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The Better to Eat You With

© Christine Hamm

Kiki Smith: Telling Tales at the International Center for Photography

"Consciously you may not even be aware that most of
the things you think are historical, that you're just
a product of what people were thinking five hundred
years ago. In trying to look at the form without any
of this moralistic stuff that's dumped on it, hopefully one
can get a more detached view that's free of
all that baggage. I know, in my life, I feel oppressed
a great deal by all these ideologies that I've either
internalized in my own psyche or am politically and socially
confronted with every day. Your body is like Everyman,
where all these things are played out..."
-- Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith takes on the big issues: society, mythology, psychology and biology. And she manages to make each piece of work balance at the intersection. In “Telling Tales” she continues to work through themes that have been essential to her as an artist, and are of personal interest to her as a woman. I have included examples of her work -- some images are directly from this exhibit and some are to illustrate stylistic points. Kiki Smith sees her art as a way of working through the definitions society has placed on the bodies of women. She is quite specific in her denial of the mind/body duality; therefore, her images of the body are also representations of psychological states.

Telling Tales is broken down into three sections -- one devoted to Snow White/Eve, one to Red Riding Hood, and one to odd, life-sized puppets surrounded with symbols of decay. Although the puppet section is evocative and certainly worthy of much examination, the other two sections interested me more, so I will concentrate on the most salient features of them.

First of all, Snow White/Eve. The walls of the Snow White/Eve installation are covered with large photographs of Kiki Smith, slumped on a pile of leaves as if suddenly asleep. She is dressed as a witch, with a bitten black apple falling out of her hand. The room is filled with the sound of the crunching of apples. “Eve” is a small white statue, made of marble dust and resin. Her hair and face, although already carved, are accented with simple graphite pencil. The figure of the statue is pear shaped, small breasted, heavy thighed and has a certain childlike distortion. It has the air of much so-called “outsider art”; that is, it is deliberately and carefully made, yet completely outside the figural canon of the western art tradition. Much of Kiki Smith’s work seems to be about undoing as much as doing. Far from classically beautiful figures, her drawings and sculptures look like they were made by a twelve year old girl. Art students all over the world have the “correct” proportions of the body drilled into their heads -- the body is always seven and a half heads tall, the hand is always a head long, etc. Smith’s work is about how the untrained, female, eye sees. Her works on paper mirror the preoccupations of near-adolescent girls -- careful, awkwardly penciled portraits of movie stars, angels and romantically dressed, 18th Century girls. As the eater of the apple, the witch, and the slumbering woman, Kiki reclaims and reorganizes the roles of Eve, Snow White and the witch. Instead of different types of women, some “bad” or “evil”, and some “good” and “innocent” -- and different forms of art, some “high” and some “low” -- Smith conflates and distorts all definitions.

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