Kiki Smith 2 and Milton Rogovin

So  I went back to the Henry Art Gallery's Kiki Smith exhibition "I myself have seen it" for another look. It is a complex exhibition and deserves a lot of looks. First I watched the Art 21 video which was really helpful . She talks about death masks, her grandmother's, her father's, her sister's. She herself is cast, that is terrifying. And she talked about Genevieve the savior of Paris.

So when I saw the series about Genevieve in the exhibition, it was clear what she was doing. The exhibition includes six photographs of parts of the sculpture, a profile face, lips, a hand,  the legs of a wolf ( perhaps signifying the enemy that Genevieve's prayers staved off from Paris), the wolf's furry face, four animal feet. Together they create an imaginary narrative, much more than the sculpture in which G calmly steps over a supine animal, but this narrative is another story, a story of fragments of bodies that seem to be frozen, even as they create, collectively, a sense of anxiety. The stasis is perhaps related to Genevieve's spiritual nature. But there didn't seem to be any suggestion of the actions that she took to save the people by bringing grain.

Going through the rest of the show starting with a young girl trapped (floating?) in a branch, to odd photographs that seem to evoke fragments of organs, to Mary Magdalene ( we know her story, Christ's "fallen" woman) , to Lot's Wife (who turned to a pillar of salt, if you remember), to the Harpies (perched about on mouldings high above us) , to the witches, to the little girls, dead white animals, dead black crows, shredded puppet, worms, and a photograph of just Guanyin's head on its side (the image is in previous post) which does not suggest her power as a goddess of love and mercy and childbearing. There is only one message for me - violence against women, and especially little girls. The show is presenting frighened girls  and oddly powerless witches. Even fairy tales where little girls succeed, like Alice in Wonderland, seem to be oddly ambibuous - will she succeed in escaping her pursuers??

The question is why doesn't Kiki Smith say what her real subject is, why is she so unwilling to be an advocate for all the victims she creates in her sculptures?? Why does she make victims from powerful goddesses and biblical women. Why can't they fight back? Why doesn't she fight back? My intelligent friend Deborah Lawrence talked me out of saying it is about personal trauma. What do I know, but why is Smith so obsessed with this single subject of death and threats of death and powerlessness.

The contrast to Cindy Sherman comes to mind who works from film, that, like fairy tales, are often about violence against women (in fact the new mythology), but we know they are re-staged with herself as the main actor, and she is opposing violence against women by calling attention to it. 

Kiki adds to the victims in the world without doing anything for them. As far as I am concerned this is not feminism.

In an intriguing revelation, she mentioned that she had worked with Bread and Puppet theater for awhile. But she takes their confrontational approach and empties it of all resistance in making these  prone or frozen or fragmented women and girls.

And what an amazing contrast to the adjacent gallery at the Henry with the photography of Milton Rogovin.

 He has photographed the working class for fifty years. He went to Chile ( the image above is from Chile,) Appalachia, photographing. among others, the families of miners and the miners themselves (particularly resonant at the moment with the horrifying greed propelled, mine accidents in the non unionized mines )and repeatedly to the Lower West Side of New York City. His people are dignfiedand strong. He honors them with his photographs.
He wrote poetry about the subjects of his work.
Here are a few of his comments.
"They are regular people just like the rest of us. We must not abandon them."
"Everybody should have an opportunity for a better education."
" All around we saw people with great potential but we knew none of them would realize it under the conditions of our society."

Here is a man who cares deeply about the human condition and has spent his life recording it and speaking up for what he believes.

Kiki Smith

The Kiki Smith exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, curated by Elizabeth Brown, in collaboration with the artist for many years and years, is a tour de force, not to be missed. Together they went through about 80,000 photographs to arrive at the show. Hats off for a great show and a great installation.

Brown wrote her dissertation on Brancusi's photographs of his own work, those haunting black and white photographs that were first published in the Little Review in the early 1920s by the eccentric genius Jane Heap. (See my website for more information on her). But what a difference. Compared to Brancusi's actions which were relatively straightforward, although the results were beautiful, Kiki Smith, is like walking into a complex game in which we have no idea which way to go or what the rules are.

The title " I myself have seen it: Photography and Kiki Smith " refers to the fact that these are Kiki's photographs of many different types, documentary, journalistic, casual, creative, serendipitous.

Those of us in the press conversed with the artist informally -a great opportunity to try to get a little more straightforward information from the artist ( her artists talk was aggravatingly indirect,  and my bete noir, about her materials and where she got them, although she had some good one liners).

Naturally, I asked her if she was concerned about environmental issues, since we were standing in a room with a lot of simulations of dead white mammals, and also a crucified Christ photograph ( that's my nod to Good Friday, today). She said she didn't like to be polemical, she didn't like to tell people what to think. Where have we heard that before? But in her case, it is true. She lays out the work, the death, the damage, the anguished adolescent girls, the mythic women, the fairy tale girls, the composite bird women, but they are all strangely passive. Oddly,  she said the same thing as William Kentridge, that making art flows from her subconscious, she doesn't know what she is going to do ahead of time. But with wildly different results. Kiki Smith does not engage social political issues, we must conclude that spontaneity is conditioned by who we are. In Kiki Smith's case, I think this show gives us a whole new perspective on who she is and what her work is about.

When I asked her about AIDS, since that was the first work I saw that impressed me at the height of the epidemic (in the art world), she said, oh I just happened to be doing work about the body then (she also said when she took emergency medical training it was just to clinically analyze the bodies) .But her sister had jsut died of AIDS! So where is the anguish, the emotion, the passion? Anyone that can produce this much work has passion, but there is a strangely absent quality, a sense that somehow her consciousness is somewhere else.

Now I am going to make a big leap and a big guess. When I saw the movie Precious, one of the key devices was that when she was being raped, she would escape into fantasy, wonderful living color celebrity status fantasy. She was absent from the world in those times.

I see the same absence in Kiki Smith, her women lie wounded, or stand introverted, her crows are dead, her imagery of Little Red Riding Hood morphing into a wolf/girl doesn't suggest she is empowered by this transformation. Lilith, another woman who has had a raw deal, is just Lilith, not all conquiering Lilith. So what about Kiki's absent emotions. Is this a result of early traumas? I am not going to go further with this and get more explicit,  but that was the message of the show for me. Going from Kiki Smith to William Kentridge, from the "feminist" introvert standing or lying passively, to the male activist declaring greed and capitalism wrong was quite a contrast. I still haven't digested it. I respect Kiki Smith for what she has done, but I wish she would stand up and declare herself. We have to penetrate the obfuscating indirectness ( which is strangely, deeply allied with sixties modernism, as became clear in the lecture).

But the show is really wonderful, dozens of images, all of them beautiful in themselves, that together give us a whole new perspective on Kiki Smith. The Seattle Weekly had a nice analysis of the experience of looking at the show, up, down, and eye level. Sharon Arnold did a wonderful analysis from a completely different perspective than mine.