There is nothing quite like an effete New York art critic writing for effete New Yorkers about an artist whose pose transcends his or her substance. Holding forth in The New Yorker, the rather trickily-named Peter Schjeldahl rather deftly illuminates the rather precipitous advantages of a life lived rather very very deeply in Flyover Country. Where a travelling exhibition of say, Carravagio, Monet or Degas would almost certainly take, but a retrospective of Kiki Smith's works such as that now at the Whitney Museum in New York would likely be desecrated with mustard-laden corn dogs and cow manure.

As we will unfortunately see; from the standpoint of the artiste and critics such as Schjeldahl, that might be understood as an entirely sympathetic, value-added response. He writes of Smith:

She is a major figure—long the leading light of communally-minded downtown avant-gardes—who makes minor art. Her sculpture, drawings, and prints betoken general concepts and generic sentiments; however striking, their form is arbitrary. Take, for example, a wall-hung iron rendition of the digestive system (1988); a floor piece of swarming crystal sperm (1989-90)... The best known illustrate carnal fact and poetic associations of the human body...She is a New York School aristocrat. Her father was the sculptor Tony Smith...rather like herself, an artist whose significance exceeds the sum of his material achievements....Kiki and her sisters served their father as studio assistants and grew up on easy terms with art-world celebrities. Kiki’s knockabout biography—as a college dropout and, before her art-world success, a baker, electrician’s assistant, surveyor, garment worker, census taker, short-order cook, and bartender—recalls bohemian eras when artists lived as lumpen proletarians, at home with the working class. The last such era involved Smith’s own generation, albeit as something of a conceit: principled downward social mobility.

Spot on, Mr. Schjeldahl. What better than "principled downward mobility" as preparation for arty installations of the human digestive system and sperm? One must consider. Is not the alternately drab and problematic plight of the "lumpenproletariat," in fact, fairly ruled by the demands of the digestive system and the phallus? Surely, Smith has penetrated the bestial subconscious of commoners blithely assuming the existence of self-determination.

Smith's career, Schjeldahl explains, is itself an expression of an historical epoch.

Smith cannot be understood except as an exemplar—and survivor—of a scene that boomed in New York in the early nineteen-eighties. That epoch of punk music, performance art, political anarchism, polymorphous sexuality, gallery graffiti, funky feminism...and prevalent bad habits was done in by factors including gentrification and, above all, AIDS....The catastrophe...fostered a movement, in the nineties, of art that marshalled political grievance....Choleric installational art was just the thing for a burgeoning circuit of biennial exhibitions. Smith’s maturation as an artist accorded with the moment....she became a bard of a suddenly sinister organic existence, with such conversation pieces as a row of huge, handsome clear glass bottles etched with names, in Gothic lettering, of our now possibly lethal secretions: semen, mucus, vomit, oil, tears, blood, milk, saliva, diarrhea, urine, sweat, and pus...

It is not at all difficult to picture a bunch of New Yorkers in an art gallery, intently gazing at bottles labelled "vomit," "urine," "sweat," "mucus," "pus," and so forth.

It is redolent with meaning, true.

Here is what it means.

Cosmpolitanism in extremis is the last refuge of the achingly lonely.

Transgression equals fatigue.

And Kiki Smith is the modern-day David Hannum.

TECHNORATI TAGS: KIKI SMITH. ART, NEW YORK, WHITNEY MUSEUM, NEW YORKER, PETER SCHJELDAHL, DAVID HANNUM

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at November 21, 2006 10:17 AM