Kiki Smith

Elie Nadelman in MoMA garden

I am in Italy to interview legendary artist Kiki Smith.  She is late arriving and we skip the niceties and we start to talk.  Today her long curly grey hair is freely flowing and she is dressed in somber tones of gray and black but her skin has the signature tattoos in turquoise that indicate this is no middle aged middle class woman.   I have a long and strange history of Kiki.  Over 20 years before I had assigned a review to a self-proclaimed misogynist writer when I was the editor of Modern Painters.  He had reviewed her show at Pace Gallery with such viciousness that I had received a call banning forever all my writers from entering Pace or ever being offered help.  Time had moved on and I was with a friend painter Sam Messer who asked me out to a dinner with ‘friends’.  Much to my horror, his friends consisted of Kiki and her than partner. I sat there hoping to be incognito for much of the dinner until she leaned forward and said in her strangely girlish voice ‘ I know who you are and I forgive you’.  I have never formally spoken to her since but seen her at private views and waved to her.  Over the years I have thought back to that review and realised how horrible it was and how painful it must have been.  Written from the perspective that it is behaviour that should be assessed in artists and that there are givens in the right material to use as well as the given that there has never been a great woman artist I sit embarrassed even in thought.

Kiki in Colle di Val d'Elsa

When she arrives I say hello and remind her of our history,  She is very late and before we even really begin to talk we are whisked off,  descending from the hill town on the corkscrew roads and Kiki says I will make you an amulet to Mario and you to she say to me in the backseat, glad I am not in the front.  The presentation is outdoors in front of the converted arches that contain her styilised girls as she calls them.  Relating clearly to Pre Rennaisance idols and as she tells me to Elie Nadelman, an artist I had not heard of since I played near his large work in the MoMA sculpture garden as a child.

We end up sitting in a beautiful converted theatre watching the documentary made about her and her work a few years ago.  Kiki admits she can’t stand watching herself but there is no option so we settle down to an hour of Kiki.  Watching her relentlessly working and thinking gives an insight into how the brain of an artist works.  I am touched by her endless repetitive model making and drawing and also her determination to make things right, this line is too sharp, that colour is too pink, move the silver girl on the bed, look at the embroidery and that moment of epiphany where she stands by a clothes line in Venice, fingering a beautiful table cloth saying that I want to make prints with this material.  It is materials that obviously attract her and it is clear that the materials of this quilt will appear at some later date. 

There are also a series of flower drawings that look anything but pretty.  She says in the same tone, ‘I made this from blood, I went to the doctor and had it drawn’ and does not seem to realise the painful visions that this immediately recalls. 

It is now pissing with rain and I hitch a ride back into town and go to bed with cold pizza and a film. I cannot go to dinner and then walk home through this downpour.   I arrive at 9 am in the square near the gallery and already the tourists are pouring into the town.  I spy Kiki sitting at a table with a bottle of black nail polish doing touch ups.  We settle down to our chat and then all too soon she is off and there is that surreal moment of spying one of the most important Chinese artists in the world, Cai Guo Qiang in town and then it is all onwards.

Lunch is in Bel Soggiorno with a view to die for.  It is a buffet of deliciousness and in my present state I want to scoop some up for later but leave it all behind.  Sob gulp.  There is risotto which is so delicious I want to marry it.