ART REVIEW: The Body in All Its Mortal Urgency
by HOLLAND COTTER
Published: December 5, 2003
SUMMERS in high school and into college, I worked as an orderly in a small urban hospital where my father was a doctor, often in the emergency room, often all night. For a bookish, day dreamy kid, into Emily Dickinson and Italian opera, it was an experience. Fairly quickly, I think, it started to loosen up my view of the world, adding something large, and also something concrete and acute, a sense of life as a we're-all-in- it-together sharing, but also as solitary and unromantically finite.
These feelings got worked out afresh every time a police ambulance screeched up to the door. The hospital staff members were in instant motion, spot-evaluating damage, hunting for vital signs, examining wounds. If someone had died, we tried to yank them back to life with jolts and chemicals. Everyone sensed the clock ticking. Collective energy, an extremely powerful force, was poured into that one person, in distress, right there. If our efforts succeeded, a patient was off to surgery or intensive care. When they failed, I had a late-night walk with a stretcher down to the morgue.
Directions: After reading the first sections of “The Body in All its Mortal Urgency”, you will write a three paragraph response about an experience you have had that has influenced your life in a crucial way. Be sure to include an intro, body, and conclusion:

SUMMERS in high school and into college, I worked as an orderly in a small urban hospital where my father was a doctor, often in the emergency room, often all night. For a bookish, daydreamy kid, into Emily Dickinson and Italian opera, it was an experience. Fairly quickly, I think, it started to loosen up my view of the world, adding something large, and also something concrete and acute, a sense of life as a we're-all-in-it-together sharing, but also as solitary and unromantically finite.

These feelings got worked out afresh every time a police ambulance screeched up to the door. The hospital staff members were in instant motion, spot-evaluating damage, hunting for vital signs, examining wounds. If someone had died, we tried to yank them back to life with jolts and chemicals. Everyone sensed the clock ticking. Collective energy, an extremely powerful force, was poured into that one person, in distress, right there. If our efforts succeeded, a patient was off to surgery or intensive care. When they failed, I had a late-night walk with a stretcher down to the morgue.

In New York in the 1980's, the artist Kiki Smith -- who has a big, rich print retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art, Queens today -- trained as an emergency medical technician in Brooklyn. Maybe she did so because she needed a job. Certainly she had a long-standing interest in the human body, the main subject of her art, and wanted to learn first-hand how it worked, inside and out.

Her fascination also had emotional roots. She was raised a Roman Catholic, in a culture of martyr-saints, miraculous healings, vivacious relics and sacramental metaphors for mortality and incorruptibility. Also, around the time of her paramedical training, AIDS began attacking family and friends, including, within two years, one of her sisters. For Ms. Smith, as for many New Yorkers, the city itself seemed to be in a state of emergency.

That charge of urgency is forceful and insistent in some of the artist's early figural sculptures. It's more understated in ''Kiki Smith: Prints, Books & Things,'' where much of the work, even when of substantial size, is graphically tentative and delicate and made with tissuey, membraneous paper. Still, gravity, tempered with humor, is there throughout the thematic survey organized by Wendy Weitman, curator of prints and illustrated books at the Modern. And it is particularly evident in the earliest material, dating from a few years after Ms. Smith -- who was born in 1954, and is a child of the artist Tony Smith -- settled in Manhattan in the late 1970's.

The city was in tough shape, and Ms. Smith's art was still very much in development when she became a member of Collaborative Projects, or Colab, a group of artists on the Lower East Side and in the South Bronx, who were communally engaged, politically active and, in a modest way, enterprising. Every now and then, Colab set up shop in a storefront and sold its art, cheap. Among Ms. Smith's first contributions to the inventory were plaster casts of severed fingers. Painted with watercolors, they could have been purloined from a reliquary.

The point is, her interest in the body was there from the start, often expressed in ways some might consider morbid or bizarre. It had its first major statement in a series of horizontally oriented linoleum prints begun in 1985 and titled ''How I Know I'm Here.'' Each print consists of clinically rendered images of internal organs; ''Grey's Anatomy'' was Ms. Smith's bible. And they're set against sketchy images, based on photographs by the artist David Wojnarowicz, of Ms. Smith eating, grimacing and gestulating in poses related to the five senses.

From this point into the early 1990's, she repeated and elaborated visceral forms: silver-painted prints of kidneys, arterial systems made of colored glass beads. With the poet Mei-mei Bersenbrugge she made a book titled ''Endocrinology'' that turns the lymphatic system into a succession of floral still lifes.

Over-all, the work comes across as both cool and confrontational. Its spirit matches that found in Buddhist texts that teach disciples to overcome their terror at the prospect of dissolution by mentally dissecting the body and scrutinizing its parts: ''hairs of the head, hairs of the body, nails, teeth, skin; muscles, sinews, bones, marrow, kidneys; heart, liver, spleen, lungs; intestines, stomach; excrement, brain; bile, digestive juices; pus, blood, grease, fat; tears, sweat, spittle, snot, fluid of the joints, urine.'' Ms. Smith's prints embody just such a litany.

Then at some point in the early 1990's, she began to pay more attention in her prints to the body's exterior. In the etching titled ''Sueño'' (1992), a life-size figure lies tucked in a fetal curl, its surface covered with patterns of hatching that resemble medical illustrations of musculature.

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