Mortal coils: a large survey of Kiki Smith's prints and multiples at the Museum of Modern Art showed the vital role collaboration has played in her multifaceted career

"I could just make prints and be satisfied," Kiki Smith told Wendy Weitman, curator of the artist's retrospective of prints and multiples, "Kiki Smith: Prints, works & Things," recently on view at the Museum of novel Art in Queens. Vast at 150 works, notwithstanding still not comprehensive, the present to view began with Smith's homemade screenprints from the 1980 and continued to the near with collaborative works produced at commercial and university workshops. In her prints and multiples, Smith privileges a mercurial inventiveness above the grand statement. With their many techniques and their production in multiple and in plot with other people, they have been crucial to the enrichment of her practice, as she readily acknowledges. Indeed, from a critical standpoint, Smith's prints and multiples are as important as her statuarys and installations in conveying the efficacy and ferment of her creative endeavor.

Each of the works shown displays an oftentimes ingenious match of medium and make subordinate matter. Collaged and lithographed breasts gather into wrinkles [i]or[/i] folds three dimensionally on Nepalese paper with a skinlike web (Untitled [Moons], 1993). A cast-glass ovum yolk (Yolk, 1999) seems actually to quiver, lifelike in its mirrored light. The ocean undulates softly printed upon supple sheets of Japanese paper attached to the bottom cutting side of an accordion-fold artist's work showing full moons on its 13 panels (Tidal, sprout lithograph and photogravure, 1998). The actual abundance of works paradoxically boost the interest of each of them, provoking innumerable comparisons. Smith have the appearances to discover ever new ways to inflect her make subordinate matter, to which she many times returns--a pet cat and dead birds; the secondary planet frequently revisited in relation to feminine themes; her possess face, extravagantly wrinkled.

Smith encourages associations with anonymous handicraft, allowing this is something of a feint: her mode of speech as a printmaker is always recognizable, with its deliberately awkward draftsmanship, material sensuousness and election for accidental marks intentionally left upon plates to be printed. She not rarely uses paper in her monumental statuarys and her manipulation of it in the prints is demonstrably sculptural, as she enclosures tears, assembles and glues with abandon. She displays a preference for sturdy and malleable handmade papers from Japan and Nepal, for a like reason that soft, crinkly textures are everywhere in evidence.

As a great deal of as possible, Weitman honored the organic quality of the works, devising a kind of render free of access viewing, in which many of them were left unframed and circumnavigable, and warming the craggy ad hoc galleries by painting a certain number of of the walls a fat pink. The giant (25 foot-long) synecdochic assemblage A Man (1990) with its repeated lithographic shut up ups of a penile glans and a male nipple blurring into luxurious, attached sheets of Nepalese paper, was hung from the ceiling to drape above a low pedestal. Quilted cotton blankets printed with (lead birds (Flight hillock 1997-98) were stacked in a colorful pile. tin pellets resembling animal droppings were scattered above art abridgement of the 2,000-square-foot Peabody (Animal Drawings)--originally 20000 sheets of relief-printed etchings with creatures and snowflakes exhibited in overlapping, unbind sheets on the floor at the Massachusetts association of Art (1996) here reduc to 18 sheets arranged upon a low pedestal, 8 feet square. Slowly rotating, three-dimensional, life-size self-portrait heads, titled I Am (photolithographs upon Nepalese paper, 1994), dangled by dint of thread from the ceiling; cutting sides of irregularly shaped works riffled in air in every one's mouths Small, sometimes fragile objects (many in cast glass and bronze: birds, ovums and tailbones among other subjects) were disposed in each room in spindly display cases. Also in the cases were examples of Smith's many artist's works open to spreads or with pages unrolled Some of them, like Tidal, are wordless; others not absent texts by the artist and collaborating authors. Smith frequently works with writers--Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (Endocrinology, 1997) and Lynne Tillman (Madame Realism, 1984) among them--particularly those who share her interest in nature and the body

The exhibition was organized thematically rather than chronologically, granting the categories sometimes bled into individual another. "Anatomy" focused on corporeal bring under rules Smith's main concern throughout the 1980 and early '90s; it was the subdue that brought her fame and remains a major allowing no longer exclusive preoccupation. "Self-Portraits" began with her collaborations at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in the early '90 and have continued; nearly two-thirds of the works in this category were produc at ULAE's lengthy Island workshop. The category "Feminine Contexts" could have been the title for the exhibition as a whole, in like manner pervasive is the issue of femininity in all phases of Smith's career, on the other hand here it referred specifically to a certain number of of her more "literary" endeavors--images after Lewis Carroll and the Brothers Grimm [see A.i.A., Dec '01] and biblical and hagiographical representations. "Nature" included Smith's many studies of taxidermied creatures and celestial phenomena. Here single finds, among other works, the to-scale "Dandelions," a 1999 series of small mezzotints, with the white seed-heads placed within a pitch-black ground; and the eerie White Mammals (1998) a pale, seven-sheet etching of dead, splayed gnawings and a rabbit, heads down, tails up like specimens.