Most notably a sculptor and printmaker, Kiki Smith in her photograph, Untitled, employs a limited depth-of-field. Materials strewn in the background call attention to the ambiguity of a looming, out-of-focus hand in the foreground. Smith's characteristic attention to organic material and the physical body is apparent in this work. The hand appears bloody and "meaty," while the presence of wrought iron connotes violence, magnifying the raw frailty of an apparently dismembered body. The finger-shaped, muscular clay pieces that lie below leave the viewer questioning whether the hand is being put back together, or is in the process of decaying, evoking a precarious state between life and death.

An American sculptor and installation artist who addressed controversies surrounding the AIDS epidemic and the family during the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Gober presents a political commentary on sexuality and isolation, within the confines of suburban homogeneity.

Gober's nearly one hundred sink drawings created during this time served as studies for his sink sculptures and installations. Like his other sink drawings, Untitled deals with the psychological implications of this seemingly banal, inanimate object, which suggests an anthropomorphic loneliness. Eye-like apertures mark the absence of faucets. Isolating the object on an otherwise empty page, the artist imagines the sink as a body--as "other." For Gober, washbasins and urinals denote the notions of forced hygiene and sexual oppression, which he associates with his bourgeois childhood.

Multimedia artist Chris Ofili presented a large series of paintings like this one in a recent exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Chris Ofili: Afro Muses, 1995-2005). Comprising a daily ritual for over ten years, the process of making these small-scale watercolors is a form of meditation for Ofili, allowing him to imagine potential projects.

These schematic, brightly adorned depictions of Black men and women have provoked comparisons to minstrel caricature and colonial stereotypes with their simplified and exaggerated hairstyles and facial features. But upon closer inspection, Ofili's Afro Muses series is more difficult to categorize. Ofili is aware of such racist visual conventions, and in fact employs them to effectively challenge their signification. He appropriates these pictorial vocabularies and combines them with imagery gleaned from contemporary culture. Works such as Untitled give Ofili an opportunity to respond to the continually unfolding acts of becoming and self-presentation at work in today's Black communities.

While Karen Finley is most famous for her performance art (see video excerpts here from her performance, Mondo New York, 1988), she is, in fact, a consummate multi-media artist. Her work comprises music and monologue recordings, books and film. Buying things that you don't need, a simple, cartoon-like ink drawing, is reproduced in her 1993 book Enough is enough. Finley details fifty-two different ways to live dysfunctionally, one method for every week of the year.

In this drawing, Finley depicts the sad, frowning face of a subject who, according to the text, will be comforted by the material excess of the prickly fur coat situated beside her. Buying things that you don't need tackles societal conventions, satirizing self-help literature while presenting ironic advice about the consumerist behavior Finley views as prevalent in our society. Nevertheless, the artist expresses a sense of empathy and compassion for her subjects through her dark humor.

Chris Burden
American (b. 1946)
How to Shrink L.A., 1999
Color pencil on paper
Private collection

Following his controversial performance pieces in the early 1970s, Chris Burden shifted his focus to sculpture, installation and drawing. Early works such as the visceral and unsettling Trans-fixed (1974) deal with the permeable boundary between artist and viewer. Challenging the audience's sense of responsibility, Burden asked them to witness his crucifixion on the hood of a car. This performance insisted upon the participation of the spectator, examining both the community and the institutions that support artwork.

The critique of American car culture explored in Trans-fixed is reprised in his drawing, How to Shrink L.A. In this piece, Burden's earlier concerns are blended with his more recent interests in utopian engineering, the frenzy and unsustainably of modern urban life, and tensions between automobile use and mass transportation. The diagrammatic, playful coloration and exuberant impracticality of this piece point to its function as a conceptual exercise that may either inspire a larger project, or remain a speculative suggestion.