Kiki Smith at PaceWildenstein - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Eleanor Heartney

Many of the elements in this exhibition recall favorite themes of the first wave of feminist art in the 1970s. Smith's imprints of intricate lace doilies on lightly crumpled rice paper bring to mind the feminist rehabilitation of decorative arts and female crafts. Her delicate drawings of genitals and breasts etched on puffy pieces of paper reiterate that era's celebrations of the female body. Images of mermaids whose mouths unleash strips of paper scribbled with erotic texts evoke the declared pleasures of female sexuality.

Where Smith differs from her feminist predecessors, and what gives her work its power and freshness, is her lack of polemic. She is fascinated with the body, its fluids and its biological processes, but she does not claim this as an essentially female response. Nor is she interested in recuperating unappreciated female crafts. And the hints of violence, malignancy or dangerous mysteries in her work are not designed to inflame the gender wars. As a result, Smith escapes the didactic tendency that mars so much self-consciously feminist work. Instead she strives for a visual poetry that unites the corporeal realm with the intangible.

The materials she employed in this, her first exhibition of drawings, accentuate the apparent contradiction. Loose, hanging pieces of unbleached, semi-transparent rice paper form the basis for most of the works. Patched together in irregular sheets to form wispy tapestries, imprinted with drawings of body parts that often look surprisingly clinical, and drenched at times with opaque black ink, this material has an organic air, evoking sheets of shed skin. On the other hand, the paper's weightlessness drains the body references of their physicality. The body becomes merely a trace, like the impress of Christ's face on Veronica's veil or like rubbings from old tombstones.

For instance, A Man consists of a patchwork of papers, some of which have been printed with oversized, isolated, slightly murky images of ears, nostrils, nipples, the iris of an eye, and testicles. The parts are laid out a bit like laboratory specimens, but the effect is more sensuous than scientific. The piece as a whole seems to defy factual interpretation.

In Restless Drawing, an amorphous mass of doilies (actually printed impressions which have been cut out and collaged) tumbles across a black paper ground. The doilies transcend their immediate reference, suggesting a primitive life form exploding as cells multiply and mutate. A line of text brings back the human reference: "Disguising her form she passed through the body restless." It seems an apt description of Smith's whole project.