A Hidden World of One’s Own
Kiki Smith's "Silver Bird"
When walking into the Brooklyn Museum’s recent Kiki Smith exhibit, a large panel presents this brief statement about the exhibit: “The idea of how women found space for creative inspiration in the past is the point of departure for Sojourn, this exhibition by Kiki Smith.” It praises Smith’s “lyrical and highly personal vocabulary of images,” and declares the work a meditation on the “course of a woman’s lifetime marked by struggles unique to female artists and the contemplative exhilaration that defines the moment of creative inspiration.”
The Brooklyn Museum is the home of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. It is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, a 1979 work by feminist artist Judy Chicago, which features a triangular table with exquisite handmade plates and embroidered place mats displaying the name of famous women throughout history. The Dinner Party was praised by feminist art critic Lucy Lippard, who stated, “My own initial experience was strongly emotional… The longer I spent with the piece, the more I became addicted to its intricate detail and hidden meanings.”
"Singer" (2008)
But The Dinner Party was the source of controversy in the art world. Art critic Hilton Kramer said “The Dinner Party reiterates its theme with an insistence and vulgarity more appropriate, perhaps, to an advertising campaign than to a work of art,” calling it an example of “art so mired in the pieties of a cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own.” Maureen Mullarkey called the work preachy and untrue to the women it claims to represent. She especially disagreed with the sentiment she labels “turn ‘em upside down and they all look alike,” an essentializing of all women which does not respect the feminist cause (Mullarkey also called the hierarchical aspect of the work into question, claiming that Chicago took advantage of her female volunteers.) Roberta Smith succinctly noted that “its historical import and social significance may be greater than its aesthetic value”.
It is true that Judy Chicago’s feminist politics are essentialist and far from nuanced. Years ago I took a class taught, in part, by Judy Chicago. What I recall of the experience is that Chicago’s insistence on essentialist, “first wave” feminism affected her perspective on second wave, “sex positive” or social deconstructionist feminists (including those important emerging feminist performance artists who engaged in a consideration of sex work—and the ways in which it potentially was or was not empowering—which I was particularly interested in).
The experience left me with a keen and intense understanding of the various battles going on in the feminist art community. I have been surprised to see one theme in the world of feminist art continue since then: it seems a celebration of women’s domestic art is the channel through which contemporary feminist art must pass, in order to be praised as doing the legitimate historical reclaiming necessary to feminist artists. This means turning the spotlight to what had been historically considered “women’s work”—china painting, quilts, sewing, embroidery. Considering the rich and varied tradition in tapestry weaving, samplers, and the like, it is an important tradition to reclaim from the recesses of “low art” categorization. As the Sackler Center website itself notes, “Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women’s work…. Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing—none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued ‘women’s work’ specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the ‘feminine.’ That hierarchy was radically challenged in the 1960s by Pop and feminist artists, alike…. In the quest for a ‘female aesthetic’ or artistic style specific to women, many 1970s feminist artists sought to elevate ‘women’s craft’ to the level of ‘high art,’ and away from its derogatory designation as ‘low art’ or ‘kitsch.’”
In keeping with this tradition, Kiki Smith’s Sojourn exhibit is inspired by a late-19th century needlework piece from Prudence Punderson, entitled “The First, Second and Last Scene of Mortality,” included in the exhibit. The piece depicts a room with a woman’s life represented from birth through death. On the far right is an infant in a cradle; the center depicts a woman of middle age, sewing; finally, on the far left is a black coffin, with the initials “P.P.” embroidered on the front. It is a striking work, reminding us of the ways in which “women’s work” incorporated and transcended purely “domestic” subject matter. Interestingly, on the wall in the room is a painting, sewn in fine detail, depicting a woman who seems to be trying to escape or hide from a man with a staff. This image, combined with the coffin, underlines the overall effect of the work, which is a sense of the woman artist in the home, which is simultaneously a place of safety and security, and a place of suffocation.
The rooms of Smith’s exhibit progress roughly according to the “life” of a woman artist. The first room is dominated by a large aluminum sculpture in the center of the room—a woman seated, one hand raised, the other on her lap. The head is disproportionately large for the body, giving it a potentially cartoonish feel; however, the expression on the figure’s face is one of divine and quiet inspiration, and has an eerie quality which pervades the entire exhibit. The piece is called “The Annunciation”—the moment when Mary learns she will become the mother to Jesus. (The Annunciation has long—perhaps too long—been a symbol connecting artistic inspiration to spirituality, particularly for women artists).
Surrounding the figure are various large drawings on Nepal paper (a sort of translucent linen material) with nearly life-size figures drawn in pencil and ink, depicted in various stages of inspiration. Deliberately recalling Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, one piece entitled “Room Enough to Enter” depicts a woman seated, one hand (as with ‘the Annunciation’) raised toward a closed window. Outside is a bird—presumably representing creativity—attempting to enter
The subsequent rooms progress through a woman’s life; drawings of pregnant women, women with children, women whose bodies seem to produce the bodies of other women in a sort of religious transposition. Mirrors of antique glass with flowers, lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling dusted in glitter and gold, cages with birds—all of this has a pretty, delicate quality, quietly undercut by small details which make the items neither wholly innocuous nor peaceful. The lightbulbs are surrounded by broken, sharp wood which hangs above; in one drawing, the ubiquitous chair is knocked to the floor.
Later in the exhibit, the drawings begin to depict women gathered together; no longer romantic, isolated figures, we see instead real women—women with tattoos and handbags, with bras and trenchcoats and glasses. This move to the real is relieving, giving us the sense that the life of the woman artist in Sojourn is coming into being. Another larger-than-life aluminum sculpture entitled “Singer” depicts a woman standing as though after delivering a great aria—she has her hand raised as though about to bow, and a bouquet of flowers in the other. This sense of triumph and success, of positive reception from the world, is optimistic and lovely. The last rooms include more large drawings of an older woman which seem to represent Smith’s mother’s recent death (one of the pieces is entitled “Mourning”). Finally the visitor enters a room with large drawings of black coffins, identical to the one depicted in the Prudence Punderson piece. In the center of the room a large pine wood coffin rests on a pine wood table; inside are clear glass dandelions, which sprout from the base of the coffin.
Leaving the exhibit one walks through “The Dinner Party.” It is striking to see both the similarities and differences between the two treatments of women and ambition, art, community. Sojourn is exponentially more subtle and interesting, less overtly political—in part because it depicts a life cycle in which one woman leaves (passes away) to make room for another woman’s spirit: “I put aside myself so there was room enough to enter” (as the title of one piece says).
Yet both also root themselves in this archeological dig into “women’s work.” Celebrating domestic art has been a foundational, aspect of feminist art; identifying visionary women artists who did all that they could with the materials available to them is a fine way of demonstrating the triumph of artistic inspiration over political and social oppression. Still, I wondered, as I finished walking through the exhibit, at what point women artists may slough off the perpetual handling of the domestic. Work which centers itself on sewing or embroidery, for example—a dying art, and something I grew up doing—risks romanticizing an art which in actuality, in part, was incredibly stifling. After all, the reality is that women turned to needlework in part because they could not turn to other materials with equal freedom (oil paints, sculpture, etc.).
Like The Dinner Party and its pervasive yonic imagery, Sojourn depicts women artistry as delicate, domestic, life-giving, natural, compassionate, and community-oriented. Yet, as important as it is to celebrate this aspect of female society and history, it seems equally important to avoid essentializing women’s psychology, and to engage more complex representations of being a woman in the world. A forty-five minute documentary on Smith’s exhibit in Venice in 2005, Homespun Tales, screens at the exhibit. It includes interviews with one of Kiki Smith’s assistants. On being asked how to interpret her work, Smith’s assistant used the word “intuitive” four times in about a minute, concluding with the statement, “Kiki’s studio is practically her body.” I cringed at this statement, which seems to center around the idea that women’s art is inseparable from their bodies and (relatedly) their supposed connection to “mother earth.” What does it mean to say her work is “intuitive”? What agency does it take from her, her reason and knowledge of women’s history, to believe that her work comes from animal-spirits (something she herself implies)?
I became a fan of Smith after seeing her brutal and haunting sculpture “Tale” (1992), which depicts a woman crawling with a “tale” of excrement behind her. It is incredibly disturbing, pulling from motifs of shame of the female body and sexual violence which pervades the Western world and its art. It is unforgettable, and I appreciate the unflinching and yet complex perspective on corporeality which she offers in that piece. In Homespun Tales, Smith hung etched drawings of beautiful flowers, made with ink of her own blood. These pieces, to me, seem a commentary on the history of the “feminine sphere” which have real weight. In retrospect, though, even these two pieces leave me unsatisfied.
In her book Proofs and Theories, Louise Gluck, former poet laureate, once wrote: “I’m puzzled, not emotionally but logically, by the contemporary determination of women to write as women. Puzzled because this seems an ambition limited by the existing conception of what, exactly, differentiates the sexes. If there are such differences, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that literature reveals them, and that it will do so more interestingly, more subtly, in the absence of intention. In a similar way, all art is historical: in both its confrontations and evasions, it speaks of its period. The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will.” I suppose, ultimately, I have a desire for feminist art to move from Woolf’s concept of “a room of one’s own” to a hidden world of one’s own psyche—one which illuminates what has been hidden, one which interestingly, and subtly, depicts what it means to be an individual. Whether one can ever do this with the absence of intention is another question altogether.
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