Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith
Two leading postwar American feminist artists preoccupied with myth, Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith make a perfect pair. That they sprang from different generations, and that one comes from a practice grounded in painting and the other from sculpture, only makes their synergy more lively.
However, a pairing is still unusual as an exhibition format, and while the curator, Jon Bird, may have found an intriguing duo, 'OtherWorlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith', instead of seeming richer than a conventional solo show, felt thinner than a group exhibition. For what it seems to lack is a third figure. The artists may be equals in stature but, considering they are a generation apart, the exhibition contains suggestions of a lineage. And given that Smith, the younger of the two, attracted the most attention ten years ago, it is a lineage that stops short of the present day.
Both Smith and Spero are influ-enced by Structuralism's interweaving of ancient and contemporary myth, and holding those terms in balance is central to their work. Indeed Spero was perhaps at the vanguard of this, since many second-wave feminists had little time for the essentialism of feminine archetypes. Now, however, with the balance tipped entirely towards the contemporary, the popular and the everyday, and away from the fashionable discourse that enthroned this subject in the academy, myth looks old hat.
In the 1970s Spero had to make the case for her interest in myth, and so perhaps for that reason her blending of the ancient with the modern seems more emphatic than Smith's. Most of her work takes the form of long friezes of hand-printed and collaged paper; sometimes they run vertically, but generally they extend horizontally and can stretch to over 200 feet. In the symbols that dance along them, Egyptian goddesses give way to strippers, while in the texts that often dance with equal vivacity across their surfaces, references to the sexual thuggery of ancient gods sit at close quarters to extracts from news reports about young girls brutalized by soldiers, interrogators, street gangs or other figures of male violence. This can be a difficult coupling, but Spero's collage aesthetic seems to have been built around the necessities of making it: her surfaces often present themselves as empty vessels for different signs, and when she does cover them with colour and pattern, it is only to facilitate her loose narratives further, either by veiling or revealing figures. At her best she whittles down the weight of myth and leaves its stories of rape and subjugation shorn of authority; conversely she sheathes cheap advertising with mythic portent and makes statistics of domestic violence seem like ancient hordes of the vengeful.
In Smith's work the contemporary is an absent term, yet the present tense returns in the fleshy presence of her figures. The life-size silicon bronze figure Lot's Wife (1996) is her most affecting piece: she's an unearthly crystallized column of a woman whose legs end in stumps, but behind the rough, greying, salt-like texture of her skin lies the real, tired body of a real woman. Hence Lot's Wife leaves her role in the biblical story and stands instead for all contemporary women damned for folly and humiliated with harsh punishment. While Spero's art may be more preoccupied with narrative, Smith's is always most impressive when the old tales seem to crowd in on the figures in this way. In the late 1980s her work revitalized traditional figurative sculpture for women and made concern with materials legi-timate once again, but perhaps only by finding this distinctive mode of address.
With 'OtherWorlds' Jon Bird makes a good case for Spero and Smith, but perhaps as individuals rather than as a pair. While the show may have offered good work from the full range of their respective careers, the tendency of Spero's to hug the wall, and of Smith's to condense around the aura of a single figure, left one gallery in particular swimming with empty space. Ulti-mately one still wanted that extra figure to complete a trio and argue for the continuing relevance of the artists and their themes. But then pairings are just so difficult that they'll always be open to some such charge.
