The Spirit of Rebellion and How It Loves Everything: The Visual Art of Patti Smith
p. 137-141
Résumés
This paper traces the imagery and conceptual activity of Patti Smith in her visual art, with an emphasis on the kinetic, and corporeal methods that Smith employs within the spectrum of her artistic production, and the sense of reverence for beauty and the ecstatic as a conception of value that does not ignore the painful, political, or abject. This paper looks at texts such as ‘A Conversation with Patti Smith,’ contributed to the book Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, Smith’s writing in Woolgathering, her memoir Just Kids, and the work of Antonin Artaud, as well as other artists whose creative output involves the merging of the ecstatic and temporal with the visual and the graphic as a means of passionate expression.
Cet article explore l’imagerie et l’activité conceptuelle que Patti Smith utilise dans son œuvre graphique, en particulier ses pratiques cinétiques et corporelles et le sens du beau et de l’extase qui nourrit les valeurs qu’elle exprime, sans pour autant négliger le douloureux, le politique ou l’abject. Nous nous appuyons sur des œuvres telles que ‘A Conversation with Patti Smith,’ contribution de Patti Smith à l’ouvrage Antonin Artaud : Works on Paper, Woolgathering, ou Just Kids, et sur les travaux d’Antonin Artaud, ainsi que sur les œuvres d’autres artistes dont la production mêle l’extatique et le temporel au travail visuel et graphique afin d’exprimer toute leur passion.
Texte intégral
1The visual art of Patti Smith runs parallel to and cannot be separated from her writing and performance. They share, in their process, a similar meditation on beauty and the transgression of the rule of cynicism toward poetry in punk and post punk culture. With an emphasis on the kinetic, and corporeal methods that Smith employs within the spectrum of her artistic production, and the sense of reverence for beauty and the ecstatic as a conception of value that does not ignore the painful, political, or abject.
2The visual art of Patti Smith is varied in its media and technique, having explored photography, painting, and drawing. Her visual work, much like her poetry and music, has a strong kinetic sensibility and even at its most austere, in the case of her photographic work in black and white, there is a sense of the moment. All of her work displays a sensitivity to the temporal, the ceremonial, and I will argue, a reverence and appreciation for the corporeal aspects of expression and poetics. Her gestural word drawings seem automatic in their development, physical and performative, merging liminal mapping of thought and the poignancy of material reality as it relates to experience.
3The artists Smith most frequently cites as inspiration for her own visual work, aside from Robert Mapplethorpe with whom she developed much of her artistic vocabulary in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, are William Blake and Antonin Artaud. It’s clear that for both these men the written word was intimately tied to the work of visual art. Although Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, among other modern painters, seem to have impacted her work, she most often cites Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ and more specifically the graphite studies for it, as having made an impression. Even in that sense it is not only Picasso’s work which is most highly kinetic and most drained of color that she finds herself attracted to, but the studies exploring its potential layout in pencil. In the end of the documentary film Dream of Life, she describes the way that Jackson Pollock may have gleaned his frenetic drips from ‘the teeth of the horse in Guernica,’ which she describes as being the catalyst for ‘a totally American art’.
4In Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, Smith is interviewed in response to the work of Artaud by Margit Rowell. She says that when she discovered the drawings of Artaud, she ‘felt akin to the fragmentation in them’. She goes on to say ‘He didn’t seem at all apologetic about moving from one kind of expression to another and being slightly crude. I had this as a little badge for myself, his unapologetic way’ (140–144).
5She often describes her interest in William Blake’s work as it relates to the merging of writing and drawing. She describes her early relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe as having drawing in common, especially drawings that included image/language juxtapositions. She says in Just Kids,
I read William Blake as a child and I always liked the idea of the handwriting as art—poetry, handwriting, the song and the image all together as one. I studied him very young, copying his writing, trying to make little books as he did. (176)
6In writing about her own art practice in Woolgathering, Smith describes how the written word functions in her work (44–46). Many of her drawings, even those that are representational images of people, are more than that in their use of the written word as a catalyst for invention. Signatures and notes, phrases, and ideas veer off, dance across the picture plane, or slow the eye and repeat in a scrawling meditation. They give the effect of tracing thought, fast or slow, transforming and repeating. Many of her drawings, as evidenced in her drawing exhibition Strange Messenger and the catalogue of the same name are made almost entirely of handwritten text. Her own drawing process is described by David Greenburg in his essay ‘Illuminations: the drawings of Patti Smith’ in the Catalogue for the Strange Messenger exhibition as having begun when she was very young, tracing out words and signatures from documents like the Declaration Of Independence (71). These incantations evoke moments like spells, repeating and transforming into new automatic phrases, taking on the beauty of calligraphy, the motion of intention, the strength of line in graphic relief.
7She writes in Woolgathering about
—the image of the word, the signatures—on long paper scrolls. I imagined that in mastering each bold, significant hand, I would capture some of the spirit of the author, of Independence itself. (45)
8The significance of this copying in her work I would touch on twofold. The first is to say that this meditation on the image of the word is, in fact, a kind of evocation.
Standing before large sheets of paper tacked to a wall, reciting. . . frustrated with the image I draw words instead—rhythms that ran off the page into the plaster. Writing lyrics evolved from the physical act of drawing words, and later refining this process lead me to performance. . .
9Many of her drawings, made as early as 1967, which appear in Strange Messenger have also had a presence in the public eye long before the show was curated. In many ways her handwritten notes and lyrics have been presented side by side as a visual partner to her music, as in the liner notes for the album Horses.1 The hand-drawn cover for her 1997 album Peace and Noise2 has text pulsing and swirling in what looks like either the petals of a flower or a map of flowing rivers. Here, the words themselves are marks, the graphic equivalent of her lyrical and performative improvisations.
10Even though many of Smith’s drawings are made up almost entirely of language, they don’t necessarily maintain legibility as an important aspect of the finished work. Often the words themselves unfold and give into the temporal quality of the space of the page, the way her song lyrics might give in to the temporal quality of the stage. In the end the work seems to use pace and rhythm to discover new and unforeseen pathways, to shift gears and to invent as they go.
11In a 1976 interview for Punk Magazine, she describes having wanted to be an artist, but then having become a performer of rock and roll. The performance of her poetry lent it sound, duration, intensity, rhythm, and music. Blossoming as a performer in the early seventies, the punk moment of CBGB’s in New York was also heavily invested in copying the image of words. In the esthetic moment, flyers, zines, and other photocopied print ephemera were just that, ephemera. Made cheaply and easily given affect with handwritten additions to preexisting photographic or print materials, this kind of ephemera begins with the intersection of the found and the hand made. Even its beauty as ephemera comes from its temporality. It seems that Smith’s own copying, although made much more precious in the sense that, as fine art, it ceases to count itself disposable, still retains a kind of temporality relevant to the creative qualities of the copy and the handwritten coexisting, documents of time. The black and white, graphic nature of these early photocopy esthetics being utilized in the growing punk scene of the early seventies seems relevant to Smith’s work. In the same interview with Punk Magazine, she’s asked:
Punk Magazine: I just wonder—are ya into color even? ’cause everything ya do seems black and white. . .
Patti: I used to like black and white. . . like black and white movies— Sweet Smell of Success, Godard movies, Black Judex, television. Lately I think the first album is a real black and white album. I think we’re moving into color though. . . things are getting anarch. . . pastoral anarchtic. . . glacier? Lenny? What’s that word where the people rise up and it goes to maniac? Is there—another like Antarctica?
Punk Magazine: anarchic.
Patti: that’s it. Its chaos. It’s static, and once you’ve got static you’ve got friction—you’ve got possibilities. . .
12The question of why and how Smith creates her visual art in the later part of her life still rests on seeking out possibilities from friction through the written word. A large part of the work produced as recently as the early 2000s focused on the destruction of the World Trade Center. As a New Yorker living within walking distance of the buildings, it makes sense that she would have a marked response, and that it would take the form of the skeletal buildings themselves, a cross-section of conflicting beliefs and corporeal immediacy. The drawings and paintings she made about it can be, potentially, and more that any of her previous output, considered as a body of work. It is a body of work in that many pieces were made in conversation with each other and are connected conceptually and esthetically, but also in that it is a formal investigation of the body of a building, a tower, and its layered meanings and implications.
13In many ways this later work is investigating the corporeal and the sacred in ways that are just as potent and prolific as her musical output, and certainly that are true to her contemporary moment and to her early role models. Like Artaud’s layered consideration of the living body and the drawing, or Picasso’s studies for an artwork on war and destruction in Spain, her new work meditates on the layers of both the material and spiritual layers of activity which formed the ruins of the building, whose intersections literally form a text whose aim is to understand more fully the otherwise incomprehensible. It both commemorates a temporal experience, and engages an artful sensitivity toward the process of consideration of life.
Bibliographie
Works Cited
Greenberg, David, Smith, John, and Patti Smith. ‘Illuminations: The Drawings of Patti Smith,’ Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: The Andy Warhol Museum, 2003.
Holmstrom, John and Bridget Hurd, eds. ‘Patti Smith,’ In Punk, The Best of Punk Magazine. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.
Smith, Patti. ‘Drawing,’ Woolgathering. New York & Madras: Hanuman Books, 1992.
Smith, Patti. ‘Contemporary Responses to Artaud,’ Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper. Margit Rowell, ed. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
Smith, Patti. Just Kids. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Notes de bas de page
Auteur
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Rachel Kessler
Artist, Los Angeles, California
Rachel Kessler is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles California. She received her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2004 and her Masters in Fine Art from Art Center College of Design in 2010.
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