QUEEN OF ARTS.

Great artists work from and for history, where no one lives. Kiki Smith, the subject of a tangy retrospective at the Whitney, "Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005," works from and for the moment, shared by everybody. She is a major figure--long the leading light of communally minded downtown avant-gardes--who makes minor art. Her sculpture, drawings, and prints betoken general concepts and generic sentiments; however striking, their form is arbitrary. The best known illustrate carnal facts and poetic associations of the human body. Take, for example, a wall-hung iron rendition of the digestive system (1988); a floor piece of swarming crystal sperm (1989-90); and "Virgin Mary" (1992), a life-size, reverently postured female figure, in beeswax, that is partly flayed, its musculature on livid display. Lately, Smith has developed a fanciful bestiary--wolves and birds, especially--with fairy-tale affinities for states of human fear and desire. "Daughter" (1999), a life-size Little Red Riding Hood made of paper, cloth, and hair, appears to be metamorphosing into a werewolf; an electronic soundtrack, by the composer Margaret De Wys, contributes appropriate growls and squeaks. Cosmic awe is a recurrent theme: lots of stars, in many shapes and mediums. Smith's works are always fiercely adept, inventive, and even elegant, but their aesthetic quality tracks, rather than transcends, her thoughts and feelings. They serve an attitude that combines a forthright desire to seduce and a mischievous will to shock.

It is tempting to say that Smith's chief creation is herself: a neo-hippie queen of bohemia and--what with her wild hair, sharp features, pale skin, and abundant little blue tattoos of rings and stars--an avatar of the Addams Family. A recent profile by Michael Kimmelman, in the Times Magazine, captured her charisma: "ethereal and laughing," in perpetual motion as a creator and in teeming company as a doyenne. (To not like her would require a knack for bitterness.) But Smith is a grounded product of breeding and circumstance, with nothing made up about her. She is a New York School aristocrat. Her father was the sculptor Tony Smith, a close friend of Barnett Newman, and, rather like herself, an artist whose significance exceeds the sum of his material achievements. (His commanding geometric works only partly fulfill a visionary genius that both anticipated and overleaped minimalism.) Kiki and her sisters served their father as studio assistants and grew up on easy terms with art-world celebrities. Kiki's knockabout biography--as a college dropout and, before her art-world success, a baker, electrician's assistant, surveyor, garment worker, census taker, short-order cook, and bartender--recalls bohemian eras when artists lived as lumpen proletarians, at home with the working class. The last such era involved Smith's own generation, albeit as something of a conceit: principled downward social mobility.

Smith cannot be understood except as an exemplar--and survivor--of a scene that boomed in New York in the early nineteen-eighties. That epoch of punk music, performance art, political anarchism, polymorphous sexuality, gallery graffiti, funky feminism, populist confederacies of artists (CoLab, ABC No Rio), and prevalent bad habits was done in by factors including gentrification and, above all, AIDS. The wave of death engulfed Smith's sister Beatrice and a great many friends. The catastrophe--practically forgotten in today's money-drugged, supercilious art world--fostered a movement, in the nineties, of art that marshalled political grievance. (A downturn in the art market boosted the trend, which nestled in art institutions. Choleric installational art was just the thing for a burgeoning circuit of biennial exhibitions.) Smith's maturation as an artist accorded with the moment. Already preoccupied with the body--a favorite source book was "Gray's Anatomy"--she became a bard of a suddenly sinister organic ...