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Essays About Hannah Wilke
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| Hannah Wilke: Self Portrait, 1978 |
The Eternal Hannah Wilke: Philosophy in
Form
by Arlene Raven
This is my testament. I knew Hannah Wilke, following her work in exhibitions
as well as visiting her in her studio in New York many times during the three decades before her death. She was, I believe,
an artist of flesh and spirit ...
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.... As a feminist her primary contribution to the Womens' Art Movement is her focus on the female body....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 female sexual organ(ism) which is degraded in a culture that valorizes phallic
power ... but rather of sameness and difference in the forms; of likeness and unlikeness among women themselves....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 concerns....
Wilke does deal with individuality-an individual woman's art, feminism, beauty, narcissism, mother. But individuality
in her art focuses as much on relationship--and individuation.
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 Intra Venus forces the viewer to confront his or her expectations about the appearance
of the female body in visual representations...
Wilke's work ... functions more subtly as well 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 (objects, interviews,
texts, music, performance, photographs) 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.
Complementing the large scale photographs, a group of pictures made of Wilke's own hair ... and a series of
dense, saturated watercolors, images of her face and hands ... also testify to her tenacious drive to render explicit the
"inexpressible" ravages of cancer.... These pictures, which in their jeweled density seem to want to replace the lost
body, are unutterably lovely and sad.
The medicalization of Wilke's body and its brutalization through illness turned it from sexual subject/object
(of her own and others' pleasures) to scientific object, and yet, while the regimes of medicine work to strip away individual
identity, 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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