September 4-10, 2003

art

Peace and Noise

Patti Smith, Query for Harry Smith (2002), 13 1/4 inches by 11 inches, colored pencil and digital image on paper.

Patti Smith muses on love, loss and the Declaration of Independence in an exhibit at the ICA.

by A.D. Amorosi

Any actor can tell you: Everything starts with the written word. So, too, for Patti Smith, whose years of drawings and paintings -- from a mid-í60s of post-de Kooning influence to silk-screens capturing the remainder of her neighboring Twin Towers -- are accumulated in "Strange Messenger," her new retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Throughout her vivid pencil or pen-on-paper drawings or silk-screens, the work overflows with words spilling over or funneling themselves into slashed, scrawled images. They rip through paper, jump off the screen in frenzied Cy Twombly fashion. But the prayerful passion and compassion in her work -- a fluttering Peace & Noise #1, a looming South Tower Gold (Monster) -- is incomparable.

Smith went to Glassboro State Teachers College between 1964 and 1967. "I wasn't really going to be a teacher. But being as I put myself through college, it was affordable and sophisticated with extraordinarily brilliant professors." It was in their theater department that she did her first singing -- playing Madame Dubonnet in The Boyfriend. "I knew I had comedic abilities, but not singing. Yet, I had to project through these incredibly complex songs. I realized then, on stage, to have no fear."

Bouncing around among Germantown, South Jersey and Upper Darby, Philly became her cultural home -- Bergman films on Market Street, Coltrane at Pep's, Modigliani at Philadelphia Museum of Art. Most crucial to "Strange Messenger," Smith spied Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol at the latter's 1965 solo at ICA. "I watched Edie walk in with a long white coat. She was my first exposure to Andy," she says. "I wasn't really into Warhol. Only later, after Robert [Mapplethorpe, her longtime friend/roommate] exposed me to Andy and I got to know [him] well, did I learn to appreciate him."

She also fell in love with the Declaration of Independence -- its beautiful, aesthetic calligraphic form, its meaning. "I remember buying a 25-cent copy as a kid, spending hours copying the signatures, the flow of the handwriting." Along with including silver-print Polaroids of the Declaration in her show, she's toured the world reading from "the revolutionary, poetic and exacting mind of Thomas Jefferson. It demands us to be astute, to overthrow any regime that isn't representing the people."

Her new appreciation for fearlessness, art history, the power of quills and a dedication to the revolutionary brought her to the Manhattan of the late '60s and the rhythmic physicality of drawing. Her earliest work shares as much delicacy as it does ferocity. "I don't analyze what I do, but that's probably the same thing inside that could, in a space of four minutes, allow me to sing a little thing like åWing' then put my foot through an amp."

While at Pratt Institute ("I felt like a hick no matter how intelligent I was"), several incidents changed her life. Meeting "companion" Mapplethorpe, a man who shared everything with her, was one. "We evolved together," she says. She also learned from an exhibition of de Kooning's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "In terms of palette and application, he was the greatest 20th-century painter. He was a sign painter, he understood sweeping strokes and intricate drawing. I'd stand there for hours, touching the skin of the works when no one was looking."

Smith pushed and punched with ballpoint pens and colored pencils, as seen in 1969's Self-Portrait or 1973's All the Hipsters Go to Heaven. "We had no money. I mean, none. The money we spent went on good, non-rag paper. I was very picky." Though much of that style is still prominent, she recently shifted, first to silver-print photography (Christ Ascension 2) then silk-screening. "I'm work- and family-oriented. I'm driven by the needs of the people rather than marketplace. If I stop recording or touring, it's because my need to contribute has shifted. It's not a sin to be motivated by fame or money," she laughs. "I'm just not."

What's motivated her, since 2001, as an art form, is silk-screen. Her subject: the doomed South Tower that crumbled to ash on Sept. 11. Haunted by its remains, she saw a striking similarity to the Tower of Babel, a tragic beauty she felt needed documenting but one she couldn't approximate through pencil. "I'm not an architectural renderer," she says. She photographed the site and persuaded friends with old beat-up screens to help her through this unpracticed form. "It's done in an almost amateurish way. But I didn't care. I just wanted some ghost of that image on paper." Once screened, the remote but devastatingly emotional images got Smith addicted to the process, one which, like Kirlian photos, unraveled the building's tattered soul and the spirits of its former inhabitants; "10 images turned to 30." The excruciating work of ink and silk-screen brought her often to tears. "No matter where one stands politically, the human dust in the air lingers. As much as I understood the soul of the remaining building, I felt the people -- 3,000 -- dying in moments, just blocks from my house. The Towers were in my sightline. I sent my daughter to school at 8:15. An hour later they were gone. Breathtaking."

At the same time, John W. Smith, exhibition curator of Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum, asked if she would show her older sketch work at AWM, not knowing of the burgeoning series. "That was a beautiful thing. Having known Andy and how his mind worked, I thought he'd approve of what I was doing. He would have chosen an equally iconic image and made multiples of it. It wasn't my motivation. But there was an Andy connection. It came naturally."

So "Strange Messenger" was born -- a tribute not just to Warhol or 9/11's victims but to the spirit all of Smith's work embodies. "Most of my visual work is done in the center of joy or aesthetic illumination -- abstract concepts or such. My written work or music, though, is often done during emotionally taxing work periods -- to communicate. The South Tower pieces were different." She believed there was a duty there to communicate the legacy of its inhabitants. "It was fate. Chance. Everything found its place."

"Strange Messenger: The Work of Patti Smith," opening reception Thu., Sept. 4, 6-8 p.m., exhibit runs through Dec. 7; "Whenever Wednesday," screening of Blank Generation and discussion with Patti Smith and director Amos Poe, Wed., Sept. 17, 7 p.m., Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-5911.