Artist Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) is known for her extensive oeuvre of often provocatively, sometimes disturbingly self-reflective works, and was one of the first women artists to cultivate a gynocentric visual repertoire.
The recipient of myriad grants and awards, yet still considered underappreciated in her native United States, Hannah Wilke to some extent suffered the ultimate paradox of the 1970s feminist cultural struggle: simultaneously dismissed by the art establishment as feminist, and rejected by the activist establishment as anti-feminist.
Artist as Glamour Girl
Hannah Wilke’s own physical beauty played an unusually prominent role in her work, beyond the simple use of her body as subject; and in the eyes of some critics, the artist occasionally failed to hold the fine line between self-reference and self-absorption. Feminist critics in particular have been leery of the ingenuousness of Wilke’s parody of objectification.
In the 1976 Art in America article “The Pleasures and Pains of Rebirth: European and American Women’s Body Art,” feminist art critic Lucy Lippard wrote of Wilke, whom she described as a “glamour girl”: “Her own confusion of her roles as beautiful woman and artist, as flirt and feminist, has resulted at times in politically ambiguous manifestations that have exposed her to criticism on a personal as well as on an artistic level.”
Through the Large Glass
One of Wilke’s most important works to encapsulate this contradiction, yet show the artist at her caustic, witty, cunningly allusive best is Through the Large Glass (1976). The piece consists of a performance filmed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, literally through the “Large Glass” of Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23).
Behind the double-thick glass panes of the Duchamp structure, criss-crossed with wire and cracks, Wilke performs a strip-tease heavy with expressive exaggeration, stylised virtually to the point of mechanisation, a dual reference to the “mannequins” of fashion photography and the Dada machine aesthetic.
Late Works and Feminist and Jewish Art Legacy
Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1987, and embarked upon the creation of her last – and in many ways most powerful – work, the Intra Venus series: a photographic documentation of her fatal illness and the devastation wrought on her iconic body by both the cancer and its treatment.
The posthumous exhibition of Intra Venus was mounted at Wilke’s longtime New York gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, in 1994 to critical acclaim. “This spectacle of impending death contains as much glory and mordant humor as indignity; indeed, the three are hard to disentangle,” wrote Nancy Princenthal in her 1997 Art in America piece “Mirror of Venus.”
“To look for the first time at those photos was to feel one's eyes grow wide with astonishment.”
Wilke’s oeuvre also encompasses a unique contribution to Jewish art, notably with the 1982-1984 sculpture series Venus Pareve, now in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in New York.
Hannah Wilke's works have recently come to the fore in a revived interest in feminist art, being featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center for Feminist Art and in the Museum of Contemporary Art's travelling exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution.
Hannah Wilke Notable Works
- Gestures (1974) performance / video
- Ponder-r-rosa 4, White Plains, Yellow Rocks (1975), latex and metal snaps
- Through the Large Glass (1976), performance / 16mm film
- Needed-Erase-Her (1976), mixed media
- Intercourse with... (1977), performance / audio installation
- Marxism & Art (1977), photographic poster
- S.O.S.Starification Object Series (1974-82), mixed media
- Hannah Manna (1987), painted ceramics
- Intra Venus Series (1990-93), photography
Hannah Wilke Selected Bibliography
- Bass, Ruth. "Hannah Wilke." ARTnews, March 1985
- Delin Hansen, Elisabeth, Kirsten Dynnol and Donald Goddard, eds. Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective [Copenhagen: Contemporary Art Center, 1998]
- Jones, Amelia, et al. Intra-Venus [New York: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1995]
- Kochheiser, Thomas H., ed. Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective [Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 1989]
- Lippard, Lucy. The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art [New York: The New Press, 1995]
- Princenthal, Nancy. "Mirror of Venus - photography, videos and performance art, Hannah Wilke, Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, New York." Art in America, February 1997
- Taylor, Martin J., ed. The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006]
Further Resources:
- The Hannah Wilke Collection & Archives, Los Angeles
 |
