INVESTIGATING IDENTITY: GLOBAL ART since 1980: FOCUS (Magdalena Abakanowicz and Kiki Smith) ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://www.metmuseum.or g/collection/the-collection- online/search/484422
TITLE or DESIGNATION: Androgyne III
ARTIST: Magdalena Abakanowicz
CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Postmodernism
DATE: 1985 C.E.
MEDIUM: burlap, resin, wood, nails, and string
TITLE or DESIGNATION: 80 Backs
ARTIST: Magdalena Abakanowicz
CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: Postmodernism
DATE: 1976-1980 C.E.
MEDIUM: burlap and resin ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: https://www.khanacademy. org/humanities/global- culture/identity- body/identity-body-united- states/a/kiki-smith-lying- with-the-wolf
TITLE or DESIGNATION: Lying with the Wolf
ARTIST: Kiki Smith
CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: American Contemporary
DATE: 2001 C.E.
MEDIUM: ink and pencil on paper ONLINE ASSIGNMENT: http://www.nytimes.com/2 006/11/17/arts/design/17ki ki.html?pagewanted=print &_r=0
TITLE or DESIGNATION: Rapture
ARTIST: Kiki Smith
CULTURE or ART HISTORICAL PERIOD: American Contemporary
DATE: 2001 C.E.
MEDIUM: bronze INVESTIGATING IDENTITY: GLOBAL ART since 1980: SELECTED TEXT (Magdalena Abakanowicz and Kiki Smith) In the 1960s, the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz received international acclaim for her large and imaginative abstract woven hangings made of various ropes and fibers. She began to make freestanding sculptures in the early 1970s from similar materials, particularly burlap, string, and cotton gauze. Her work since 1974 has featured fragmented human figures- faces without skulls, bodies without heads, and torsos without legs-placed singly or in large groupings.
These body parts appear as hollow shells, the result of their being hardened fiber casts made from plaster molds. Yet despite their incompleteness, they are intended to be seen in the round, the hollow interior being as much a part of the piece as the molded exterior. The creases, ridges, and veins of the hardened-fiber surface assume organic characteristics, reminiscent of the earth's rough surface or the cellular composition of human skin. The emergence of Magdalena Abakanowicz as a major force on the international art scene could not have been extrapolated from any of the available data. Beginning in Russia in the first hopeful decade of the twentieth century, artists conceived of a new Golden Age. The promise of a steady advance toward an ideal order was expressed by the bright, clean, mechanically drawn abstract forms of the Constructivists. This optimism spread to Holland, Belgium, German, France, and ultimately the United States.
In the regularity and universality of geometric shapes, artists discovered a formal vocabulary appropriate to a world where man and machine would be in harmony, thanks to the benign forces of industrialization. Looking back from the closing years of the twentieth century, these idealistic art theories based on a utopian concept of progress seem foolishly naïve. Genghis Khan as portrayed in a 14th- century Yuan era album
Much of the strength that Abakanowicz needed to survive and to create an unconventional, nonconformist art came from knowing who she was. Her father’s family had been killed during the Russian Revolution, and only he and his brother escaped to Poland, their mother’s homeland.
Konstanty Abakanowicz traced his aristocratic lineage to the dreaded Tartar conqueror Genghis Khan, who swept down into China and Russia from Mongolia. The ancestor who gave his name to Magdalena’s family was the fierce Abaka-Khan, or Abaqa, a twelfth-century Ilkhan of Persia. Magdalena Abakanowicz. Bronze Crowd at the Nasher Sculpture Garden in Dallas, Texas
As a child of the aristocracy, Magdalena did not attend primary school. Instead she had different tutors, who made her memorize facts and formulas, tasks alien to her inquiring and curious mind.
Thoroughly miserable with this bookish knowledge, she learned by studying nature outside in the fields and woods. She was intrigued by peasant lore that told of forest spirits, both good and evil, and she soon came to feel that nature was animated by mysterious forces. Magdalena Abakanowicz. Four Seated Figures, 2002
She was nine in September 1939 when the German army invaded Poland. She remembers standing with her family on the terrace of her house and watching German tanks rumble toward them down the allée that led from the edge of the park.
By the following year the battlefront approached, and the situation had become so dangerous that the family could not remain on the isolated country estate any longer. Magdalena’s father order the horses harnessed to take them to Warsaw. The loss of her childhood home and the familiar surrounding forest made her feel “hollow. As if my insides had been removed and the exterior, unsupported by anything, shrank, losing its form.” Magdalena Abakanowicz. Walking Figures, 2012, Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, New York, bronze In the early 1950s, the most energetic and creative young people in the country were converging on the capital. Knowing that her aristocratic background would prevent her from registering at the university, Magdalena pretended to be the daughter of a clerk so that she could enroll in the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She earned money giving blood, cleaning streets, working on construction (including rebuilding the old town), and coaching sports. Stalinism was alive and dominated the Fine Arts Academy, where Socialist Realism was the official style. Magadalena found the atmosphere stifling; the rigid orthodoxy served only to feed her spirit of revolt and rebellion. Magdalena Abakanowicz. Androgyne III, 1985, burlap, resin, wood, nails and string
Abakanowicz saw man as fighting for control over his own contradictory nature, which she understood arose from the structure of the human brain itself, “formed of interdependent parts that originated during different stages of evolution.” Concluding that civilization’s battle to achieve balance and integration had proven futile, she found that this essential but unresolved human striving and its frustration were reflected in the conflicts recorded in myth and philosophy. Magdalena Abakanowicz. 80 Backs, 1976-80, burlap and resin
Certainly, her study of neurology did not alter her own observation that the human brain is not able to keep destructive instincts in check. Her experience as well as her reading of philosophy and literature led her to formulate a personal conception of Existentialism, which despite its fundamental pessimism, was not defeatist. Even in the absence of hope, she believed that the struggle to achieve a mental and physical equilibrium through the carthartic and transformative capacities of art was a moral imperative.
Even before the growth of popular awareness that overpopulation was an increasing threat to human survival, Abakanowicz’s experiences of the behavior of dehumanized masses bewitched by cruel dictators led her to the theme of the crowd as a roving herd, easily driven in any direction. She confesses to a fear of crowds, and especially of the uncontrolled behavior caused when the excited masses turn upon one another, forgetting their common humanity. “A crowd,” she has said, “is the most cruel because it begins to act like a brainless organism.”
After visiting Asia and Australia, returning to Warsaw, Abakanowicz could not work for many months. Europe seemed overcrowded, its people nervous and aggressive: she could find no relationship to an environment that now seemed foreign to her. The journey encouraged her to increase the number of Backs, first to forty, then to eighty. She saw these backs gathered in Polish churches in demonstrations, in the bowed backs of Indonesian Ramayana dancers, and in photographs from concentration camps. These images of the sacred and the profane suddenly came together in the idea of creating a group large enough to fill a whole space, and the result was the evocative, multivalent image of the mass of headless, limbless Backs. She began to make freestanding sculptures in the early 1970s from burlap, string, and cotton gauze. Her work since 1974 has featured fragmented human figures- faces without heads, bodies without heads, and torsos without legs- placed singly or in large groupings. These body parts are not only dismembered but also appear as hollow shells, the result of their being hardened fiber casts made from plaster molds.
Yet despite their incompleteness, they are intended to be seen in the round, the hollow interior being as much a part of the piece as the molded exterior. Although the casting process makes all the pieces almost identical in size and form, each attains some sense of individuality in its particular texture and pattern. The creases, ridges, and veins of the hardened-fiber surface assume organic characteristics, reminding us perhaps of the earth’s rough surface, or of the cellular composition of human skin. Androgyn III utilizes the same molded-torso shell found in Abakanowicz’s sculptural series Backs, begun in 1976.
Unlike the earlier pieces, which sat directly on the floor, the Androgyn torsos are perched on low stretchers of wooden legs, the long poles filling in for the lost legs. Through those provocative images the artist expresses the physical and spiritual condition of mankind. As she says, they are “about existence in general.” The artist stated, “When I investigate into humans, I investigate into myself. When I yield to my curiosity, I do not expect rational explanations. I have not really upset the original image carried within myself. Human beings with whom I am dealing in my art concern human beings in general. At the Venice Biennale and ROSC in Dublin, in Paris and elsewhere, people who saw the Backs would as ‘Is it Auschwitz?’, ‘Is it a religious rite in Peru?’, ‘Is it the dance of the Ramayana?’ All these questions may be answered in the affirmative because it is about the human condition in general.” Magdalena Abakanowicz. Four on a Bench, 1990 Kiki Smith. Untitled, 1990, beeswax and microcrystalline wax figures on metal stands
A distinctly unflattering approach to the representation of the human body is the hallmark of New York-based Kiki Smith (b. 1954), the daughter of Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith. In her work, Smith has explored the question of who controls the human body, an interest that grew out of her training as an emergency medical service technician.
Smith, however, also wants to reveal the socially constructed nature of the body, and she encourages the viewer how external forces shape people’s perceptions of their bodies. In works such as Untitled, the artist dramatically departed from conventional representations of the body, both in art and in the media. She suspended two life-size wax figures, one male and one female, both nude, from metal stands. Smith marked each of the sculptures with long white drips- body fluids running from the woman’s breasts and down the man’s legs. Kiki Smith. Lying with the Wolf, 2001, ink and pencil on paper
This delicate but large-scale work on paper, which depicts a female nude reclining intimately alongside a wolf, represents the assimilation of several themes that Kiki Smith has explored throughout her decades- long career.
Featuring an act of bonding between human and animal, the piece speaks not only to Smith’s fascination with and reverence for the natural world, but also her noted interests in religious narratives and mythology, the history of figuration in western art, and contemporary notions of feminine domesticity, spiritual yearning, and sexual identity.
Lying with the Wolf is one in a short series of works executed between 2000 and 2002 that illustrates women’s relationships with animals, drawing from representations found in visual, literary, and oral histories.
Smith is most interested in narratives that speak to collectively shared mythologies; these include folk tales, biblical stories and Victorian literature, yet the once-familiar stories are then fragmented and conflated with one another to form new clusters of meaning and association. Kiki Smith. Geneviève and the May Wolf, 2000, bronze
Many of Smith’s works from this period feature a female protagonist who is based on Little Red Riding Hood as well Sainte Geneviève, the Patron Saint of Paris. Geneviève is herself often associated with Saint Francis of Assisi because of her close relationships with animals and her ability, in particular, to domesticate wolves.
Other works in the series include Geneviève and the May Wolf—a bronze sculpture in which a standing female figure calmly embraces the wolf—and Rapture, which is perhaps more closely aligned to Red Riding Hood, as it depicts a woman stepping out from the stomach of the recumbent creature. The pair as depicted in Lying with the Wolf, however, seems locked in a more intimate embrace, as the wolf nuzzles affectionately into the nude woman’s arms. She wraps herself around the animal’s body in a gesture of comforting, her fingers stroking the soft fur beneath its ears and along the side of its stomach.
The wolf’s wildness is tamed, and both figures seem to nurture one another, floating within the abstract space of the textured paper surface upon which they are delicately drawn. Smith imbues a story that is normally quite violent with a kind of tenderness that is characteristic of her overall aesthetic. Top left: Kiki Smith. St. Geneviève,1999, ink and pencil on paper
Bottom left: Kiki Smith. Wearing the Skin, 2002
It has been suggested by some critics that Smith’s reinterpretations of Red Riding Hood and Sainte Geneviève represent a feminist approach to popular folktales. This is supported by her placement of “woman” amidst the natural world, but also, importantly, at a structural level: in the way in which the two narratives are fragmented and combined.
Borrowing from divergent sources in order to forge a new storyline, Smith demonstrates the slippery relationship between a visual image and its multiple references, adopting a narrative style indebted to feminist re- writings of history. Kiki Smith. Born, 2002, bronze
Some people describe Kiki Smith’s artwork as a journey from the body’s hidden inside to the body’s relationship with the outside environment. Smith explains that she wants to reclaim our bodies from fragmentation within society and art history. People are divided into oppositions between male and female and between mind and body through society and culture. In the art world, the Cubists formally fragment the human figure to illuminate the varying facets of form.
Her work has also been discussed in the context of feminism and attempts to redefine the images of women through their own experiences. In the beginning, Smith presents the audience with situations with which all women must come to terms. She carefully avoids direct relationships to challenging issues like abortion, gender identity, and sexuality by centering her work around biological functions of the female body. As the curator Helaine Posner has explained: “Instead of presenting them in their traditional roles as predator and prey, Smith re-imagined these characters as companions, equals in purpose and scale.” The distinction between “predator” and “prey” might be thought of as a metaphor for hierarchies of power in human relationships, which have traditionally been drawn along the lines of gender, race, and class. Because patriarchal societies typically grant more power to men, while requiring women to be submissive or dependent, we can think of this “overturning” in Smith’s art as a political statement against such inequalities. The artistic narratives portrayed in her work are ones in which binaries are flipped and opposing qualities are merged; in so doing, Smith asserts a critical feminist position that favors the articulation of multiple meanings. Top Left: Kiki Smith, Lilith, 1994, bronze
Throughout the 1990s, Smith would come to embrace her religious upbringing, creating works that are spiritual, ethereal, and markedly more decorative. Celestial motifs and references to the natural world became ubiquitous, although these themes are still deeply connected to the body.
As an investigation of the body in its capacity for fertility, reproduction, and nurturing, this turn towards the natural environment would eventually lead Smith to her interest in animals and our connections to them.
Lying with the Wolf is an extension of this yearning to connect the earthly with the spiritual and the personal with the collective. Kiki Smith. Rapture, 2001, bronze
Smith is not a true celestialist. Her art is far too deliberate, struggled with, and materialist for that. And this is not a mystical show. In the last gallery a bronze sculpture titled Rapture of a life-size nude woman, scowling, exhausted, not young, stepping from the ripped-open belly of a wolf, is more about rupture than about ecstasy. It is creepy-miraculous, pathological-fantastical, in the spirit of the 1980s work. Smith was largely self- taught and, obviously, fully self-aware.
Speaking of Rapture, Kiki Smith stated, "It’s a resurrection/birth story; ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a kind of resurrection/birth myth. And then I thought it was like Venus on the half shell or like the Virgin on the moon. It’s the same form- a large horizontal form and a vertical coming out of it.” INVESTIGATING IDENTITY: GLOBAL ART since 1980: ACTIVITIES and REVIEW (Magdalena Abakanowicz and Kiki Smith)