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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.

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