From the very start, art critics saw Hannah’s willingness to use her body in her work as an act of “narcissism” (“A harmless air of narcissism pervades this show…” New York Times, 9/20/75). This strange descriptor still follows her beyond the grave, despite the passionate efforts of writers like Amanda Jones and Laura Cottingham to refute it. In his review of Intra-Venus, Hannah’s posthumous show, Ralph Rugoff describes the artist’s startling photos of her naked cancer-ridden body as “a deeply thrilling venture into narcissism.” As if the only possible reason for a woman to publically reveal herself could be self-therapeutic. As if the point was not to reveal the circumstances of one’s own objectification. As if Hannah Wilke was not brilliantly feeding back her audience’s prejudice and fear, inviting them to join her for a naked lunch.
A few smart men like Peter Frank and Gerrit Lansing recognized the strategy and wit of Hannah’s work, though not, perhaps, the boldness and the cost. The fact she was a genius. At any rate, the controversy around her work never agglomerated into major stardom. By 1980 Guy Trebay was sniffing in the Village Voice that Hannah’s vagina “is now as familiar to us as an old shoe.” Has anybody ever said this about Chris Burden’s penis?
No one apart from Hannah’s closest friends and family recognized the sweetness and idealism at the bottom of her work. Her warmth. The human-ness of her female person.
In an amazing text written in 1976, Hannah proved to be her own best critic:
“Rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint or latex loosely laid out like love vulnerably exposed…continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs… Gambling as well as gamboling… To exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one. The way my smile just gleams, the way I sip my tea. To be a sugar giver instead of a salt cellar, to not sell out…”
Hannah Wilke Wittgenstein was pure female intellect, her entire gorgeous being stretched out in paradoxical proposition.
In 1979, Claes Oldenburg, Hannah’s partner since the late 1960s, changed their door-locks while she was out one day and married someone else. She recreated the collection of 50 rayguns she’d collected for his work and posed naked with them in a series of ‘performalist self portraits’ called So Help Me Hannah in which she “demonstrates” and overturns her favorite classic citations of male philosophy and art.
Hannah Wilke on Ad Reinhardt: sitting naked in a corner, feeling hopeless, head in hands, high-heeled legs apart. She’s surrounded by toy pistols and bazookas. “WHAT DOES THIS REPRESENT/WHAT DO YOU REPRESENT” the title reads.
Hannah Wilke on Karl Marx: Posed shakily on the pistons of a combustion engine in her strappy high-heeled sandals, naked body part of the machine, Hannah lunges forward in profile, toy guns in hand. EXCHANGE VALUES. (Exchange values? Whose?)
The insertion of Hannah Wilke’s complex human presence throws all slogans into question. Her beauty is compelling, but as in Gestures, her presence circumvents the pose.
“I have long since resolved to be a Jew… I regard that as more important than my art,” R.B. Kitaj and Arnold Schoenberg declared. Hannah Wilke said: “Feminism in a larger sense is intrinsically more important to me than art.” No one ever called these men bad Jews.
The bitterest irony of Hannah Wilke’s career is that her imitators who risked much less became art stars of the early ’80s. “Wilke’s projection of herself contrasts markedly with the more impersonal impersonations of…the recent work of Cindy Sherman, whose ‘dress up’ masquerades are au fond no less narcissistic, but somehow easier to accept or digest as art because they disguise the self and parody the suffering, pain and pleasure we sense as real in Wilke’s art,” Lowery Sims argued in a New Museum catalog in 1984. But by then art history had already labelled Wilke dumb, her imitators smart:
Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, 1980: [Because Hannah Wilke’s art] “has no theory of the representations of women, it presents images of women as unproblematic. It does not take into account the social contradictions of ‘femininity’.” (Screen: 35–39)
Catherine Liu, 1989: “Wilke is well known for appearing nude in her work. She projects a hippylike comfort with her own nakedness. But her self exposure, which translates as some kind of rhetoric of sexual freedom for women, is too facile, too simple a formulation. The work of artists like Cindy Sherman and Aimee Rankin has shown female sexuality to be the site of as much pain as pleasure.” (Artforum 12/89)
“Because we rejected a certain kind of theoretical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,” the poet Alice Notley said to me in Paris last year. Hannah Wilke spent a great deal of energy throughout her life trying to prove that she was right. If art’s a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too. Dear Dick, That’s what I realized when I fell in love with you.
“Of course, Hannah did become a monster,” I said to Warren Niesluchowski. Warren’s a friend, an artworld personality and critic, a smart and cultivated guy. We were sitting on Mike Kelley’s patio at a barbecue, catching up on news. Warren knows everyone in the artworld. He’d known Hannah since they met in 1975 at the Soho restaurant Food.
Warren chuckled. “Yes, she did. But of the wrong kind. Not a monster on the order of Picasso, or—” (and here he named several other famous males). “The problem was, she started taking everything so personally. She refused to take a leap of faith. Her work was no longer art.”
In 1985 Claes Oldenburg threatened an injunction against the University of Missouri Press. They were preparing a book of Hannah Wilke’s work and writings to accompany her first major retrospective.
In order to protect his “privacy,” Claes Oldenburg demanded that the following items be removed: 1) a photograph from Advertisements For Living that depicted Claes together with Hannah’s eight year old niece. 2) Any mention of his name in Hannah’s writings. 3) Reproduction of a collaborative poster, Artists Make Toys. 4) Quotations from a correspondence between him and Hannah that was a part of Hannah Wilke’s text, I Object.
Claes’ fame and the University’s unwillingness to defend her made it possible for Oldenburg to erase a huge portion of Hannah Wilke’s life. Eraser, Erase-her—the title of one of Wilke’s later works.
I explained to Warren about the difference between male and female monsters. “Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who’s not invited to the party, they have to understand the reason why.”
Monstrosity: the self as a machine. The Blob, mindlessly swallowing and engorging, rolling down the supermarket aisle absorbing pancake mix and jello and everyone in town. Unwise and unstoppable. The horror of The Blob is a horror of the fearless. To become The Blob requires a certain force of will.
Every question, once it’s formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.