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Kiki Smith by Frank Gaard, Walker non-employee

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Kiki Smith Kourai 2005 Frank Gaard‘s long history with the Walker began with his first solo show, Viewpoints–Frank Gaard: Paintings in 1980. Represented in the permanent collection by five paintings and a series of notebooks, his most recent involvement includes a 2004 commission to create a billboard in downtown Minneapolis. He agreed to share his [...]

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Kiki Smith Kourai 2005

Frank Gaard‘s long history with the Walker began with his first solo show, Viewpoints–Frank Gaard: Paintings in 1980. Represented in the permanent collection by five paintings and a series of notebooks, his most recent involvement includes a 2004 commission to create a billboard in downtown Minneapolis. He agreed to share his thoughts on the new exhibition Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005.

I once heard of a collector who only collected things that were colored black. All the most famous artists had black works in their collections; indeed, when hard times came they made even more black-colored art. The painter who told me this story was an abstract painter who has horses to feed and has made quite a lot of black paintings. This is a preface to the Kiki Smith show at Walker, which is very black (and white), and it’s sculpture of a personal type, but still obviously well financed (bronze even, oi!).

I enjoyed the show and the company of my dearest love, Pearly, who tells me her dreams. As here with Ms. Kiki Smith, I was taken with a dreamy work at the very back of the exhibition. Five nude women carrying wolves over their shoulders, the piece is flat on paper from Nepal and is partly collaged and drawn with a marker of an indeterminate type (perhaps a felt-tip?). The images are curious, as they open a Pandora’s box of imaging. The image most Early Christians would have recognized as Jesus The Good Shepherd (a clothed man with a lamb on his shoulders ), this was how the Christ image was coded, and the reverse is true in the piece named Kourai where the shepherds are nude females and decidedly Pagan (check out the girl fur twixt these women’s legs, exquisite drawing, worthy of Georgia O’Keefe) and the animals are wolves not lambs or calves (as with Greek Kourai).

The return to the pagan world, the Pre-Christian era, is also in other art: Matisse and Picasso made hay on this conception of a Mediterranean new paganism. But Kiki Smith’s work herein speaks to an even earlier utopia, the Greece where the nude human figure appears as an ideal boy (or girl), (boys first because they were the ones most desired for fucking by the ancient Greeks), and where better to see these sculptures than in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (recently redecorated)? Maybe there were five women in the piece? The thing is, it’s a brilliant statement about the culture we arise from, i.e. Greek, and the paganism that has returned as terror. The destructive maelstrom of our world at this moment on a cold night in February, this work is the image of a truer past for our culture born of women and the wolf who becomes our/her child. In some ways this work is brilliant, utterly, even if the artist only sees my p.o.v. as an alternative interpretation; for me, it’s this idea of an alternative culture myth of origin that is exciting. What if instead of a sweet adolescent Jew with an errant lamb upon his shoulder, the new image was several nude women with wolves? Different outcomes from different myths of origin. Maybe we do inherit the wind and the poison of our war-making and our development model! Maybe every art work is a scream and a laugh; a pre-christian era–think about it, good spot for artists–invented architecture, painting, sculpture, theater, philosophy. All we are saying is give art a chance.

Kiki Smith is an artist who makes fabulous things and things more perplexing. Oddly it reminds me of myself (minus the color); this sort of genius or yo-yo, who can say? But my suspicion is when she’s on (insert musical metaphor here), she’s genius incarnate. But when she not, she’s not. This goes to an idea I think is rather in the mix of late that art-working is, as W.B. Yeats once suggested, a fragile mood, that what it is that makes creative action is delicate. And this runs through the work, this mood of creation (carving a pelvis from stone!). I like to see an artist, in this post-minimalist time, who has courage and let’s her feelings flow–and doesn’t depend on sentimentality; that’s where a lot of us fail. We get too obsessed with mortality, when it’s better to dance on the devil in the pale moonlight.

The black everywhere in the show is a key measure of the artist as sculptor. It’s not that she besmirches the Walker’s wedding-dress white walls but rather that she’s making the most of that whiteness. Kiki is smart; the woman thing was there for her at the beginning. That’s how I first saw her images in Avalanche (I think) but all the artists who liked Eva Hesse’s art, myself included, saw the other myth of creation, the juicy one, Babylon and the fires in Baghdad. De Sade is a philosopher as much as a fiction writer, and maybe the world is tumbling towards a new Babylon? Kiki Smith creates discourse, she opens the windows and lets in possibilities. Her limits are shown in the presence of her genius, she’s so fucking human. And she’s not finished; hell, she’s younger than me by 10 years.

Postscriptus: Hmmm, I don’t like sculpture very much (I’ve been painting since 1960). For a while I ran an organization called The Anti-Sculpture League. I’m just telling you this since the artist herein, Ms. Kiki Smith, is primarily a sculptor. I don’t hold it against her that she’s a sculptor, but I think it’s better to make flat things. They are easier to store. I guess I just don’t get sculpture. Why make a crow when they are everywhere already?

Joseph Beuys is in the house

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Joseph Beuys, Fan Photo, 1982, black-and-white photograph, 12 x 9-3/8 inches, Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992 © 2006 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Joseph Beuys‘ work. In 1997 I curated an exhibition from the Walker’s [...]

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Joseph Beuys, Fan Photo, 1982, black-and-white photograph, 12 x 9-3/8 inches, Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection, Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1992

© 2006 Estate of Joseph Beuys/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Joseph Beuys‘ work. In 1997 I curated an exhibition from the Walker’s deep collection of Beuys objects; I’ve published a few essays on him; and in 2004 I taught a college class just on his work — a whole semester, thirteen lectures, on one artist. I could have done thirteen more, if I’d had the time and the stamina; for me, his work is gut-wrenching, inspiring, precise, aggravating, perversely beautiful, and undeniably Important. And there’s a lot of it: Beuys was nothing if not prolific. He used to say that his totem animal was the hare. I’d guess the Energizer Bunny was part of the family, too.

Even after all my thinking and looking, I wasn’t prepared for the punch of seeing Tierfrau (Animal Woman) (1949/1984) for the first time. It’s a bronze, about 18 inches tall, and on loan to the Walker for just a few months from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. I was excited to see the piece, which I knew only from reproductions, so as soon as we had it installed I went to take a look. I was amused to see the gallery guard slowly circumnavigating the sculpture on its pedestal, seemingly mesmerized by its presence. I was, too — it was so much more powerful than I’d expected. Seeing it confirmed for me something I already knew: photographs are a terrible way to look at sculpture. Besides the obvious problem of only being able to see one side of a work, in a photo you also can’t confront it with your body — to visually, viscerally feel it, to relate its heft, texture, size, and temperature to your own. What happens when you do is often surprising. This skinny, prickly little bronze thing had me completely entranced. I found it mysterious, and mystery is seductive. So I decided to do some research. (Yes, I’m a nerdy historian. I like research. This is not an apology.)

I found that Animal Woman bridges Beuys’ entire career, which is the reason for its unusual date of 1949/1984. The upper half is based on Zinnakt (Tin Nude), made in 1949 while he was a student at the Kunstakademie in Dsseldorf, Germany. Tin Nude is a portable fetish object with a tiny head and feet that bracket conical breasts, ballooning thighs, protruding buttocks, and a smooth, swollen abdomen suitable for rubbing. It has no arms and it can’t stand up; it can only lie there, with its arched back and thrusting pelvis. The object has no relationship to walking, talking flesh-and-blood women — it’s an Archetype, all about fecundity, rituals, and the Great Mother Goddess.

Beuys was clearly fond of his little Tin Nude, because in 1984 — just two years before he died — he placed it upright on a lumpy, bell-shaped base, cast the whole thing in bronze, and named it Animal Woman. The transformation is astonishing: no longer a passive fertility figure, this regal creature looks as if she is queen of some netherworld, and has just emerged from the goo still sporting a few prehistoric spines. The protrusions are actually remnants of the casting process that Beuys decided not to smooth off, and the mottled patina he added to the bronze suggests woodsy camouflage or maybe molting skin. (You aren’t tempted to rub this belly!) And what’s up with that crude pedestal she’s standing on? Is it a water spout that’s thrusting her up out of the primordial sea? There is some kind of movement implied by her stance — I can almost imagine her bounding through the forest or winging off into the ether. It’s true that Animal Woman and her predecessor embody well-worn ideas about the primal link between the feminine and the earth (a cornerstone of Beuys’ ideology), but the artist has accomplished something extraordinary here — Tin Nude has morphed from a quasi- Venus of Willendorf to a sister of the Winged Victory of Samothrace – an Extreme Makeover of the art historical kind.

We installed Animal Woman in a gallery of postwar paintings and sculpture by the likes of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt (part of the exhibition The Shape of Time). She completely holds her own in their company — in fact, the earthiness of Beuys’ sculpture offers a pungent counterpoint to all those ethereal American abstractions. But she’s only in Minneapolis through the end of May. Don’t miss the chance to see her.

(Rights to reproduce Animal Woman on this site were not freely available, so come to the Walker to see the real thing.)