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| Kiki Smith |
Kiki Smith (b. 1954) is an artist, sculptor, and printmaker. Her work can
be seen or has been shown in countless museums, including the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum
of Contemporary Art. An exhibition of her work Prints, Books and Things, ran at
the New York MoMA from December 5, 2003 to March 8, 2004, and was followed by
an interactive website. The following conversation focuses on Smith’s collaboration
with poet Leslie Scalapino, The Animal Is in the World Like Water in Water
(2010). : Being Poet
Leonard Schwartz : Today’s guest, on the
phone from New York, is Kiki Smith. She is an internationally known artist
working in multiple mediums. About her work, it has been written, “Smith
represents the female body as one of resistance and transgression. Her women
reject the graceful refined poses of Western statuary, and startle by
performing extremely private acts in a remarkably public and matter of fact
manner.” The work of Kiki Smith’s I’d like to talk about today is a
collaboration she’s done with the poet Leslie Scalapino: The Animal Is in the
World Like Water in Water, published by Granary Books in an edition of forty or
forty-five copies. We have one copy here at the Evergreen State College in our
rare books room. Welcome, Kiki Smith.
Kiki Smith : Thank you. Thank you very much.
Schwartz : Wonderful to have you on the line. I
know you’re a busy person and working on many projects all at once. Can you say
a little bit about your collaboration with the poet Leslie Scalapino?
Smith : Sure. Leslie had asked me to write her — I
don’t know what you call those — a blurb?
Schwartz : A blurb, sure.
Smith : For the back of a book that she made, also
with Granary Press, and I did. At that time, I didn’t know she was friends with
my friend Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and I didn’t know her work particularly well,
although I had heard her read. I’m not somebody who writes blurbs. I don’t know
much about things like that, but I did it nonetheless. Then thinking about it,
I wrote that I really liked her work. I think she suggested to me then that we
could make something together. I didn’t have any idea particularly what to do.
I made some very strange drawings, and then I thought she could make something
that went with them. We tried to think of who could publish it, and that took a
while. We asked Granary, and they weren’t interested in doing it at the time
because they had other commitments. So, we didn’t really know where to go with
it, but we sort of made it nonetheless. Leslie also rewrote and reworked it,
and then eventually Granary Press came back to me, just by chance, and asked if
we would like to do it. They were ready, I guess. We said, “Yes, we would love
to,” and then we started working on it.
Schwartz : There was a period in the past — I
associate it with the heyday of the New York School — in which poets and
painters worked together collaboratively in really exciting ways more often.
That’s rarer these days, and you are an artist who has worked with poets. You
mentioned Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and now Leslie Scalapino. Let me first just
say, the book is extraordinary. It includes digital prints of your images, each
individually hand-colored by you, Kiki Smith. The book is accordion-bound in
Ultrasuede, a pleasure to the touch. There are forty-five copies. Each one of
those copies is very expensive. It’s very much an art object or a book art
project, as well, to which one makes pilgrimage in order to find a copy and
read the book, or to read the book and look at the book. Can you say, though, a
little bit about the relationship between word and image for you in this book?
Smith : I periodically like to use words in
relationship to my work. Probably because, historically, how language and image
go together is very interesting. It has a rich history pre-book: in painting,
and then in stone. Like the Sumerians or the Egyptians, where it’s pictorial
and language at the same time, or like altar paintings of the saints with words
coming out of their mouths, or Nancy Spiro’s work. She’s worked very
extensively with text. Before that, when I was younger, I mostly worked with my
own text. Since I met Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, we’ve made maybe four projects
together. And I’ve worked with Leslie and Anne Waldman a little bit, and
different people. Henri Cole and I made a broadside together. For me, it’s just
a pleasure. I’ve also made several books with Lynne Tillman, who’s more a
fiction writer. But it’s interesting because it can’t be illustration. You
can’t make something that is an illustration of something, because then it’s
just working for somebody else, which I’m not that into. Each one that I’ve
done, for the most part, has really been a collaboration, and sometimes it
comes just from talking. Mei-mei and I just talked for a long time, and then we
did things simultaneous to one another. With Leslie, I actually made the work
first, you know, in a certain way. She wasn’t making an illustration either;
she made something that could couple it, that could coincide in the same space.
In certain ways they go together, and in other ways they move apart from one
another, or are antithetical to one another’s meaning. I like that it’s not a
one-to-one correlation. It’s just possibility.
Schwartz : That’s really intriguing. I do
understand that the risk or the threat is that something becomes illustrative —
that the image becomes illustrative of the poem, or the poem …
Smith : Which also has a great history. You know,
it has to work, even if very superficially. Mei-mei will make poems and I just
use all the animals she mentions in the poems, or all the different kinds of
natural phenomenon. I’ll just make images of those. In that way it’s maybe
closer [to illustration], but it’s just whatever is pleasurable, and also — in
terms of printmaking or technically working with paper masters or master
printmakers — what’s interesting. How to push that: your use of and the form of
a book.
Schwartz : You do mention that your sequence of
forty-three drawings had been, I think, completed beforehand, and it’s titled
Women Being Eaten by Animals. About those drawings, Scalapino writes, “I wrote
the poem using the sense of an unalterable past occurrence: One female,
apparently the same girl, is repeatedly, in very similar images as variations,
bitten and clawed by a leopard-like, lion-like animal. Both person and animal
have abstracted features, giving the impression of innocence or opaqueness. As
in a dream of similar actions or a dream of a single, timeless action, the girl
flecked with blood while being unaltered by the animal’s touch, there is no
representation of motion except stillness of the figures floating in space of
page. Neither the girl nor the animal articulate expression, as if phenomena of
feeling(s) do not exist.” Kiki, we are on radio and we can’t show the images,
so I’ve read this text on your images. Is there anything you can say about the
extraordinarily sensual and extraordinarily disturbing quality of the woman
being eaten by animals?
Smith : I was asked by the Museum of Modern Art,
by Wendy Whiteman, if I wanted to make an exhibition of my prints, probably a
little less than ten years ago. I wanted a hook for it because it was Queens.
She asked me if I wanted to make a billboard, which never happened, but I
immediately thought of Rousseau’s — I think it’s a lion or leopard attacking
the white antelope [Henri Rousseau’s The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the
Antelope] — and it has the same trajectory of those animals. There is a central
animal and they are in some big jungle, and then the other one comes lunging
into it. So, I thought about that: that most animals are actually eaten. They
leave the planet being eaten alive. I had to think about that for a while,
unpleasantly. But then I also thought that, for me, it was more how you get out
of your body. How you get out of your own ego-consciousness. What penetrates
and what is penetrant to you, and what gives you freedom at the same time? I
think about animals a lot in very convoluted ways, but part of it is this sort
of shamanistic space of people either acting as animals, or making associative
attributes to animals, or anthropomorphizing animals. It moves around. But it’s
just my own convoluted entertainment of how to escape “me,” or something like
that. It’s not unpleasant any of it. It’s also [this idea that we are] not to
be separate from the rest of the universe, that we have this idea of autonomy,
but really we’re a part of a whole.
Schwartz : I certainly was moved by that aspect
of the work: the absence of privileging the human over the animal, that there
is a kind of offering being made. I also thought of certain images from early
Buddhist tradition — I think it may be Indian Buddhism, but it may be elsewhere
as well — that illustrate the story of the Buddha offering himself to the
starving tiger to be eaten. I know your work tends to get associated with a
certain kind of relationship to Catholic spirituality, but I kept thinking of
that image of the Buddha’s offering of himself to the tiger.
Smith : That’s interesting. My mother was a
Catholic. She converted to Catholicism from some other religion, but then she
converted to, or rather, practiced Hinduism and Buddhism. So, I think it’s true
to say that I grew up in a mixed household. And anyone, from the sixties
anyway, is influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and many other religions just by
the nature of growing up in the sixties, which I did. Because, you know, the
East … For the last hundred years in art and in philosophy, but very directly
in art, Hinduism and different parts of Buddhism, certainly Zen Buddhism, were
a very big influence. I’m very interested in the iconography of religions, much
more than I’m actually interested in belief systems. I feel like being Catholic
was enough for me for one lifetime. But I love the iconographies that are
associated with belief systems. I find that one can be playful in those
histories also.
Schwartz : Absolutely. I just spoke with Ibrahim
Muhawi — who is a translator of Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet — about
the difference between metaphor and symbol. Symbol has to do with
identification, he argued, in locking us into a body, or locking us into a particular
tradition; whereas metaphor opens things up, retains a relationship to a thing
to be sure, but also opens it up to multiple possibilities. Also, of course,
Leslie Scalapino as a poet is very influenced by Zen Buddhism as a practicing
Buddhist.
Smith : She was a really fascinating person,
someone who was very abstract in her thinking. But I think the thing that I
liked about — more when you listen to her, if you let it go inside of you — I
always thought it was a little like standing behind thought. Like you’re
standing behind thought, just observing it. And it goes into you, in a way that
you don’t have to be analytic. You can, but you don’t have to [in order] to get
it. The words penetrate you and then make a consciousness inside of you. I
mean, she has an enormous breadth of work. She had dynamic energy for her work
and for many other artists’ work, and supported other artists: artists and
writers both.
Schwartz : Sure, theater as well. I think dance
groups have been involved as well.
Smith : Yes, dance. I recently saw her piece with
Fiona Templeton.
Schwartz : Kiki, can I read a short passage from
the poem?
Smith : Sure.
Schwartz : This is from Kiki Smith and Leslie
Scalapino’s The Animal Is in the World Like Water in Water.
[Reads
from The Animal Is in the World Like Water in Water.]
So,
that was Leslie Scalapino from her collaboration with Kiki Smith, The Animal Is
in the World Like Water in Water, published by Granary Books. That last line I
stopped at, “hierarchy is incomprehensible,” also really speaks, to me, to the
relationship between the two forms: your drawing of the female form and the
animal form. Kiki, can I ask you, do you have other specifically poetry and art
collaborations that you are working on currently?
Smith : Uh … I don’t know. I can’t remember!
[Laughter.] I’m trying to make stained glass windows with songs, with words
from songs. It’s something I’ve wanted to make for about ten years, so I
finally decided to make it now. It’s with a song called “Tramp on the Street,”
which was written in the late 1800s. I’m always, in my fantasy life, making
chapels, which I make and don’t belong anywhere. No one seems to have the
slightest interest in them, but I need to make them. I feel very passionate
about making them, so I’m going off to Germany for the next month to paint some
more. And besides that, I don’t know. The only thing I did want to say is that
“the animal is in the world like water in water” is from George Bataille, and I
think it’s from Theory of Religion. I’m trying to plod my way through reading
that, which is not easy.
Schwartz : Thank you for mentioning that because
I did note that “the animal is in the world like water in water” is a quote
from Bataille. And I did think about the collaborations between George Bataille
and Hans Bellmer, their edition of The Story of the Eye.
Smith : Yes, yes.
Schwartz : Do you know Bellmer’s poupées, those
dolls, those infinitely flexible female forms with a certain kind of violence
towards the form built into them? Do you have a view or interest in Bellmer?
Smith : When I was young I hated them. I thought
that this was really terrible, and as I got older I loved them. I absolutely
love them. I had a short show at the ICP, the International Center of
Photography in New York, and one of the big hooks for me was that there was an
extensive Bellmer show downstairs in the basement exhibition space, and I had
the upstairs. It was just heaven for me to see it. Mine is like a super soft
version. But mine is … it’s not transgressive, but a more open possibility of
being in a body. Obviously both have their own weird sexual connotations. He
was really deep in it. This transgressive aspect of being in a body, maybe
there is some relationship to Catholicism in that because it’s caught in the
body, the dilemmas of being in a body. I don’t know. But I’m crazy about his
work. His etchings, his photographs, his coloring, hand-coloring the
photographs, setting up props, making sculpture and then using it as an object
for photography, or as an object to be acted on in a theatrical way or
something. There are just a million interesting ways to think about it.
Schwartz : It’s really intriguing to hear you
talk about Bellmer. It also makes me think of another artist of that period,
André Masson, and of a particular story he tells of being left for dead on the
battlefield in World War I with his chest blown open, and no longer being able
to tell the difference between where his chest leaves off and the sky begins as
he looks up. And then wanting to spend the rest of his life trying to paint
that powerful color that he saw when he couldn’t tell the difference any longer
between his body and the sky.
Smith : Well, I think that’s what George Bataille
is talking about too: the pre-ego-conscious space of being not-separate in the
world. But also, I studied to be an emergency medical technician, and we had to
work in the emergency room and someone had a big knife wound, and I realized
that I couldn’t have cared less that my purpose was to stitch him up. All I
thought was, “Wow, isn’t that great, the outsides and the insides at the same
time!” [Laughter.] So I thought I wasn’t suited for a medical career.
Schwartz : Right, right, you’re no longer in the
field. No one can call in and try and sue you for enjoying it aesthetically.
Smith : I guess because it gave me something to
think about. Yes, that space between here and there.
Schwartz : That’s really powerful, Kiki. How
great to hear your thoughts on Bellmer and Bataille, as well as on Scalapino
and the book you’ve just completed. Let me just mention that there are
forty-five copies of The Animal Is in the World Like Water in Water. One of
those copies exists at the Evergreen State College’s rare books room. Please
come by the college and the library to look at it on the premises. And Kiki
Smith, thank you so much for coming to the phone and talking with me.
Smith : Thank you. Thank you. It’s my pleasure to
talk to you. I also want to say that Leslie was an extraordinary person. For
me, it was a great honor to work with her.
Schwartz : We all miss her terribly, and it’s
great to have this work of hers available to us.
Smith : It is wonderful.
(source : jacket2.org)
© Kiki Smith, courtesy the Pace Gallery.
© Kiki Smith, courtesy the Pace Gallery.
