But really Dick I’m moved to write you differently ’cause everything is different now. I think of you a lot now that crossing socially seems inevitable. Both of us are in the LA artworld and it’s small.
The image that I have of you is frozen in a single snapshot: April 19, the opening of the Jeffrey Vallance/Eleanor Antin/Charles Gaines show at the Santa Monica Museum. You’re standing in the largest Jeffrey Vallance room, talking, drink-in-hand, to a knot of younger people (students?). Tall, black shirt and Euro-cut black jacket, standard opening wear for artists. You’re standing very straight, your face smushed back in against itself; smiling-talking-moving yet imploding somehow backwards towards the immobility of the frame. You’re locked. You are a country. A separate state. Visible, unbridgeable. And I’m standing in a tiny cluster next to yours, a trio, Daniel Marlos and Mike Kelley and just like you I’m shaky—my body trembles slightly as it cuts through space. But also very present. The Conquering of Fear is like performance. You recognize your fear and then you move with it.
So far I’ve told “our” story twice, late at night, as fully as I could, to Fred Dewey and Sabina Ott. It’s the story of 250 letters, my “debasement,” jumping headlong off a cliff. Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? What hooks me on our story is our different readings of it. You think it’s personal and private; my neurosis. “The greatest secret in the world is, THERE IS NO SECRET.” Claire Parnet and Gilles Deleuze. I think our story is performative philosophy.
The artist Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Butter in 1940 and grew up in Manhattan and Long Island. She died of cancer at the age of 52. Wilke’s output was prolific and consistent. Through constant effort she maintained a visible career. At a certain point, perhaps the early ’70s, her work began addressing the following question:
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
To ask this question, to be willing to live it through, is still so bold.
In 1974, after producing drawings, ceramics and sculptural wall pieces—many of which involved a “tough, ambiguous depiction of traditionally female imagery” (Douglas Crimp, 1972) for 11 years, Hannah started to insert her own image into her art. I don’t know what experiences or conditions in her life precipitated this. Was she pushed towards it by critics such as Phyllis Derfner, who wrote responding to her show of cunts fashioned out of washing machine lint at Feldman in 1972:
“There is some wit in this but it is swamped by aggressive ideology… The ideology is that of women’s liberation. Female bodies have been shown, but only in an oppressive, ‘sexist’ manner. Wilke’s forthright repetitious presentation of the most intimate image of female sexuality is intended to be a cure for all this. I don’t see how it is supposed to work. It is boring and superficial.”
Unlike Judy Chicago and her bloated vaginal renditions of Great Cunts In History—a show that every mother in the world could take her daughters to—Hannah never was afraid to be undignified, to trash herself, to call a cunt a cunt. “I want to throw back to the audience everything the world throws at me” (Penny Arcade, 1982). Hannah later told the Soho Weekly News how she’d collected ‘material’ for this work over several years by doing laundry for Claes Oldenburg, her companion at that time. Even then Hannah was a neo-Dadaist. Claes Oldenburg, Great Male Universal Artist, shanghai’d.
In 1974 Wilke made her first videotape, Gestures. Created one day after the death of her sister’s husband, Gestures was, among other things, an expression of grief and dismay, a reaching for the body after death. The critic James Collins gave it two thumbs up in Artforum. “Every time I see her work I think of pussy,” he declared. An early champion of Wilke’s work, Collins described Gestures thusly:
“Erotically Wilke’s video was more successful—‘hornier’—than the sculpture. Why? Well she’s actually in it for a start. The video is probably the best thing in the show because by being in the pieces, using just her head and hands, she gives the folding gestures, particularly, more meaning. Stroking, kneading, preening and slapping her face were interesting but the folding mouth gestures were the naughtiest. Because she’s sensuously breaking a cultural rule and that’s one definition of erotic. Pushing at her lips and then folding them back… Using her mouth as a surrogate vagina and her tongue as a surrogate clitoris, in the context of her face, with its whole psychological history, was strong stuff !…
“Wilke’s position in the art world is a strange paradox between her own physical beauty and her very serious art. She longs to fulfill her sexuality; but her attempt to deal with this dilemma within the women’s movement has a touching air of pathos about it.”
But don’t you see, the paradoxes in Hannah Wilke’s work are not pathetic, they’re polemic. (It’s like that night, Dick, when you called me “passive-aggressive” on the phone? Wrong!) Gestures throws the weirdnesses of male response to female sexuality wide open.
Meanwhile, Hannah-in-the-work was exploring much more personal and human ground.
“Ree Morton told me that when she saw the video she almost cried,” Wilke recalled several years later. “I exposed myself beyond posing and she saw past it. She saw the pathos beyond posing.”
From this point on, Hannah willingly became a self-created work of art.
In SOS Starification Object Series (1974-1979) she turns to face the camera in 3/4 profile, bare tits and jeans unzipped with one hand on her crotch. Her eyes are bare and heavy. Her long hair’s set in housewife rollers, obviously a home job. Eight bits of chewed-up gum, shaped to simulate vaginas are stuck across her face like scars or pimples. “Gum has a shape before you chew it. But when it comes out, it comes out as real garbage,” she later said. “In this society we use people up the way we use up chewing gum.” In her presence, Hannah always was extremely beautiful.
In 1977 she made another videotape called Intercourse with…in which the answering-machine messages left by her boyfriends, friends and family play as she removes the names of the most troubling, spelled out in Pres-type, from her naked body. “Become your own myth,” she started saying.
Like every other work of art, Hannah became a piece of road-kill for the artpress jackals. Torn literally apart. Her naked body straddling interpretations of the hippie-men who saw her as an avatar of sexual liberation and hostile feminists like Lucy Lippard who saw any female self-display as patriarchal putty.
Hannah started using the impossibility of her life, her artwork, and career as material. If art’s a seismographic project, when that project’s met with miscomprehension, failure must become its subject too. In 1976 she produced a poster modelled after the famous School for Visual Arts subway ads that read:
“Having a talent isn’t worth much unless you know what to do with it.” Hannah reproduced it with a photo of her fucked-up self. Portrait of the Artist as an Object: she’s wearing a crocheted apron that doesn’t hide her naked tits at all and clutching a Mickey Mouse doll. The now famous chewing gum vaginas are arranged like tiny scabs across her body. In a later poster called Marxism And Art, Hannah’s wearing a man’s shirt flung wide open to reveal bare breasts, chewed up cunts and a wide man’s tie. “Beware of Fascist Feminism,” the poster reads.