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Bat (front), 2000,
Deutsche Bank Collection
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Her drawings of wolves, birds, and bats are animated in a
quick, almost choppy stroke and do have a storybook quality to them. Bat
, 2000, part of the
Deutsche Bank Collection, features a bat with its wings nearly folded
around itself in a funny act of self-protection. Bats, after all, are
supposed to go out and scare people; Smith’s bat is just a bit shy. As she
says in the film, Squatting the Palace: "As a kid I was traumatized
by language; my father made us wash our hands every time we’d get near a
book, so I couldn’t read." That trauma is in the drawings.
Smith’s attraction to the metaphysical is a way of side-stepping her earlier
confrontational work, such as Tale and The Virgin Mary,
1990, in which the Virgin’s leg looks like one long umbilical cord, a
scary thing indeed. Instead, many works in the retrospective feature
mythical creatures that remain enigmatic and unnecessarily secretive.
Black Animal Drawing, 1996-1998, depicts a wolf, a peacock, and a deer
standing side by side for no particular reason and looking
semi-threatening. The sculpture Crows, 1995, feels like the bronze
birds have just succumbed to West
Nile Disease, falling to the ground in a dead thud.
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Installation shot of Kiki Smith's 2005
Venice exhibition,
from Kiki
Smith: Squatting the Palace,
Directed by Vivien Bittencourt/Vincent Katz.
Courtesy Checkerboard Films
At times, the Whitney retrospective fights with itself,
struggling to be more aggressive. Much of the exhibition feels organized
around creating a known synopsis of the artist, i.e. Smith’s relationship
to the body, eroticism, and the political. At times, the work is too
metaphysical and evasive. But it’s often disarmingly physical and
powerful, especially in a work like Sueno , 1992, a brown and black
etching on handmade Japanese paper that’s also part of the Deutsche Bank
Collection. Sueno is deceptively simple. It features a single
figure in a partial fetal pose, caught in a kind of dance. It’s primitive
and almost uneventful, which is exactly where its power lies. The face is
nearly masked. Sueno stands in stark contrast to the photogravure
series Las Animus, 1997, which features a squatting and angry Kiki
intercut with close-ups of her hair. The rawness is a direct example of
Smith’s relationship to performance and her connection to the
multi-disciplinary performance artist
Carolee Schneemann.
Las Animus and Schneeman’s 1963 work,
Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions are almost diagrams for a macabre and
erotic performance. Smith’s work puts the human body on trial, accusing it
of its failings. Her work is riddled with flagellation. In Untitled
, 1992, the back of a seated figure contains eight long gashes. These are
not the simple cuts and bruises of daily life. What we’re left with is a
sense that Smith, like us, has become a third party to her own world.
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