Interpretting Life, Death, and Mythology: Kiki Smith's Sculptures | Art21

KIKI SMITH: There aren’t commemorative 
sculptures for, for witches.

So then I thought oh I wanted 
to make these women on pyres.

Their arms are out like, 
like Christ you know saying,

why have you forsaken me?

They should be in all these towns in Europe.

You know, so no one has 
needed it in their town yet,

but (LAUGHS), but, but you know I,

I thought I can have, you know,

you know I just make them anyway.

Art is something that moves from 
your insides into the physical world,

and at the same time it is just 
a representation of your inside,

in a different form.

Basically, I think art is…

it’s just a way to think.

You know it’s like standing in the wind

and letting it pull you where, 
whatever direction it wants to go.

And you know things start saying 
pay attention to this and make this.

You know I think when I was in school

it was very difficult for me to learn how to read.

And so I just had to learn from looking at things.

I saw a picture in the 
Louvre of Geneviève with the,

sitting with the uh, wolves and the lambs.

And Geneviève’s like the savior of Paris.

And so I drew my friend, 
Geneviève as the Geneviève.

And I cut up and made cartoons out of her.

And I made sculptures afterwards.

First I made the Geneviève where 
she’s just standing next to a wolf.

And then I made RAPTURE where the 
woman’s walking out of the wolf.

It’s this sort of resurrection.

I just have this inventory of images 
and I can start mixing them up.

And if you make them like a kind of character.

They get to live again.

They get to have this life 
outside of just one version.

I have one standing Geneviève.

You know I just cut her up over and over and over,

and reconfiguring it and sort 
of smoothing the seams out.

This could have a little bit of heat going.

You know just, just to smooth out slightly.

A lot of times I’d go into the molds

and just make papier-mâché sculptures

and then you can cut them up really easily

and you know put them back together.

Wax is much more complicated 
and then we spend you know,

endless quantities of time trying to fix them.

It would be much faster in a way just to 
cast another person and redo it, but it…

I don’t know, it’s just funny to me to make 
it all keep coming out of the same sculpture.

And this I’ll make in aluminum

and they’ll go on this sort 
of wood, wood crutches.

So it will kind of lean back uh, 
he’ll lean back a bit like that

and then it will be on this 
sort of floating in air.

To me it’s something interesting 
about sculpture or something

hovering off the ground, or having this,

like a different relationship to the ground.

It could be like that.
SMITH: And how fast does this set up?

MAN: About five minutes.

SMITH: Oh that’s great.

SMITH: It’s going to become a, a dead witch under…

uh, a pile of wood. But uh, you know so

and then I thought about the 
wicked witch in the WIZARD OF OZ,

cause she’s under the house.

So that I’m just under a 
wood pile in the backyard.

When I was a kid, my father had 
my grandmother’s death mask.

She died like about twenty 
years before I was born.

And then uh, when my father died,

my sister Bebe and I made a 
death mask of his head and hands.

And then uh, when my sister died,

then I went back and I made a 
death mask of her hands and head.

And so I have like three 
generations of death masks.

That’s pretty good.

Kiki VO: We were a little 
bit like the Adams Family.

We lived in this big house and there was a gravestone with our name in front of the house.

And you know we had this enormous 
sculpture in the back of the house.

Kiki: And uh, you know we were really unpopular

and the kids would say I was a witch.

And you know we were really....

And my father had a beard and a Porsche

and we were really like mortified,

embarrassed you know that he had a car like that

and didn’t have, you know, 
a big Woody station wagon.

Kiki VO: We made mostly paper models for him.

Like thousands of tetrahedron 
and octahedron flattened models.

And then we would sit and 
put them together, you know,

after school every day. In my family 
there was always a kind of morbidity.

My father would always say 
that, that it’s Irish Catholic.

One whole part of our house was all uh,

my father’s parent’s clothing, 
all from you know the late 1800’s…

and teeth you know, people’s dentures.

It was all, you know, lots 
of death, death everywhere.

You know I spent a couple 
years drawing dead animals....

I had this vision of, that I was 
supposed to make another Noah’s ark

but it was of dead animals.

Kiki VO: This was when my cat died.

I made all these sort of Pietà,

sort of self-portrait Pietà 
of me holding my dead cat.

And I made like fifty billion 
prints of dead animals

and I think hmm, how come I 
own all those prints still?

My big investment in my future.

Kiki: Gorgeous, calm down…

–no you’re supposed 
to come down you dumb bird!

Here…

I just, I really love printmaking.

It’s just this scratch, scratchy,

scratchy motion that I like the best.

BILL: This blade is so warm it 
dries this stuff right away.

BILL: If you were to understand 
that the way she works this,

this is just normal because every 
fiber of her body is about art.

She can’t do anything but what she does.

My father taught us to trust our intuition.

You know my mother would always 
say believe your intuition

that always you get in trouble 
when you don’t pay attention to it.

You know I don’t think in other aspects of 
my personal life or daily life I do that,

but always in my art I do that.

And sometimes I don’t like where my art is 
going or something but I always know that …

you know and I always go like why 
do I have to be making these things,

or it’s embarrassing or something like that

but I always trust that that’s what 
is appropriate for me to be doing.

I mean for me, I’m just trying to 
have as many experiences as I can

in sort of playing in different forms.

I love domestic life like, you know 
like cupboards and blankets and dishes.

You know, the first blanket I made,

she was a witch with her consorts 
of all her familiars, her animals.

Kiki: And then I thought this could 
be another female image with animals.

And I’m a big Virgin Mary fan.

Catholicism is all about storytelling.

You know about reiterating 
over and over and over again

these sort of mythological stories.

Dolls and things like that 
are in the realm of fiction.

I’ll carry them around and then

I’ll break their leg off

or their head gets knocked off or something,

but none of that is really seen in the end at all

but to me that’s really a 
big part about making it.

This stuff makes me nervous.

Cause they’re so specific.

Like a story, I don’t want to 
be so declarative like that.

You know...I’d rather make something 
that’s very open-ended that like I,

it can have a meaning to me,

but then it also can have a meaning to somebody else can fill it up with their meaning.

Off-camera: Ohhhh!!!
Kiki: Oh, it doesn’t matter.

Hi! How are you? Good! (OVERLAP)

I have no innate ability for 
doing things physically and stuff,

so I have to really learn and try to do it.

And, and to me that’s the pleasure in it.

And a friend of mine’s son died,

and I went to a Baptist funeral and 
I’d never been in a Baptist church.

And all the women wore nurse’s uniforms.

All the ushers.

And they stood there with Kleenex boxes.

It was so moving to me to see like god’s nurses,

you know like these women 
there like just with Kleenex.

Like it was so simple and so beautiful.

And I thought about like, like saints,

like little saint sculptures 
or something like that.

Kiki VO: I also to make each one unique.

The more you manipulate it the 
more actual life you put into it.

I think people don’t like it if you say

you don’t have any genetically 
innate ability for making things—

they go, oh no, that’s not true—you do.

People have this fantasy that artists are, like,

creating or having this inspiration all the time

and so for me I think what 
I like about this is work.

You know like ninety percent of 
it is that you have to come here

and file out your bad 
mistakes and stuff like that.

Or it gives you

this enormous freedom in just filing

and doing things like that for hours on end.

Like I always know what to do.

I never have, like I never 
have a moment in my life

when I don’t know what to do.

I always know there’s some filing to do, you know.