HANNAH WILKE

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EXCERPTS FROM ESSAYS ABOUT HANNAH WILKE

Essays About Hannah Wilke

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Hannah Wilke: Self Portrait, 1978

Hannah Wilke
by Nancy Princenthal
 
Perhaps more than her sexual candor, the quality that distinguished Wilke among her peers--and that forms the most illuminating comparison with artists of succeeding generations-- is her spirit of affirmation.... Wilke invited us to enter her life in it's every particular--and, equally, to find our own lives reflected there.... Wilke insisted on exploring and expressing the body's most insistent and powerful conditions....The formal intelligence of her sculpture and, later, the theoretical reach of her photography were what she most wanted acknowledged. Carrying on her legacy are, really, any artists who flaunt their gifts and present irresolvably perplexing challenges to critical protocol...
 
Excerpts from Hannah Wilke by Nancy Princenthal
Copyright Nancy Princenthal
Prestel Publishing, New York, 2010
 
 
Hannah Wilke: Making Myself Into a Monument
by Tracy Fitzpatrick
 
Wilke's practise is rooted in her devotion to malleability and her interest in vulnerability....For Wilke these forms were a language reflecting the pleasures and pains of the female experience, both universal and specific.... Wilke first adopted vaginal imagery in the late 1950's, before most other artists who also produced what later came to be termed feminist "essentialist" art, or art that stemmed from imagery of the female body.... The ultimate expression of Wilke's sculptural priorities ... is Wilke's adaptation of her own body as sculptural material --as what she called "living sculpture." ... Considering these works as rooted in a sculptural practise raises a range of new insights and ... demonstrate the line Wilke walked between her desire to investigate the transitory nature of art and life and her desire to create a lasting record of her own art and life....
 
Excerpts from "Hannah Wilke: Making Myself Into A Monument," by Tracy Fitzpatrick.
Copyright Tracy Fitzpatrick, Neuberger Museum of Art.
Published in exhibition catalog Hannah Wilke: Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, 2009.
 
 

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Hannah Wilke: Gum on postcard

The Eternal Hannah Wilke: Philosophy in Form
by Arlene Raven
 
Like Eve, the first woman, Wilke is self-originating with a vengeance. And she has often been first. She was the first, for instance, to make vaginal art. Her terra cotta labia of the 1960's, invented and self-appropriated to be fashioned in every medium she ever used, are a fertile source for the female imagery of the feminist artists of the next decade....The artist bares herself in sensual drawings, photographs, sculptures, performances and film. Hers is a self-documentation and a feminist art form; starkly personal, culturally historical, and symbolically transcendent. Wilke was passionate in this portrayal all of her life. She has driven deep into her corporeal self to produce a legacy for the sacred collective that is so seminal and fundamental that she has been and remains a lodestar.... Wilke eschews euphemism often used to cover abuses of  power. Underlieing the inextricable connection between language and truth, this artist's lexacon becomes a blunt badge of  moral courage  that melds personal, cultural, and artistic truths....
 
Excerpts from "The Eternal Hannah Wilke" by Arlene Raven.
Copyright the Estate of Arlene Raven.
Published in Hannah Wilke: Selected Work, 1960-1992,
Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles, and SolwayJones, 2004.
 
 
 
Hannah Wilke
by Joanna Frueh
 
Throughout her career Wilke has engaged, confronted, and led significant developments in contemporary and twentieth century art.... Wilke is one of the few artists creating female erotic discourse, and she is the only one to consistently use both herself and sculptural forms.... It was Wilke ... who originated vaginal imagery, as signature, as feminist statement, as universal symbol....a signature is the manifestation of intimate poetics, the presence of a self that can project vision and belief.... Wilke creates a multiplicity ... beautiful objects that speak not of Otherness, the position into which a male-dominant society has cast women ... The sensuously folded shells are exist-ential, treating the importance of  eroticism as an energy that must permeate an individual's life if it is to be vital....They deal with women's reproduction of life, but not, however, as purely anatomical glorification....Wilke recognizes that women are life-givers, people who not only give birth literally but who also bring forth ideas and art, who create culture and society....Her intention is to make a female form universal, to have it seen as symbolic of both women's and humanity's concern.
 
Excerpts from "Hannah Wilke" by Joanna Frueh. Copyright Joanna Frueh.
Published in Hannah Wilke:A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press,1989.

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Hannah Wilke: Ceramic Sculptures

 
 
Intra Venus and Hannah Wilke's Feminine Narcissism
by Amelia Jones
 
Wilke's radical narcissism culminated in her acerbic, witty, and tragic Intra Venus, the last project she completed before she died of lymphoma in1993....Wilke's work ... functions more subtly to interrogate and explore profound issues of the embodied female subject as both artistic subject and object. Wilke refuses the construction of woman as the pathetic, obscene, victimized subject of the patriarchal gaze ... offering her body within a fully theorized array of expressions ... that articulate a pro-active rather than re-active feminist subject. Through her myriad, often contradictory presentations of her self, Wilke solicits this gaze, grafting it onto and into her body/self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back to expose and exacerbate its reciprocity.... Wilke's sense of humor and compulsion to perform once again transformed an objectifying practice into an opportunity for self-expression.
 
Excerpts from "Intra Venus and Hannah Wilke's Feminine Narcissism"
by Amelia Jones. Copyright Amelia Jones.
Published in Intra Venus, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 1995.
 
 
'Everybody Dies, Even the Gorgeous:'
Resurrecting the Work of Hannah Wilke
by Amelia Jones
 
Wilke's self-love, so Intra Venus seems to say, had a depth that is moving in a lacerating kind of way. Paradoxically, in the reiterative self-display of the Intra-Venus works, Wilke suggested that her self-love was built of self-knowledge--and thus subversive of the patriarchal construction of the feminine body as only a picture, only display. This, then, is the other side of the artifice highlighted in her earlier performative self-portraits. ...Wilke's works have never been about a superficial self  isolated as pretty picture, but about a female subject deeply absorbed in its own embodied self-reflection....
The beauty here is not that of appearance, but of being--a being that persists, struggles, in the face of death's inexorable and "untimely" approach.
 
Excerpts from "'Everybody Dies... Even the Gorgeous:' Resurrecting the Work of Hannah Wilke" by Amelia Jones. Copyright Amelia Jones.
First published in markzine.com, 2003. Reprinted in The Rhetoric of the Pose: Rethinking Hannah Wilke, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2005.
 
 
 
 
 

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Hannah Wilke: Intra Venus 7, 1992-3 (left image in diptych) Copyright Donald Goddard.

 
 
 
 
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All Hannah Wilke Art, Images, Writing and Text
     Copyright © Marsie, Emanuelle, Damon and Andrew Scharlatt/VAGA, NY
 
HANNAH WILKE COLLECTION & ARCHIVE, LOS ANGELES