carlo
mccormick

One very subtle way in which your work approaches the issue of gender and representation seems to be in your choice of materials. Sometimes it’s as if you’re deliberately doing “girlie art.”

kiki
smith

I think I am. A friend of mine once said to me that nobody was going to take the things that I or the girls I knew did, seriously because we all worked in cardboard and stuff like that. I think, for about five years after that I said, “Okay, fuck you, I’m going to make everything really indestructible and you can’t take it away from me. You can say it’s shit, but at least you can’t say it’s shit because it’s going to self-destruct.” I made things out of bronze for a while. I tried to make them out of concrete, and then I just thought, “Fuck it!” I didn’t like that. I really like making things delicate. I guess you could call them “girls’ materials;” but they’re just things that are associated with girls: soft materials like paper-maché. I don’t have any ultimate allegiance to it. I would just as easily use some other material, but I like that quality of fragility. In making work that’s about the body, playing with the indestructibility of life, where life is this ferocious force that keeps propelling us; at the same time, it’s also about how you can just pierce it and it dies. I’m always playing between these two extremes about life. For me using the paper is very hardy. My paper sculptures are made out of paper that is used for archival purposes and is very tough and strong. It’s a little bit deceiving because it looks much more fragile than it really is.

mccormick

In terms of this dichotomy between the vitality of the life force and the frailty, or mortality, of the body, the way in which people most commonly consolidate these extremes is in the notion of a spiritual force. Your paper bodies have that kind of mystical presence, as if they were vessels of some metaphysical experience.

smith

Yes, but I did them to think out a piece I wanted to do five years ago that I’ve finally gotten around to making just recently, about the skin as an envelope. You always have these boundaries in your daily life, but also in your physical life as well. Skin is the surface, or boundary line, of the body’s limit. The skin is actually this very porous membrane, so on a microscopic level you get into the question of what’s inside and what’s outside. Things are going through you all the time. You’re really very penetrable on the surface, you just have the illusion of a wall between your insides and the outside. Now, more and more, people are talking about the skin as an organ doing repair work and performing different functions within the body. What I wanted to do was to make just the form of it, without any content. They are just these empty shells, and paper allowed me to make them very light, like they’d be if they were made of skin. I know what you mean by their spiritual quality. I hung one of them up in the corner of my studio, just to get it out of the way, but it was shortly after my sister Bebe died, when I saw it suspended there and thought that it is like a spirit. With all these people we know dying from AIDS, you have this hovering of people’s presence who you don’t have physical access to anymore but are still quite vital to your life. Having this body hanging in the corner reminded me of that, so I made a whole installation of them about that.

mccormick

At the outset, however, that was not your intent?

smith

Right, that was just an association I made later. Originally it was purely about form. There’s something Aquinas said about form being separated from matter, which is an underlying concern in my art. A lot of my work is about separating form from matter and kind of seeing what you’ve got. In a way, it was also the first time that I’d made a figurative sculpture because, until then, I’d always made sculptures of the internal organs. I’d never made the outside and I guess I was pretty frightened of the outside because I don’t like personality. I just want to talk about the generic experience of the body without it becoming specific to specific people. With skin you get into all those things, like individual features, or race, whereas livers are more anonymous. People don’t have such a clear idea of personality from livers — though livers probably have real personalities, but people just wouldn’t know how to read them. The paper body sculptures have taken on more of a spiritual meaning. Because they have no weight to them — they’re translucent and fragile — they have this quality of transcendence.

mccormick

Part of what makes your art so powerful and resonant is that it has a remarkable simplicity, directness, and purity that challenges the viewer to wonder why. Why this stomach? Whose stomach? Why is it alone and solitary in space? Why is it made of glass? People have to ask themselves what is it that it’s making them feel or think, and why. By not telling the audience what it means, it remains provocatively nonspecific. We may try to read some particular, absolute significance, intention, meaning, or reason behind the work but, in fact, it’s simply basic fascination.

smith

Yeah, I always liked the idea of making things that are really open, that everybody can come to with their own ideas and responses. Everybody already knows everything. You make an object and it’s just like saying, “Pay attention to this!” or “Concentrate on this for a moment!”  — like a mantra. You already have your own references and you can come to your own associations. Hopefully something in it resonates with enough things that you can think about your own life. I have probably very specific personal reasons for doing things that sometimes I know about and sometimes I don’t, but I don’t necessarily find it all that interesting to tell people why.

mccormick

One’s relation to the body is very personal but, on the other hand, it’s also universal.

smith

I know, that’s why it is universal. But I think it’s cultural. You could say that within a certain culture, people have x amount of different responses. I have a friend who works as a nurse in a maternity ward and she says that women of different nationalities give birth very differently. We act as if all our experiences of the body are universal, but they aren’t. People have totally different attitudes and perceptions about it and actually are doing things physically very differently. Some women in labor are very quiet while others are cursing their heads off. People don’t have the same experiences. Physiologically they do certain things the same way, for example, people understand smiling and frowning all over the world, but it’s just to pay attention to those aspects of the body for people to get in touch with their feelings.

mccormick

Do you try to bring out areas of subjectivity in this?

smith

Yes, maybe in the materials as the vehicle for subjectivity, at least in terms of how they try to make it personal or show the types of ambivalence in my relation to the subject.

mccormick

That is, in how you recontextualize the anatomy outside the body. In doing this, how much of your work would you say is psychological and how much of it is purely formal?

smith

I’d say, about ninety-nine percent of it is psychological. But then again, maybe it isn’t. I remember reading this article someone wrote about me and realizing how two of the main systems I was working on were systems that were weak in my body. I thought it was interesting that, in the end, what I was doing was a kind of self-healing, a building or manifesting of those parts of my body that are inherently weak. Maybe I could go to a doctor instead. That’s part of it, but a lot of it is trying to investigate one’s feelings or psychological relationship with the body. Another part of it is phenomenologically saying, “Look at it, look at the skin surface, or the endocrine system, or how much blood there is in the body, and try to see how these things relate in the social or the political, now that all these different factions in society are trying to vie for control of the body, or the ideologies and philosophies of the body.” It tries to make people look at and examine those philosophies and ideologies that own you in every aspect of your life — be it religion, government, health, gender definition, or whatever.

mccormick

Is it then, in a sense, trying to reclaim the body from society for the individual?

smith

Absolutely. Trying to reclaim it, trying to separate yourself from these ideologies that your head is packed full with. Consciously you may not even be aware that most of the things you think are historical, that you’re just a product of what people were thinking five hundred years ago. In trying to look at the form without any of this moralistic stuff that’s dumped on it, hopefully one can get a more detached view that’s free of all that baggage. I know, in my life, I feel oppressed a great deal by all these ideologies that I’ve either internalized in my own psyche or am politically and socially confronted with every day. Your body is like Everyman, where all these things are played out and you’re like a hemophiliac just trying to keep your blood in while all these external forces, these vampires, are trying to get at it.

mccormick

Those gothic monster myths that arose out of the late Romantic era, such as the vampire, the Wolfman, or Frankenstein, are like phobic allegories of the primal fear culture feels as the body is increasingly perverted, corrupted, or mutated by the unknown, intangible forces of society, science, technology, medicine, or in other words, humanity itself.

smith

Yeah. Frankenstein is an allegory of what our body is now — a composite body where you’ve got your brother’s kidney, somebody else’s eyes, and a slew of surgical implants. People generally think of their body as their fortress, their landscape for being here, but this is rapidly becoming less and less so.

mccormick

You know, our friend Mike Osterhout’s uncle just died, who was one of the first heart transplant patients. He was on his fifth heart.

smith

Wow, really? What a greedy fuck. That’s the type of thing that’s so interesting about the body now that is not simply psychological but fascinating in many ways. I mean, if you take your heart, or any image like that, look at all the meanings that surround this one object that’s basically just a pump, pumping blood through your body. For me it’s entertaining to think about all that cultural baggage, or about the object, if you let go of some of that stuff, or if you embrace some of it but not all of it. What are the other possibilities to comprehend it?

mccormick

What sort of shifts do you see as having recently taken place in people’s perceptions of the body? As long as I’ve known you, you’ve always had a kind of clinically cold fascination with the biological mechanics of the human anatomy. But whereas a half dozen years ago the average person would have found your work gruesome and grotesque, now it’s far more widely appreciated and being shown in places like New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

smith

I think AIDS has had a lot to do with people’s consciousness of the body as a political and social weapon or landscape. It has really pushed the body forward in people’s minds in a way that it became more than something they were simply stuck in, freaked out about, or having pleasure with. We’ve become aware of the body as a social organism that is very much manipulated by different venues and different agendas.

mccormick

Wouldn’t you say that feminism has also had a lot of impact on this?

smith

Yes, definitely, in terms of people’s consciousness about ownership of the body as well as a lot of things concerning reclaiming the body from patriarchy, medicine, religion, or any other form of institutionalized repression. Lots of the things that justify racism and sexism, it seems to me, have to do with our perceptions of the body, and the dichotomies that exist within them in which everything is kind of broken up — like how the body and those things closer to the physical world are always denigrated and not seen as an integral part of society. People who do manual labor or bear children, the closer they are to the earth, the more they’re considered less important than scientists or doctors. To me this is always a kind of contempt for the physical that is in Christianity and that capitalism propagates or exploits. You can look at this stuff through the body to see how it’s this connection to the physical that is, itself, seen as putrid, which causes me and many other people out there a lot of pain. Having all these contradictions in one’s being is very confusing and shows up in one’s personality in ways that are extremely uncomfortable. All the ways technology is changing the body, where we now have transplants, artificial organs, and skin being grown from the circumcised foreskins of penises, and all the new ideas of reproduction it has created, including surrogate mothers, artificial inseminations, test-tube babies, hysterectomies, and abortions, have enormous ramifications in the way people view their lives. It’s very different now, and it’s a lot for people to change their sense of boundaries, or their definitions of who and what they are. I guess, in my work I’m just trying to set myself straight on these things.

mccormick

One particularly extreme aspect of this politicization of the body and its boundaries over the past century is the emergence of prisons. I know that for many years you’ve been regularly visiting several political prisoners who are serving long sentences in high secu-rity American federal penitentiaries for their radical activities. How do you see this form of physical confinement and social rescindment of fundamental human rights and dignities in relation to other modes of oppression and marginalization that take place via the body?

smith

Prisons are where the government is basically trying to restrain whole segments of the population by controlling the body to benefit the other part of the population. We have more people warehoused in prisons today than at any other time in history. It says a great deal about our society that it has to imprison people who are trying to instigate change or separate certain ideological factors out of its population to continually function.

mccormick

It’s like a mass dissection, or amputation, of the social body.

smith

Yes, it’s true control over that body. The thing about prisons is that they’re really into control. They’re keeping people twenty-three hours a day locked up. They’ve got them monitored on cameras all the time. Some prisoners are chained and shackled to go to the showers. They’re strip-searched, their anuses and vaginal cavities are searched. This is the way that people are physically intimidated. Marion, Illinois, has squads that randomly go around beating up people, just to keep the level of intimidation up. They have contaminated water, a superhigh rate of infant morta-lity, miscarriages, and cancer. It’s about controlling the body to try to change people’s ideology and it doesn’t even work. Now they have these bracelets that monitor an individual’s movements, so they can enforce in-house detention. This stuff is only acceptable because we have this Western idea of disease where you cut it out, separate one thing from another, and therefore you’ve fixed it; whereas, in fact, you’re never really dealing with the causes of whatever it is, be it insurrection or massive drug abuse. Nothing gets fixed. There’s simply this Band-Aid effect, and it all comes from this disease model — a medical idea that’s only a couple of hundred years old.

mccormick

Your work was dealing with body politics and medical representations ages before they became so popular or prevalent as a topic. I remember how when this type of subject matter suddenly became the hot new trend in the art world, with a flurry of exhibitions and critical writings on the body, you expressed a lot of antipathy toward this art world and seemed concerned that you might get lumped into some faddish group or movement.

smith

I was probably protecting my turf. Actually I’m kind of happy about it. I realize that I’m glad that there are more people talking about the body because it’s more entertaining for me. It’s an enormous territory that everyone can go into. It’s like making landscape painting — millions of people can do it for eternity and it can always be different. There are so many aspects that never occur to you, and also some that do but you’ll never really get to. Then somebody else does them and you don’t care that you didn’t do it, you’re just as happy that they exist. For me, as an art career thing, I don’t want to be part of a fad because I intend to be an artist for a long time. I don’t want to be in twenty thousand shows in one month and then that would be the end of my career. In part, being a female, since women weren’t so popular in the art world for a long time, you stay home alone, do everything yourself, and do it because it’s a necessity for you rather than because anyone’s congratulating you for it. So you feel like you want to continue doing that regardless of trends. Of course I can always get to that point where I go back home and just do it on my own, but it’s nice having access. In a way, all the recent interest in this subject is a fad, and there is some degree of trivialization as a result of this. However, I’ve also begun to meet other artists who are dealing with the body and seen lots of really interesting work. I get excited checking out how certain artists are dealing with it in totally different ways. It’s a chance to see your own limits in how some people do things that you’d never do and push things further than you have. I think I look at the body from a very eccentric way because I make stuff that’s more conceptually based and then, the next day, do something that’s more idiosyncratic and personal. I just sort of do whatever occurs to me and it’s not in any kind of logical or linear format. I love seeing how diverse artists’ takes on the body can be from mine, like Orshi Drozdik who talks about the history of philosophy, or science, in relation to the body. There’s Andres Serrano, there’s Alex Grey, there’s Bruce Nauman ... You can talk about it in political terms or from a spiritual perspective; there are just so many implications. It’s like looking at a center to see what’s around, and there’s a lot of stuff around.

mccormick

Where do you see these various axes of content or perspective as intersecting in your art?

smith

My work kind of meanders around different areas depending upon what I’m struck by. Sometimes I like thinking about what all this new technology means, and at other times I’m investigating more spiritual terms or dealing with gender and sexuality. Besides it being about these horrible things like oppression or death, our experience of the body is also what brings us some of the greatest pleasure in our lives. That’s something that I probably haven’t dealt with as much and would like to try to think about more. Right now I’ve begun making these bosoms with milk coming out of them because I feel that the body is this nurturing abundance.

mccormick

Whenever you deal with fertility or procreation, you never seem especially interested in those aspects of childbearing or motherhood that are stereotypically expected of women artists who, after all, could find no truer self-expression than that single and foremost biological reason for their existence — having kids.

smith

Yeah, right. I’m not making art about being a woman able to reproduce. I haven’t reproduced and know very little of it in that way. To me, making stuff about birth is about the fact that one is born oneself rather than that one is a capable breeder. That’s an entirely different thing. Everyone is born. That’s how you get here, and it’s also something that you have to keep on repeating over and over again to keep your life vital — to be like a phoenix, to make new, or renew, your life existence.