Blog #5 Kiki Smith, Roland Barthes, & Carla Bengtson

Hello World,

I was very much intrigued by Kiki Smith. I seemed to find a lot of similarities with her and myself. Beliefs and practices mostly, but other things too, such as her difficulty as a younger woman with reading. She says because of her troubles, she began to observe instead. I appreciate her flexibility and acceptance of her struggle, for  I too had a very hard time reading  for most of my life and had to find other means of learning. Kiki says because of her keen observances she became more fascinated with objects and the practice of 'making'. "The thing about making things is that you have a proof. You have some proof every day that something has been accomplished, that somethings different... It's physical proof that everything is okay for a minute." (Learning by Looking interview) I started making things when I was really little. I would spend hours in my room sewing pillows, felt pink underwear that didn't fit and many other experiments. There was never a real reason I thought back then why I did it, only that it seemed like the most natural thing to do. It was only when I was much older that I realized that by 'making', I had a sense of calmness, almost like a meditative state, where everything was at peace. Smith says that it's one of her "loose theories of Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world, that it's through the physical world that you have spiritual life..." (Learning by looking interview) Through the physical object that you are making comes spirituality, or in other words the calmness that comes with the making.

Intuition has always been a present influence in everything I do in my life. The 'makings' of my life and my art have been purely done by a little voice inside. Smith is also a practitioner of this. She trusts it with everything she does or does not do. "It's like standing in the wind and letting it pull you whatever direction it wants to go. Some stuff is rally direct. Things start telling you what you're supposed to pay attention to. I have lots of times where my work just said, 'make it like this.' And then it's like your faithful servant. I make this meditation of give myself to this work." (History of Objects interview)  She is basically a vessel where her art is thriving through. Roland Barthes writes about this same idea of loosing yourself in a sense to the art. "Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (The Death of the Author p.1) The artist has given themselves to the work. And by doing so, a lot of times the artist changes with the experience of the process. Change is the one thing that is absolutely constant, therefore we must be able to flow with it, just as flowing with you're intuition, otherwise the rest of the world is not parallel with you. "One's self is always shifting in relationship to beauty and you always have to be able to incorporate yourself or your new self into life. Like your skin hanging off your arm and stuff, and then you have to think, well that's rally beautiful too. It just isn't beautiful in a way that I knew was beautiful before..." (History of Objects interview) And for Barthes, he sees the change as well, "The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the dame relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child." (Death of the Author p.3) The inevitable change that comes with experiences and time is part of what makes the art art.

Carla Bengtson is an artist who has infused her art with nature. Some of her work involved the participation of ants. This idea came to her quite unexpectedly. Every time she started to draw, an ant would start walking across her paper. Most people I believe would brush the ants away from the page, but Bengtson found that the ants' visit was an opportunity. Her sense to 'just go with it' reminded me of how Smith would of responded to that situation. Smith comments, "My father told us to trust our intuition." (History of Objects interview) And another perspective on Bengtson's behavior would coincide with Barthes' writing; "For him (Mallarme) for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language acts, 'performs', and not 'me'." ( The Death of the Author p.2) Bengtson saw that the art had a life of its own. Watching the ants do what they will, the art was being created almost without her. Bengtson showed us many different examples of how art evolved from the representation of nature to the very abstract of nature and back to nature itself. One quote that caught my attention was that "Not everything is art, but everything is art supplies," referring to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. I would say that Smith would agree with this, being the observer and scavenger she is. Always looking for new things to collect and incorporate in her work. At one point Bengtson mentioned Andy Goldsworthy which I am a huge fan of. If any artist was to use the 'art supplies' that nature has provided and to do so without making a huge karmic footprint, I'd say he accomplished that.