Final Term Paper on Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith

As Kiki Smith best put it in a one on one interview, “I’m a thing-maker.” (Munro, 489) She is a living visual artist that is of the Post-Modern field, in which her exquisite individualistic pieces have graced our times. With pieces that may be considered too aggressive, she has made her mark in history and has become one of America’s greatest female artists. Kiki Smith’s artwork proves her statement, “No…I don’t want to be owned by…I don’t want to be hedged by…belief systems…” (Munro, 499) Thereby, pushing the boundaries of society and creating her own style.

Kiki Smith was born with art surrounding her. One of artistic influences was her father, Tony Smith. Tony Smith was a Modernist sculptor and philosopher- rhetorician. Tony Smith’s obsessive drive to solve essential problems shared by several vocations was passed on to Kiki. However, she expressed “I don’t want to be owned by a belief system.” (Munro, 493) Kiki Smith’s artistic inclinations began as a child when she helped her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures. (http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/smith/index.html) He also taught her not to draw what she sees, but what she knows. (Posner, 31)

Sadly her father passed away when Kiki was 26 in 1980. To add further tragedy to Kiki Smith’s life, her younger sister Bebe succumbed to AIDS. With these tragedies in her life Kiki was now pushed to explore her curiosity and examine closer the body’s internal systems and fluid systems. (Munro, 493) As a result of her new found interest her first piece was created around 1979. For this piece Kiki Smith made pillow cases and sheets painted in dark red fabric paint with cut-up arms and legs, and eye, and a mouth, and a shirt made the same way. (Posner, 31) Kiki Smith explained that this piece was how her internal psychic life felt, not chopped up, but in disarray, fragile. (Posner, 31)

Following the display of the pillow cases and body parts, Kiki Smith made a piece called Hand in Jar, in which she found a latex hand on the street and put it in a jar with dirty fish water from her aquarium and let algae start to grow on it. This piece was an interesting piece representing the relationships between parasite and host. (Posner, 32) This piece to Kiki Smith was meant for the audience to view the interdependent nature of the world and how collaborative it is, teamwork. (Posner, 32)

Later on in 1990, Kiki Smith put together a Projects Room at the Museum of Modern Art that caused some disarray in the artistic world. By her challenging the boundaries of individualism and art she displayed a theater of body-events including a floor-scatter of blown glass sperm and, on a shelf, twelve glass jugs labeled blood, urine, pus, semen, saliva, vomit, and so on. In addition to those displays, she had paper images of a skinned arm, leg, and torso. Finally, suspended Kiki suspended a tapestry of beeswax cubes, each one a print lifted from a square inch of human skin.

Later on she joined the PaceWildenstein Gallery, where she displayed a series of standing Virgins, some flayed, with internal organs spilling out or lined in silver. Kiki Smith gave the explanation that “The Virgin flayed was a piece about her ‘being in the flesh,’ but robbed of her sexuality in return for her divinity. On one hand, she’s pure and sacred. On the other, she’s the protector of procreation. But in her daily life, she’s robbed...” (Munro, 495) There by even challenging religious view.

However, one of the most interesting pieces that she made was as she described was for “entertainment” value in which she exhibited a figure of a women crouched and urinating in a string of shiny beads. In this piece she transcends the barrier of norms of society and displays the true reality that should not be spoken of.

To sum up, Kiki Smith is a female artist that surpasses the barriers that society and all norms have created to oppress the reality that exists and should be expressed and spoken of no matter what. Her originality and her exquisite eye for detail have given her one of the Post-Modern’s favorite American artists.


Bibliography

Munro, Eleanor, Originals American Women Artists, Da Capo Press (1979, 2000),
pgs. 499- 501.

Posner, Helaine, Kiki Smith, A Bulfinch Press Book (1998)

Art in the 21st Century: the series, (2001-2007). Kiki Smith. Retrieved April 28, 2008, from http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/smith/index.html