2009.53: Stairs

Identification and Creation

Object Number

2009.53

People

Mimi Smith, American (Brookline, MA born 1942)

Title

Stairs

Classification

Drawings

Work Type

drawing

Date

1974

Culture

American

Persistent Link

https://hvrd.art/o/331589

Physical Descriptions

Medium

Knotted thread, tape measures, eyelets

Dimensions

266.7 x 121.9 cm (105 x 48 in.)

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History

Collection of the artist, sold; [through Anna Kustera Gallery]; to Harvard Art Museum, March 2009.

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund

Copyright

© 1974 Mimi Smith

Accession Year

2009

Object Number

2009.53

Division

Modern and Contemporary Art

Contact

am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu

Permissions

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Descriptions

Commentary

In 1972 Mimi Smith moved, with her husband and small children, to a suburban neighborhood in Cleveland. Describing feelings of entrapment (she had begun her career as an artist in NY), Smith began to measure the contents and rooms of her domestic space. Translating these measurements into thread, which she knotted obsessively, and tape measures Smith, who referred to these works as drawings, began to enact conceptual art's affection for measurement and precision within the domestic sphere. Like Sylvia Plimack Mangold's paintings of her domestic interior these drawings explore the "trick" of perspective by showing the contradiction between actual measurement and the appearance of objects in space. Cleaving open the space between "reality" and "representation" can be seen in this context to have as much to do with Mel Bochner's exercises in measurement as they do with the feminist agenda of bringing reality and representation into a closer proximity to one another. "Stairs" is a classic work of Smith's evoking not only receding space, but space upwards, as well as access to another plane (i.e. another floor). In this regard its play with space is quite fanciful-albeit lonely in their evocation of a staircase to nowhere. But the work also plays with the tradition of trompe l'oeil, tricking the eye into a belief in a space not present. Despite the works playfulness, the emotional connotation of the work is vexed-the knotted thread speaks to a kind of obsessive, mindless activity (Smith was to make the analogy between knotting and housework) and the stairs (and other pieces of furniture meticulously made by Smith) have a kind of stark emptiness that subtly undermine the so-called American dream of a house in the suburb being the embodiment of fulfillment. In Smith's case it appears rather as an empty shell.

Publication History

• Uber die Kleidung, die durch das Lebenbegleitet: Ein Gesprach mit Mimi Smith von Heinz-Norb, Titel (Germany), p. 154, ill.
• Lisa Gabrielle Mark, ed., WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA and London, 2007), p. 55, 303, ill.

Exhibition History

• 32Q: 1120 Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 08/10/2017 - 03/15/2018

Subjects and Contexts

• Collection Highlights

Verification Level