November 5, 2006 Nan Golden for The New York Times The Intuitionist By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN Ellen Page Wilson/Pace Wildenstein, New Yo r k Harlan & Weaver, New York Smith's Anatomy "Head With Bird II," 1994, "Touch," 2006, from a set of etchings, 30 inches by 22 inches. phosphorous bronze and white bronze, 14 inches by 12 inches by 6 1/4 inches The Dakis Joannou Collection Kiki Smith "Untitled," 1995, brown paper, methyl cellulose and horsehair, "Sojourner," 2006 (in progress), digital image on silk, 53 inches by 18 inches by 50 inches about 38 inches by 48 inches. Late one sunny morning last month, I stopped by to visit Kiki Smith. I recognized the house in the East Village by the wind chimes on the fire escape. Climbing a staircase, from which the banister had strangely been removed, I found Smith, ethereal and laughing as usual, in her studio on the second floor, which doubles as her living room. It's blue and white, airy and peaceful, with tall glass doors at one end (opening onto a scary, straight drop, as if down the rabbit hole) to an overgrown garden. After the usual pleasantries, Smith told me that her French dealer, Jean Frémon, would be arriving shortly to see a few outdoor sculptures she had installed in a pair of gardens up the street. Then she was expected on Canal Street at Harlan & Weaver, the print maker ("It's my second home," she said, and she wasn't kidding, as she had been going several times a day, day and night, for months, I learned). She was working on a series of etchings of flowers, a theme inspired by her mother's death last year. The prints had to be finished in time for an art fair, she explained, and she had only a couple of days left in town before she flew to London for a different show, for which she was in Philadelphia a day earlier, to cast various sculptures of tree limbs and moths. I was losing track but smiling, pretending to keep up. After Harlan & Weaver, she went on, she had to rush uptown to Pace Editions, on the edge of Chelsea, to design, using Photoshop, a series of silk banners for yet another show, which would be timed to coincide with her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Oh, and that evening, she said, she had a seat at a benefit - she couldn't recall for what, offhand. At 52, Smith has a thick halo of gray hair and porcelain skin liberally tattooed with turquoise rings and stars. They make rows on her fingers, arms and legs. She also wears strings of necklaces and bracelets stacked atop one another. You can hear when she's coming because her jewelry jingles. She looks a little like the woman who runs the local candle shop. Her hands constantly fiddle: she's always drawing or making things out of clay or whatever. Partly, it's a way to distract her gaze. Mostly, for her, making art is like breathing. Since she emerged during the late 70's, she has become an art-world fixture, pushing contemporary art past 70's feminism, reinventing some of feminism's themes and processes and its activist spirit. Early on, she was involved with the collectively run center for art, ABC No Rio, on the Lower East Side. Her first solo show in New York, in 1988, included sculptures of a terra-cotta rib cage and a cast-iron version of the digestive system that resembled a radiator. A show at the Museum of Modern Art two years later had 12 silvered glass water bottles, labeled with bodily fluids in gothic letters, a separate piece made up of crystal sperm and a work called "Dowry Cloth," an irregular Modernist grid made of sewn felted wool and human hair. She belongs to a dynasty. Her father, Tony Smith, was one of the preeminent postwar American sculpt ors. Her mother, Jane Lawrence Smith, a onetime Broadway actress and opera singer before she married and raised three daughters, returned to her stage career later in life, working in experimental-theater productions and independent films until not long before she died. (Her mother's great friend Tennessee Williams was best man at the Smiths' wedding.) Artists like Barnett Newman and Richard Tuttle came by the Smiths' big Victorian house in South Orange, N.J., and Kiki remembers how contemporary art was "like air, completely ordinary, although I couldn't have told you what Minimalism meant, and I hardly saw representational art until college, which I guess was partly what attracted me to it. It seemed like a way for me to have a life of my own." She likes to repeat the anecdote about herself and her two younger twin sisters, after school, makin g paper models of octahedrons and tetrahedrons for their father to use for his sculptures. "We were the local weirdos, until it became cool and exotic, when I was a teenager, to be from the family of an artist." Beatrice, one of the twin sisters, died of AIDS during the 80's, and some of Kiki's art about the human body as an object under duress, and sometimes dead, was no doubt a response to AIDS, which also afflicted many other people Smith was close to then, like the artist David Wojnarowicz. Her other sister, Seton, has become a prominent artist, too - she makes large, fuzzy Cibachrome photographs mostly of architecture and landscapes - a path she settled on as a teenager, while Kiki was still struggling to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. She was a lousy student. She studied baking for a while; she t rained as an emergency medical technician. Finally, she found her way to a career that, in retrospect, has come to seem inevitable. During the last 20 years or so, her work has been in innumerable exhibitions around the world. The latest, the traveling retrospective that opens this month at the Whitney, was organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Because Smith's father, an architect by training, made famously huge, metal, geometric abstractions that came to be crudely associated with a kind of macho Minimalism during the 60's, Kiki's work is often casually regarded as a reaction against his. But this assessment is deceptive. Her prime subject has been the body - or, in the feminist vein, the body as social and political object. She makes work both about what the body looks like on the outside, in all its sagging flesh and fragility, and about what it produces on the inside: pus, urine, sperm, breast milk, excrement, spit. Gray's Anatomy was, for a while, a big source. She has made prints of internal organs like the liver and sculptures of arterial systems made of colored glass beads. She has made sculptures of severed limbs and fingers, like reliquary objects, and one of the Virgin Mary, flayed. Much of the work is delicate and lovely, but more than a few people have found figures like the one she devised with beeswax and papier-mâché, called "Tale," of a woman on her hands and knees trailing excrement, revolting. Her longtime friend Tom Otterness, also a sculptor, remembers how, some years back, he was sitting with his future wife, Coleen Fitzgibbon, "when we lived downstairs from Kiki on Ludlow Street. Suddenly, Coleen looked out the window in horror," he says. "There was this flayed body being lowered outside the building. It was one of Kiki's creations, all bloodied with a rope around its neck, heading down to the street, off to the shippers. This sort of thing went on all the time. "The image I have," he continues, "is of her plunging her hand into her chest and pulling out her heart and her guts and saying: 'You think you make personal work? Well, try this.' Her art goes further than everyone else's, I think. She's willing to go anywhere with it, and sometimes I'm just left dumbfounded. She's fearless. Totally fearless." Smith also produces dreamy, gossamer works of animals and mythical and religious figures - motifs and themes she recycles in tissue-y paper and fabric (often traditional, craft-oriented, "women's" materials, she likes to point out), along with bronze, wax, plaster and just about anything that catches her fancy. " My mom always said to trust one's inner voice," Smith said. "I think a lot of making art is listening to yourself. I got that from both parents. What always attracted me about my father's work was that it was also intuitive." That October morning I visited her, everything in Smith's house (she lives alone) was in artful, slightly exquisite disarray. Plaster and bronze sculptures of figurines were laid here and there; fading roses filled crystal vases. An oval mirror hung above a weathered blue chest, bouncing light across a kitchen table crowded with coffee cups, half-finished drawings, books, scraps of silk for that banner project at Pace, rubber stamps and tiny metal birds made for yet another project, and a Steuben vase she is designing, delicately etched with fingerprints. One of Rachel Whiteread's sculptures of a bookshelf hung on the wall nearby, in lieu of a bookshelf. A painting by Tony Smith (green-and-red abstract wormy shapes) topped the mantelpiece. So much of Kiki's art, I thought, has come to look like her house, and vice versa. In Venice recently, she devised an entire suite of rooms, which blurred, as she does in her studio and living room, the line between art and life.