Im contemplating naming my first born daughter after Kiki Smith
I'm just posting this as a back up document for my art history class... Because I dont trust technology.
Feel free to read, I dont mind if ya dont... its mostly just opinion on the artist.
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S. Beleek Vickers
Prof. Susan Rosoff
ARH3471: Art in the Last 25 Years
February 20th, 2009
Looking into the Next Century: Kiki Smith
We are all human. We all urinate, defecate and copulate. We are all mortal and fragile and frail. Kiki Smith explores our connection to the natural in a manner that some would find crude or disgusting, but undoubtedly effective and powerful. She is a force to be reckoned with in the art world, exposing universal truths and shared experiences of our necessity of bodily functions as human beings. Smith also shines a light on our continual denial and discomfort with our natural wastes and fluids, thus reflecting our social norms and taboos as a generation, and the modern artist’s need to push at them. And with work manifested in a multitude of media, including print, sculpture and installation, Smith is readily accessible to galleries and viewers in a more substantial and sustainable way then a site specific artist or a performance artist. For these reasons, I believe Smith will be a lasting icon in art history, and a major influence on artists yet to come.
Kiki Smith is unique as an artist because she turns one’s attention towards items and occurrences most would readily avert one’s eyes from. Considering humans have arguably been walking this earth for almost 200,000 years, why is it that we are still so ashamed of our natural human processes? Most people will not allow others to see them in these natural processes, or will only do so at the utmost level of comfort. Why is this? Why does the attention towards these everyday occurrences make one so uncomfortable? Smith makes one ask pose these questions as she blatantly displays life size sculptures depicting the natural release of waste, in works such as “Pee Body” and “Digestive System” as well as in the sculptures of two limp figures, dripping milk and semen from their sex organs in the work “Untitled”. Her frankness and willingness to remove the veil, to confront the big pink elephant in the room, is precisely why I enjoy her work and why I think she will be pertinent for decades to come.
Point of view is crucial in Smith’s effectiveness as an artist. She does not depict women in overtly sexual beings, nor completely strips them down to decrepit hags. Smith loosely glazes her work with a clinical gaze, which leads the viewer more open to accept one’s natural functions. However, she does not completely remove the knowledge of one’s discomfort with such images and topics. Instead she plays them to her advantage, as in the piece, “Tale”. A life size woman, bent on all fours, crawling across the floor, with a trail of feces attached to her rectum is a powerful image. One feels sorry for this unidentifiable woman, as well as slightly uncomfortable in her presence, with the naked display of her excrements behind her. She cannot seem to escape the physical trail of her most inner workings and with this Smith makes an interesting social commentary, describing it “as a representation of the feeling of being burdened with one’s own inescapable history” (Heartney 197). Depicting these life size figures in such positions not only presents them in a frail and vulnerable state, but also returns the human to its true state as an animal. By making the figures squat or crawl on all fours, one’s human ability to ambulate on just one’s legs is removed, and instead returned to a primal state of being.
I think her work truly speaks to people because of her depiction of humans as innately vulnerable creatures. She negates our ideas of immortality, saying, “You’re really very penetrable on the surface, you just have the illusion of a wall between your insides and the outside” (Heartney 196). She drives this point home by not only depicting the figure in vulnerable positions, but also by using fragile materials, such as wax and paper. I think this relays the message that our true identities cannot be hidden. Despite emotional walls we may put up, or facades we may display, our true nature still resides within us, and can still be easily exposed. Her use of somewhat “girlie materials” also empowers her as a feminist artist. She does not shy away from the fact that she is a woman artist, but instead takes command, and by doing so, exemplifies what men and women, artists and viewers alike should strive to achieve… a complete control, acceptance, and pride of one’s self. If nothing else, Smith connects and humbles the viewer. By relating the human back to its natural release of waste and fluid as a necessity of function, one is connected back to every other human and animal. This in turn temporarily removes the viewer from one’s own ego, social standing, or culture, and that is a powerful thing for an artist to accomplish. Smith herself expresses her interest in being related back to nature, saying “I prefer to be identified with nature, with animals. Not to be separate from the universe” (Heartney 194).
Smith’s work is also a good reflection of contemporary art of our time, as well as an insight into social issues of our day. In her sculpture of a squatting woman, appearing to urinate in a somewhat ashamed position ”Pee Body”, Smith unifies one’s inner most processes with one’s physical outward appearance. By doing so she makes the viewer confront one’s own shared experience of human function. This is an upsetting and somewhat repulsive piece to the average viewer, to see such a blatant display of something normally hidden behind closed doors. Her confrontation of this natural, yet hidden, function showcases our current society’s discomfort with our collective human form. By removing the idea of the body as merely the subject of academic tradition, and instead as a vessel to funnel human necessity, feminist thought, social issue, and inner existence, Smith revived artists interest in the human body. With the body as her subject, she also reflected on the eighties and the AIDS epidemic. After the loss of her sister Beatrice to AIDS, Smith created an installation in 1990 of hanging human forms. Suspended from the ceiling the forms are a representation of all of those that have passed from the disease. The physical sculptures evoke the feeling of the deceased and their continual presence and necessity in one’s life, even after death. Smith’s works will give viewers for years to come an idea of what issues (feminism, AIDS, and the body) were important in our day.
While her more recent work is intriguing due to its more personal nature to the artist, I believe Smith will be best known for her earlier works involving the body and its functions, simply because they are completely universal. They do not speak specifically to one generation, one culture, or one age. Whether one will admit it or not, we as animals and as humans are connected by these processes. Everyone from the President down to a bird or mouse is thus connected and in a sense brought to a basic equality. This clinical, unifying point of view by the artist re-evaluates how one looks at the human figure in art, and her removal of the female gaze and depiction of woman specific functions has made her a lasting facet of feminist art, as well as contemporary art. She is a bold artist, commanding and utilizing every possible facet of her work and herself as a female artist. Smith’s fusion of social and body issues as a forceful exposition of human function and emotion effectively encompass art in the last 25 years. The ideas, questions, taboos, and social standards that have been posed, poked, and prodded at by contemporary artists of our day are reflected in the work of Kiki Smith, and will continue to influence generations of artists to come.
Bibliography
Heartney, Eleanor, et al. After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed
Contemporary Art. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2007
McDaniel, Craig, and Jean Robertson. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after
1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005
Arnason, H. Harvard. History of modern art: painting, sculpture, architecture,
photography. 5th Ed. New York: Prentice Hall, 2003.
Selected Images
Smith, Kiki
Tale
1992
Smith, Kiki
Pee Body
1992
Smith, Kiki
Untitled
1990