The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates with the planed city a 'metaphorical' or mobile city, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: "a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation."
Michael de Certeau 1
Kaneem Smith's work in fiber-based sculpture deploys the resonance of materials as a correlative of personal and cultural memory. The sedimented histories of prior and current uses of materials and objects, embedded in the accretions of surface as well as the materials and objects themselves, scale, and the gestures of forms categorize the work-and its installation-as site conditioned/determined. 2 Smith's installation engages both the architectural context of the gallery in which it is installed, and the absent alterity of the architectural context of Southside, where she is currently in the UTD-Southside Artist Residency. More broadly, the works reference the historicity and societal context in which objects had their use value, and which informs their current re-deployment as material with which to create artworks. This shift of function, as well as spatial referent and specific resonances becomes the supervening content of the work, underscoring the historicity of the work and its distinction from the history of its presently absent referent: the work of the artworks is the absence which is history rendered in concrete, visible form.
The dialogue between sculpture and architecture is venerable and ancient. In its more recent manifestations, site conditioned/determined works require the viewer to "use all the same (immediate) cues the artist used in forming the art-response [to the site and its phenomenal conditions] to form his or her operative-response (judgments). . . ."3 The aesthetic of reception 4 entailed in this regard of the works shifts a part of the site of reference to the viewer from the work, so that meaning obtains in the relation between the subject-side of the viewer and the object-side of the work, rather than from either side of the relation alone. In this situation, the several members of an interpretive community do not have "all the same (immediate) cues the artist used." Even in a synchronic historicity shared by artist and viewer, cues not broadly held within a social formation are unlikely to be available to all viewers. More, whether 'immediate' is understood to be without temporal deferral, in its quotidian sense or in Derrida's sense of différance as entailing temporal deferral 5 or without mediation by concept, in Kant's sense, 6 or used in a sense related to Heidegger's notion of Zuhandenheit, 'ready-to-handness.' 7 Given all of that, exegesis would seem difficult and uncertain at best, if not impossible. But all of that is generated by the interwoven diachronic traces of trajectories through a discursive field, and not immediately from an encounter with the artworks themselves. In encountering the artworks themselves, the concrete materiality of the artworks in their phenomenal form given in immediate perception is the ground of an adequate hermeneutic.
Thus the canvas mail bags, stuffed with cotton, or coated to saturation with wax, retain a reference to their antecedent use as containers for conveying units of communication, a reference in which the complex societal organization in which such communication and its conveyance are necessary and possible. The mail bags on open shelves suspended by cables from the roof joists evoke that conveyance and the labor it entails through its absence, through the stillness and suspension of activity of the forms. The cotton stuffing the mailbags on the shelves-and indeed, the cotton from which the fabric of the mail bags themselves is woven-references a social and economic formation in which cotton was king, the agrarian infrastructure for a form of life. That this was a form of life long entailing the evil of slavery is imbricated in the signification of cotton as material. At Southside, built in 1910 as the first Sears Catalog and Distribution Center outside Chicago, the Coffin Factory edifice at the south of complex was once the site of the largest coffin manufacturing operation in the United States. The final stage of the manufacturing process involved stuffing cotton inside the coffin linings, an operation performed in an interior suggestive of a Holocaust crematorium in its feeling of being a perduring ancillary to death. So also the resonances entailed in the coating of the canvas mail bags with wax. Wax is a sealant, a preservative, a means of waterproofing. Its translucency, as in the sculpture of Medardo Rosso, is suggestive of flesh. This translucency and its resonance with flesh is especially evident in the three mailbags at the east of the gallery, where the solidified droplets of wax are correlative with frozen beads of sweat. This translucency appears also in the works at the south and north ends of the west gallery wall; in the former, hanging cotton straps with frayed ends are coated with wax, in the latter, short cloth straps are attached to a crumpled fabric form, all rendered immobile by saturation with wax.
Burlap coffee bags, opened and flattened, sewn together on their short sides, pinned to the north entry wall of the gallery and to each other to form voluminous swags are, like the canvas mail bags, containers for conveyance, in this case for bulk commodities such as coffee beans. As the mail bags have their use value as containers for conveying units of communication and thus necessarily reference the complex societal organization in which such communication and its conveyance are necessary and possible, so burlap bags have their use value in the bulk shipment of commodities, necessarily referencing a social formation in which trade in agricultural exports and imports is a fundamental aspect of exchange. Exchange is fundamentally a relationship, a betweenness of subjectivities no less than of objects, with all the relations and hierarchies of power-economic and otherwise-that entails. Exchange, export and import, presupposes a border, a liminal zone across which entities are transmissible, a porosity akin to the loose, open weave of burlap, a liminality which equiprimordially separates and connects, is distal and engaging visuality and proximal and engaging tactility.
The long woven jute form stretching distally in an undulating line along the north interior wall of the gallery is proximally haptic and tactile in its mode of engagement. Plastic, melted by a heat gun, here replaces the wax on the canvas mail bags and strapping, yet the effect is similar: the displacement of rough, opaque, dry fabric with a smooth, translucent, liquid (albeit a liquid that is a solid at room temperature) film. With both canvas-wax and jute-plastic, an oppositional pair is instantiated at the level of material. Opposition of feel and reference and resonance of materials is in itself in opposition to their intimate physical connection: the wax saturates the fabric, the plastic melts into the jute fiber. A dialectic obtains, in which the deployment of oppositional materials is sublated into a metaphor of transcendence in which material retains its character even as it is negated by the material serving as an oppositional term. This reciprocity of oppositional terms within a dialectic is not least a metaphor of one's embodiment, of the ontological reciprocity of the senuous and the rational aspects of one's being. 8
Lili Kaneem Smith studied at Maryland Institute, College of Art, and at Rice University before earning the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 1995, and the Master of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 2001. Smith's recent exhibitions include: Mix! Series: Sculpture by Kaneem Smith, Dallas Center for Contemporary Art; Continuous Change: Movement and Process, African American Museum, Dallas; The Mortification of the Past is Inevitable, Project Row Houses, Houston; Nadezda Prvulovic and Kaneem Smith, The Gallery at The University of Texas at Arlington; Kaneem Smith & Rachel Bryan: Sculpture and Prints, Sarah A. Coyne Gallery, Syracuse University; Essential Space, Part II: Francis Bagley, Linnea Glatt and Kaneem Smith, McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas; George and Kaneem Smith, Legacy: A Visual Dialogue, Galveston Art Center.