Kiki Smith and the Scientific Stance
February 2004

There is this tendency in writing on contemporary art to just drop these certain sound-byte-type statements nonchalantly in the midst of some description of an artwork; we skim over them, not giving them much thought. They appear as incidental phrases, placed somewhere in the text where one wouldn’t be likely to pause, but they allude to a very large and complex issue which ought to receive a good bit of attention. Everyone involved tends to assume the idea must be well enough understood. Here’s an example: in Wendy Weitman’s essay for Kiki Smith’s retrospective of prints, she says, “(Smith’s) images of our vital biological parts are shockingly honest, nonhierarchical, nearly clinical. In 1985, Smith completed her first published portfolio….” This sounds pretty convincing, right? Nothing terribly debatable here. But what, exactly, does “nearly clinical” mean? Though it is a very strange phrase, it seems to make sense for Smith’s work. But why does it make sense, and how?

The piece Weitman is describing at this point in her text is Possession is Nine Tenths of the Law of 1985, a set of nine prints depicting nine internal organs, in a decidedly straightforward, diagrammatic manner. Each organ is centered in a blank rectangle; indeed the connotation is of some kind of utilitarian documentation. “Clinical” seems a reasonable adjective. In fact, it seems quite reasonable in very much the same way for the majority of the work in this show. There is a certain authoritative, “factual” aura to much of Smith’s work; images are very often placed blatantly before us as if they were evidence of something or other. Destruction of Birds, and White Mammals, of 1998, and Fawn, 2001, share this same non-composition. So, one is forced to wonder, in this context, what is an etching like Fawn “about?” Is it just exactly as simple as it seems: it’s “about” a young deer? Any contemporary art viewer can tell you, it’s never that simple; even if the artist were to tell us “it is that simple”, we would interpret that to mean that the piece is about the notion of being a simple picture of a deer in today’s theory-and-politics-fraught art world. This interpreting, this “reading,” of artworks is a rather peculiar practice, especially in comparison with other approaches to imagery, more scientific, or “clinical” approaches.

If an image is actually clinical, or scientific, such as an illustration of a bodily organ or a young deer, in a textbook which deals with those things, there is none of this interpreting going on. Either the image is successful in showing a viewer some specific thing, or it’s not. If there is any question over what is being shown or why, it’s called bad presentation. In scientific fields, this is quite obviously the way it is.

To return to Kiki Smith, there are some other reasons one might call her images “clinical.” Besides the presentation, we have the subject matter. Clearly the aforementioned pieces are making some kind of reference to medical science or the study of nature, but in this show, there are quite a few more works which do the same, as well as works which deal with other scientific questions or theories. Lucy’s Daughters, 1990, is a reference to a well-known three million year old skeleton of a human ancestor. We have Cause I’m on My Time, 1990, and Black Flag, 1989, which are both drawings of ovum. We have the bronze Tailbone, 1993, and the cast glass Tail, 1997, which are both models of a tailbone. We have Vis Consili Expers Mole Ruit Sua (It Falls into Ruin by its Own Weight), 1990, which are bronze replicas of Smith’s own skull, made possible by “advanced medical technology.” Certainly, these all have their connotations, their “readings,” which have been much discussed in the past. No doubt, Smith is important for her dealing with the body and with feminism in the bold and powerful way she that has. At issue here is not what her work is generally taken to be “about,” but how this meaning comes to us. The recurring scientific themes are very relevant to this formation of meaning in Smith’s work.

We’ve established that in actual scientific texts or images, the meaning is understood to be a simple transferal: a viewer doesn’t need to do anything but view. And in contrast, for contemporary art, the formation of meaning is understood to be located “in” the viewer. Kiki Smith’s work tends to problematize this. With such strong scientific references, a viewer tends to form a meaning in the shape of a question rather than a statement: “this is what it’s about, right?” Something about that “factual” aura of Smith’s work leads one to believe that there must be some approval process, that it’s much more a de-coding than a creating of meaning…. There must be some “in-club” of people who really know what Fawn is about…. This is a bit of an uncomfortable perversion of the freedom we want to perceive in the artistic metaphor. Probably more often than we would like to believe, what appears to be a healthy ambiguity really amounts to something more like an in-club initiation quiz. The part that really is up to us is whether Smith should be condemned for creating this kind of situation, or commended for bringing up the issue while making some admittedly important artwork.