STEREOSKOP
KIKI SMITH by Alice van Danisch
2025
Woman in the corner, 2004
Kiki Smith
“A human-shaped tongue curving upwards, which seems to be having an animated conversation with the free-standing hand turned towards it: "Tongue and Hand" (1985) or the sinewy bronze woman crouching in the corner of the exhibition space: "Woman in the Corner" (2004). As we all know, art speaks for itself. Kiki Smith's artworks are surprising because they communicate with themselves within themselves. Her works defy conventional perception by dissecting the human body into its individual parts and placing it in a socio-politically accusatory context. The inner and outer corporeality and the engaging space in and around it have preoccupied the multimedia-working German-American artist since the beginning of her career at the end of the 1970s. Her radical depiction of body parts and fluids resonated strongly in America in the 1980s and 1990s, "where reproductive technology, feminist activism and the AIDS crisis placed the non-normative body at the center of a broader discourse on gender, origin and sexual identity” (1).
"I think I chose the body as a subject, not consciously, but because it is the one form that we all share. It's something that everybody has their own authentic experience with." (1990) (2).
In the constitution of commonality, which describes the sharing of our bodies as shaping us, there is the idea of a togetherness that is separated by the individual experience of each body. This "togetherness" also contains the "alongside each other", which the artist takes quite literally in "Untitled (Skins)" (1992) and aligns small square patches as "skin" surface to "skin" surface. The seemingly human is brought into shape, filed and displayed decoratively. Here, too, the "physicality" of the surfaces communicates in itself: sweeping elevations next to deep furrows, smoothness and roughness nestling against each other, like the contrasts of human inner life manifested as "skin" pieces made of metal.
Untitled (Skins), 1992
Kiki Smith
In Smiths' own perception of her work, the dichotomy and discrepancy between what is shown and what is perceived becomes clear once again. She describes her art as something holy that only ever reveals parts of itself to the outside world as well as to itself:
"Art is something that can stand for you, but it is not you and because of that it protects you, (so) that you can show a lot of yourself and still remain concealed. It can do both: the greatest possible exposure and the greatest possible distance. For me, it's like an amulet or a sacred necklace you can wear around your neck" (3).
(1) Okwui Enwezor in: Kiki Smith. Procession, exhibition catalog for Haus der Kunst Munich, Munich 2018, S. 7.
(2) "Hearing You With My Eyes", Kiki Smith, exhibition catalog for the exhibition "Kiki Smith. Hearing You With My Eyes" at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (09/10/2020 – 10/01/2021), p. 16.
(3) Kiki Smith in an interview with Ariane Binder, 3Sat contribution to the artist's first major retrospective in Germany: "Procession", 2018, Haus der Kunst, Min 04:59 - 05:33.