Kiki Smith on Cave Girls, Collaboration, and Some of Her Earliest Works
Feature by Joseph Nechvatal for Hyperallergic
"Since the early 1980s, Kiki Smith has created artworks marked by her fascination and concern with the human body. In a conversation with Hyperallergic, she discusses some of her first films and audio works, which have been scantily acknowledged, offering a corrective to the object-based record of her decades-long career.
Kiki Smith has been celebrated for her sculptures, prints, photographs, drawings, and textiles, marked first by her fascination and concern with the human body.
On the occasion of Smith’s solo exhibition at The 11 Conti – Monnaie de Paris — which the institution recently announced will be its last — I spoke with her about some of her very first artworks, made between the years 1980 and 1984, including her film Cave Girls (co-directed with Ellen Cooper), several of her audio works and her performances as a member of The ABC No Rio Cardboard Air Band. These performative works, which I directly encountered — and sometimes participated in, as a fellow artist working in New York’s downtown scene — have been scantily acknowledged within Smith’s oeuvre and go completely unrecognized within her current Parisian retrospective. While outstanding, that exhibition explores only her enthralling and dreamy art objects created using bronze, plaster, glass, porcelain, tapestry, paper and wax. Here, I offer a corrective to the object-based record, so as to further expand on Smith’s layered, decades-long career."
Read the full feature in Hyperallergic.
