Whitney: the pulse of American Art

There is nothing better to shake off New York’s sudden chill and disagreeable gray than a visit to see Kiki Smith’s blacks, whites, grays, papers, jars, and sculpted forms at the Whitney. There is something here for those who seek the conceptual in art and just as much for those who yearn for figurative expressions and myths of yore. Beasts, body parts, chimeras, bodily fluids… Smith has them all. The Virgin Mary is exposed to us minus her layer of skin, like a Body Worlds exhibit, the musculature of the deltoids prominent. Just a few feet away is Mary Magdalene in bronze covered with satyr-hair looking rapturously up at the sky. All around are women and girls, the female of the species, in different stages of development, in moments of exchange and confrontation with other life forms (often animal) and other lives (their own). These women and girls are haunting and beautiful, sometimes damaged, at other moments on the verge of damage. They emerge and regress and recoil. They seek and mourn.

There are all sorts of filters: art history, religion, environmental issues, myth… one can use to interpret Smith’s work. But I found myself looking at the pieces, drawn in by them, responding to them without the clutter introduced by over-thinking. In the different moods they evoke, their beauty and ugliness, their suspension above the air, their textures, their fragility and solidness, I found myself in a one to one dialog with the work itself. So many of these works exist. That is to say, not just as the objects they are but with the full force of life one usually associates with living creatures. The magic of Kiki Smith is that despite (and not because of) the multiplicity of ideas and influences, materials, media, and techniques she uses, she does not lose sight of what lies at the heart of art, life, or things.

Smith is able to use physical matter to do all sorts of work for her. In Pietà her self-portrait with a dead cat, we don’t need the knowledge that this is a self-portrait nor the historical tradition starting all the way from Michelangelo to fully and utterly engage with the emotions of the piece. Smith’s light-handed lines and the surface of the paper (somewhat crumpled) give us an immediate sense of the ephemeral.

Art is always subject to individual interpretation, there is no experience of it outside of the human mind, each viewer’s mind—his particular histories, knowledge, ideas, and moods. Smith approaches the viewer with a check-mate, she comes in at you at all sorts of visual, conceptual, tactile, conscious and sub-conscious levels to draw you out and regardless of the frequency at which you are humming chances are she’s in tune with one of them. She does this over and over again with paper and sculpture, glass and thread, bronze and wax, grey and black and white and silver. Indeed paper itself is no longer paper in her hands, it has dimensionality, sensuality, form. There in lies her genius.

Recent articles on this show appeared in the New York Times and the New Yorker. You can also see some short video clips on PBS of Smith and her work.