Kiki Smith collection premiers at MOMA

New York City has seen more than its share of unconventional and controversial art, but the Kiki Smith exhibit certainly holds its own in what is often called this new wave of modern art. For the next couple of months the Modern Museum of Art (Queens) will present "Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things," a first-time collection of this sculptor's works in the world of printed art.

Smith has printed on everything from t-shirts and scarves to posters but has shown a preference for fine, handmade Japanese paper, which adds a certain frailty and delicacy to her work.

If you walk out of the Kiki Smith exhibit without taking anything else away from it, at least remember a few of this amazing artists' words: "Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries." (1998)

This German-born American artist has been followed by the MOMA ever since its 1986 acquisition of her portfolio (now greatly enlarged). Several of her works have in the past been exhibited at the old MOMA in Manhattan. This artist who has never had a studio of her own, but worked in various universities and private studios often in collaboration with other printmakers, puts no boundaries on her art.

Her themes range from anatomy and self-portraiture to nature and female iconography. It is not easy to categorize even this small selection of her works, which mix prints, fabric designs, detailed etchings and unconventional sculptures.

As Wendy Weitman, Curator of the MOMA and sponsor of the exhibition praises, she "conflates beautiful materials and forms with content." Kiki Smith herself designed the vitrines of the showcases which present many of her smaller works at the exhibition, often setting one piece against another, creating new works of art out of her own prints. Indeed, Weitman insists she "treats the catalog as art itself."

The earlier part of her collection delves into the themes of death, mortality and rebirth, focusing on the anatomy of the human body. Pieces such as Possession is Nine-Tenth of the Law (1985) really emphasize the corporeal rather than the cerebral aspect of human nature, literally juxtaposing nine canvases, each an etching of a different internal organ.

In All Souls (1988) Smith reprinted several dozen times, on delicate Thai tissue paper, the same picture of a fetus taken from a Japanese anatomy book. This work shows awe at the vastness of the human population, but also flirts with women's rights, child abuse and, as much of her collection, carries a certain catholic undertone.

Some of her works can also be very political. One of her earlier prints, Cause/effect (1984) protests American involvement in Nicaragua by very graphically depicting a sea of skulls in the Reflective Pool in front of the White House. And indeed a very eerie feel emanates from it.

After walking through the exhibit, it is difficult not to remark Smith's really unique approach to printmaking. More than just perfecting the technique of prints, she incorporates many sculpted elements. She even sometimes turns her prints into sculptures themselves, fascinated as she is by the concept of bookmaking and folds many of her prints into small booklets.

Weitman explained that she is a "sculptor of paper . . . [she gives a] huge sensitivity to the medium." Perhaps one of the most startling examples of how she reworks her prints is Tidal (1998), thirteen different representations of the moon, presented on a long, accordion-folded handmade paper, surrounded by a wavelike crumbled picture of water.

Weitman goes on, "both the spontaneity and ease of the medium appealed to [Smith's] hands-on approach to art making, and allowed her to print on paper as well as on fabric." The extreme physicality of her training as a sculptor is really reflected in her printmaking. She is not afraid to use her own hair to trace ink onto her prints or even to get up on the etching plate and have the printer outline her body, as she did in Sueño, later filling in all the muscle details with fine etched lines.

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"Maybe because prints are this other world – they're a secret entrance into using myself as a subject . . . I've been much more self-revealing in doing prints." (Kiki 1991)

In fact, the exhibition devotes an entire room to her collection of never-before displayed distorted self-portraits, ranging from outstretched photographs of herself to three photolitographed distorted images of her face pasted onto suspended paper heads against a black backdrop.

Perhaps the most disturbing, but certainly most self-revealing of her works, these prints culminate in a monumental lithograph Banshee Pearls (1991) that extends along twelve sheets and incorporates many of her individual self-caricatures, using everything from photographs to hand drawings.

Banshee, something her father often called her, was "a female spirit from Gaelic folklore believed to presage death by wailing," and there is indeed that sordid sense to the cluster of self-portraits.

Perhaps it is Blue Feet (2003), the piece chosen to represent the exhibition, that embodies the strongest elements of Smith's work. A cut and folded etching of two suspended feet against a starry sky, on handmade Japanese paper, along which are printed phrases borrowed from a poem by the seventeenth-century Mexican nun de la Cruz, this work represents in Weitman's words "a conflation of the startling and the decorative."

It is uncertain whether the feet are hanging from a body or rising up to heaven, but this work "reveals an artist stretching herself formally and conceptually... a female voice dominates; and the tension between the beautiful and the confrontational remains."

This is not a show that everyone will love. Some will hate its daring and graphic depictions of intestines and other organs, or her grossly distorted self-portraits, perhaps reminiscent of the Sensations show which Mayor Giuliani tried to close down several years ago. However I expect that most will be touched by the exhibition, perhaps as much as I was, and leave feeling they have experienced part of Smith's life and shared part of her soul.

Perhaps nothing can better depict the free-spiritedness and somewhat detached element of her work than Kiki herself sitting in a corner sowing her next art piece, while Glenn Lowry, director of the MOMA, praised her work to the biggest art critics.

The show will be on until March 8th at the MOMA Queens. Admission is $12, $8.50 for students with ID. Pay what you wish admission on Fridays, 4-7:45 PM. Also make sure to check out the very interactive Web site covering the making of many of the 135 of her illustrated works at http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2003/kikismith/.