Kiki Smith, an aritst in our time

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."