Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake
Installation view of Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2021. Artwork © 2021 Scharlatt Family, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; except for artwork © Donald Goddard. Photo by AliseO'Brien, © Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Hannah Wilke, Art For Life’s Sake at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
by D.K. Sole
The curator, Tamara H. Schenkenberg, has described the guiding principle of Art For Life’s Sake as “eros” -- not the act of sex (she adds), but rather Hannah Wilke’s lifelong work of finding an art-language to bring the sexual fact of the human body into the foreground. “A new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are nameable and at the same time quite abstract,” as Wilke put it in 1977. One year later she added, succinctly, in conversation with Max Ernst: “There is this ethics of ambiguity otherwise it wouldn't be art.” When people point out that her work is feminist it’s often the eros they refer to: the ceramic box “cunts”, the labial “roses”, but this idea that it is ethical to create situations that make us hesitate rather than pin something immediately down to an identity, is also potent. As Lucy Lippard noted in 1966, Wilke’s sculptures make sexual references and unmake them at the same time. They are not unmistakably something.
Her eros is established in the first room of this exhibition, which is also, chronologically, the earliest part of Wilke’s life as an adult artist.
It includes works she made as an undergraduate in the 1960s. Around the walls her drawings describe scribbled organic bulges or billowy cloudlike shapes interrupting sets of straight horizontal bands that run from one side of the page to the other or bend themselves into right-angled pens or frames. There are hints in these billows to tell you you’re supposed to read them as bodies, maybe female bodies, with mounds popping off to the sides. They let you know what the young artist’s priorities are going to be until the end of her life: curved flesh will break up rigidity and order. The popcorn look of these mounds – as if they’ve exploded out of nothing – resonates with her later explanation of her use of circles: “It’s like cell division … instant and constant transformation.” It’s flesh as “eros” as Schenkenberg says, but also as a joke, a clown, a wild card. The colours in the rectangles behind these lusty pencilled cracks are so cutiepie-pink!
This idea of eros-as-interruption will appear throughout the rest of Art for Life’s Sake in several forms: from the masses of folded vulva-like ceramics laid out on the floor in patterns that alter your progress through the rooms and sit over rows of architectural lines on the Pulitzer’s floor; to the S.O.S. Starification Object Series photos of the 1970s in which Wilke interrupts the sight of her own naked skin by attaching to it small chewing-gum representations of more vulva; to the postcard pieces where similar forms made from kneaded erasers swarm like flies over formal portraits of monumental buildings; to a small wall, almost at the end of the show, where we see her plans for huge public sculptures that would have butted into the horizon with eros-shapes. The earliest of these plans was made in 1975 and the latest in 1989 and none of them have ever been realised. “Lack of financial support,” explains the text.
Hannah Wilke, Lincoln Memorial, 197662 kneaded erasersculptures on postcard on painted board in Plexiglas box. Framed: 15 7/8 × 17 13/16 inches (40.3 × 45.2 cm) Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Alison Jacques, London and Courtesy of Michael Solway, Cincinnati. © 2021 Scharlatt Family, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Her interruptions are places that ask you to pause and veer. You thought things were going to keep going like this, but what if we all went off like that instead? Which is also the structure of a joke. Her objects describe sex without being seductive. The “roses” stare at you from the wall at face height. The ceramics sit on the floor like bear traps.
The undergrad ceramics on the pedestal in front of the drawings in the first room look like her initial experiments towards the eros-idea. Here eros is not an interrupter. The objects are arranged together but each one is singular. The artist seems to be searching for a shape. These early forms are chunky, mostly blocks of red-brown clay with holes dug into them and the edges of the holes dragged up into lips. But then one of them is folded so that it looks like an empty burrito. In context it looks like the prototype of the folded box-like vulva-shapes she would soon be creating in multitudes. Almost every object in the next room will be one of those folded forms. Wilke will cover some of them with the pastel colours that, in Room 1, belonged to the drawings.
Hannah Wilke, Untitled, ca. late 1960s, Terracotta 3 1/2 × 9 1/4 × 11 1/4 inches (8.9 × 23.5 × 28.6 cm)Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles. Courtesy Alison Jacques, London, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Michael Brzezinski, courtesy Alison Jacques, London. © 2021 Scharlatt Family, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
As we look at the burrito we might be tempted to fantasize about the lives of artists in general. Does inspiration genuinely strike? Was this - the moment when she folded the clay instead of clawing at it - the moment when the future arrived? How did she know? What was it like to know? This magic door is in front of us and it won’t open. In an interview with Tyler Green on the Modern Art Notes podcast, Schenkenberg tells us how this idea will play out: “Once she starts working serially her forms all come from a circle, a circle of clay or a circle of gum or a circle of latex and she turns them into three-dimensional forms through quick gesture.” Her oeuvre grew out of a tortilla.
It’s as if the fragility of the individual artist has been manifested here. What if she had missed it? That self-made clue? She might have wandered off on the path of chunk-holes forever. The next fold-filled room of the show would not exist and the latex “roses” that come in the room after that would not exist either.
The artist’s drawing practice follows us into this second room, but now it’s radically different. The smooth curves recur once then disappear; instead we have a sheet covered with sketches of sagging, natualistic, fleshy objects. She made these expressionistic drawings throughout her life, even though she must have suspected – looking at the work she exhibited - that history would downplay them and focus on her satirical sexiness and her innovative materials, the latex, the gum, and, later, video. From now on (with few exceptions), the subjects of her drawings and paintings will not be placed against straight lines to create a calculated meaning. They will exist on the page individually. When she sketches her dead pet lovebird, Seura Chaya, it lies diagonally across the sheet of paper, in space, alone.
A division is asserting itself. Flat surfaces – drawing and photography and video – are for realism and individualism. The more materialised forms are used to express the more abstract ideas. A mass is made of individuals – each clay form is hand-folded and somewhat different, even if the method of folding them is the same. But these individuals don’t have personalities, only differences.
Photography and video and painting are used to express a different idea: this is this individual. Her mother is not part of a mass, she is her mother. Wilke’s photographs show her lying alone in a bed. Her head is on the pillow. It is hers. Her daughter’s gaze insists on it. Even the buildings in the postcard photographs have individuality: there is nothing else in the frame quite like them. When she shows us her semi-naked body posed like a celebrity persona in the S.O.S. Starification photos, part of the joke is that this is her body, the body of an artist, not the body of an actor or a model who is being paid to disappear into the role. Artists – according to popular folklore - are supposed to want to stand out, not dissolve themselves. If they dissolve then they should be dissolving ecstatically into their brushstrokes, like Van Gogh. Not like this. Stop it! But she doesn’t stop. She puts on a classical toga instead, in Can (1978). Here’s your art!
The boundaries of the folded forms become apparent. They can express abundance, presence, persistence, fleshiness, humour. What they can’t do – what she decided not to do with them – is express absence and sadness. The photos on the wall show us her mother, Selma Butter, emaciated, dying, flattened into her pillow, but the ceramics on the floor in the same room are bright red and blue and patterned with fireworks. (We’ve reached the ‘80s now in her oeuvre and the folded shapes have exploded from ‘70s minimalism and natural surfaces into units of artificial color.) There is no death in the ceramics. They’re always ready to act.
Schenkenberg’s Wilke lives the life of a good artist. Her trust in her central idea keeps her on track throughout her life, giving her the freedom to adopt new media, new ways of working, without losing sight of herself. Her ideas seed later ideas; she responds to herself. In the very late self-portrait series Intra-Venus, she cocks one knee up in her hospital bed like a softcore centrefold; she is dying of lymphoma and this coy act calls back not only to the satirical movie star photos of her healthy body in the ‘70s but even farther back than that, to the cutiepie pastel colours backdropping the raw slits in the early drawings. Seen in tandem with the other shots they make one of her earlier points even clearer: in both cases the nudity doesn’t show us her. Schenkenberg’s Wilke is a thinker who goes down thinking.
Installation view of Hannah Wilke: Art for Life's Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2021. Foreground: Artwork © 2021 Scharlatt
Family, Hannah Wilke Collection & Archive, Los Angeles/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Background: Artwork © Donald Goddard. Photo by Alise O'Brien, © Pulitzer Arts Foundation"
Hannah Wilke, “Art For Life’s Sake” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, MO 63108. Jun 4, 2021–Jan 16, 2022
Australian artist D.K. SOLE lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is the Director of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado. Link to her Instagram.
Published by Wendy Kveck on 9/20/2021