at cocktail parties. 
Literally. 
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