My appreciation of the vast amount of drawings kiki has made over her long career is a constant source for my inquiry. I begin this blog putting together key points Kiki talked about in this interview. One of her major artistic influences in relation to using the body and internal organs was Frida Kahlo, Kiki drew inspiration from Kahlo’s surrealist paintings and how Kahlo used her own personal internal bodily experiences on to canvas. It is very evident these two artists were not inhibited as to the somewhat gory bloody images they made. Kiki in her life size sculptures the Human Body, Tail and her beeswax, microstyle male and female bodies untitled, and there are lots of others to view. The more i look at these sculptures the less grotesque they become, Tail a life size female with entrails trailing metres long out of her bottom, conjures up loads of thoughts and my immediate response is to give it a code a symbolic title. Is this body a statement of feminism, Kiki says the exterment so much being purged is women expelling there baggage, so is this sculpture a re-birth of women hood ? Does it symbolise beauty is under the skin not what we see on the outside. As i listen to and read more about Kiki i am easily convinced this work is not to embars makes us feel dirty, it is about women’s internal feelings a personal struggle with the outside world.
Patricia Briggs gives an overview while what i consider she was attempting to be precise in her account of the exhibition A Gathering, 1980-2005. held at Walker Art Centre, 2005. As a source to be relied upon i find it superficial and it certainly does not big deep in Smith’s practice. I also feel that the vast use of the word feminism and the body sculptured as abject symbolism raised in this review repetitive. Briggs skims over Kiki’s drawings and just focuses on the bronze works from, a female’s perspective. Smith is a tremendously talented we all know this, she has exhibited extensively for more than twenty five years. Her drawings may not have the shock value that some of Kiki’s sculptures do, but they i feel show a deeper sense of the artist practice, they have probably taken a much longer time to make and therefore hold significantly more value in why Kiki made them. Surely this is what people want to know ! The exhibition travelled to the Whitney Museum, here it was reviewed by Rosa Berland, Rosa in her opening paragraph sats “The artist deftly prints and then rubs away at the surfaces, making paper worn, layered and archaically beautiful. She sculpts waxen and bronze skin as bruised, scarred or rough, and renders diverse objects in unexpected materials” Berland talks about Smith’s encyclopedic visual mythology in her works, this gives meaning and the viewer can then look at the works with greater understanding. Sure the female body in the exhibition is ever present but it does not need to be reviewed by Briggs as this abject sensationalist object. Berland i get the sense really does understand Kiki Smiths work, she goes into detail about the inventive use of Smiths materials and the curiosity factor of how they initially came to be made, and without putting an ugliness of the female bodies on exhibition she articulates a feminism mythos and surrealism.
reference :http://contemporaryart2010.blogspot.com/2010/01/march-17_10.html
Briggs, Patricia. Woman's Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2008): 66-68. Accessed August 15, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/20358172.
Berland, Rosa J. H. "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005." C : International Contemporary Art, Summer, 2007, 46-47, Accessed August 15,2020