Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

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.

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.